I keep thinking that Pamela Paul, who is consistently heterodox by criticizing the “progressive” left, will be given the boot as a regular NYT op-ed columnist. But I’m happy to see that she’s still in there swinging, this time criticizing the progressive (do I need to keep calling it that?) brand of transgender activism in favor of common sense. This is not a “transphobic” point of view, but a liberal and empathic one.
It so happens that Trump campaigned against the extremist, activist form of gender activism, and that helped him win, but aspects of his transgender policy, like cutting off federal funding for people transitioning at any age, are not palatable to many of us. But many of us still refuse to countenance the participation in women’s athletics of men identifying as women, or the placement of trans women in rape-counseling centers, women’s shelters, or women’s prisons. Those are the trivially few (but fair) exceptions to otherwise complete legal and moral equality of trans people, and favoring them does not make you transphobic.
Nevertheless, Paul is going to be called transphobic for standing up for reason. In the article below she points out that her position, which is also mine, is classically liberal:
Democrats have long been on the right side of health care, scientific progress, women’s rights, gay rights and education. This is the party that truly cares about families and aims to address their needs, especially on the more pressing economic issues that have many Americans feeling that their backs are up against a wall. But on transgender issues specifically, one way to make clear that Democrats are listening to their constituencies would be to accept a broader range of perspectives.
Click below to read, or find the article archived here.
Paul points out the inordinate effort the Trump campaign put into opposing “progressive” gender issues, and notes that those ads had an effect, even though only a a small proportion of Americans are transgender. That’s because the ads pointed out a strong tilt of Harris’s campaign (and Biden’s administration) towards wokeness, even though I was convinced when Biden was elected in 2020 that he would be more centrist.
Paul:
During the closing weeks of the election, Republican campaigns spent over $65 million on ads ridiculing, among several candidates, Kamala Harris for supporting “taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners” and “illegal aliens,” all ending with variations on the tagline: “Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
At campaign events Trump attacked the idea of letting transgender girls and women play on female sports teams, and implied that children were having gender surgery in classrooms.
“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house,” he said at a rally in Wisconsin, “and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation?”
Why did Trump and his allies devote so much attention and resources to something that seemingly affects a small number of people compared with top voter concerns like immigration, the economy, crime, abortion and democracy? Maybe because it worked. According to Harris’s leading super PAC, viewers shifted 2.7 percentage points toward Trump after watching one of these ads.
If that was true in general, then this issue alone would be sufficient to have swung the election towards Trump. But those who opposed Trump, including both Paul and me, have the concerns that I noted above, including as well some schools hiding children’s changed gender identities from their parents, as well the dangers of “gender-affirming care”:
Trump’s charge that children are undergoing gender transition surgeries in school is obviously absurd. But his words may have struck a chord with those who disagree with school districts that have teachers and administrators hide from parents that their children have adopted new gender identities. As The Times reported last year, one mother of a 15-year-old only accidentally discovered her child’s public school had been covering up the fact that for six months, her child had been going by a new name and using the boys’ bathroom.
In recent years, the concepts of gender identity and the possibility of being born in the wrong body have been introduced as early as elementary school. But a Washington Post poll found that 77 percent of Americans do not want teachers discussing these ideas in kindergarten through third grade and more than half oppose trans identity being talked about even in middle school.
The Democratic Party’s platform includes a pledge to defend gender-affirming care for minors. For people who are not well versed in the issue, this may sound like therapy to make children feel comfortable in their bodies; what it usually means in practice is allowing children to adopt a new name and pronouns, and in many cases, enabling them to change their bodies to resemble that of the opposite sex. This process can include puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones and, in some cases, surgery. More than 14,000 American children had gender-related medical interventions between 2019 and 2023.
While much of Europe has been pulling back from the gender-affirmation model, evidence has emerged that in the United States, proponents of this approach have let politics color science.
Trust in Democrats has also been hurt by their refusal to publicize data that might hurt the progressive form of gender activism, and that is offensive not just to the public, but also to scientists:
To cite two recent examples, one prominent advocate of gender-affirming care suppressed her own government-funded research because she feared it might be “weaponized” against her agenda, The Times reported. Meanwhile, Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary of health and human services chosen by President Biden, worked to get a transgender organization to remove age limits from its proposed guidelines for surgeries, including mastectomies and hysterectomies for minors, because she said they would give fuel to political foes, according to recently released court documents. After this disclosure, the Biden administration released a statement saying it opposed such surgeries for minors.
