When dining with friends last night and talking about Trump’s controversial executive orders, I realized that there was some serendipity in these orders, which covered a variety of topics. And the serendipity was that suddenly it has become okay to discuss things that were previously either taboo or fraught topics—things like the binary nature of human sex, whether DEI is a good thing, and how immigration needs to be reformed. That can only be to the good, for a taboo topic is one that doesn’t go away, but just goes underground where it simmers slowly until it boils over. Now we can talk about them, even if arguing why some of Trump’s orders are malign.
One of the topics newly airing, a topic with which I’ve had some acquaintance, is sex and gender issues. How many human sexes are there? To what extent must we respect people’s claims of being nonbinary or transsexual? Should the rights of transsexual people ever be curtailed to further the rights of others? Should trans-identified men compete with women in sports, or be put in women’s prisons? Previously, even asking these questions got one labeled a transphobe, and I well know that accusation (I reject it). But it’s time to air these questions civilly and using data, though that is hard to do given the rancor of gender extremists.
Perhaps the first person demonized by gender fever was Abigail Shrier, whose views I’ve defended extensively. She has maintained that there is such a thing as rapid onset gender dysphoria, that its rapidity comes from social contagion (people urging others to transition), and that therapists who engage in “affirmative therapy” are engaged in malpractice, for they promote medical treatment (hormones and surgery) to kids who are too young to understand what they’re getting..
Shrier’s first book broaching these topics, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (2020), was praised by some (including me) but demonized by many, especially those with “gender fever”. You may remember that the ACLU’s LGBTQ+ law expert, trans-identified woman Chase Strangio, called for banning Shrier’s book in a tweet that he later deleted:
It’s shameful that an ACLU bigwig called for censorship of a book he didn’t like. Clearly, for Strangio, ideological purity takes precedence over free speech. That attitude will spell the death of the ACLU–at least as we knew it.
Shrier’s second book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids aren’t Growing Up, deals not just with affirmative therapy but the “therapization” of all of life for young people in America, imbuing many with the idea that they suffer from some mental disorder that needs professional assistance. I read that book, too, and gave it a glowing review on this site. Both books are well worth reading.
But my point here is twofold. First, it’s now okay to talk about the topics of her books without being demonized. Second, Shrier was pretty much right about all of her theses: there is social contagion causing gender dysphoria, accounting for its sudden rise, and, especially, that giving surgery, puberty blockers, or cross-sex hormones to children or adolescents is a bad idea.
In her new piece at the Free Press (click below or find a free version at this archived link), Shrier takes a victory lap: it’s now okay to seriously consider and discuss her ideas (except, of course, among extreme gender activists, who will never discuss any idea that contradict their ideology), and, importantly, she was right about social contagion and especially about the dangers of willy-nilly dispensing affirmative therapy, puberty blockers, and cross-sex hormones to children and adolescents.
I’ll give a few quotes. Shrier, who previously wrote op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, is a clear and engaging writer, a pleasure to read, and she starts her new piece with a real hook:
When the history of 21st-century gender mania is written, it should include this signal entry: In 2020, a website called GoFundMe, usually a place to find disaster-relief appeals and charities for starving children, contained more than 30,000 urgent appeals from young women seeking to remove their perfectly healthy breasts.
Another entry, from June 2020: The New England Journal of Medicine, America’s platinum medical publication, published a piece explaining that biological sex is actually “assigned at birth” by a doctor—and not a verifiable fact, based on our gametes, stamped into every one of our cells. In fact, biological sex ought to be deleted from our birth certificates—the authors claimed—because a person’s biological sex serves “no clinical utility.” Breaking news to gynecologists.
Public schools began asking elementary kids whether they might like to identify as “genderqueer” or “nonbinary.” Any dissent from this gender movement was met with suppression. The American Civil Liberties Union’s most prominent lawyer, Chase Strangio, announced his intention to suppress Irreversible Damage, my book-length investigation into the sudden spike in transgender identification among teen girls. “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on,” he tweeted. Weeks later, Amazon deleted Ryan Anderson’s book criticizing the transgender medical industry.
I could go on. But as of January 28, 2025, I don’t have to.
