Media/Arts

Trans Mission: What's the Rush to Reassign Gender?

Documentary Explores the Maw of Child Gender Medicine Programs

The Center for Bioethics and Culture has produced a powerful documentary film, Trans Mission: What's the Rush to Reassign Gender?, taking a deep dive into the gender identity industry, exploring the issues around allowing children to medically and surgically transition.

The film looks into what gender identity affirmation means when it becomes a doctor's endorsement of a minor's distress, or whether doctors can know if patients who diagnose themselves with gender dysphoria will remain happy with irreversible cosmetic procedures.

Exploring the impact of gender identity affirmation on children, the film cuts through the noise and dissects how open discussion and free speech are gashed when affirmation becomes the rule for allowable public debate.

"Trans Mission" explores these issues in 52 minutes of interviews with 17 doctors, parents, activists, and adults who sought medical affirmation of their gender identities.

It discusses how others lash into people with concerns about gender identity beliefs, pushing them out of the conversation.

One mother tells her story of how doctors scared her into thinking her daughter would commit suicide unless they let them put her on puberty blockers.

Brenton, the father of a young boy, talks about the pressure that doctors put on the boy's mother to start him on hormone treatments early, while he was still growing, and the expectations this created for his son.

"He has a fantasy of taking a potion and that he's going to be like Peter Pan," Brenton says.

Dr. Paul Hruz, a pediatric endocrinologist, says that doctors' pressure on hesitant parents is hard to challenge without a medical background.

Yet he says, "There's a very good reason to be concerned about the outcome specifically, that some of the largest studies that have been done with the longest follow-up have shown that suicide rates remain markedly elevated after you undergo these affirmation interventions."

With these serious issues at stake, the film zeroes in on how anyone who expresses concern about child transition is being shut out of the public debate.

Whether it's Twitter banning outspoken feminists like Meghan Murphy, or Australian universities canceling talks by pediatric endocrinologists like Dr. Quentin Van Meter, Trans-Mission lays out how hard it's become for anyone to dissent from the social prescription to affirm gender identity.

As a reviewer, Dr. Heather Brunskell-Evans, sociologist and author of Transgender Body Politics, says, " The film powerfully conveys that children with gender dysphoria are the victims of a powerful ideology, with bereft parents desperately attempting to protect them in the face of social hostility."

Alix Aharon, a cofounder of Partners for Ethical Care and founder of The Gender Mapping Project, says a documentary like this is crucial, especially with the hundreds of counted gender clinics for children and teens in the United States, Australia, Canada, and Europe.

James Lindsay, best-selling author and founder of New Discourses, says, "One of the most concerning and harmful things happening in the world today is the wholesale and uncritical encouragement of transition in minors."

"Trans Mission sheds much-needed light on this issue and is an invitation to start having crucial conversations about it that will lead to protecting some of our most vulnerable kids. Watch this film, share it, and start talking." Lindsay says.

Viewers can share the trailer, or watch the documentary on Vimeo or YouTube.

— Source: Center for Bioethics and Culture