Yet the Department of Health and Human Services continues to say that gender-affirming care is “crucial” for young people and “has been shown to increase positive outcomes for transgender and nonbinary children and adolescents” — even though the most comprehensive overview of research, which assessed all major American and global studies on the subject, found scant evidence of this. Even so, all the leading American medical associations continue to back gender-affirming care.
I have written about this before,(so has Paul) and it’s simply wrong to remove age limits for surgeries (I favor 18 or 21), much less to suppress research showing that gender-affirming care isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and doesn’t have the uniformly positive results that many advocates claim. Suppressing results that hurt your political platform, of course, is harmful because it injects ideology into science, but, more important, this impedes proper treatment of gender-dysphoric children.
In the end, people of good will are not “transphobic” in the sense of being bigoted against trans people. But there are limits—limits based on fairness and danger to women—in saying that transwomen should always be treated the same as biological women, and the same goes for transmen being treated as men. But those are exceptions, and I utterly reject people saying that those views are transphobic. As Paul says at the end:
Democrats should fight these tendencies and ensure that everyone, regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation, is respected and protected under existing law. Rather than double down on beliefs and policies that are out of step with the best medical evidence, Democrats and everyone else who support transgender rights should embrace a common-sense approach from their government, their schools, their mental health care workers and their doctors. Vulnerable people are depending on it.
May she have a long run at the NYT!
The Cass report was big news in the UK, and seems to have also had an impact in some W European states. Also, when the left wing activist leadership of the BMA ( doctor trade union ) denounced the Cass report, many of its members resigned in protest or called its leaders ‘bonkers’.
However, I don’t see anything about the US medical bureaucracy agreeing with the Cass report findings. Nonetheless, public sentiment in Anglo countries is in line with Hilary Cass and her researchers.
Ramesh 49% Indian XY, 49% Chinese XY, 2% Denisovan gender indeterminate
States that are led by Republicans — I think it’s 20 now — and the Canadian province of Alberta have passed, or will be passing, legislation that respects the science reviewed by Dame Cass’s team in her recommendations to the NHS on puberty blockers. Most of these jurisdictions include additional rules to protect women’s sport and restrict hormones and surgery in minors that go beyond her remit but are well supported on other grounds.
As for the Democratic states and more leftish Canadian provinces, the consensus is that nothing will change until doctors quietly quit and find reasons in their hearts not to do this anymore. If you don’t keep systematic databases and registries, it’s amazing what you can pretend never happened.
RE: “As for the Democratic states and more leftish Canadian provinces, the consensus is that nothing will change until doctors quietly quit and find reasons in their hearts not to do this anymore.”
But then this will end only when these docs retire. Stopping it before then would be an admission (from them) that it was wrong to do this.
I’d suggest calling it “far left” or “woke left” or similar, rather than “progressive”. After all, these ideas are not “progress”.
They’re not really exceptions to “complete legal and moral equality” at all. Trans people fully have all the same legal and moral rights as anyone else (of their biological sex) does.
“Regressive” left seems pretty accurate to me.
I prefer “oppressive” left. It highlights their major aspect that annoys people, and it hits them upside the head with their oppressor/oppressed Manicheanism.
I like the way you think, Barbara.
Thank you. I assume you’re not referring to my kind disposition…. There are some benefits to having been a child well trained in passive-aggression.
Jerry, I don’t think one needs to worry that Pamela Paul will be dismissed. She seems to be a popular columnist (judging by the comments of Times readers below her columns), and she isn’t even the most conservative Times columnist: David French, Bret Stephens and Ross Douthat are to the right of her.
The Times swore off toeing the activist line on transgender stuff about 2 years ago.
I was listening to the Gender: A Wider Lens podcast (hosted by psychotherapists Stella O’Malley & Sasha Ayad) yesterday, the episode with American journalist Lisa Selin Davis (LSD), from June 2024. LSD mentioned that the trans activists had offered the Times to school its journalists how to write about trans issues. The Times declined. I learned that LSD has gotten a contract for a book about the transgender debate in the US – that’s good news, in my view. Jesse Singal had to deliver his book manuscript (about transgender medicine, I believe) to his publisher at the end of September or October. So we have this to look forward to next year.
