In this 45-minute video, Christina Buttons, an independent journalist who used to write for The Daily Wire but now has her own Substack site, discusses the gender fracas with the Triggernometry crew. As you know, the Cass Review in the UK has considerably rolled back “affirmative care” for those pondering gender transition, and several European countries adhere to many of its recommendations. But the U.S. obstinately rejects the Cass Review. In fact, the Biden Administration has gotten the powerful and affirmative-care-supporting WPATH organization to eliminate minimum age limits for dispensing hormones or performing surgery.
The problem is, as Buttons argues, that there is really no evidence supporting the efficacy of “affirmative care”. Yes, there are transgender people who have been happy with their transitions, and that’s great, but that’s not the same thing as testing the efficacy of affirmative care on young people who are troubled, weighing it against an alternative: normal, objective therapy that, in many cases, allows gender dysphoric adolescents to come out as gay. (Buttons notes that about 70% of young people with gender dysphoria come out as gay without affirmative therapy.) No surgery or hormones required there. And, as Andrew Sullivan has emphasized, the affirmative-care crew have even come out as opponents of the gay-rights movement, perhaps because they think that gay kids really should be transitioning.
Buttons’s explanation of why this medical brouhaha is so pervasive in the U.S., despite the lack of evidence that it works, is convincing, but I’ll let you listen yourself. And her own experience with mental distress as a teenager spurred her passion for ensuring that children like she was aren’t put onto a conveyer belt leading to hormone therapy and surgery. Her personal experiences, describing a desperate search to understand what was happening to her, explain why so many young women latch onto the “I’m-in-the-wrong body” explanation.
In the last five minutes, Buttons describes her detransitioning from being a Social Justice Warrior to an objective journalist who is horrified when ideologues twist or reject the facts.
Here are the YouTube notes:
Formerly a Democrat, Christina’s primary focus is gender transition, detransition and the lack of evidence supporting the gender-affirming model of care. She is passionate about debunking pseudoscience, and her articles are informed by experts in gender medicine research and adhere to the principles of evidence-based medicine (EBM). She also writes about ‘Social Justice’ ideology, mental health disorders, autism – she has Asperger’s Syndrome – and critical thinking.
h/t: Rosemary
Biden just quit!
Far from what liberals and progressives believe, trans is not an extension of gay rights, but its nemesis. And “gender affirming care” is the gay/lesbian conversion therapy from inferno AND the nullification of feminism.
For gay/lesbians, the mind was considered ill and the body hale. For trans, the mind is considered hale and the body ill (in need of modification, some of it extreme and dangerous).
Gays/lesbians wanted the medical world to get out of their life; trans wants medical world to be in a tight hug. From those 2 precepts spring a world of differences.
The infrastructure of gay/lesbian rights has metamorphosed into trans rights….raison d’etre for its continued existence and fund raising. And there are true believers, many of them, who see trans as the next link in the intoxicating notion of “the right side of history”.
That’s seriously good.
+1
+1 – excellent! It has always seemed to me that LGB are options within a category – sexual partner preference – while T is an entirely different category – personal sexual identity.
+1; Nice post.
Buttons is excellent.
Well worth the watch.
Thanks for posting it.
This was excellent. SHE is excellent. Her and Colin Wright at realitys last stand.
D.A.
NYC
I thought Buttons had a lot of interesting things to say on the intersection of autism and transgender identification — that a young autistic adolescent’s desire to figure out why they feel so disconnected and “wrong” can lead to trying on a variety of explanations and roles, with having a different “brain sex” being an attractive modern possibility. How chilling that the major autism organizations in the US are ignoring the dangers here and instead going gung-ho for what she rightly terms “gender pseudoscience.” I’ve even run across claims that the high proportion of autistic minors who identify as trans is good evidence that Gender Identity is innate and biological, since it’s apparently neurologically connected to autism.
They’re ignoring how many of the traits of autism can lead to susceptibility for a sweeping explanatory narrative. One frustrated parent of an autistic child responded to the information that True Trans Kids were “persistent, consistent, and insistent” about being a different gender by exclaiming “but she’s that way about EVERYTHING!”
+1.
Thank you.
The decision of autism groups of all types, in every Anglophone country I know of, to approach this topic from a supine position, is pretty amazing to me. Considering how fearless and fierce (to put it politely) some can be going after other potential sources of harm to their community.
A killer argument against “autistic kids are really just trans” is the evidence that autism and schizophrenia are opposite ends of a continuum of neurobehavioral traits, with many of the same underlying genetic associations, and neurotypical individuals +/- in the middle of the spectrum. Get a lot of these alleles at a common set of genes and you’re likely to become autistic; get a lot of other alleles at the same set of genes are you’re likely to become schizophrenic.
Autism is the opposite of schizophrenia in many ways. But if autistic individuals become trans, what do schizophrenic individuals become? What’s the opposite of trans?
I see so much clinical research on ‘patient satisfaction’ laundered into research on ‘efficacy and outcomes’ these days, not just in this particular topic. More than when I worked in the field 10+ years back, but likely that’s just a limitation of my perspective.
It’s especially a problem in a country like the USA, where direct advertising of medical products/procedures to patients is legal, routine, and massive; and in patient communities that are strongly self-organizing and self-diagnosing, and rock into clinical settings already knowing what exact treatments they want and what to do to get them.
Progressive discourse in the US, like other forms of word magic, seems particularly dependent on euphemisms. “Diversity” and “Inclusion” are obvious examples, and now “Belonging” is often added to the rituals. Going back a good deal earlier, we got “affirmative action”, and it is no surprise that now we have “affirmative care”. An explicit program to dismiss individuals accused of thought-crime (like James Damore and many others) from their positions will no doubt soon be labelled “Affirmative Affirmation”.
This use of word magic seems more prevalent in the US, than in European venues. Commenter #6 may have hit on a key explanation for this general phenomenon: the
pervasiveness of advertising and the advertising industry in the US, and thus of USian culture. Many, many years ago, Cyril Kornbluth and Fred Pohl advanced essentially this hypothesis in some remarkably prescient science fiction classics.
+1. Gimme Moke! (But I am annoyed that “Campbell”, one of my ancestral clans, is very bad therein.)