Main Edition
US
FR
March 11, 2024 - 7:00pm
Sex changes ought to be a universal human right, the author and critic Andrea Long Chu has argued.
In a new piece for New York magazine, Chu, who is transgender, writes that all people, including children and those with mental illness, should be able to medically alter their sex at will.
“We will never be able to defend the rights of transgender kids until we understand them purely on their own terms: as full members of society who would like to change their sex,” the writer notes. “It does not matter where this desire comes from […] We must be prepared to defend the idea that, in principle, everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history.”
Chu goes on to state that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones have also been used to treat infertility and menopause, preserving patients’ natal sex against the process of ageing. Transgender people should therefore have just as much of a right to these drugs as patients using them to affirm their birth sex.
“What we today call gender-affirming care is part of a larger history of sex-affirming care governed by strong normative ideas of health, productivity, and moral worth,” Chu writes. “The real question is which sex can be affirmed — and why […] It is the purpose of sex change, and not the change itself, which determines its acceptability.”
Chu has written essays on gender for an array of prestige publications including the New York Times, and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize last year for book reviews. The writer is perhaps best known for an essay titled, “My new vagina won’t make me happy”, which argued that mental wellbeing wasn’t the point of transitioning.
The writer has a reputation for subversion even within trans circles, previously making the taboo argument that porn and sexual desire can be driving factors in transgender identification. This breaks with the belief popular among activists that transitioning is strictly a means of self-actualisation rather than fetish fulfilment.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeI’ll admit I didn’t get to the end of the very long linked article but I didn’t find what I read particularly interesting. It seemed be saying that all attempts to understand gender and trans are wrong and we will never really understand gender and trans until we understand it. A circular argument that is par for the course on the topic.
The Tao which can be understood is not the real Tao; the gender that can be understood is not the true gender.
You compare Tao to body. This you are blind.
Maybe try a more articulate commentator – Jan Morris in her autobiography “Conundrum” ?
Commenting after her gender reassignment surgery in Casablanca :
“… Now when I looked at myself I no longer seemed a hybrid or chimera: I was all of a piece, as proportioned once again, though in a different kind, as I had been so exuberantly on Everest long before. Then I had felt lean and muscular: now I felt above all deliciously clean. The protuberances I had grown increasingly to detest had been scoured from me. I was made, by my own light, normal”
She is very reflective throughout this biography – not just about her perceived physical state but emotional and psychological as well, over years.
Highly recommended for a more balanced insight into what trans folks experience.
You mean he.
Isn’t ‘she’ the sissy-porn specialist ?
Mind you that bloke at Manchester had written a paper about watching porn content of young boys and masturbating to it.
But at least he was kicked out after it became public whereas a ‘lady’ like Andrea Long Chu (or should that be Long Chew ?) can apparently be taken seriously in the new and exciting world of queer studies.
Double standards for ‘women’ I can’t help but feel. That’s why so many transparent freaks have been attracted to this ever-expanding space and should never be let into women’s spaces.
I saw a video today from Andrew Doyle’s WPATH special last night which examined links between porn websites about castration and the inclusion of eunuchs as a category in the WPATH
document that claims they too need our understanding and medical ‘treatment’.
Meanwhile Doritos has pulled a sponsorship deal with another Trans ‘influencer’ after all sorts or porn links and references to underage sex were discovered.
If you don’t have a problem with this yet, then just wait till the MAPs get going.
Universities need closing down at this point or being starved of all financial support for this type of grifting, self-fantasising tripe.
Deleted
My comment’s disappeared?
Should you comment that?
Check back after three days.
Oh yes, this is truly exasperating, isn’t it? This happens to my comments very often – and this given that I observe all the rules. One of my, quite innocuous comments, is not reinstated yet. I have asked many times what the specific reasons for taking down my comments were, but am yet to receive an answer. It’s cold comfort that your comment might reappear in several days after it was posted…. Very disappointing.
Just repost.
LOL
The prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed until late twenties. Making a drastic surgical decision, based on the wiring of an unfinished brain, is an error.
