2 uur 23 min.
"Here's the bottom line...It is going to be very difficult for them to find loving, long term partners, because you have fucked up their bodies in ways that are going to complicate relationships." Year Zero with Wesley Yang
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- Maatschappij en cultuur
Corinna Cohn is a software developer living in Indiana who was among the very first teenagers to go on cross-sex hormones in adolescence, at the age of 15 in 1993. He was inducted into a cross-sex identity on the very first transsexual-interest Internet Relay Chat groups in the early 1990’s and underwent vaginoplasty at the age of 19. After decades of attempting to live as a woman, he reached an acknowledgment that he insists every other person who undertakes the same quixotic endeavor will eventually acknowledge to be true: “Their sex is what they were born as. Everybody knows if you're born male, you're always male. If you're born female, you're always female. There's no disputing that.”
Having made irrevocable choices with his body while too young to understand the lifelong consequences that would flow from it, Cohn continues to take estrogen to this day (tied as he is to the medical leash that all those who undergo transgender medical procedures invariably bind themselves), and prefers to be properly sexed, but will humor those who insist on using the cross-sex pronouns that correspond to the gender presentation that attends a lifetime of estrogen intake. He is an eloquent writer and speaker who has extracted all the wisdom there is to derive from the misadventure on the far end of human extremity on which he launched himself while still a callow, impetuous young man. He has watched with dismay as this misadventure has been normalized and marketed to children by the very authorities that should be protecting them from practices that will do them harm.
He has devoted himself to ensuring that no child repeats the mistake he made — one that no child, in his considered judgment, can possibly be competent to make, particularly in the context of a pediatric clinical system that has abandoned all gatekeeping on principle. He has devoted himself to holding at bay the totalitarian overwriting of reality that would have to be executed to make the world safe for such damaged children — a project to which the ruling powers of the Western world have explicitly pledged themselves. We spoke for two and a half hours in July.
—Wesley Yang
Year Zero is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Excerpts:
On the state of pediatric gender medicine under the affirmative care model
“If you'd asked me four years ago, should children be allowed to transition? I would have said, “well, I think that there are some young people, not children, obviously, but young people — maybe 16, maybe even 14, who are so clear that they are so unhappy in their sexed body and have so much dysphoria and have so much dissonance with their bodies, that this might be the best thing for them. I would have said that a few years ago.
I still believe that we might find that there are some diagnostic criteria that give us some confidence that somebody who's a 16 year old might have a better life experience starting this.
But I don't believe that there's a single practicing gender clinician, or gender therapist or gender affirming social worker — I don't believe that there's a single person who's practicing right now…Let me let me put it that way. There might be people here and there. There is nobody who's part of a functioning system anywhere in the United States, where a young person can be exposed to this in a way that centers the needs of that young person. There's not a functioning system anywhere.”
The Moral Obligation that the Affirmative Care Model Shirks
Wesley: Can we muster the authority to say, “No, this isn't good for you. And we're allowed to say that, and that's actually our duty.”
Corinna: It is our duty. That is our duty! We owe others. We have social responsibilities. We owe others. And for these young people, we owe them protection and we owe them the truth. They deserve it.”
What’s Really at Stake
It's so frustrating. It is s
Corinna Cohn is a software developer living in Indiana who was among the very first teenagers to go on cross-sex hormones in adolescence, at the age of 15 in 1993. He was inducted into a cross-sex identity on the very first transsexual-interest Internet Relay Chat groups in the early 1990’s and underwent vaginoplasty at the age of 19. After decades of attempting to live as a woman, he reached an acknowledgment that he insists every other person who undertakes the same quixotic endeavor will eventually acknowledge to be true: “Their sex is what they were born as. Everybody knows if you're born male, you're always male. If you're born female, you're always female. There's no disputing that.”
Having made irrevocable choices with his body while too young to understand the lifelong consequences that would flow from it, Cohn continues to take estrogen to this day (tied as he is to the medical leash that all those who undergo transgender medical procedures invariably bind themselves), and prefers to be properly sexed, but will humor those who insist on using the cross-sex pronouns that correspond to the gender presentation that attends a lifetime of estrogen intake. He is an eloquent writer and speaker who has extracted all the wisdom there is to derive from the misadventure on the far end of human extremity on which he launched himself while still a callow, impetuous young man. He has watched with dismay as this misadventure has been normalized and marketed to children by the very authorities that should be protecting them from practices that will do them harm.
He has devoted himself to ensuring that no child repeats the mistake he made — one that no child, in his considered judgment, can possibly be competent to make, particularly in the context of a pediatric clinical system that has abandoned all gatekeeping on principle. He has devoted himself to holding at bay the totalitarian overwriting of reality that would have to be executed to make the world safe for such damaged children — a project to which the ruling powers of the Western world have explicitly pledged themselves. We spoke for two and a half hours in July.
—Wesley Yang
Year Zero is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Excerpts:
On the state of pediatric gender medicine under the affirmative care model
“If you'd asked me four years ago, should children be allowed to transition? I would have said, “well, I think that there are some young people, not children, obviously, but young people — maybe 16, maybe even 14, who are so clear that they are so unhappy in their sexed body and have so much dysphoria and have so much dissonance with their bodies, that this might be the best thing for them. I would have said that a few years ago.
I still believe that we might find that there are some diagnostic criteria that give us some confidence that somebody who's a 16 year old might have a better life experience starting this.
But I don't believe that there's a single practicing gender clinician, or gender therapist or gender affirming social worker — I don't believe that there's a single person who's practicing right now…Let me let me put it that way. There might be people here and there. There is nobody who's part of a functioning system anywhere in the United States, where a young person can be exposed to this in a way that centers the needs of that young person. There's not a functioning system anywhere.”
The Moral Obligation that the Affirmative Care Model Shirks
Wesley: Can we muster the authority to say, “No, this isn't good for you. And we're allowed to say that, and that's actually our duty.”
Corinna: It is our duty. That is our duty! We owe others. We have social responsibilities. We owe others. And for these young people, we owe them protection and we owe them the truth. They deserve it.”
What’s Really at Stake
It's so frustrating. It is s
2 uur 23 min.