On that day, President Donald Trump signed an executive order announcing that the federal government would no longer “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another,” and that it would “rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”
Did you know that a lot of the damaging gender policy came from Obama?
If it seems odd that the spell of pediatric gender medicine should have been ended by politicians and not physicians, consider that in America, politics is how it began. Specifically, it began with Obamacare.
Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature legislation incentivizing and coercing private insurers to offer their products on a government exchange, prohibited those companies from discriminating on the basis of sex. And in May 2016, six years after the bill’s enactment, the Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services added this fateful qualification: Discrimination on the basis of “sex” was to include discrimination on the basis of “gender identity.”
“Obama effectively wrote into law, through healthcare, that gender identity is a protected class,” healthcare executive and gender-medicine researcher Zhenya Abbruzzese told me. And that opened a huge new source of funding for these treatments. “Because once these insurers feel like they have to cover it, that’s it. You have just turned on the engine,” Abbruzzese said.
If an insurer covers testosterone to treat a man who was deficient, then, according to gender ideology’s cracked logic, the insurer would also need to cover testosterone for a woman identifying as a man. If a procedure to remove a man’s unwanted breast tissue was covered, then a similar procedure for a woman identifying as a man must also be covered. Denying those claims could subject insurers to federal enforcement action.
To mandate coverage for gender treatments, activists “snuck in gender identity without Congress ever voting for it,” Abbruzzese told me. Transgender rights groups filed lawsuits, to test whether judges agreed: Suddenly, a “woman” was anyone who claimed to be one, as far as provision of healthcare was concerned. Luxury cosmetic treatments became available even to minors covered by their parents’ insurance—at fire-sale prices.
Shrier discusses the odious and harmful organization The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which never saw an intervention towards transition it didn’t like, and even collaborated with the U.S. govenment (the Biden administration) to hide data suggesting that affirmative care and puberty blockers did not help young people with gender dysphoria. This hiding of data that the author Johanna Olson-Kennedy (and the Biden administration) didn’t like is one of the most disgusting incidents I know of involving withholding data:
[WPATH] suppressed publication of systematic reviews of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries undertaken by Johns Hopkins University. That research would almost certainly have revealed, as so many systematic reviews have now done, that while the risk of sterility, cardiac event, osteoporosis, and bone fracture were high, any alleged mental health benefits of the WPATH-approved puberty blockers-to-cross sex hormones protocol remained unproven.
But the Biden administration pressed onward, suing any state that enacted bans on medical transition for minors. Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, a transgender adult, successfully pressured WPATH to drop minimum age requirements for gender medical treatments and surgeries in its September 2022 standards of care. Again and again, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris used the bully pulpit to assure “transgender Americans . . . especially the young people” that “your president has your back,” as Biden declared in an April 2021 address to Congress.
In 2022, the Department of Health and Human Services published a fact sheet claiming that gender affirming treatments for youth were “crucial to overall health and well-being.” Any physician or therapist who might otherwise have been tempted to discourage trans-identified youth from immediate and irreversible medical transition sat up and took note.
The Obama and Biden administrations worked in tandem with activist organizations. Federal funds poured into tainted research. Gender physician Johanna Olson-Kennedy received nearly $10 million from the National Institutes of Health to study the effects of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on gender-confused adolescents ages 11 and up. (She later lowered the age to 8.) Olson-Kennedy and a team of colleagues recruited hundreds of transgender-identified minors. They gave one cohort of the children cross-sex hormones and another puberty blockers—to determine if either treatment produced improvements in mental health. (There was no control group.) After only one year on cross-sex hormones, two of her 315 subjects had committed suicide.
As for her nine-year study on puberty blockers, Olson-Kennedy didn’t like the results so, by her own admission, she shelved them. “She said the findings might fuel the kind of political attacks that have led to the bans of the youth gender treatments in more than 20 states,” according to The New York Times. She told the Times she intends to publish the data, but that getting her work to a place where it wouldn’t be “weaponized” required it to be “clear and concise. And that takes time.”
The public that had funded her research has never had the opportunity to review its results.
