Down, down, down

Sandro Botticelli, Map of Hell, The Divine Comedy, 1480–1490

Those of us who uncovered this medical scandal by ourselves—not by reading books and newspapers but by piecing together journal articles and decoding euphemisms and finding first one person with a story and then another and another and another—descended into hell one rung at a time.

I descended for years.

There was the long stretch of time my friend tangled with gender, when I followed her down one rabbithole after another. There was the lonely year I spent in Montreal and the sticky summer I spent in Washington, D.C., poring over books—in sociology, medicine, psychiatry, anthropology, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, on ADHD, suggestion, placebo effects, multiple personality, mania, hysteria, green sickness, body projects, endocrinology, eugenics, deviance, Prozac, cult dynamics, cognitive dissonance, and Gnosticism—under the cool blue eye of human understanding.

Sometimes I uncovered things that made me lose my footing. I slid fast. When I looked into puberty blockers, I fell hard.

But I took every step under my own power and initiative. No one pushed—or pulled—me.

---

Now we're at a point where whole societies that have sleepwalked into this madness must be made to see it for what it is.

But it’s hard to be the bearer of bad news: what to say? How to say it? How to say anything at all and be heard, when no one wants to hear it?

For people who have not paid attention—and those who have not understood what it is they’ve supported—the descent will be precipitous: the ground beneath their feet will simply disappear.

Some bearers of bad news insert footholds and guardrails. They don’t want the hearer to descend too fast—or turn around, or stop up their ears. So they offer concessions. The Dutch protocol is a favorite concession. A critical article will nod to the Dutch, as though to reassure the reader: there’s a right way to do this and there’s a right group of people to do it to. Others insist that some children are no doubt trans and no doubt helped by early interventions—even though many more are harmed. This is a way of offering people—clinicians, activists, parents—who have caused harm a ‘golden bridge.’ You were traveling in the right direction but you went too far. Here’s a way back.

But any strategic fictions we reinforce will need to be dismantled. This direction of travel was always wrong, every step of the way.

I think the only golden bridge we can offer is this: Perhaps your intentions were good.

As far as consolations go, it's thin. Good intentions, terrible—foreseeable—consequences. Perhaps it’s no consolation at all. But that’s where we are.

---

“But the stars that marked our starting fall away.
We must go deeper into greater pain,
for it is not permitted that we stay.”

Still, people have been pushed—or pulled—over the edge before: parents whose children have disappeared online, only to reemerge with strange new stories to tell; spouses who have lost husbands or wives. What can people who've survived such a fall tell us about how to break bad news?

When Virgil and Dante descend into hell, Virgil knows that Dante must rest along the way. When the gradient steepens, Virgil embraces Dante—like a parent swaddling an infant—and they plunge together.

I saw them coming, wings extended wide
intent on catching us: a fearful scene!

Suddenly I was snatched up by my guide--
you know the way a mother, woken by 
the noise of flames crackling near her bedside

will grab her child immediately, and fly,
not even pausing to throw on a gown,
more worried for his than her own safety--

so he grabbed me; then from the higher ground 
he launched himself, and skidded on his back
into the next infernal circle down.

Water never shot from sluice so quick
to power the drive-wheel of a scutching mill
revolving with repeated rapid clack

as did my master clatter down that hill
with me clutched to his chest, not like a comrade,
but a son (whom he was careful not to spill).

There’s also this:

Who, even freed from all the chains of verse,
and given endless time, could tell the tale
of what I saw now? The blood, and guts, and worse?

I guarantee you every tongue would fail:
our minds weren't built for such reality,
beside which any form of words must pale.

Still, Dante writes.