The Trans Teen Illusion (Part 2)

The gay kids aren't all right

This is Part 2 of an essay on “trans” teens. Read Part 1 here.

Last week I introduced you to teen boys who seemed to be working as transsexual prostitutes and a woman whose family gave up everything to pay for her FTM medical transition, which she started at age 14.

This week I’ll cover Teena Brandon, a lawsuit brought by an NYC foster kid, and a surprising oversight in a 2021 study of detransitioners. I’m exploring the wide variety of ways adults have misunderstood teenagers who identify as the opposite sex.

The Murder of Teena Brandon (Nebraska, 1993)

Teena Brandon’s mother, JoAnn, gave birth to her at 16, in 1972. Her husband had just died in a car crash, and she also had a toddler to take care of, who she’d given birth to at 14. The family was poor. They lived on the fringes of Lincoln, Nebraska, near grain elevators.

Around her 18th birthday Brandon started dating a girl and told her she was a hermaphrodite. Brandon also described herself as a man trapped in a woman’s body. Over the next few years she dated other girls and upped her gender game, sometimes saying she was in the process of getting a sex change, had already had one, or that she had something between her legs that would grow eventually. She only resorted to these gambits when girlfriends asked questions; around other new people she met, she just pretended to be a guy.

JoAnn later said her daughter learned about sex changes from The Montel Williams Show. In fact Montel came on the air in 1991, several months after Brandon began pretending to be male. But she could have picked up the info on some other channel; trans was a staple of 1980s and 1990s talk shows. According to Joanne Meyerowitz in How Sex Changed:

“This new breed of shows … elevated ‘personal experience’ and gave transsexuals a chance to break the monopoly on ‘truth’ held by scientific authorities. … They were the experts on themselves. … The talk shows avoided the finer points of academic theory, but they provided … ‘ground-level versions’ of theories that questioned the boundaries of sex and emphasized the social construction of gender.”

So Brandon almost certainly watched TV shows that imparted wacky ideas about sex which didn’t even meet the epistemic standards of queer theory professors.

Meyerowitz quotes Jerry Springer, whose talk show hit the air in 1991:

“Perhaps we’d like to think there are only two classifications: male and female. But the reality is … we are all simply degrees of one or the other: either mostly male or mostly female, mostly man, mostly woman.”

To stay afloat and fund gifts for her girlfriends, Brandon committed petty crimes like check forgery. The charges started catching up with her around age 20, when she spent some time in (women’s) jail. Brandon never medically transitioned.

Brandon was murdered just after her 21st birthday by two morons who’d recently raped her and wanted to make sure she couldn’t testify against them. They’d turned their sadistic attention on Brandon in the first place because she was a woman who claimed to be a man.

Amid all the activist tripe and Oscar bait, several sources about Brandon stand out as possibly reliable. First, The Humboldt Murders by John Gregory Dunne, published by The New Yorker in January 1997, was probably rigorously fact-checked. Second, The Brandon Teena Story, a 1998 documentary, consists almost entirely of courtroom and police station audio, photos, and interviews with a wide range of players. Third, Stacey D’Erasmo’s 1999 piece in Out Magazine contains valuable reporting. It claims Brandon never used the name “Brandon Teena,” which makes me nervous about the documentary … but we’re just going to go with it.

Activists adopted Brandon after her death. Dunne:

“The Brandons were available to the press, and to gay and transgender activists, who took an almost proprietary interest in them. One referred to Teena Brandon’s murder as ‘the gay O. J. Simpson case’; it was as if [the others murdered alongside Brandon] were only supporting players. Before [one murderer’s] trial, several dozen transsexuals drawn to Falls City by appeals on the Internet demonstrated in support of Teena Brandon outside the courthouse; many wore T-shirts lettered with the words ‘Transsexual Menace.’”

D’Erasmo tells a different story: that at least one Brandon, JoAnn, “adamantly refused to meet with transgender groups and screamed into TV cameras, ‘Her name is Teena, not Brandon!’”

It’s complicated. In 2000, the LGBT org Lambda Legal began representing JoAnn to argue before the Nebraska Supreme Court, successfully, that the sheriff was liable for failing to protect her daughter. Lambda’s website now refers to Teena as a “transgender man.” Normally I’d expect a law firm to honor its client’s understanding of her dead child, but in this case I’m betting Lambda didn’t run the website copy by JoAnn.

