I mentioned this article this morning, but wanted to give a bit more detail because it’s important in two ways. First, it’s a good and objective assessment of gender transitioning in America, giving both the upsides and downsides. Second, it’s in the New York Times, which has, until recently, taken the “affirmative treatment” side of gender transitioning, staying away from the topics of harmful puberty blockers and those who reverse transitioning (“detransitioners”) or those who avoid medical transitioning after thinking about it (“desisters”). Recently, however, the paper has become more objective on transitioning (this started with Emily Bazelon’s 2022 article “The Battle Over Gender Therapy“, for which Bazelon got a lot of pushback from her colleagues). Pamela Paul’s article takes that even farther. It’s well worth reading. For more plaudits, read Eliza Mondegreen’s short UnHerd piece about Paul’s article, “The New York Times Gets Braver With Gender Coverage“. An except from Mondegreen:
This is a deeply moving piece that goes much further in its implications than anything the New York Times has run before. There are, however, also curiosities surrounding Pamela Paul’s piece, like the editorial decision to relegate her reporting to the opinion pages, and to run an apologia of sorts by Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury, in which she suggests, in the mildest possible terms, that more conversation is a good thing for “humanity, nuance and empathy,” and that gender medicine is full of “complexities.”
If you read that apologia, by the editorial page editor, it’s pretty worthless, trying not to denigrate what Paul said but simply urging “more discussion.” Yes, of course, but all of us have said that all along. But more important, we need more research!
To read Paul’s piece, you can click below, or find it archived for free here if you’re not a subscriber. This is definitely not an op-ed, however it’s labeled. At nearly 5,000 words, it qualifies at least as “news analysis”.
In short, Paul’s thesis is that America is dealing poorly with adolescents who wish to transition (nobody seems to have any issue with those over 25 who want to change gender), forcing them into an “affirmative treatment” program that affirms their “wrong body” feelings without question, gives them hormones to halt puberty, and then goes on to prescribe hormones that change your secondary sex characteristics, as well as surgery. Rarely do children with gender dysphoria get longer-term, objective care that explores their feelings rather than hustling them on to adopt another gender presentation. Further, Paul makes three claims—all supported by evidence—that gender activists hate (this is my summary):
- There is indeed evidence for a form of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD), in which children, without prior indication, suddenly claim they’re in the wrong body and want to change gender. Gender activists have long claimed that ROGD is a fictional syndrome, one wrongly supported by Abigail Shrier in her readable but much-criticized (by gender activists) book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. This book is still causing controversy, but it seems that, in the main, Shrier’s claims were correct. ROGD does seem to be a real syndrome.
- It appears that ROGD may be promoted by social media and the urging of peers, who, perhaps having transitioned themselves, urge others to do so. Gender activists have long denied that social pressure plays a significant role in the transitioning of children and adolescents. Given social media and what I’ve read from those who have transitioned, I think social pressure is important.
- The majority (80%) of gender dysphoric children, if they don’t transition, resolve their identities by the time they reach puberty, often coming out as gay—a much less intrusive result. Further, about a third of people who take hormone therapy stop the procedure within four years, though by then permanent physiological damage, including infertility, might have been done.
Paul will undoubtedly be demonized for this, but I give her many encomiums. She’s a brave woman, who, like John McWhorter, isn’t afraid to tackle “antiwoke” topics in the NYT op-ed section. (Paul used to be the Sunday book-review editor.) She is a woman who is doing good, and I sugggest subscribi9ng to her columns if you take the NYT.
I’ll give a few quotes from Paul (indented) under each topic.
Improper treatment of gender dysphoria:
At 17, desperate to begin hormone therapy, Powell broke the news to her parents. They sent her to a gender specialist to make sure she was serious. In the fall of her senior year of high school, she started cross-sex hormones. She had a double mastectomy the summer before college, then went off as a transgender man named Grayson to Sarah Lawrence College, where she was paired with a male roommate on a men’s floor. At 5-foot-3, she felt she came across as a very effeminate gay man.
At no point during her medical or surgical transition, Powell says, did anyone ask her about the reasons behind her gender dysphoria or her depression. At no point was she asked about her sexual orientation. And at no point was she asked about any previous trauma, and so neither the therapists nor the doctors ever learned that she’d been sexually abused as a child.
“I wish there had been more open conversations,” Powell, now 23 and detransitioned, told me. “But I was told there is one cure and one thing to do if this is your problem, and this will help you.”