“transgender kids until we understand them purely on their own terms: as full members of society who would like to change their sex,”
This totally confused statement proves that some people never achieve fully developed brains! Children are deliberately and totally correctly not full members of society – they are rightly prohibited from doing many things and rightly protected in ways adults are not.
It is this sort of screwed up thinking that will form part of the argument for allowing paedophiles to have their way with “consenting” kids
“This totally confused … with “consenting” kids” <– That stupidity written by someone who confuses pedophilia with medical care, and who presumably is only making a special plead that they don;t like this medical care.
***
Let us know when you realize where you train of thought left the tracks.
Do you really think children are mature enough to fully comprehend the ramifications of gender-reassignment surgery? How it will affect their sex-life and their chances of forming healthy romantic relationships?
I would actually say Talia, that your train of thought is actually not ‘on track’ with what Adrian was trying to say. Every ‘mature’ adult is well aware of the reasons why we as a society have boundaries around certain things that are age-relevant. Heck, we even have them in the cinema. Think PG, R ratings etc. Age of drinking, voting, driving a car, etc. You do not give keys a 10 year old and say go drive on the road child just because you want to. That of course is a very ‘appropriate’ (NOT – very reprehensible actually) for you to go and do just because you say so.
What IS reprehensible, is the mass push onto minors of an adults sexual
identity. Like that is what defines every single person and nothing else. This belief actually pushes a person to believe that sexual identity is the pinnacle of personhood and nothing else about anyone is of worth or note. And then to wonder why people question this to me is ridiculous. If SEX is all you hold of any worth – then it is to be expected that people are going to question your motives. To not believe otherwise shows the gaping holes and hypocrisy of this movement. A narcissitic delusion.
It also shows a complete lack of understanding of human development.
Was your train ever on the tracks ?
So you favor prohibiting all medical care to all youth because they are not mature enough to consent? Or you are only making a special pleading they can not consent to this medical care against which you have a factless, mindless, heartless prejudice?
***
Because it is one of the two.
Medical care given to children, with their parents consent, is to save/prolong their lives, not destroy it.
Small flaw in the argument: You can’t change your Sex.
If you like, you can wear whatever clothes you feel align with your “gender”, adopt whatever pronouns you like, even have surgery so you feel your body aligns more with aforementioned gender. Hence trans-gender.
But you cannot change your Sex, which is biological and immutable.
We said. Humans only have sex and it is unchangeable.
A factless idiocy to claim it.
Champagne socialist, that’s you? Having changed your errrrm… gender? But not your manners?
The Finland study quashes the ‘ dead kid or trans kid’ blackmail line; WPATH files malpractice – ‘in their own words’; NHS announces no routine use of puberty blockers for kids’. All in one week. Gender ideology is SO going down. And not a minute too soon.
Biggest misfit idiots are the ones who deny it.
Exactly. Sex is determined by your chromosomes – XX or XY (with <1% oddities). You can’t change it even if you cut off bits or add bits or take oceans of hormones.
Sex is not only one dimorphic characteristic in a human being, it is several among many. If sex were determined by your chromosomes, we would have about 17 sexes, since there are at least that many possible combinations of usual X and usual Y, and that leaves alone the variances from the usual within one chromosome, and they can all each have variances.
No exceptions ever prove a rule, all exceptions prove how a rule is wrong.
They are all either male or female. Sex is determined by gametes—ova or sperm.
I think they will come for you very soon and you will be safe again in your lovely “quilted room”
Your ignorance is endless.
Pretend however is amusing.
Spot on -but the whole movement is based on this false assertion.”Andrea” Long Chu changes her name,demands to be referred to as “she” (or “they”-who knows),gets a pair of silicone breast implants ,takes a shed load of testosterone blockers and is suddenly is “affirming their birth sex”.
Anyway-I have no issue with fully formed adults having medical procedures which they think will cure them of some dysphoria-just don’t demand it as a “right” and expect the taxpayer to fund it.
“Spot on” <– For being imbecilic, bigoted idiocy, yes.