Surely the fact that Rachel Levine is a trans-identified man affected her harmful behavior as Assistant Secretary of Health, which underscores the dangers of appointing wolves to guard the henhouse, or at least reporting on the state of the hens. Likewise, Chase Strangio, as the ACLU’s director of LGBTQ litigation, is another harmful wolf. He has corrupted the ACLU’s mission away from providing civil rights for all to prioritizing the rights of LGBTQ individuals.
As Shrier reports, Trump’s new Executive orders ameliorate the situations she’s warned about (yes, it is okay to admit that some of Trump’s orders are salubrious):
Trump’s executive order directs federally funded institutions to stop reliance on WPATH, calling its recommendations “junk science.” Cut off from what Abbruzzese calls WPATH’s “evidence laundering,” insurers will be forced to evaluate the gender medical evidence and issue policies on their own. Systematic reviews and investigations already undertaken in England, Finland, and Sweden indicate it’s not likely they will find the evidence for medically transitioning children to be terribly impressive. Activist researchers into gender medicine might soon see their federal grants dry up.
Every healthcare entity accepting federal dollars (nearly all of them, in Obamacare’s world) risks losing contracts with Medicare and Medicaid if they continue to provide pediatric gender transitions.
This executive order does not abolish pediatric gender medicine. Boutique practices that do not rely on federal funding can still offer “top surgery” to minors, for instance. There will surely be litigation to challenge the reach of Trump’s order.
But that order does break the spell—and the spell was always our biggest problem. Parents who allowed their children to transition are often caricatured as Hollywood eccentrics, the sort who bequeath their estates to teacup Chihuahuas. The parents I spoke to—even those who allowed their children to transition—are nothing like that.
Many are conscientious and loving and afraid, if a little naive. They believed medical science was above politics and beyond question. They had wandered into a Truman Show, an all-consuming simulacrum, designed to convince them to abandon their protective instincts. If the parents still weren’t convinced, therapists coerced them into allowing their daughters to undergo gender transition with this thinly veiled threat: “Would you rather a live son or a dead daughter?”
In the end, Shrier pats herself and her “allies” on the back for raising the alarm, but it’s a well-deserved pat, and if I ever meet her, I’ll add one of my own:
Disagreeable contrarians who resisted gender fever are the real oddballs. Some combination of personality quirk and conviction that occasionally makes us obnoxious employees and intolerable cocktail-party guests also inoculated us against gender madness. There is no reforming us.
But we served a vital function: Together, a ragtag crew of truculent journalists and outcast researchers stopped the entire herd from running off the cliff. None of us ever expected to be welcomed back into the same elite circles that, only recently, had cheered or looked away as a generation of tormented girls took themselves apart.
An excellent Free Press piece by Abigail, as always. Thank you for sharing, I hadn’t seen it. I didn’t realize genderwoo was sneaked in via Obama care.
Perhaps Johanna Olson-Kennedy should follow Exulansic for some facts, she documents “individuals killed as a result of trans ideology, either directly through medicalization, or indirectly due to lack of recognition of transition as the cry for help and indication of social emotional psychological instability that it so often, if not always, is”.
Most listed here are young women who took their own lives. This list is already far too long.
Spencer Jamie, age 22
https://exulansic.substack.com/p/the-dead-names-spencer-jamie
Forest Harader
https://exulansic.substack.com/p/the-dead-names-forest-harader
Kathleen “Myles” Fitzpatrick, age 17
https://exulansic.substack.com/p/the-dead-names-kathleen-myles-fitzpatrick
Naomi Lily Anne Mora, aka Roy Mora, 15
https://exulansic.substack.com/p/trans-teenager-dead-after-jumping
DJ Bwisit aka Anthony “Tony” Joseph Javellana, 22
https://exulansic.substack.com/p/trans-tiktoker-dj-bwisit-aka-anthony
Meka Shabazz
https://exulansic.substack.com/p/another-dead-name-meka-shabazz
Griffin Shaun Sivret, 24
https://exulansic.substack.com/p/rip-griffin
Dagny “Nex” Benedict
https://exulansic.substack.com/p/the-dead-names-dagny-nex-benedict
Yarden Silveira, age 23
https://exulansic.substack.com/p/the-dead-names-yarden-silveira
Liam Johns, 35, mother of two young children
https://exulansic.substack.com/p/the-dead-names-liam-johns
Grim reading.
