The unending desires of Andrea Long Chu

Mere desire is justification for medical transition

Much ink has been spilled (and will be spilled) on transgender writer/critic Andrea Long Chu’s article in New York magazine on the moral case for allowing every child – “regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history” – to medically transition if they so desire.

Chu’s claim to fame in contemporary culture is their open, exultant, and fetishistic embrace of the most regressive gender stereotypes about women (“Daisy Dukes, bikini tops, and all the dresses, and, my god, for the breasts”), and being open about it – “Any TERF will tell you that most of these items are just the traditional trappings of patriarchal femininity.” They have also been very honest about their motive to transition – “for gossip and compliments, lipstick and mascara, for crying at the movies, for being someone’s girlfriend, for letting her pay the check or carry my bags,” and so on.

So, you can sense their ennui here as they try to talk about Judith Butler’s latest book. You can sense their boredom as they wade perfunctorily through the obligatory waters of the religious right, TERFs, JK Rowling, Littman-bashing, Abigail Shrier, specious comparisons of transgender rights with abortion rights, and several paragraphs of discussions about 'intersex.' You can feel that they are really not into it when they try the ponderous acronym TARL to jumpstart a lazy hashtag.

In fact, in their desire to get to the meat of their argument, Chu willingly concedes the truth behind all the misgivings of the critics of gender medicine: the reality of biological sex and that the anti-trans movement has “neutral biological fact” on its side (though somehow in a very, very hateful way); that gender identity is a “thin peg” that was “clumsily adopted from psychiatry and strongly influenced by both gender studies and the born-this-way tactics of the campaign for marriage equality;” or that there are “health risks of sex-changing care or the looming possibility of detransition.” They also concede that other than this medical experimentation – and that too only on children – there is now no other discrimination faced by transgender people: “The public now appears to favor protections for trans people from discrimination in employment, housing, and public spaces.” In fact, Chu is willing to throw the entire medical establishment and the sham researchers under the bus for having failed to show evidence of gender-affirming care without resorting to – in many cases – blatant deception. Sure, Chu seems to be saying, it is “good and right for advocates to fight back,” but I have bigger fish to fry.

And then, after hacking our way through the impenetrable thicket of interminable Butlerian prose,¹ we have it: “The freedom of sex does not promise happiness… it is also true that where there is freedom, there will always be regret… If we are to recognize the rights of trans kids, we will also have to accept that, like us, they have a right to the hazards of their own free will.”

Now, where have we heard this before? From Chu, of course! Back in 2018, a few days before getting their neovagina, Chu was at their confessional best: “...there is no guarantee that it will make me happier.” They have felt “demonstrably worse” after hormones – because, you know, estrogen makes women go all weepy (oh, the godawful stereotyping again, but perhaps not as bad as “getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is”). Also, you come to know that they became suicidal only after taking hormones. By this point, one can imagine poor Jack Turban going, “Dude, WTF!”

Why then go for hormones or surgery at all? Well, because they want it. As simple as that.

“I… believe that surgery’s only prerequisite should be a simple demonstration of want. Beyond this, no amount of pain, anticipated or continuing, justifies its withholding.” Evidence, schmevidence!

Hippocratic oath be damned – if the kids want it, they should get it. (Now available on the local pharmacist’s menu – cocaine and OxyCodone. The kids wanted it, after all.) But even then, “Nothing, not even surgery, will grant me the mute simplicity of having always been a woman. The negative passions – grief, self-loathing, shame, regret – are as much a human right as universal healthcare or food. There are no good outcomes in transition.”

There we have it. A refreshingly honest statement on why young men and women should have the right to medically transition – not because it promises them a better outcome in life – there can’t be with all that grief, self-loathing, shame, regret, after all – but because they want it. “It does not matter where this desire comes from.”

And what about the regret? Gender physicians and surgeons everywhere will be overjoyed to know that Chu has them covered: “If we are to recognize the rights of trans kids, we will also have to accept that, like us, they have a right to the hazards of their own free will.” Never mind that the doctors on WPATH say that talking to young people about the medical issues around transition is like “talking to a blank wall” (transcript of the Identity Evolution Workshop, May 6, 2022, page 13). Or that young people – even in their mid-20s – have an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex that is involved in executive functions (i.e., those that provide the cognitive abilities that are necessary for prosocial behavior, successful goal-planning, and achievement), leaving them with immature and compromised core cognitive abilities.

It’s all free will, baby! And that free will includes the right of children to “want things that are bad for them” (as Chu said in an interview a few months before their vaginoplasty).

And what if things go south? Well, “No single federal program would benefit trans people more than Medicare for All.” (However, that courtesy of society subsidizing your free will extends only till your transition; if you regret your decision later, that regret falls under the column of the hazard of free will – detransitioners are shit out of luck.) It’s all free will until someone needs to pay the bill. Brings back the memories of 2008 when the banks could privatize their gains and socialize their losses, doesn’t it?

Not everyone can successfully appropriate a different race and gender while making writing about their porn fantasies a living

So, parents, now you know. Your children have every right to demand any surgery they want. Just the mere desire is all the justification you need to pay for it or convince your insurance – whose premiums are your responsibility – to do so until, of course, society decides to pick up the tab for every procedure that can be dreamt up by any imaginative soul. Because neither the school that won’t out the child to their parents nor Andrea will – hazards of free will, after all.

(When Chu says that the debate has shifted from being a social issue (“hence a question of rights”) to a medical issue (“hence a question of evidence”), I don’t think that they realize that, for the overwhelming majority of parents, the latter has always been the – and only – issue: just show us the evidence that these medical interventions work, these parents are saying, so that we are not left with tending for our adult children for the rest of their lives. Because not everyone can successfully appropriate a different race and gender while making writing about their sissy porn fantasies into a living.)

For a TARL like me to realize how revolutionary this is, all I had to do was consider a simple thought experiment. How about apotemnophilia, also known as amputee identity disorder, which is “defined as the desire for amputation of a healthy limb, and may be accompanied by behaviour of pretending to be an amputee and sometimes, but not necessarily, by sexual arousal”? Will that be allowed by Chu? Here’s a simple find-and-replace in Chu’s final paragraph:

“Freedom is easy to imagine when it is the freedom to do as you’re told. What we cannot conceive is why they are making all this apotemnophilia trouble in the first place. They do not owe us an explanation. They are busy taking charge of their own creation. They may not change the world, but they will certainly change themselves… We have not yet begun to understand the courage of the child who says she is an amputee for the first time without any biological “proof” to back this up. …But still she speaks. The sentence “I am an amputee” is performative speech in the classic sense… She is not only declaring her intent to exercise her freedom from her limbs in the future; she is, by uttering these words, already exercising it. She is working the weakness in the norm. She is not afraid of her limbs – she is against it. That is not nothing.”

To that, all I can say is: wow!

1. After reading the article, I had to concede that Chu has truly learned from the master (they/them): the same turgidity of prose, the same meanderings in obtuseness so that people do not immediately sense the absolute lack of substance behind their words. And the same sense of inadequacy that leads them to include “Pulitzer-winning” after the name (and even in their Twitter bio) because they can’t fucking believe it.