. . .In May 2017, Emerick began searching “gender” online and encountered trans advocacy websites. After realizing she could “pick the other side,” she told her mother, “I’m sick of being called a dyke and not a real girl.” If she were a man, she’d be free to pursue relationships with women.
That September, she and her mother met with a licensed professional counselor for the first of two 90-minute consultations. She told the counselor that she had wished to be a Boy Scout rather than a Girl Scout. She said she didn’t like being gay or a butch lesbian. She also told the counselor that she had suffered from anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation. The clinic recommended testosterone, which was prescribed by a nearby L.G.B.T.Q. health clinic. Shortly thereafter, she was also diagnosed with A.D.H.D. She developed panic attacks. At age 17, she was cleared for a double mastectomy.
“I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m having my breasts removed. I’m 17. I’m too young for this,’” she recalled. But she went ahead with the operation.
Gender activists and their drive for “affirmative care”:
Progressives often portray the heated debate over childhood transgender care as a clash between those who are trying to help growing numbers of children express what they believe their genders to be and conservative politicians who won’t let kids be themselves.
But right-wing demagogues are not the only ones who have inflamed this debate. Transgender activists have pushed their own ideological extremism, especially by pressing for a treatment orthodoxy that has faced increased scrutiny in recent years. Under that model of care, clinicians are expected to affirm a young person’s assertion of gender identity and even provide medical treatment before, or even without, exploring other possible sources of distress.
Many who think there needs to be a more cautious approach — including well-meaning liberal parents, doctors and people who have undergone gender transition and subsequently regretted their procedures — have been attacked as anti-trans and intimidated into silencing their concerns.
Activists’ resistance to objective care:
Laura Edwards-Leeper, the founding psychologist of the first pediatric gender clinic in the United States, said that when she started her practice in 2007, most of her patients had longstanding and deep-seated gender dysphoria. Transitioning clearly made sense for almost all of them, and any mental health issues they had were generally resolved through gender transition.
“But that is just not the case anymore,” she told me recently. While she doesn’t regret transitioning the earlier cohort of patients and opposes government bans on transgender medical care, she said, “As far as I can tell, there are no professional organizations who are stepping in to regulate what’s going on.”
Rapid onset gender dysphoria:
Most of her patients now, she said, have no history of childhood gender dysphoria. Others refer to this phenomenon, with some controversy, as rapid onset gender dysphoria, in which adolescents, particularly tween and teenage girls, express gender dysphoria despite never having done so when they were younger. Frequently, they have mental health issues unrelated to gender. While professional associations say there is a lack of quality research on rapid onset gender dysphoria, several researchers have documented the phenomenon, and many health care providers have seen evidence of it in their practices.
“The population has changed drastically,” said Edwards-Leeper, a former head of the Child and Adolescent Committee for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the organization responsible for setting gender transition guidelines for medical professionals.
For these young people, she told me, “you have to take time to really assess what’s going on and hear the timeline and get the parents’ perspective in order to create an individualized treatment plan. Many providers are completely missing that step.”
. . . . In a recent study in The Archives of Sexual Behavior, about 40 young detransitioners out of 78 surveyed said they had suffered from rapid onset gender dysphoria. Trans activists have fought hard to suppress any discussion of rapid onset gender dysphoria, despite evidence that the condition is real. In its guide for journalists, the activist organization GLAAD warns the media against using the term, as it is not “a formal condition or diagnosis.” Human Rights Campaign, another activist group, calls it “a right-wing theory.” A group of professional organizations put out a statement urging clinicians to eliminate the term from use.
Social pressure:
Many parents of kids who consider themselves trans say their children were introduced to transgender influencers on YouTube or TikTok, a phenomenon intensified for some by the isolation and online cocoon of Covid. Others say their kids learned these ideas in the classroom, as early as elementary school, often in child-friendly ways through curriculums supplied by trans rights organizations, with concepts like the gender unicorn or the Genderbread person.
The suicide trope (the tactic of warning parents that their kids will commit suicide if not allowed to transition, often expressed as “do you want a dead daughter or a live son?”, or vice versa):
After Kathleen’s 15-year-old son, whom she described as an obsessive child, abruptly told his parents he was trans, the doctor who was going to assess whether he had A.D.H.D. referred him instead to someone who specialized in both A.D.H.D. and gender. Kathleen, who asked to be identified only by her first name to protect her son’s privacy, assumed that the specialist would do some kind of evaluation or assessment. That was not the case.