Yes, it’s shocking that these terrible cases aren’t in all the headlines. The media should be screaming at these unnecessary deaths. They are so tragic that I didn’t quote any details and just included the links so people could choose whether or not to go and look at them.
Griffin was a big shock to me as I’ve been following her trials and tribulations over several years, she hasn’t had much of a life since she went down the woo path.
love her
As someone who has actually read Abigail Shrier’s book (“Irreversible Damage”), she (AS) gives full credit to Lisa Littman. Lisa Littman did the original work on ROGD.
Good piece by Shrier. Let’s hope that the tide is turning.
And yes. We’re now free to talk about these things again.
Clear, principled, all ’round. Bravo.
Reading Shrier’s book helped me understand and navigate the transgender craze that convinced my daughter at 13 that she was nonbinary. She got this idea from a friend who identified as nonbinary and learned that not feeling comfortable in her body and not conforming to gender stereotypes made her nonbinary.
She wanted puberty blockers and they/them pronouns, and my wife and I didn’t comply to either request, but we let her dress as she pleased, which made her look like a boy. A few months before her sixteenth birthday she started wearing dresses again, which she preferred as a young girl and started wearing earrings and makeup. She is also much happier
That’s the story I needed to read after reading just a few of the stories (linked in a comment above) of the tragic ends met by some transitioners. So thank you for sharing, and I am very glad to know your daughter is happier now!
Thank you! My wife and I were very worried. It was difficult period to navigate. Reading Shrier’s book was very helpful in helping me understand she was happening.
In normal times, I would never have wanted Trump to win the election, but these aren’t normal times. I have been disgusted with the Biden’s Administrations support for affirmative care and medical transitioning of children and teens, especially after four comprehensive reviews concluded there is very weak evidence supporting it. It’s hard not to take this personally.
Congratulations and best wishes to all your family and especially to the young lady!
Nice tribute to Abigail Shriner and yes, Lisa Littman deserves a hat tip, also. Dr. Littman was also bitterly criticized in the pseudo-scientific community.
*Shrier. (Sorry!)
Unfortunately, trump’s cdc has shit-canned much of its data gathering and communications. The important and timely MMWR has not appeared in a couple of weeks and with the elimination of “T” by fiat and at least a pause in carrying out the YRBS (Youth Risk Behavior Survey), we will have no scientifically reliable primary data on how many of our high-schoolers self identify as transgender or question their sexuality…or possibly engage in risky behaviors such as tobacco and alcohol use, or fights or gun use, suicide attempts or have unstable home lives. This survey, with a large distribution to grades 9-12 every two years has a thirty year history of data in some areas for identifying trends. This rich dataset could now end. Regardless of adults’ attitude toward anything other than traditional hetero identity, adolescents question and deal with many nonstandard situations. Schools must know what to expect and in what numbers if only knowing to provide sensible, mature adult voices for these children to speak with. We could always talk about these issues, though in many cases soon found ourselves shunned and talking to ourselves. But now I fear that there will no longer be a factual statistical basis for any discussion. I am thrilled to see the end of the dei bathwater, but I worry about the babies being thrown out with it.
The left went insane in the Obama-Biden years (not just in the US but Canada, Europe, etc too.)
I don’t think a man as odd as Trump would ever have been elected without the crazy left.
And yes it’s appalling that the CDC is having funds cut.
Cdc is not just having funds cut, but for now has had all outward looking comms cut. Many clinicians rely on the MMWR for timely data and medical/public health information.
Trump is crazy. I don’t mean metaphorically either.
Compared to Democrats he’s sane with respect to topic of transitioning children and teens. A sane Democratic Party would have helped Trump lose.
@Jeff I’ve said the same many times. The Dems brought this on themselves. They went way too far left, caving in to radicals such as the extreme trans lobby.
Trump would have lost to an old school Democrat.