“just don’t demand it as a “right” and expect the taxpayer to fund it.” <– Then defund all public expenditure for all healthcare — or admit you are merely such an imbecilic, bigoted idiot — one who at that wants to force some boys to have breasts and periods and to force some girls to have beards and deep voices.
…
Face the consequences of what you say you want.
As silly as right to demand same quality of life as Richard Branson or Jeff Bezos
If a boy has breasts and periods then they are a girl. If a girl has a deep voice and a beard then they are a boy/man, just like you.
**** off
It’s my body and I’ll cry if I want to.
Wisdom of early Rock.
“Small flaw in the argument: You can’t change your Sex.” <– Except exactly as is on the proverbial label.
Sex is no more biological than is gender — they both are.
You need to take more water with it sir.
Meh. More of the same activist talking points. I have no idea if sex change operations should be a right – haven’t thought about it ever – but if an adult wants to change their sex, go for it. Just don’t drag kids into your politics.
Except, if you “change your sex” you’ll still be the same sex you were born… just minus… some parts. On the plus side, you can get a whole lot of forever health problems. Quite the trade!
People harbour all kind of beliefs. It’s none of my business – as long as they don’t try to impose their beliefs on me.
But they do, incessantly. Sad thing is they really believe that eventually people will agree with them and give support. Just a bunch of deluded attention seekers.
Maybe
Doctors should have stayed out of this political insanity
Only sex exists and it is immutable. Gender theory is akin to astrology. Humans a bodies and our minds may imagine something else,but that does not make it real. It is degrading to human embodiment and there we just oppose this dehumanizing mutilation and disfiguring of the human condition.
“Only sex exists and it is immutable. Gender theory is akin to astrology.” <– Spoken like true ideologue.
Sex and gender both physically exist as two separate physically sexually dimorphic characteristics of a person, neither developing per usual in all people either together or separately. You have no physical evidence to the contrary — all the objective physical evidence goes against you.
*It is your ideology to deny it.*
You think it is not degrading, mutilating, and disfiguring to the “human condition” to force women and girls to have beards and deep voices and to force boys and men to have breasts ans periods.
*Your motivation to your monstrousness is your ideology, — no facts.*
No. Public funding should not go toward any vanity plastic surgery and I will vote against any political party that proposes that.
As I gently tell my own students: if you’re genuinely confused about your gender, go stand naked in front of a full-length mirror for a couple of hours. You’ll eventually figure it out.
Re: Talia—don’t feed trolls. It’s only enabling and encouraging.
Well said
As before, just like your good self, a woman who has a deep voice and a beard is a man. No amount of your self pitying, hand wringing wailing is going to convince SANE people. And the ones who you manage to hoodwink, well that speaks for itself.
It seems to me that we are still working out what human rights are and how they should be implemented without adding assertions about sex (gender) changes to the mix.
Plus we still have to consider how one male person’s ‘human rights’ to present as a woman should be weighed against the collective rights of a changing room or prison wing or sports team full of unaltered women.
We’re still working out that the concept of universal human rights – at least as currently understood – is a cancer. It’s the same sort of utopian stupidity that brought us over a century of Marxism.
As currently understood = without any responsibilities and applied universally regardless of culture, history or resources (i.e. the ability to pay for them).
Present how you like. Wear female clothing, try to look like a female, I don’t think many care too much about that. If this was as far as it went then there’d be little to no issue.
Presenting doesn’t trump sex-based rights however.
The slippery slope of progressivism:
Even if this Thing is bad, it never happens / OK, the Thing happens, but only very rarely / Actually, the Thing happens a lot, but you would have to be a pearl-clutcher to complain / In fact, the Thing happens all the time, and it’s good.
Don’t expect us to pay for it then.
Public health funds should be limited to use for actual medical problems. No good complaining about health systems allegedly being under-resourced if people keep adding luxury items like this and expecting someone else to pay for it.
Commital for incurable mental health problems should remain free.
Previous generations had very good reasons for keeping these people at the margins of society.
Confirmation bias much ?
Now it’s not enough to mess around with genders, now we move to having a different sex by choice???!!! Everybody’s gone insane…
Keep away from the kids!