One activist, a San Francisco FTM named Matt Rice, speculates to D’Erasmo about Brandon’s isolation (it’s unclear what period of Brandon’s life Rice is referring to):

“You’re not going to approach resources geared for lesbians if you see yourself as a straight guy … A whole sea of uncertainty surrounds Brandon. If he hadn’t died, would there have been any help for him?”

This echoes a line from Dunne about Brandon’s predicament after being charged with forgery:

“Her continued insistence that she was not gay eliminated [the option of] retreat into the gay communities of Lincoln and Omaha, where she could have been sheltered and nourished.”

Were “gay communities” in the business of harboring fugitives in the 90s? I arrived on the scene in the mid-2000s and couldn’t even get those people to email me their class notes when I was out sick.

Rice and Dunne are both making an assumption: that a special kind of “help” is available for gay people – so much help that it can save a high school dropout with open criminal charges. And the reason Brandon couldn’t access the Help was because she told her friends she was a hermaphrodite. 

It’s a silly fantasy. Rice is pushing a “trans folks are more vulnerable than cis gays” agenda; Dunne is feathering his thesis that Brandon was a jackass for pretending to be a man. 

The New Yorker v. Nebraska

Yes: Dunne dismisses Brandon’s trans identity casually, without divulging what he believes about trans identity in general. He treats her claims to maleness as lies that her girlfriends rolled with because they enjoyed dating “a lean and unmuscular quasi-man who offered sex without pregnancy or fisticuffs.”

Like Dunne, I sometimes side eye lesbians who insist they’re men. But Brandon wasn’t some coastal clout chaser who thought she was cooler than the other lesbians; she was a doofy adolescent who never left the prairie. And while Dunne is correct to point out that her sex and gender cosmos made no sense, he misses the bigger picture: it meshed with transgender doctrine.

OK, so Brandon hadn’t actually started on testosterone, nevermind had surgery. But transsexuals broke the monopoly on “‘truth,’” remember? Thanks to her TV education, Brandon probably did believe she was a man in a woman’s body, or at least a “hermaphrodite.” The TV transsexuals might have even told her that pretending to be male constituted step one of the sex change.

Worse, Brandon was admitted to a “crisis center” at age 19 and diagnosed as a transsexual. An encounter with the mental health system can be even more mind boggling than watching the Jerry Springer Show.

Brandon probably also imbibed idiot theories about lesbianism. I was born over a decade after she was, and a popular smut story among my tween peers involved a lesbian sticking a live lobster in her vagina because she liked how it wriggled. Lesbians also hated men, were bitter because they couldn’t get a boyfriend, had been abused, were just doing it for attention from men, hated sex, feared penetration, and loved stuffing hideous objects in their vaginas (like lobsters). In this environment it was hard to figure out you were gay and come to terms with it. Why should poor Brandon?

Uninterested in Brandon’s gender and sexuality, Dunne focuses on something else:

“The tyranny from which [Brandon] could not escape was less that of gender than of class, a prison … especially in white America, where class distinctions are not supposed to exist. Hers was the marginalized world of mobile homes, grungy rentals, public housing, unemployment, welfare, service jobs, minimum wage, social workers, domestic abuse, sexual molestation, absent fathers, paternity tests, teen-age pregnancies, foster homes, court-ordered psychological counselling, learning centers rather than high schools, Job Corps, petty crime, felony convictions, and penitentiary hard time.”

Dunne is right to zero in on poverty but wrong to see it as some kind of narrative rival to gender. What made Brandon so vulnerable – so prone to getting raped and murdered – was that she was a poor, uneducated young lesbian who’d been exposed to crazy ideas about gender. The elements were entwined. 

A grain elevator in Lincoln, Nebraska

What could Dunne have written if he’d felt curious about Brandon’s gender ideas, tuned into trash TV, and analyzed the transgender propaganda of his day? Something valuable, I imagine – he was a witty guy apparently unconcerned with pieties.