The meeting was brief and began on a shocking note. “In front of my son, the therapist said, ‘Do you want a dead son or a live daughter?’” Kathleen recounted.
Parents are routinely warned that to pursue any path outside of agreeing with a child’s self-declared gender identity is to put a gender dysphoric youth at risk for suicide, which feels to many people like emotional blackmail. Proponents of the gender-affirming model have cited studies showing an association between that standard of care and a lower risk of suicide. But those studies were found to have methodological flaws or have been deemed not entirely conclusive. A survey of studies on the psychological effects of cross-sex hormones, published three years ago in The Journal of the Endocrine Society, the professional organization for hormone specialists, found it “could not draw any conclusions about death by suicide.” In a letter to The Wall Street Journal last year, 21 experts from nine countries said that survey was one reason they believed there was “no reliable evidence to suggest that hormonal transition is an effective suicide prevention measure.”
Leave our kids alone: All kids who have serious problems about their sexuality or gender deserve therapy. But they should get good, objective therapy, not “affirmative therapy”.
To the trans activist dictum that children know their gender best, it is important to add something all parents know from experience: Children change their minds all the time. One mother told me that after her teenage son desisted — pulled back from a trans identity before any irreversible medical procedures — he explained, “I was just rebelling. I look at it like a subculture, like being goth.”
“The job of children and adolescents is to experiment and explore where they fit into the world, and a big part of that exploration, especially during adolescence, is around their sense of identity,” Sasha Ayad, a licensed professional counselor based in Phoenix, told me. “Children at that age often present with a great deal of certainty and urgency about who they believe they are at the time and things they would like to do in order to enact that sense of identity.”
Ayad, a co-author of “When Kids Say They’re Trans: A Guide for Thoughtful Parents,” advises parents to be wary of the gender affirmation model. “We’ve always known that adolescents are particularly malleable in relationship to their peers and their social context and that exploration is often an attempt to navigate difficulties of that stage, such as puberty, coming to terms with the responsibilities and complications of young adulthood, romance and solidifying their sexual orientation,” she told me. For providing this kind of exploratory approach in her own practice with gender dysphoric youth, Ayad has had her license challenged twice, both times by adults who were not her patients. Both times, the charges were dismissed
And I find this statistic, which is stable, to be pretty telling:
. . . Studies show that around eight in 10 cases of childhood gender dysphoria resolve themselves by puberty and 30 percent of people on hormone therapy discontinue its use within four years, though the effects, including infertility, are often irreversible.
I could go on with Paul’s stories of “detransitioners” and “desisters,” but you can read the article yourself, especially since it’s archived. But for writing this story, and especially for calling attention to the problems of “affirmative therapy” and for telling stories of those who de-transition, Paul will be called a “transphobe”. She is not, nor are any of us who simply want gender-dysphoric kids to be treated properly.
And good for the NYT for publishing this. Now we’ll know they’re really serious when they start questioning whether trans women should be competing against natal women in sports, or put in women’s prisons.
Appreciate your discussing this and very appreciative of your blog. Long time reader, rarely comment.
It might be interesting for your readers to look at the link to a ”critique” and ”debunking”” of Pamela Paul’s essay to see how many of these they can spot: 1. Manipulative language 2. Falsehoods—and since the author ought to know the truth—would actually be lies 3. Statements torn so out of context that they are misleading and distort the truth. This version about Lisa Littman and her ROGD study and what happened to Littman and the study and later studies on ROGD is just one of many clear examples.
https://www.advocate.com/transgender/nyt-trans-article-debunked
Debunked: This misleading NYT anti-trans column relies on pseudoscience
The opinion piece by Pamela Paul relies on routinely debunked disinformation and gets factual information wrong about transgender care. It is the latest NYT published piece to do so….
By all means read the critique. But that critique is written by gender activists. Also, Paul notes that ROGD is “controversial” and says that about Littman’s paper. But she also produced a non-retracted paper.
I’m sorry, but a lot of what Paul said is right, and if you think that less “affirmative care” should be given to all people with gender dysphoria, I feel sorry for you. That is cruel and unempathic. Further, we know that puberty blockers are not properly tested, and in Europe are widely regarded as “clinical trials”, not routine care.
The influence of social pressures on transition are clear as well.
As I said, we need more research, but you seem to think things are fine as they are. No, they’re not.