Suggested addition from my separate comment:
4) pay for it yourself
Exactly. It’s elective surgery, like a facelift or breast enhancement (except as recovery from cancer etc.).
No, it is not like a facelift or breast enhancement — it is like breast reconstruction after cancer.
So you’ll advocate for the end of the NHS immediately then?
Where on earth did I say that ???
If you read my comments properly, you’ll see that all I’m saying is that there are some treatments which belong within the scope of the NHS (those that deal with genuine health problems) and some others that do not. I don’t think there’s anything controversial or surprising about that. After all, we don’t have unlimited resources to throw at the NHS, do we ? So let’s make sure we spend the money where it’s really needed.
I’d happily see the NHS reformed and made more efficient though. It’s a massive, costly, wasteful bureaucracy. And like all aging bureaucracies, it’s increasingly losing sight of its core objectives. That’s Parkinson’s Law 101.
Messing with sex and gender is no small issue. In the beginning we were created man and woman, and every generation that did try to play with the institutions of sex, marriage and family have paid the price for doing so. Our generation will be no exception unless we reconsider the path we have chosen and turn. Three years ago the Norwegian government put into law “positive discrimination”: LGBTQ+ applicants for a job shall be the preferred candidate for a job. Last year it became illegal to try to influence/convince a person uncertain about their gender. Their uncertainty is a protected condition, but at the same time preschool children onwards are influenced be government instituted/funded programs teaching gender fluidity and instilling uncertainty about identity.
If an adult want’s to fiddle with their body, that’s up to them, but leave the kids alone.
Any treatment, medical or phycological, should be at the cost of the patient, the taxpayer should not be paying for it.
And when it goes wrong it’s down to the individual to pay to put it right, none of this getting your bits chopped off in Turkey then the NHS sorting the problems out.
Bring back the asylums.
These are not serious people. They are emotionally retarded children whose argument comes down to:
“I don’t care. Its my room and I’ll paint it black if I want to. You can’t stop me.”
It would be lovely to ignore them like we ignore an infant having a tantrum. Unfortunately the damage done by their ideology to the bodies of children and to women’s sex-based rights are very serious.
This is a personal obsession that Chu wants applied to everyone. It’s many things, including a mass psychosis.
Imagine if 1% of the population of the US decided to pretend to flip between sexes at a whim – millions of unnecessary profound surgeries (and often irreversible!) and dangerous drug treatments.
Everyone outside of the ‘progressive’ West will ignore such stuff.
Once you understand that people like Mr Chu are insane, it becomes a lot easier to follow their line of reasoning. Which is, basically, that they do not exist in the same reality as the rest of us.
“children and those with mental illness”!
Children was bad enough, but the mentally ill too?! Let me recount a story, told to me by a urologist surgeon friend working in the NHS:
Patient presents unconscious, having lost blood after dismembering himself. Patient’s records indicate a history of psychosis. My friend wants to attempt a surgical reattachment of the patient’s p***s. However, an ethics committee must be convened before he can do so, as the patient is unconscious and cannot give consent to the procedure. During this committee, it is speculated by some that the patient may have acted intentionally in attempting to make a trans- identity manifest. The committee takes half an hour.
In the end, the committee approves the surgery but, sadly, the reattachment fails some time later. The patient, once conscious, relays that he was off his meds when he dismembered himself and was hearing voices telling him that he was trans and had to do this. Back on his meds, he denies any trans- identity, and is very upset at having performed this amateur surgery on himself.
There is no such thing as a “sex change”. When Mr Chu has to cope with menstrual pain, unwanted pregnancy and menopause, then we can discuss whether he is a woman. He is play acting and insisting we all go along with him. Why why why is this even a thing? Transsexuals are not new, but why has this been allowed to become a mass psychosis?
It’s the new “in thing”. It will pass if they’re ignored, just like a brat having a temper tantrum.
“no more inherently revolutionary than, say, the contraceptive Pill”
When I got to this line, I thought… how can anyone take this person seriously? It is literally called “the sexual revolution.”
