Spend any time whatsoever in trans spaces and one of the first things you’ll notice is the rampant infantilization.
There are grown adults
snuggling with cuddly toys and blaming every kind of negative emotion and social transgression on going through “second puberty” (sorry: still not a thing!). They try to recreate the childhoods and rites of passage they never experienced: giggly sleepovers, bubble-gum pink, sparkly lipgloss and painted nails, truth or dare, learning how to shave and tie ties. They cling to childish hobbies and interests, like Pokémon or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or My Little Ponies, or overidentify with the underage aesthetics of anime. Middle-aged men dress up like schoolgirls, tugging frilly knee socks up over their bony joints and tying bows in their hair.
Trans-identified adults fantasize about do-overs: if only they’d been allowed to transition before puberty struck. Everything would have been different. The fantasy of starting over and blocking puberty helps keep the promise of transition intact when it would otherwise fall apart.
Transition didn’t fail because it was a mistake. Transition failed because this pharmaceutical intervention was withheld from me as a child. That, and
children make a more appealing face for a movement that
struggles with optics. Thus, activists enlist children in an adult cause, trading children’s open futures for talking points and political cover.
Activists rally around children and conceal what’s unsavory about the movement behind their innocence.
Then there’s the endless talk about “
eggs” (people who are supposedly in denial about their trans identities): the moment you realize you’re trans is described as “hatching” or “cracking your egg.” New members are often referred to—or refer to themselves—as “baby trans” who need to be shown the ways of the strange new world they find themselves in. There’s the expectation from many activists that their feelings ought to be handled with kid gloves and—indeed—far too many grown-ups end up placating activists as though they were fussy toddlers.
There are many ways to interpret the disconcerting childishness of trans communities. “
Peter Pan Syndrome.” Plain-old immaturity. Many trans-identified individuals seem afraid to grow up, as though they worry about their ability to meet the world of adult responsibilities. For these people, ‘trans’ is a cul-de-sac or a cocoon, a substitute for meaningful growth and change. And then there are some men who appear to fetishize childhood the way they fetishize womanhood,
feeding twisted fantasies that they ought to have starved.
But there’s something else going on here, too.
Self-infantilization and co-infantilization facilitate the process of resocialization into radical new beliefs and ways of relating to the world.
We often talk about children as sponges, soaking up the world for the first time. Anyone who has spent any time hanging out with a small child knows how children can suffuse ordinary events with wonder, and how open they are to the world around them. There’s nothing quite like it.
But to be so open and unformed is also to be profoundly vulnerable to manipulation and distortion. Cults and high-control movements often try to induce this childlike malleability in new members. Initiates—by definition—know nothing. Cults often pair newcomers up with seasoned members (often referred to as older siblings), who provide a mix of instruction and surveillance. Cult recruitment activities can facilitate this kind of regression, too, as the Moonies did during recruitment weekends packed with juvenile skits and sing-alongs.
The revelation that one is transgender dissolves the connection between one’s life pre-transition and post-transition. Life before that point was mere subsistence in a state of false consciousness. One is ‘born again’ as trans.
Transition is thus conceptualized as a process of unlearning/relearning
everything: everything you ever thought you knew about who you are, everything you thought you knew about humanity, everything you thought you knew about your family (caring and concerned or repressive and transphobic?)—not to mention learning how to stand and walk in a convincingly masculine or feminine way, figuring out which gestures will give you away and which will uphold the illusion you’re attempting to create…
This is the way the trans movement walks people back to childhood and why this toxic set of beliefs unravels adolescent and grown-up psyches alike the way that it does. One’s perceptions, doubts, and prior experiences cannot be trusted—must, in fact, be disowned. Happiness can be found only through submission to the mystery of gender, which one is unfit to judge. The childishness this requires—and creates, and enforces—is pathological, not innocent, no matter how many cheery pastel shades are applied. It’s a feature, not a bug.