I apologize i wasn’t clear, Professor Coyne! i was posting the so-called ”debunking” as an EXAMPLE of the combination of manipulative language, falsehoods/lies, and ripped from context distortions frequently used by some transgender activists. I wasn’t ask readers to look for that in YOUR posts! I have learned a lot from you, Colin Wright, Carole Hooven about biological sex vs. sex is on a spectrum claim and a lot from Helen Joyce, Kathleen Stock, and a name that should become more familiar to your readers, another philosopher, Holly Lawford-Smith, who is perhaps the clearest writer of gender [ideology] critical feminism–of course faced her own problems with university press not wanting to publish her contracted book after ”complaints”. She also has a number of very clear youtube videos. Yes we absolutely need more research and the documentation in Hannah Barnes’ Time to Think from Travistock [a lot of staff emails, interviews, reports, etc.] and Jamie Reed’s whistleblowing here in USA, it is clear that follow up studies of patients WERE specifically not being carried out, so the research that should have been done all these years wasnt and has to be done now. I am in agreement with the European nations that did systematic reviews and have revised their approach to e.g. puberty blockers as experimental. I think you and i are largely in agreement, sorry for not being clearer!
Yes, Holly Lawford-Smith has been treated appallingly and subjected to several investigations by the University of Melbourne. The bullying of (almost exclusively) women for standing for women’s rights has spread throughout the English-speaking world.
Wes, your point in your original post was clear. I wonder if what threw Dr. Coyne off was the lack of quotation marks around that final quote from the Advocate article, making it possible to misinterpret it as your words.
Yes your right Ken that was my fault yes, i should have put quote marks around it, thanks!
Got it. Sorry for misinterpreting!
That Advocate piece links to Erin Reed.
I subscribe to Reed’s substack, not as a paid subscriber, because Reed is the maven of Sins of Commissions and Omissions. There are also better articles among Reed’s substack tracking laws, etc.
The writing is important because it is such a text book example of the specious non-logic and obfuscation that composes so much of trans ideology.
Here is a link to the substack:
https://www.erininthemorning.com/
Jerry and friends, the ruckus has been raised. This posting has been making the rounds on Substack. I haven’t read all of Paul’s piece nor all of Reed’s “debunking” to formulate an opinion one way or the other, just hanging this here FYI.
https://open.substack.com/pub/erininthemorn/p/debunked-misleading-nyt-anti-trans
From Leed’s article:
Yes, because immersion in a compelling narrative which emphasizes the significance of “always knowing you were trans” is unlikely to lead to recreated memories in an agitated and highly suggestible adolescent subject. /sarcasm
I’m not impressed.
Not to mention that, when you’re, oh, twelve or so years of age, six months seems like forever.
I think we need to clarify terminology.
As I understand it, ‘desisters’ are people who suffered gender-dysphoria but did not transition, socially nor medically/surgically.
‘Detransitioners’ are people who did transition in part of full, and then reverted back to identifying as their original sex.
Yes, you’re right. I’ll try to fix it.
It’s tempting to think that it’s clearly possible to criticize the diagnostic procedures and medical treatments of children while leaving the bulk of the theories surrounding transgender alone. After all, there can still be adults who need transition in order to be happy and we can then agree to consider them to be the gender they believe themselves to be. Wouldn’t advocates want to tighten up the system involving early transition in order to avoid error and harm?
Not if the case for legal and social rights depends on the existence of the “Trans Child.” If trans people are to be considered legitimate, full members of whatever sex category they feel drawn towards (including neither), gender identity must ultimately be innate, knowable, compelling, and inviolable. Feeling repulsed by your own sex must be like being black or being gay in order for the law to recognize being transgender as a protected class in law.
Otherwise it’s too easy to minimize or dismiss a trans identity, if only by emphasizing the importance of Being Kind to the Afflicted. The affliction is supposed to be ours, that we mentally misgender trans people out of ignorance and error. The option of deciding to not always agree with and support someone’s gender identity in every situation isn’t an option.
An ideology based on self-declaration can’t give up any aspect; it has to stand on origins in a Trans Child who willingly accepts all danger and risk because anything is better than not being believed.
There are 2 ways of understanding your comment about “who need transition in order to be happy and we can then agree to consider them to be the gender they believe themselves to be. ”
1) This is a true state
2) This is a belief that is put on as an actor assumes a persona on the stage
If we agree that the trans are 2), I have no problem.
If we must agree that the trans are 1), I will completely reject any “stage persona of the trans”. The trans are psychotically deluded. There is no such thing as a “male gender in a female body” or the other way around.
The trans are trying to force normal non-psychotic people into the belief that there are cases of 1). I reject that, utterly.