Throughout this article I kept wondering if Chu would ever provide, you know, an *argument* for his assertions. But nope, just assertion after assertion… he has a feeling, and we must all respect it.
Someday we’ll remember the age-old wisdom that chasing after our feelings is not a long-term strategy for a satisfying life.
I’m 100% in his corner. He is correct. Let anyone change their view of their sex.
But we need to criminalize all recruitment of minors, with a severe penalty.
And none of this sex-change shit should be covered by insurance. Not a single bit. ALL self-pay.
As many have pointed out, you cannot change sex. I do find the argument that anyone should be able to change at will perplexing, as once you have chopped something off, you cannot simply sew it back on again if you change your mind.
I don’t know, Talia sounds stupid enough to try.
“It does not matter where this desire comes from […] We must be prepared to defend the idea that, in principle, everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history.”
The problem of our age: Fighting back against people who stand up and say obviously false things with no reluctance whatsoever. Logic is useless against them. They refuse to acknowledge consistent reality. They think their cause is so vital that truth is irrelevant. And they will mercilessly attack anyone who dares disagree.
They are in for a shock when the sane majority start attacking back.
It is equally as universal a human right as any healthcare is.
How very arch of you.
Because of course you are merely pointing out that ‘Healthcare’ of any sort is not a Human Right but rather a cultural achievement. Almost inconceivably difficult to attain and still harder to maintain, in historical terms. Yet ineffably easy to squander – if treated frivolously.
Like wasting resources on transgenders.
You again, yaawwwn.
It has become an increasingly worrying trend to qualify “sexual and reproductive rights” as fundamental/constitutional rights. These broadly and vaguely defined rights signify 1) the ‘right’ to subject children and teens (and mentally ill people, as we read in the article) to irreversible and dangerous “gender-affirming” operations; 2) the right to abortion up to the moment of giving birth (here the euphemism is “perinatal abortion”).
One of the many dangers of this approach is that the push to make these rights fundamental will eventually result in sidelining other rights and freedoms that have been recognised as fundamental for a long time, like the right to free speech (‘transphobia’ as a hate crime being a salient example).
One could say much more on this topic, but for the sake of brevity I will stop here.
He can argue all he wants, but there is no such thing as a sex change. A simple cheek swab will prove that a male is a male.
No one here is lumping gay and bi people in with trans people. See, that’s a dishonest argument.
In a certain sense they are a universal right, but mainly in the same sense that suicide is a right. One of the sad ironies is that 10 years after transitioning the suicide rate is 19 times above average.
Western culture is bumping up against the cognitive dissonance it has created for itself since the enlightenment – wishing for meaning while holding a material cosmology. The material brain being that brain which is incapable of wishing for meaning. Unsurprisingly, we’ve become very disillusioned with modernity; a disillusionment that got a strong start with the French revolution. One can hardly blame the trans movement.
The internet is a great tool for accelerating and exacerbating the disillusionment.
Someone should check this perverted male’s hard drive.
I see that my comment didn’t last. I’m beginning to think there’s not much point contributing comments to UnHerd.
There are no universal rights unless there is a world government to decree such right. UN conventions are largely worthless. Reference to Universal Declaration of Rights is spitting in wind. Human history shows so called rights exist when an organized group with armed means to enforce it’s will.desires to bestow permitted behavior on all or some of humans under its control. Take your pick: Marx, Nietzsche religious traditionalists and so called rationalists agree. If you community that runs your environment says no, it’s no. You can cry. But that’s not a right
This magnificently ugly man has mutilated himself to become a hot babe. FAIL. He is ugly, fat, and will never find a man who wants to have a sexual relationship with him. Self-delusion is beyond amazing for such pathetic monsters as this man.
It is beyond parady that this freak says ” that trans women are more likely to be sexually assaulted than biological women.” – wrong. No man would consider raping such a hideous fat perverse diseased thing as he has become. If he claims rape, and accuses you, demand a jury trial – one look at this freak, and the laughter would be very loud.
He’s either so mentally ill that he needs locking up; or he’s a twisted and evil person, a threat to society, and needs locking up.