It’s hard to overestimate the extent to which adopting the radical trans agenda is damaging to the Democratic Party. Unless the party just wants to be the party of the college educated. (Even many college-educated voters, myself included, are against that agenda as well, but few of them are probably deeming this the most important issue.) When this agenda is pushed by scientists, that’s bad for science too – for the same reason that it is bad for the Democrats: male and female, sexual dimorphism, these are things we all are knowledgeable about. Nobody can change sex, not through a speech act, nor with hormones and surgery. And the few female-only spaces that still exist, they are there for good reasons. As Helen Lewis put it in article for The Atlantic magazine a few days ago, the Democrats can neither explain nor defend their policy on transgender, except with statements that are easily shown to be false (like: there is a medical consensus on gender-affirming care; the radical trans agenda does not conflict with the legitimate interest of other social groups).
“It’s hard to overestimate the extent to which adopting the radical trans agenda is damaging to the Democratic Party.” And it is hard to understand why Democratic pols don’t realize this and change it. Perhaps they suppose: (1) anything attached to the word “affirmative” must be superfine; and (2) voters who dislike the trans agenda must be born in the wrong bodies.
+1
ISTM irrational to think that sex isn’t binary but oppression is.
Biden invited Dylan Mulvaney into the White House. Yes, that Dylan Mulvaney. I found this hard to believe. However, I actually watched the video.
And on that occasion Biden said that he expected the trans rights campaign to unfold like the gay liberation struggle: as people learn more about trans issues and get to personally know trans people, they will come around to support the radical trans agenda. This has not happened. In fact, the opinion polls show the opposite. And it’s not hard to see why. For discrimination against gays to stop, the influence of religion had to decline first since it is the principal vector of homophobia. So when discrimination against gays was outlawed only the remaining hardcore religious believers had to take it on the chin. But the radical trans agenda goes against the interests of 3 groups: women, children and lesbians. So the politics of gay rights is different from the politics of transgenderism. But Biden doesn’t get this because he lives in a bubble (and possibly also because he is not as sharp as he used to be).
The most important voice opposing gender ideology is probably J.K. Rowling. Of course, I don’t speak for her. However, to the best of my knowledge, she is not particularly religious, nor is she a lesbian (she does have lesbian friends). I am reasonably sure, she is not a child.
I’m not sure that the government at any level should be paying for “sex” change surgeries for anyone. It seems like these are cosmetic procedures except in vanishingly few cases of real gender dysphoria.
That’s one of the big contradictions: Feeling oneself to be trans (that is, rejecting the sex of one’s own body) is supposed to be normal, according to trans activists. But if this is so, why do you need medical treatment, paid by health insurance? You are not ill. So why medical treatment? (Cosmetic surgery is not paid by health insurance, except in cases of disfiguring accident.)
If, on the other hand, feeling trans is a pathology, then you can’t condemn medical gatekeeping and advocate for medical treatment on demand (where a doctor simply has to affirm the patient’s self-diagnosis).
A note to Jerry: This was my last comment here today.
Another big contradiction is that
1.) feeling oneself to be trans (that is, rejecting the sex of one’s own body) is ALL that’s needed to actually BE that sex/gender in reality, society, and law. You don’t have to have dysphoria, take hormones, undergo surgery, wear makeup, dress in a certain style, or act, talk, or move in any particular way. Everyone knows “who (i e what) they are.” If someone says they’re a woman (or man) we must take their word. The “brain sex” matters.
and
2.) Gender Affirming Treatment is critically necessary to those trans people who would rather die than look at themselves in the mirror and see the wrong sex – or have other people make that mistake. This is a reasonable reaction. The body matters.
What both these conflicting tenets have in common is that, if true, society is required to go along. If someone with a full beard & intact penis insists they’re a woman, the general public must grant them that status. If a costly and difficult series of sex trait modifications has taken place, that’s so the public is more likely to grant them that status. The onus of change is placed on every citizen. If you don’t believe, either fake it till you make it, permanently pretend, or shut up.
That’s one reason this topic resonated with the swing voters. What’s taking place here is a massive case of gaslighting. It’s coercive and intrusive. Gay rights didn’t require this. Trans rights — which come down to the right to be believed — does.
🎯 to you and everyone in the thread under Dr. B’s comment.
Not many patients get their treatment under public insurance in the U.S. (although they do in Canada). President-elect Trump’s pledge to bar Medicaid and Medicare coverage for it sends the right message to the private insurers that the federal government will not compel them to cover it.