In Obama’s defense (I’m a fan but he had faults)…. back in 2012-2014 – remember the North Carolina basketball team flap over toilets? — “trans” wasn’t really a thing most people recognized.
Although the dreadful “I am Jazz” reality show started in about 2010 trans as a aspirational, cool goal for disturbed teens hadn’t gathered much steam (see the numbers). The inflection point was 2010-2014 and multi-variate.
Lots of stuff then – Time Mag. (that disaster of a once great publication) said “Trans is the new civil rights” on the front page. The rise of activist group WPATH.
Also the “like” button (2012) and just more social media/kids phones more common.
In 2015 gay marriage leaving activists looking for something new (they admit this now and many, like GLAAD and Mermaids are still proud of this!).
There was a confluence of factors leading to this disaster. In such complex situations be very careful of attributing the genesis of something as being “THAT moment” “THAT person” etc. (not that PCC or Abigail does – but I see it a lot in many domains).
No matter how satisfying it might be to look at only one “cause”… complicated disasters, from helicopter crashes to large deranged social movements have many causes.
D.A.
NYC
ps. Abigail S. is a STAR.
Strangio has certainly prioritized TQ individuals, has s/he cared about the rights of LGB individuals?
For example, has s/he defended the right of lesbians and gays to declare sexual attraction based on sex (as opposed to on “gender identity”)?
She doesn’t support lesbians having male free spaces and she has been involved in several cases that attack women’s rights. She did however support same sex marriage.
Wendy Kaminer, a former member of the board of the ACLU, claims the rot started around 2003 and wrote a book about it.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0029F1QJI/
I applaud you for defending science and speaking out.
“But we served a vital function: Together, a ragtag crew of truculent journalists and outcast researchers stopped the entire herd from running off the cliff.” These researchers and journalists do deserve our admiration and support. They were and are courageous individuals, maybe “oddballs” in their own worlds, who kept a spotlight on a child gender transition parade in which the crowd was told and sometimes convinced that the unclothed emperor was splendidly dressed. But if Vice President Harris was sitting in the Oval Office, the parade would have likely continued unabated and been publicly funded for another four or more years. Ironies abound as a result of the last election.
I wonder how long it’s going to take until we see class action law suits directed at some of the doctors who performed these surgeries on children so flippantly? Some can’t reproduce and some can’t orgasm. A hell of a good case to sue.
I understand that there are class action suits in the pipeline.
‘Dr’ Sidhbh Gallagher is one of the worst butchers of breasts. She is already being sued by the parents of Abigail Pierce who died after being operated on by Gallagher. It is not thought that Abigail’s breast op was related to gender, but Gallagher has butchered many children during double mastectomies. She has operated on several above the maximum recommended BMI, and when their wounds failed to heal properly, Gallagher abandoned them.
I understand that she has no medical malpractice insurance. I don’t know about the US system, but I think that deters people from suing her?
Gallagher has worked on Jazz Jennings, and then had Jennings working in her surgery, persuading other children it was okay to have their breasts removed. Totally immoral.
https://exulansic.substack.com/p/dr-gallagher-fled-the-state-in-secret
There are several single-plaintiff medical malpractice suits in the works and one or two in Canada I believe. I don’t think “class-action” is what you mean here. In med mal, each plaintiff claiming injury sues individually and each must prove his injuries were due to the doctor’s fault in his particular case, not just due to the treatment.
These harmful effects are exactly what the patients seeking gender-affirming treatment said at the time were what he (AFAB) or she (AMAB) wanted. They only became harms when the young men unexpectedly and unfaithfully turned back into women and found that their medically and surgically altered bodies were now totally (and irreversibly) unfit for purpose. Why would a 12-year-old boy want to have menstrual periods, gestate a baby, or have guy stick his penis in his “front hole”? He’s seen this on porn and the idea that someone like himself, assigned female at birth, is expected to let boys do that to him if he wants to be popular fills him with dread and thoughts of self-harm. It is better to have no orgasm than the “wrong” (female) orgasm, said with the wisdom of someone who’s never had one. And yes, the miracle T will do all that and more.
