Genspect
= “a voice for parents with gender-questioning kids.”
URL = https://genspect.org/
Description
Jessie Mannisto:
""Genspect is a new organization, founded as “a voice for parents with gender-questioning kids.” Since they launched in late June, Genspect’s team has hit the ground running with their outreach to media organizations (including Third Factor) in an effort to express that voice.
“It’s not a support group, it’s not campaigning against transgenderism, and it’s not a research society,” said Angus Fox, a member of Genspect’s press team, who spoke to me in June. “It’s an alliance for parents and professionals who are concerned about medicalizing people who are going through a formative period, where everything’s in flux. They’re seeing gender as all important, but there are so many things going on in their lives, and it all goes under the heading ‘gender.’ And there are a lot of parents and professionals who are very worried about this.”"
(https://www.thirdfactor.org/angus-fox-genspect/)
Discussion
Jessie Mannisto:
"To ensure that the concerns of the eighty-five percent are heard and addressed, Genspect will take a hard line against extremist and fringe views of all stripes. “There is such a thing as transphobia,” Angus said. “It’s really ugly—people who say ‘I wouldn’t have a trans person in my home; I don’t think trans people should be able to stand for office or be out in public.’” On the opposite fringe, he observed, “[T]here’s this group of activists that either you agree with them on everything or you’re a Nazi. They really believe that.”
Ideally, the Genspect team hopes that by establishing firm boundaries with respect to those fringes, they’ll be able to consider and showcase stories that aren’t being heard—and there’s a range of them. “We’ve got trans people within our organization; we’ve got detransitioners as well,” Angus said. “It’s about saying, ‘Let’s have a real dialogue.’ We’re hoping that people can start to hear these stories that are hidden. There’s thousands and thousands of parents out there.
“We want to get these arguments out in the mainstream so we don’t just hear one narrative,” Angus continued. “You can’t work out who’s right and who’s wrong if you don’t have a dialogue.”
Dialogue is indeed a core value at Genspect. The parents in the organization run the gamut from conservative to liberal and disagree profoundly about plenty of political issues. What they share, however, is a strong sense that their individual children have other struggles that aren’t being addressed because they’re being subsumed under the framework of gender dysphoria. The idea is that, as Angus related it, these young people might realize some other explanation fits their particular struggle better: “Oh, this wasn’t an issue of gender identity. It’s actually that I was gay and had to come to terms with it. Or that I was kind of different in terms of my thinking. I didn’t fit in. I was an outsider in some sense.”"