Thank you again for distilling the essence of this madness into a high-proof dose of sanity. Coercion and “the right to be believed”.
I do have compassion for people suffering as “trans”. I even want to embrace the idea DrB articulated of “real gender dysphoria”, as if those few cases are somehow special or different. But I can’t embrace that because it’s all nonsense: nobody is born in the wrong body, and humans don’t have a gendered soul. We have sex differences, social stereotypes, and mental illnesses.
Gary Francione has written well about the issues here. A trans woman who takes herself to be a woman has no more right to be believed than a Catholic who believes in transsubstantiation has a right to be believed about the metaphysical transformation supposedly undergone by bread and wine when the priest performs the mass.
That is exactly why we ought to use “transubstantiation” to refer to the mystical process by which individuals who imagine themselves born in the wrong body “transition” by announcement to a different one.
As for myself, I claim that the body I should> occupy is that of Tsar Ivan V of the Russian Empire, and therefore my chosen pronoun is “его императорское величество”.
“Cosmetic surgery is not paid by health insurance, except in cases of disfiguring accident.”
I expect transgender advocates would say that having been “born in the wrong body” is a disfiguring accident.
There has been a clear change in the people complaining of gender dysphoria:
-Early onset and consistent complaint as opposed to teenage onset among groups
-Mostly males wanting to be women, but now mostly females wanting to be men
-satisfaction with transition and the desire to live quietly as if a member of the opposite sex with almost no detransitioners, but now the transition must be shouted from the rooftops and never allowed to disappear into the past. Possible that many (most?) will eventually regret their choice.
And also a clear change in our approach:
-used to live as if the opposite sex for two years before surgery, with intensive psychiatric evaluation, but now no psychiatric evaluation is allowed in case it turns up issues that make transition unwise
-there were no puberty blockers, which cause irreversible changes in development in cases where a change of heart occurs
-regarded as a pathological condition for which, unusually, the best treatment was to confirm the patient’s delusions, but now celebrated as “brave” and normal
-small children were protected against too much information on sex until it was age-appropriate, but now they are proselytized at a young age to consider themselves free to choose a gender
-unwillingness to allow debate or demurral, presumably because the horror of having ruined many young lives is too awful to contemplate
I have a great deal of sympathy for the ‘old-fashioned’ gender dysphorics, and we knew that many/most would desist and become gay, and those that persisted were usually delighted to live quietly in their adopted form. I am alarmed for the youngsters now who seem to be following a fad, as it is all too likely they will regret what they have been allowed/encouraged to do, especially as there is no way back.
The ads were so effective because they communicated an anti-Harris message at several levels. The ad’s brilliant tag line works at three levels: (1) it refers back to the idea of using Americans’ tax dollars to pay for something for illegal immigrant prisoners — not a particularly popular use of tax dollars, (2) it linked Harris with deeply unpopular wokism more generally, and (3) …
…For the most part, voters do not decide whom to vote for based upon the nuances of a particular policy proposal. Rather, their decision about whether or not to vote for a candidate is affected by their perception regarding whether a candidate seems to hear them, seems to understand them, and seems to care about them. That ad – with its devastatingly effective tag line – communicated a general message about who it is that Harris listens to and cares about — and it isn’t hard-working Americans.
https://carolinacurmudgeon.substack.com/p/why-harris-lost-and-why-lots-of-people
Yup. A very effective ad that covered a lot of ground in just a few seconds. Essentially, it painted Kamala Harris as tainted by moral rot, and it resonated.
Leaving this page too. Apparently one snarky comment on FB is enough to get ones face bitten off lol.
Good luck folks. Hopefully its not a long 4 years of that destructive clown in office.
Cam
Gender expression and identity as a protected ground against discrimination should be removed from civil/human right laws. Three reasons:
1) It is nonsense to regard being born in the wrong body a ground for anything;
2) If men are allowed to say they are women in any way shape or form, it undermines the ability to enforce the common-sense exemptions we all seem to support (but which the trans activists bitterly oppose.) If you refuse entry of a man, who claims to be a woman, into a women’s shelter, he has a case to sue you for gender identity discrimination.
3) The way “discrimination” is alleged usually arises in ways that subvert sex identity with gender identity and therefore endow trans people with rights that no one else has (e.g., to sue or legally harass others who don’t respect their pronouns or who say true statements like “transwomen are men.”) All “positive” rights encourage lawfare which we want to avoid as much as possible.