Do you know how miserable and self-harm-inducing it makes him that his developing breasts cause everyone who looks at him to misgender him? It gets worse every month even as his beard starts to fill in with hormone “replacement”! Flippant is in the eye of the beholder. Enthusiastically, non-judgmentally affirming is what the happy patient said on RateMyMD. Non-flippant means paternalistic. Bad.
All the expert witnesses from WPATH and the blue-ribbon professional medical societies will testify that the doctor fully met the standard of care that prevailed at the time he treated the patient. “What the doctor did is exactly how we treat gender dysphoria in boys assigned female at birth.” Treatment that meets a standard of care in all respects can’t be judged to have caused a dissatisfying outcome no matter how dire. The doctor must escape liability. The jury can’t say, “Well, your treatment met the prevailing standard but we’re finding you at fault and liable anyway just because this poor girl got really messed up from what you did to her.”
Except when it does. The church-going jurors wearing MAGA hats can say, “WTF? Wait just a gol-darn second. This is nuts. Them fancy doctors are just coverin’ each other’s butts. $15 million to the plaintiff!” They do sometimes ignore the self-serving experts and make a “hell-of-a-good-case” common-sense judgement. But you can’t count on it and a jury verdict that flips the bird at the law is going to be appealed by the doctor’s insurance carrier, particularly with a whole industry at stake.
Legislation against this treatment is the way to go, I think, at least in minors. I don’t think med mal lawsuits will get you there.
In my state, by a law adopted in the last couple of years, a 13 year old may access gender affirming care defined to include puberty blockers, hormone replacement, and surgeries including castration and breast removals, with, or in certain circumstances, without parental permission. Children may enter our state for these services. But we will no longer allow or recognize marriages that take place before a person is 18 years old, with or without parental permission. It’s like living in a Looney Tunes cartoon.
Some of the truth is starting to emerge.
Oh what a surprise the much touted 1% de transition rate actually is 30% and this from WPath. It will be higher than that I suspect.
https://x.com/SwipeWright/status/1885726408925954352
Amazingly and completely unpredictably the whole thing was a vehicle to allow cross dressing men to feel more comfortable
https://x.com/BevJacksonAuth/status/1886127329140994424
Honestly I find it completely unfathomable that anyone could believe the nonsense of the trapped gender soul.
In one study of transition, 40% of people dropped out during the study. They were not contacted, and we’re just excluded from the final statistics.
The best way to show that people rarely desist or detransition is not to count those who desist of detransition
Unfortunately TRAs often just look at the headlines, and not how the data was produced.
That, too, is a suspicious number…or at least should be. Basically it’s a CYA as in “cover your ass” move.
Colin Wright (SwipeWright) seems to have picked up a tweet by someone called Amaya Deakins, which the writer recants here (including recanting the 30% figure):
https://x.com/amayadeakins/status/1886181269106491832?s=19&mx=2
She’s apparently no longer an active WPATH member, either.
The TRAs are loving it:
https://x.com/legaltweetz/status/1886114953163092233?s=19
(h/t to “Maryse” on Canadian Discord)
And then there is this…….your thoughts?
“The Democrat party is completely and totally broken. Just listen to this gender insanity:”
https://x.com/ClayTravis/status/1885856373549748516
The whole thing is ridiculous. There was one woman who started the I am a young black womanhood and I should be the vice chair blah blah and then broke out into song. Wow all of a sudden the DNC became Americas Got Talent
On this trajectory of nonsense the Republican Party should probably offer their sincerest thanks for ensuring they will be voted in for many years
Back in the 90’s skeptical publications were putting out articles on medical quackery and the ways it appealed to those who adopted it. One of the red flags to look out for were cures or therapies which were purported to explain and/or solve a suspiciously broad host of symptoms.
Such dubious modalities as Multiple Personality Syndrome, Repressed Memories, and even alien abduction were presented as the underlying source for such garden variety problems as anxiety, depression, weight gain, night sweats, a sense of being “wrong,” fatigue, anger, brain fog, and so forth and so on. Run your eye down the checklist, it turns out you might be suffering from a simple answer to all your problems. The fact that this solution might also be criticized by many people in the mainstream made it even more appealing: you were not only a victim, but a crusader.