I wasn’t really taking either position, but talking about whether both sides could agree with Paul but go on as usual with arguments concerning adults. On the surface it seems like we can, but once the assumptions that 1) “Children know who they are” and 2)“Our Gender Identity is our core self and at all stages must be affirmed or it’s like death” are off the table, what’s left is deciding how much to humor the trans-identified to make them happy. It’s no longer about rights, but accomodations.
I think the concept of the Trans Child — with all its baggage of juvenile knowledge, clinical affirmation, and early transition— is a necessary element in the claim that it’s a true state. It’s possibly why so many advocates fight hard against even obviously reasonable reservations on the shaky pediatric medicine.
Perceptive insight. (Yours I mean.)
Without trans children there are no “trans rights are human rights”, and no rights-based incursion of men into women’s sports and prisons. Trans is just an acquired proclivity, like unconventional fashion sense. The best they could get would be recognition of trans as a mental-health disability (which the activists vehemently reject) that entitled them to reasonable accommodation. I have to build wheelchair ramps to accommodate people with paraplegia who can still do the job but I don’t have to hire mentally retarded or severely autistic people to be air-traffic controllers.
I read this article in full via a similar report in the Spectator and it is very good.
What I struggle to understand is what actually motivates transgender activists? What do they perceive to be the conclusion of all that they push and seem to believe or do they not believe and have some other ulterior intent and if so what?
Radical transgender activists come in at least two varieties.
1. Allies. They are not transgender themselves. They believe that the pursuit of the radical transgender agenda is the next frontier of the civil rights struggle (after gay rights had been secured by, circa, 2015). (Sex realists like Jerry and many other commenters here, myself included, are derided as racist aunts and uncles – bigoted, fearful of the unknown and uninformed. Don’t you know that sex is a spectrum?) So if you are into social activism, and not inclined to ask many questions, then this is an attractive cause. The claim that radical transgenderism is the next civil rights struggle is, of course, false.
2. Transgender adults for whom medical transitioning has worked. They make the mistake to assume that what worked from them will work for everybody – a classic case of an erroneous inference because of selection bias. Most gender-dysphoric kids just outgrow their gender dysphoria and end up being gay – if you don’t intervene with puberty-blockers, etc.
Besides the activists, there are a lot of people who are social conformists. They will go along with a lot of nonsense just to live a quiet life. The German playwright Bertold Brecht one said “Pity the country that needs heros.” Because most people are just ordinary human beings who are not willing to stand up for their beliefs or spend a lot of time on making sure that these beliefs are well-founded (an exception are nationalist beliefs; but then nationalism is the most powerful modern ideology). The upshot is that small groups of passionate individuals can exercise influence on public affairs that is disproportionately large.
Yes, thanks Peter, helps understanding.
Another piece of good news:
Jesse Singal, Jan 25, 2024
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/im-writing-another-book
“I’ve signed a contract with Thesis, a new imprint of Penguin Random House, to write a book about the United States’ youth gender medicine debate.”
Excellent, thanks Peter – I’ll look forward to reading Jesse’s book.
Maybe of interest:
Debby Hayton: I went through an agonising operation because I thought becoming a woman would finally make me happy… Then I had a devastating revelation. Daily Mail, Jan 26, 2024
https://archive.is/1LF1C
Excerpted from: Transsexual Apostate, by Debbie Hayton, to be published by Swift Press on February 8, 2024
The treatment of Hayton by journalists interviewing him for the book launch has caused divisions on X/Twitter between those gender-critical feminists who think it is acceptable to use female pronouns and those who are vehemently opposed to doing so.
Ruckus, ruckus!!!!, you say? Transgender world is treating it as a hydrogen bomb. And they should.
I am linking to several responses by trans activists and organizations former gay/lesbian rights groups which glommed on to trans once gay marriage became a reality. Notice how the responses evade discussing that Paul’s piece centers on detransitioners.
Trans world loathes detransitioners. In fact, in 2022/23 when Oregon passed a law to extend state medical insurance for “gender affirming care”, trans lobby specifically told legislature not to include detransition coverage, and the legislature, mostly Democrats, complied. But there is another reason, the most critical, for the animosity toward detransitioners.
Both lesbians and gays are often gender non-conforming when children, as in sissy boys and tomboy girls. But those things are also treated as evidence of transgenderism. So, How to tell the difference between children who may turn out to be gay/lesbian from the very small number who may be trans?