The common-sense exemptions — there are others that defy enumeration — might suffice if the trans activists would agree to them as we come up with more of them. But they won’t, so the underpinnings of their opposition have to kicked out from underneath them.
Why did Trump and his allies devote so much attention and resources to something that seemingly affects a small number of people compared with top voter concerns like immigration, the economy, crime, abortion and democracy?
When the claim that it seemingly affects a small number of people that claim needs to be assessed in the whole context.
The fact that it directly affects women and kids is not a small number but numerically the majority of the population. This is why it resonates with the voters.
Lying about transgender impacts is ultimately shooting themselves in the foot. The irreparable harm and the refusal to keep data eg detransistioners can last for only so long until it will inevitably to been shown to be one of the greatest medical hoaxes.
Everyone knows no one can change their sex but their secret weapon is that it only works if everyone else fully complies with their gendered soul concept.
Is it plausible that the trans issue is the only one for which the Democratic Party and ideologically captured institutions engage in policy-based evidence making (and suppressing) rather than in evidence-based policy making? Really? The only one?
To answer your rhetorical question, of course not. For one, consider the blanket opposition to genetically-modified crops on health grounds, despite decades of actual evidence.
Is it plausible that the pet-eating* issue is the only one for which the Republican Party and ideologically captured institutions engage in policy-based evidence making (and suppressing) rather than in evidence-based policy making? Really? The only one?
Reality denial is a big problem no matter who’s doing it. If you want to talk partisan, Republicans win the denial crown easily though.
*(was going to go for ‘climate’ or ‘election fraud’ but snarkier is funnier)
You appear to be the only partisan in this discussion. You are welcome to continue it with yourself.
Of course there are lots of evidence-denying Republicans (and Greens and Libertarians and …). The big difference for me is that the Democrats have loudly proclaimed that they are the party of evidence, of reality, etc. The Republicans claim more that they are the party of The American Way and Traditional Values (which are negotiable w.r.t. reality).
There is a great deal of money behind the ideological capture of the Democratic Party and other institutions. Among important sources of funding are the Arcus Foundation, the Open Society Foundation and Jennifer Pritzker. Their funding includes not only support for medical treatment for trans people (including minors), but also more recently support for making hormones and surgery available, not as medical treatment, but as a form of autonomy. The idea is you should be able to get hormone treatments not because you have a medical condition of gender dysphoria, but because you should have the right to have hormone treatment to make your body into the body you want it to be. Trans kids are supposedly deprived of autonomy if they can’t reshape their bodies by the availability of hormone treatment. See Global Action for Trans Equality.
“Jennifer”
Other horrible surgeries are available for those who were “born in the wrong body” in regard to matters other than sex. For example, see: https://www.limblength.org/conditions/short-stature/ , which offers this:
“The International Center for Limb Lengthening performs cosmetic height surgery, also called stature lengthening, for healthy individuals who are unhappy with their height and want to be taller. [Note: If you are considering limb lengthening due to a dwarfism condition, please see this page.] For those interested in height enhancement, we offer bilateral simultaneous leg elongation—where both legs are lengthened at the same time using Precice (NuVasive) internal nail technology.” There have been no official statements yet on whether limb lengthening should be considered a constitutional right,
should be made available to prisoners in jail, and similar related issues.
Thanks to Jerry for listing the exceptions to the legal and moral equality of trans people. There are trans people who try to push the envelope, like Jessica Yaniv, a transwoman who went to a tribunal in British Columbia because women offering other women a service of doing Bikini waxing refused to wax Yaniv’s scrotum. Yaniv lost her case.
He wonseveral cases as an anonymous complainant before a lawyer acting for one of the later respondents smoked him out as a vexatious litigant and showed the Human Rights Commission that he was shaking down these female cosmeticians who provided these services in their private homes to other immigrant women. That’s when the Commission shamefacedly told him to take a hike and assessed costs against him. The earlier respondents couldn’t find lawyers willing to take their cases because most of the Vancouver law firms made nice incomes helping trans people sue all and sundry and didn’t want to lose the business representing transphobes.
The whole thing stank. But sunshine was a good disinfectant.
HIS case. The reason we are in this absurd situation in the first place is that people are willing to give them an inch, then they take a mile.