On Abusing the Transgender Issue for Political Advantage

In recent days, I became engaged with a friend on social media about a notion that progressive-minded people in the USA have become increasingly “extreme” and are thereby estranging themselves from most people, enhancing the chances of conservatives and the Trump wing of the Republican Party in upcoming elections. One of the people in this conversation happens to identify as traditional Jew. I asked him what issues he thought illustrated this idea. He replied with two: he notes increasing amounts of hostility toward Israel among progressives, and his second was his assertion that Democrats are supporting transgender people in ways that “most” people find disturbing.

I prefer to deal with the Israel issue in a separate essay, my purpose here is to discuss only the second issue my friend raised, that of the alleged pro-transgender stance of “most Democrats.”

I think the most important idea I can hope to communicate in what needs to be a brief essay is the absurdity of the argument. A dependable authority, the Williams Institute of UCLA Law School estimates the percentage of Americans who identify as transgender (short term “trans”) at .8%. That means that less than one out of a hundred people consider themselves trans.

But most of the publicity surrounds people who have not just identified as trans but have taken steps to alter their bodies to conform to their desired identity. According to a recent study by Harvard, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, we are now speaking of 0.0053% (that is 53 out of every 100,000) Americans.

Regardless of how you might feel about whether people should be altering their bodies, I believe we need to keep some sense of perspective. Does it really make sense to elect politicians who are doing things like depriving millions of people (no exaggeration!) of health insurance because you are concerned about .0053% of people who are altering their sex organs? Worried that your kids might lose out to a transgendered person in some athletic competition? How about thinking harder about sending your kids to underfunded schools where they are not getting enough education to compete with a robot?

This is clearly a case of demonization. Demonization is a political strategy by which one faction uses some sort of spectacular situation that applies to almost no one to get people to vote against their real interests.

Now, I need to take this one step further because of an aspect of this idea which is particularly important to traditional Jews. Do you know what large numbers of people have argued for more than 2,000 years now? That the Orthodox Jewish practice of circumcision is a barbaric sexual assault on an infant incapable of giving consent to the mutilation of his sexual organ. Circumcision has been used for millennia to demonize Jews (and others who have similar practices). Several countries have banned infant circumcision, albeit usually with an exemption for Jews.

In fact, even though I am a circumcised Jew who had his son circumcised on the eighth day of his life per religious requirement, I must concede that the anti-circumcision argument has merit. Nothing prevents an adult from enduring circumcision if that is what they desire to do out of not only religious reasons, but even merely cosmetic ones. The infant, however, is being condemned to this identification, and in some cases, when grown, circumcised people have bitterly resented their sexual mutilation at the hand of their parents.

When I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a growing movement to ban infant circumcision, led in part by a Jewish physician, Dr. Dean Idell. The arguments were effectively identical to the arguments we are hearing today against allowing parents to authorize treatment for their children who desire to alter their birth sex. Having said this, I need to make a critically important distinction. There are vanishingly small numbers of medical authorities who would agree to permanent sex alteration for minors. The possibility that a minor might regret such a decision is simply too great to imagine a permanent change as advisable at an early age. As a child approaches puberty, some request, and often parents are willing to allow, chemical treatments that postpone puberty. These are temporary and there is no evidence of harm to those who pursue this strategy. Then, when the child reaches the legal age of majority, they can decide on additional steps, such as surgery, to accomplish their life goal. And again, this decision is made by just 53 out of 100,000 people.

The anti-circumcision movement in the SF Bay Area quieted considerably when it was discovered that circumcised men were much less likely to spread HIV-AIDS than uncircumcised men. Especially in Africa where HIV medications were unaffordable, circumcision became a strategy for moderating the epidemic. And that made it difficult for progressives, especially in a place like San Francisco which experienced a high level of HIV infection, to campaign aggressively against the practice.

But before that happened. the anti-circumcision argument in the San Franciso Bay Area had a devastating consequence for a dear friend of mine. My friend, colleague, and supervisor at the Berkeley Hillel Foundation had a boy and arranged for a circumcision performed by a member of the local Orthodox congregation who was a surgeon and who performed most of our local circumcisions. As occasionally happens, there was a post-surgical infection. The infection was successfully treated, but his mother flew into a rage over the situation because she had not wanted him circumcised at all. She was a member of the Algerian-French Jewish aristocracy and while ordinary Algerian Jews generally circumcise, a few wealthy people who consider themselves more French than Jewish do not. Against her husband’s wishes, she filed a malpractice lawsuit against the physician, and the attorney she hired was Dr. Dean Idell’s spouse.

The Jerusalem Post ran a headline that read (paraphrasing from memory), “Rabbi’s Wife Sues Mohel for Circumcising Their Son.” Within a short time, it became clear that the boy was doing fine, and the lawsuit was dropped. But the damage to my friend’s career was not. I was the Associate Director at the time, and I received a phone call from an important person in the local Jewish Federation’s hierarchy. He told me, “Jack, you have to convince him to divorce her.” I replied that I would do no such thing and terminated the call. Several months later, while he and his associate were at the annual Hillel convention, a group of Jewish students opened our Hillel to Salvadoran refugees seeking asylum. (I had already moved to Michigan by this time.) Neither of them gave their consent to this action, although I suspect both were sympathetic to it, but I guess the Federation now had its chance. The pressure to remove himself as Director became intense, and if truth be known, he was tired of it all. And just like that, my friend, mentor, colleague, supervisor, the person who presided over my marriage to Terri, decided to leave the dream job he had intended to retire from.

Now, I realize that I have meandered off the original discussion, but I hope you will agree that the story has been interesting. But let’s return to the original point. The number of people who identify as transgender is miniscule—less than 1% of the population. The number of those who use some sort of surgical procedure to further define their sexual identity is even more miniscule, about 53 out of every 100,000 people. But somehow this issue is so important that because of it people are willing to vote for politicians who have refused to provide health insurance to all Americans and are actively in the process of removing it from millions.

The point of my discussion of circumcision is that any claim that this is because of some objection to parents allowing cosmetic surgery for minors is bogus. And it’s not just circumcision. Parents routinely allow their minor children to receive all sorts of cosmetic piercings which also have potentially lethal consequences from infection. No, what this really is is an outright effort to find an issue, any issue, that will distract large numbers of people from voting for candidates who are promoting healthcare for all, taking a more sensible approach to undocumented residents, and declining engagement in new wars.

As for targeting transgender folks for poisonous attacks, how about considering the age-old advice of my parents and friends: Mind your own business.