Why, you silly cisgender person, Children know themselves! And that isn’t a plausible explanation, it is treated as a categorical explanation and condition. Detransitioners are living refutations of that dictum. Anyway a few links:
Epic thread from GLAAD:
https://twitter.com/glaad/status/1753490723280720031
Erin Reed’s, to whom other have linked:
https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/debunked-misleading-nyt-anti-trans
And in a different vein, the excellent writer Leor Sapir listed the 10 most “liked” comments by NYTimes readers to the Paul column…they should be read:
https://twitter.com/LeorSapir/status/1753491809454440587
I can’t verify this, because archived copies don’t show the comments below the line, but it is interesting if true: https://twitter.com/LeorSapir/status/1753491809454440587
Hi JezGrove,
The Paul article is back on home page of NYTimes…..and it may be free?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/02/opinion/transgender-children-gender-dysphoria.html
Anyway, here are 2 favorites comment as of now:
T
Tony
NJFeb. 2
I predict we will look back on this period with the same disgust we feel about the overprescription of amphetamines like Adderall to every 8-year-old boy who couldn’t sit still for an entire day. The most damage is often done by doctors and parents who are so well-meaning that they cease to think critically.
5277 Recommend
A Humanist
Finger Lakes, NYFeb. 2
Thank you for presenting a non-polarized view of this complex issue.
Having been a 13 year old, I have a dim view of the enduring wisdom of decisions made at that age.
4967 Recommend
Sall Grover in Australia is fighting a court battle over gender identity ideology: https://x.com/salltweets/status/1753894147847790959
Related –
Recent NYTimes article about Abigail Schrier’s book being challenged, in a Vermont public library in 2021. A parent of a transgender adult told the librarian she found the book harmful.
There’s no way to know if the parent was involved or her child’s age, but it makes me think of Helen Joyce’s comments about parents of who supported their child’s medical interventions.
“A lot of people have done what is the worst thing you could do, which is to harm their children irrevocably… Those people will have to believe that they did the right thing for the rest of their lives, for their own sanity, and for their own self-respect. So they’ll still be fighting, and each one of those people destroys entire organizations and entire friendship groups.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/03/us/libraries-book-bans.html?unlocked_article_code=1.S00.WN1C.Yhcy8pL11Qg3&bgrp=t&smid=url-share
This was going to be my comment, and I’m glad you referenced it as I think it is quite revealing about the politics/sympathies of both the library staff (who did the right thing by accepting and displaying the donated book by Schrier) and the critics who would ban the book for allegedly causing harm. The merits of Schrier’s argument about ROGD are frustratingly absent in the reporting.
This is for people who haven’t followed the debate closely so far.
If you care and want to stay informed as the second or third greatest medical scandal in North America in the last 30 years unfolds (the biggest one is the opioid epidemic, second biggest either the Vioxx scandal or transgender youth medicine), these are the people I have found to be worth following (substack, X/Twitter, YouTube, UnHerd), as far as journalism is concerned: Helen Joyce, Lisa Selin Davis, Jesse Singal, Bernard Lane, Leor Sapir, Eliza Mondegreen (+ Genspect and SEGM accounts on X).
Pamela Paul’s NYT piece is excellent. I agree with Jerry: She’s courageous and doesn’t seem to mind eating her lunch while not sitting at the cool kids’ table.
How weird is this trans craze?
1. Children diagnosing themselves, many of them having mental health issues besides gender dysphoria (we are told that all these other mental health issues will go away after transitioning). Where else in medicine are patients allowed to self-diagnose?
2. Detransitioners who have been medically harmed (by surgery, hormone treatments, etc.) being demonized. Remind me of another medical condition where the victims of doctor-induced harm are hounded, smeared and defamed.
3. People complaining that right-wing politicians should leave treatment decision to parents, their kids and their docs, while left-wing politicians get a pass when they impose so-called conversion therapy bans (which amount to stipulating or implying that only the affirmative treatment approach to gender dysphoria is acceptable and that a doctor might be sued if he/she doesn’t follow it).
4. Claiming that gender dysphoria is not a medical condition while also demanding that medical treatments for trans-identified people must be paid by health insurance and not allowing doctors to pose a differential diagnosis (because any and all problems a gender-dysphoric person may have are due to him/her not having medically transitioned yet).
5. The gender theory that underwrites all this tells us that gender identification is fluid but we must affirm kids with cross-sex gender identification because they could not be wrong (never mind the fluidity of gender identification).