But Dunne wasn’t curious because he disdained Brandon and her family and friends. That parade of horribles I quoted? I think it’s supposed to be an exhaustive list of all the components of low-income Nebraska society. Dunne says Brandon failed to realize her rapists might murder her because “she did not have the imaginative range[.]”

There is no beauty in Dunne’s account of Humboldt County. Where there is grace – he glimpses a victim’s mother, a murderer’s mother, and the aunt of a supporting player chatting in a courtroom – Dunne recoils. “I think it was the saddest sight I have ever seen.” He accuses the aunt of “wearing a swanky sweat jacket[.]”

Reading this, I felt like I was watching Dunne compete for some kind of elegant snark award against Martin Amis. And perhaps he was, because he was no ordinary New Yorker writer – he was Joan Didion’s husband. In 1997 elites didn’t try to hide their snobbery or pretend they were just concerned that the poor people in question might be racist. 

Dunne keeps gratuitously invoking Willa Cather, the other lesbian from Nebraska:

“I suspect that Teena Brandon would have made Cather impatient … Cather would have regarded her obsession with gender and its discontents as self-indulgent, and her gender confusion as an excuse to abdicate personal responsibility.”

And so Dunne takes his place in the long line of pompous adults misunderstanding “trans” teens. It’s the saddest sight I’ve ever seen.

Brian L. v. Admin. for Children's Services (NYC, 2008)

Brian entered NYC’s foster care system around age 10, in 1995. As an adolescent he was diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder. The foster care agency, Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), remained legally responsible for his healthcare until April 2006, when he turned 21. At some point he began hormone therapy (age unclear).

Several months before Brian’s 21st birthday, he sued to compel ACS to fund genital surgery. ACS refused, arguing:

“[Brian] simply has not demonstrated the kind of serious, thoughtful, and committed approach that would, as a matter of basic logic, be expected of anyone appropriately planning for this type of fundamental and serious surgical process. Rather, she has behaved in a manner that is indecisive, unstable, and self-defeating, and has been all but impossible to engage in meaningful planning on this or any other vital issue.”

Brian’s psychotherapist argued:

“[S]ex reassignment surgery was medically necessary to alleviate [Brian’s] depression, anxiety disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.”

The appeals court characterized a “medical doctor’s” testimony:

“[He] determined that sex reassignment surgery was indicated for [Brian] because without it [Brian’s] emotional and behavioral problems, e.g., anxiety, borderline personality disorder, would ‘deteriorat[e],’ thereby ‘hinder[ing] further relationship, adjustment, personal and professional growth.’"

A family court granted Brian’s petition. ACS appealed. The Manhattan-based appeals court reversed the family court, citing technical issues. It made this ruling in the face of a phalanx of civil rights lawyers and medical industry players who had submitted amicus briefs on behalf of Brian.

This decision by a panel of New York judges, urged by child welfare officials, might mark the first time in US history that adults used the law to protect an indigent youth from gender medicine – about fifty years after “street queens” started using estrogen.

“… A Survey of 100 Detransitioners” (2021)

In 2021 the physician-researcher Lisa Littman published a study of young people who had identified as the opposite sex, medicalized, but then changed their mind and detransitioned. 

Littman’s 115-question survey, administered in 2016-17, didn’t ask her subjects if they’d wanted to transition because they were confused about or uncomfortable with their homosexuality. But 23% of the respondents told her something like that in an open-text response field, without prompting. 

I don’t fault Littman for her oversight. To put it in context, she drafted the survey after homophobia had been widely repudiated and before public discourse about transing the gay away had erupted. She also solicited input from two detransitioners at the outset of the study. Finally, the post-2010 cohort of trans youth does include a lot of straight kids.

But it means something that a smart, open-minded researcher like Littman didn’t consider “trans” kids might often be gay (or that gay people might regret transitioning?). It fits a long historical pattern. If you can’t see who the gender patients are, then you can’t see what the gender doctors are doing.

They’re preying on gay kids.

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More “trans” teen content

• No Way Back (2023 documentary)

• Time to Think by Hannah Barnes (2023)

• My writing on Brandt v. Rutledge, the 2022 trial about Arkansas’ ban on pediatric gender medicine

• Dead Name (2022 documentary)

• Corinna Cohn’s 2022 essay on transitioning as a teen in the 90s

• Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier (2020)