I remember an online test a few years ago titled something like “Am I transgender?” Skeptics tried to find any combination of responses which gave a null result. There were none. It was always something to seriously consider. Rumination and deep contemplation would then lead to an epiphany which was of course entirely self-generated and influenced by nothing but what you know to be true about yourself.
People often underestimate how easy it is to become convinced that you’ve always kind of known something you haven’t always known. If teenage girls are involved, all the worse.
FWIW, teenagers in general are hardly paragons of rational decision making.
Yes. They’ve also been fed a steady diet of “they want trans people dead.” More than a few of the gender critical have warned that these executive orders could set off a powder keg of self-harm and retaliatory violence from young people who literally see them as an attack on their lives.
There may be only two sexes (sometimes called ‘male’ and ‘female’) in all species (plants and animals). However, sex in humans is not strictly binary. 99+% of humans are just male or female. However, a very small number of humans have no sex. Some humans (Chimeras? Mosaics?) have both sexes. So for humans at least 4 cases be devised. As a practical matter, sex in humans is ‘pretty damn binary’ (R. Dawkins although he was not referring to humans).
The reason there are 2 sexes is because there are only two gamete types: sperm (male) and egg(female).
Yes and I have said exactly that. It is as close to binary as you can come. The frequency of individuals that do not fit the male or female slot is between 1/5600 and 1/20,000. That is pretty damn binary. l I presume you simply missed the several posts where I have made exactly the point you are implying I have missed.
Like others I am pleased to see some pull back about trans treatment for the young, women’s sports, and the like. But I am not pleased that religious bigots have piggy backed on this to move us backwards with respect to gender acceptance. Yes, sex is binary XX and XY, but society had largely accepted gender fluidity with respect to same-sex relationships, dress, and the like. Jerry has always been careful to separate the sex binary from acceptance of trans people and by implication gays and the like. I suspect that this distinction is completely lost on the religious right belief that anything outside the Christian orthodoxy is immoral and forbidden. Perhaps as one example, is there really any principled reason for Trump to ban trans individuals in the military? I just wish the turn had been moderate like in Europe, although religious-based populism might yet push us backward there as well.
Have you seen any evidence that religious conservatives are using the trans issue to introduce legislation rolling back gay rights or enforcing gender conformity?
This is of course what trans activists have claimed — that after using sex based rights to keep trans-identified males out of women’s spaces and sports THEY will be now coming after same-sex marriage and children playing with the “wrong” toys. But aside from culture war whining from the usual hardcore suspects, I haven’t seen this. Acceptance of homosexuality has gone down, true, but that seems to be tied to the forced teaming of LGB with the QT. Certainly the wording and chain of reasoning in the Executive Orders seem pretty closely focused on criticizing gender ideology, as opposed to condemning a more general “deviations from God’s holy plan,” or what have you.
As for trans in the military, from what I can tell the issues seem to be men living in close quarters with women, women living in close quarters with men, and trans people not being battle-ready because they require a steady supply of drugs, surgery, and mental health accommodations. I don’t know, maybe there’s more.
I saw this video, can’t remember from who, but it was from a gay service member, he is against it bc no trans people are let into battle, they just kinda sit around in an office, and the government pays for their treatments. I’m no conservative, I believe in free healthcare for all, but trans stuff is cosmetic, shouldn’t be covered by the government.
I don’t see any signs of religious bigotry. I’m sure it exists but this was not the driving factor. It was more a return to common sense.
“Perhaps as one example, is there really any principled reason for Trump to ban trans individuals in the military?”
Yes. If their condition limits their availability for deployment; if they need special accommodations that are rarely, if ever, available in spartan conditions; if they suffer from mental health issues because of their condition; if their presence would disrupt the unit—something akin to men in women’s prisons. I would have documented the problems that might exist before issuing a blanket ban, but I suspect the data will support it. The military is primarily about the mission, not about the self-fulfillment of individual desire. “But they want to serve!” And so do many others who find that the governing DoD directive has over 40 pages of medical, physical, and psychological conditions that disqualify people from service.