6. Or, gender identity is not fluid, it’s innate and stable. But then how do you explain detransitioners?
7. The bonkers idea that gender non-conforming behavior should be medicalized: There’s only one way to be a woman and one way to be a man. If you don’t fit the sterotypes it’s because you are in the wrong body.
8. People claiming that school teachers should be allowed to socially transition kids at school (new name, new pronouns, different clothes) without the knowledge and/or the consent of their parents because – are your ready for this? (I’m not making this up) – a) kids have privacy rights vis-à-vis their own parents, and/or b) socially transitioning is no different than joining the school’s chess club (never mind that it puts you on a path that leads to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery which in turn means sexual infertility and severely degraded sexual functioning).
9. People claiming that you can change your sex or that sex is not real (just a performance).
Beside Paul’s piece I also recommend reading these:
Jennifer Block: Gender dysphoria in young people is rising—and so is professional disagreement. British Medical Journal (BMJ), 23 February 2023; 380:p382
https://www.bmj.com/content/380/bmj.p382
Jennifer Block: Youth gender medicine has become a hall of mirrors. Boston Globe, Nov 7, 2023
Despite the certainty projected by medical institutions about the ‘affirming’ model of care, some pioneering practitioners worry it may have gone too far.
https://archive.is/NsuoW
Leor Sapir, Feb 2, 2024:
[A thread on] Pamela Paul’s piece on detransitioners and “gender-affirming care” in the New York Times today is a welcome journalistic contribution to the ongoing debate on a thorny subject. Paul gets many things right and one thing wrong.
https://twitter.com/LeorSapir/status/1753417775341588488
Leor Sapir, Feb 2, 2024:
The 10 most popular NYT reader comments on the piece on detransitioners and the harms of “gender-affirming care” [by Pamela Paul]
https://twitter.com/LeorSapir/status/1753491845189951780
Perhaps this is germane to nothing, but I can’t help but wonder . . .
Everything I feel, I feel, and especially can only describe, even if just implicitly, in opposition to another feeling.
I know what it is to feel happy because I have been sad.
I can describe what it is to feel healthy because I have felt unhealthy.
I can describe what it is to feel serene because I have felt anxious.
But if you ask me what it is to feel like a man, I am at a loss for words. I have nothing to compare it to. I can mouth some cliches about manliness, perhaps, but they won’t ring true with me, because they’re not really *my* feelings.
So I can’t help but feel suspicious of someone who claims to feel they were born in the wrong body. How could they possibly know?
Am I being myopic or self-centered in how I’m conceiving of this?
No, you’re absolutely correct. A man can only base “how it feels to be a woman” (and vice versa) on stereotypes – or in some cases, fantasies. It literally makes no sense to claim to have been born in the wrong body. “I am my body, and my body is me”, as children’s author Rachel Rooney wrote in a book trying to convince young kids to be happy in the only body they will ever have, and for which she was cancelled by her publisher.
Edit: The UK’s Gender Recognition Act (2004), which introduced the process through which someone can obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) and so invoke a legal pretence that they have changed their gender, says that an applicant for a GRC must live as the gender they want to become for two years. No details of what this actually means is defined in the law or elsewhere. It has been suggested that changing your name on a utility bill could suffice. Everything in this area is either undefined or uses circular definitions. It’s all utterly mad.
We need Tiresias to settle this. Or, for that matter, Hermaphroditus or Ardhanarishvara.😉
I think you’ve captured the issue nicely. Gender ideology is simply incoherent. I don’t feel like a man–I AM a man, by which I mean an adult, human male. We are embodied creatures, just like every other creature on the planet and inventing concepts such as gender that presuppose a dualistic nature of the self whereby we can exist separately from our gonochoristic biology is about as anti-science as one could get.
The tides slowly seem to be turning. The history books 20-30 years from now are going to be very interesting.
I’m sorry but this is over intellectualizing mental illness. If I claimed that I was Charlamegne and demanded I be addressed as Holy Roman Emperor: I’d be in a small room with the a lithium drip.
Would transitioning from one gender to another even be an issue if society allowed each individual to be themselves instead of assigning them societal roles…girls play with dolls, boys don’t, etc.??? If we didn’t place expectations on the genders to act a certain way because of their gender, perhaps kids wouldn’t feel out of place in their bodies or selves.
