Reflecting on The Witch Trials of JK Rowling

I just finished listening to the sixth episode of The Witch Trials of JK Rowling, which features interviews with two Harry Potter fans who identify as transgender, Natalie Wynn and a 17-year-old named Noah.

I found the ‘Natalie’ segment hard to listen to because of the breathless falsetto, whiny theatre-kid energy, rampant dishonesty, and shameless manipulation.

The ‘Noah’ segment is hard to listen to because Noah is exactly who Rowling is worried about: a bright, sensitive kid who was going through a hard time and needed real help and understanding but found gender instead.

But what I want to write about is the way Noah leans so heavily on the promise that transition is medicine to say (more or less): I made the right choice. Doctors evaluated me and there was a medical decision that was made that I needed to transition. Noah returns to this again and again and again, running over the promises medical providers made as though those promises were beads on a rosary.

This faith in medicine cuts Noah off from the insights Megan Phelps-Roper offers: that distress and disgust at puberty is normal. That Noah was perhaps having a thoroughly typical female experience of adolescence.

At one point, Noah says: “Part of my journey with self mutilation was that I hated my body and wanted to punish my body…” Under trans ideology, Noah is encouraged to seek out the companionship of other people who identify as trans, regardless of their age or sex or life experience. But while they may use the same language of self-discovery, it’s doubtful that such a diverse group of people is sharing an experience of ‘being trans’ at all. Noah’s real peers are other teenage girls—anorexics and cutters on their own self-harm journeys—enacting various escape attempts.

To ward off doubt—and trans identity tends to be riddled with doubt—patients, parents, and doctors cling to ‘certainties.’ One of the most compelling balms is the idea—true or false—that you had no choice but to act as you did.

You can hear this in a recent conversation with Rose, a mother who came to regret socially transitioning her two young sons. Even when what she was doing didn’t feel right, she felt there was no alternative. She believed she had no choice. So she must be doing the right thing, even if it felt wrong.

You can hear it with gender clinicians, who insist that psychotherapy can’t resolve or relieve gender-related distress. Their hands are tied. They must affirm. And if they feel queasy about a case here and there, they must overcome those feelings and get with the program.

You can hear it when young people justify their decisions to undergo irreversible medical interventions—like the young woman I mentioned in my Genspect presentation, who expressed doubts about her upcoming double mastectomy and said she was “doing my best to see this as a medical treatment for dysphoria but there’s always a lingering fear in the back of my head.” The belief that those procedures are medically necessary helps keep doubts at bay.

And you can hear it in Noah’s story, when Noah says things like: Well, in my case, my distress wouldn’t have gotten better because I was evaluated by professionals, this was a medical process…

I listen to Noah and I think about the story Bob Withers told of a young person who had clung to the promises of having been evaluated and diagnosed and set on the right treatment pathway. This faith in medicine persisted through the ups and downs of transition—right up until the moment this young person overheard their doctor saying that he affirms every patient who walks through the door. All at once, the illusion of having been seen and cared for as an individual collapsed.

As gender ‘medicine’ teeters, many more patients face such devastating realizations: that their medical providers served a cause and failed their patients.