Doug, our military (Canadian Armed Forces) is attempting to comply with a Cabinet directive to compel members to make the culture more welcoming to transgender soldiers. You might have seen news stories from across the border that we are putting tampon dispensers in the men’s latrines. (This implies, consistent with Canadian human rights legislation, that the soldiers are using sex-segregated spaces according to their gender.)
You might be professionally interested in this little official government vignette to be used in training sessions for fixing the culture:
https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/services/conduct-and-culture/training-and-education/professional-conduct-scenarios-based-learning/scenario-standing-up-for-a-transgender-soldier.html
This is not the lot that went ashore at Juno Beach. It’s no wonder more people are quitting than are joining. We could increase our defence spending to 2% of GDP, sure, if we had the political will but we won’t have anyone to spend it on….except administrators and people to run courses like this.
If I remember correctly, people are not banned simply for identifying as “trans”. But if they join, they must accept being housed according to their actual sex, and they cannot be on hormone treatment.
Actually there is a reason for the military rule … barracks, showers, etc. are segregated between men and women, to avoid cases of harassment and violence towards women. Trans women in the military would mean men in the reserved spaces for women. Those men could access those spaces by simple self-ID as “women”. Plus, the rules for getting into to military, police, fire-fighters… are different for men and women. In Spain there are hundreds of men who have claimed to be women to enter those forces without the strength necessary to pass for men … and they get the added benefits of being “women”. In armies women are not necessarily in combat, they get other jobs… those jobs are coveted by some men …
My son recently went through Marine Corps training in San Diego. The women training with him did not have to meet the same physical requirements. The male recruits, for example, were expected to be able to do 40 pushups in 30 seconds, the women, 20 (still, impressive. I would be lucky to do 5). The men were required to carry packs with as much as 80 lbs, the women’s max was 45 (still very hard!). The men were required to be able to run a mile in 8:30, the women in 10:00 (still, pretty speedy). Even now, as a Marine, he is required to do more physically than the women and some posts are not given to women.
There are good, sound reasons for these differences in requirements. Women can (and do) serve with distinction and honor, and these differences allow them to serve. But this small example shows, to me anyway, why there are issues with transwomen in the military that need to be addressed, even outside the barrack’s bathroom/changing room.
Abigail Shrier might have been one of the first to be demonized but before her there were lesbians such as Cathy Brennan in the US and Julie Bindel in the UK who were already raising concerns and were promptly demonized (activists advocating ‘canceling’ Bindel, the first time I’d heard this use of the term).
Goddam, this is awful. It’s embarrassing — the Biden administration — the mendacity of the trans-show — this undermined so much else. And it being sneaked (snuck?) into practice administratively, and, let’s not overlook: The redefinition of conversion therapy.
And it’s way beyond awful the human toll of these unfortunate youngsters. (I’ll be all judgmental, call me a prude, too, and allow as to how I don’t fancy the adults who are into it, best not get started on that.)
Again, as I have stated here, my thanks to this blog and to some of the commentariat for cluing me to the reality of the gender-shitshow.
In particular, someone put me onto Kathleen Stock and her Book: Material Girls- Why Reality Matter for Feminism.
I have had disagreements with some of these same, and will probably continue to do so, and we must all check ourselves for our tribal reflexes (they lied to us about X, so they must also be lying about Y)
One might almost imagine that reality matters for everyone.
It’s been a busy day, so late to this thread. This battle is not over. There’s some serious shit to get into with my fellow travelers and I don’t relish it. I continue to learn on this topic…and what to say to my peers whose kids or grandkids caught in the contagion.
Thank you for this excellent post!
To me, Obama looks more and more a smooth-talking conman with little if any morality, and a disastrous impact that is only beginning to be seen. Even more worrying is how the vaunted system of checks and balances of an old-established democracy spectacularly failed to limit the damage.
Also, I think that the scientific and medical communities should do deep soul-searching. I have always disliked the “business model” of modern science, where the typical scientist is reduced to a drudge forced to work long hours for little pay, with an uncertain future, and totally dependent on his funder and his superiors. It is obvious that when the funder and the superiors decide to abuse science, you cannot expect researchers kept on such a tight leash to suddenly become heroes and kick their meager income in order to defend What Is Right.