I hate to play the conservative here, but every time I hear someone recite the mantra that gender roles are obsolete and need to be done away with, I cringe. Most people don’t want to figure out the entirety of human coexistence from scratch – they want guidelines on how to act and what is acceptable to say, what is worth striving for and what constitutes failure. Why shouldn’t these guidelines be gender-neutral? Because testosterone is one helluva drug – men and women are different, and being a (typical) man or woman comes with different predispositions, potentials and failure modes. Men need guidelines, among other things, to direct their competitiveness and aggression into constructive channels; women need different guidelines to avoid abuse of the powers that they wield, social, sexual and otherwise.
Of course, no set of gender-specific guidelines will fit each personality, and we should allow people to ignore them (at their own peril). But looking at the last couple of decades, formal gender-specific expectations on boys/ men and girls/ women have decreased dramatically, while at the same time the expression of exaggerated masculinity and feminity has increased (hello Instagram, hi TikTok!) AND discomfort with one’s gender has exploded. Is taking more steps in the same direction really going to help?
But how can a society both radically reject the belief that men should be masculine and women should be feminine AND put an increasing emphasis on masculine men and feminine women as role models? Wouldn’t the immediate effect of the second part undermine the likelihood of the first part?
I think it could be argued that, over the last few decades, the Free To Be You And Me no-gender-roles ideal has been swamped over by aggressively pink and blue toy aisles. If nothing else, it’s mixed messages with the first being stated reasonably at regular intervals and the second being shouted constantly from the rooftops through a blow horn.
My tendency is to think that’s the more likely cause of a large increase in childhood gender dysphoria.
In addition to the personal harm, I also worry about the political harm, since this is an issue where the Republicans are generally right, and the Democrats wrong. I can see this issue tipping a swing voter into the GOP column.
As for the live son or dead daughter challenge, the stats don’t back it up. A study of the ~15,000 kids treated at the Tavistock revealed just 4 suicides, 2 of them after transition. It is available here:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-022-02287-7
It is generally agreed and discussed in the paper that the transgender population has a higher suicide rate, but what is not clear is that this is directly a result of being trans: these kids have multiple psychiatric diagnoses, all of which can affect suicidality, and to which, alarmingly, gender clinicians are willfully blind. If those issues were addressed and treated rather than rushing into transition, we might do a far better job of preventing the suicides. As it is, we have evidence that transition does not prevent eventual suicide, and in that respect it is a failed treatment.
The either/or question posed to parents is totally misleading and simply designed to enforce acquiescence.
+1
I’ve noticed where one stands on the trans debate is pretty highly IQ coincident, with the activists on the left side of the bell curve, the noisy ones even sheering off into personality disorderland.
There are bright people on the “other” (trans women are women) side but not if they look into it very deeply, just below the surface. Some shut up at that point, not eager to endure the madness of the trans-rights purple haired taliban.
Until Abigail S.’s book you needed to look under the surface pretty devotedly to find out the truth. Now days that higher IQ conclusion, and the science/biology is more readily available, thanks to people like Pamela Paul, Dawkins, PCC(E) and those like them.
D.A.
NYC
I really don’t think differing levels of intelligence has anything to do with it.
I think it’s true critical thinkers & scholars versus ideology-over-everything types, rather than just intelligence, but this might differ from issue to issue. Hell, you don’t have to follow this issue very long before you notice that some of the non-crazy commentary on the gender issue comes from the right, sometimes overlapping with anti-vaxxers or even Discovery Institute people. So peoples’ ability to think critically about a topic often varies based on their general attitudes. It’s hard to think critically about “your own side.”
The problem is that there has been a huge gap in the discussion, because most of the left has gone all the way to crazy-town and most of the center-left/liberal side stayed quiet out of ignorance or fear. It’s slowly changing, mostly because of the detransitioners and the outrages in sports. Also, the realization that there is no safe ground: If you sign all the way up for gender ideology, then you’ve also signed up for some truly spectacular, in-your-face sexism and homophobia. It didn’t have to be this way, reasonable accomodations for people with differing religious views have a long history in liberal societies, but the activists couldn’t leave it at that. They want everyone to pretend to believe all the lies about biology, science, etc.
The problem with the issue is that if you stick a toe in, it can easily take over your life. The scale of the problem is rather like if the Discovery Institute had succeeded in its goals to take over all the elite institutions and inculcate its beliefs throughout schools and government. I’m convinced that in 50-100 years this stuff will have the same reputation as eugenics: a poorly-evidenced, half-baked ideology that lined up with the zeitgeist of the day, and appealed to bleeding-heart elites. Although well-meaning in the abstract, in practice it led to the injury and sterilization of thousands of vulnerable youth without truly well-informed consent.