The American Humanist Association (AHA) is among the most prominent humanist/atheist/skeptical organizations in America, but it’s been getting increasingly “progressive” (read “woke”). You may remember that in 2021 the AHA revoked its “Humanist of the Year” award given to Richard Dawkins 15 years earlier, saying this:
Regrettably, Richard Dawkins has over the past several years accumulated a history of making statements that use the guise of scientific discourse to demean marginalized groups, an approach antithetical to humanist values. His latest statement implies that the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while also simultaneously attacking Black identity as one that can be assumed when convenient. His subsequent attempts at clarification are inadequate and convey neither sensitivity nor sincerity.
This is an arrant mischaracterization of Dawkins’s views, which were most famously expressed in this tweet in 2021 (note the coincidence with the year of revocation):
It didn’t matter to the AHA that Dawkins tried to explain what he meant by that tweet: it was a question intended to provoke discussion:
It didn’t matter that the Rachel Dolezal “transracial” issue is certainly worth discussing, and the first tweet above surely did not mean that Richard thinks the “identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while also simultaneously attacking Black identity as one that can be assumed when convenient.” That can be said only if you want to attack Dawkins to begin with or are flautning virtue at the expense of truth.
This shows two things relevant to this post: that the AHA has become overly woke, and, more relevant for today, the organization waving the banner of gender activism (here the issue of transgenderism) beyond reason, ignoring the facts. Both of these conclusions can be seen in the article below by Kavita Narayan, identified by the AHA as “a humanist writer and researcher based in LA.”.
Even though the piece is long for many people’s attention spans, I suggest you read the whole thing to check whether my assertions are correct and to see where the AHA probably stands on this issue. I assume that the AHA agrees with Narayan’s views, as she repeatedly invokes what the AHA believes to justify her conclusions, and the organization allowed her to publish the long article.
Here are some of the AHA’s assertions I’ve gleaned from the article. Bold headings are mine, Narayan’s quotes are indented, and my comments are flush left:
1.) Denying “affirmative care” to anyone (including adolescents) who wants it, with that care including hormones and surgery, is unethical.
Transmasculine and nonbinary individuals report invasive gatekeeping, as well: Jordan, 22 and nonbinary, remembers undergoing humiliating questioning before a hysterectomy consultation, a stark reflection of a system built only for cis bodies.
A humanist framework grounded in reason, equality, and bodily autonomy holds that denying care based on gender identity is not only a practical failure, but an ethical breach. “To deny someone care… is not just unethical, it’s inhuman,” says ethicist Casey Ruhl.
. . . This is where humanism can make a unique impact. Unlike traditional religions that may treat gender diversity as a moral debate, humanism begins from a different premise: that every individual has inherent worth, and that self-determination is not a privilege, but a right. “Humanism allows us to honor people without pretending to know them better than they know themselves,” says Elan, a queer humanist chaplain.
Note that they give no age limit here: any child or adolescent who claims to be of the sex different from their natal sex has a right not just to be believed, but also given affirmative care. I would add here that unless you’re “of age” (I’ll take it to be the age of 18, the legal age at which a person can make their own healthcare decisions), I would not be so quick to say that a person “knows themselves,” particularly when it comes to “knowing” that they’re really of their non-natal sex. “Self-determination” for medical issues is not a right for anyone under 18, and may not be warranted if someone wants to transition when they have other psychological issues when over age 18. Often gender dysphoria is part of a complex of other, unrelated psychological problems, problems that are often confused with gender dysphoria itself (see below). It can also be exacerbated by social pressure–the “affirmation” from peers, which is often very strong.
Finally, remember that doctors are not obligated legally to do anything that a patient wants, even if it’s harmless. If someone goes to a doctor with a viral infection and demands antibiotics, doctors are perfectly within their rights to refuse, for antibiotics are not only useless against viruses, but their wanton use can increase antibiotic resistance in bacteria. If you ask someone to cut off your arm because you think it’s superfluous (yes, there are such people), doctors can and will refuse, and will not suffer for it. And no doctor is obligated to give children or adolescents puberty blockers or hormones just because they ask for it. (A good doctor will refer such people to competent specialists.) This doesn’t mean that if someone has an easily treatable ailment or injury, it is ETHICAL for a doctor to refuse treatment, but gender transitioning does not fall into this category. It takes a specialist in pediatric gender transitioning, objective rather than affirmative therapy, and above all what we don’t have: evidence that it’s safe to use puberty blockers. After puberty is over, of course, a gender-specialist doctor can help transitioning by giving hormones and other things, though surgery is something that requires careful thought, and perhaps many surgeons won’t agree to go snipping off breasts or genitals.
2.) There is no lower age limit to begin “affirmative treatment”, and treatment that includes puberty blockers is reversible. While the article argues that gender-affirming care is safe and efficacious “when providce with informed consent”, what does that mean? If parents assent that it’s okay to inject a child or adolescent with hormones or cut off bits of their body, does that mean that a child of any age has a right to do that, so long as they find a compliant doctor? Look at the title of this section:
The Myth of “Too Young” and the Data That Debunks It
Opponents of gender-affirming care often argue that children are too young to make life-altering decisions. But this talking point misunderstands both the process and the people it affects.
Gender-affirming care for minors doesn’t begin with surgery. It starts with listening. It involves long conversations with therapists, pediatricians, and families. Puberty blockers, often the first clinical step, are fully reversible and give young people time to explore their identity without the permanent effects of endogenous puberty.
Narayan’s “myth of too young” is invidious. First, it’s not uncommon for children to be referred to doctors for affvirmative therapy or even hormones after just one or a few visits, lacking those “long conversations.”
Second, talk therapy that supports and verifies the conclusion of a young person that they are transgender should be, but is not invariably, objective. What if the therapist fails to affirm the child’s assertion, concluding that the child is too young or is caught in a morass of psychological confusion? Is that unethical?
And is “too young” really a myth? Children as young as 11 (e.g., Jazz Jennings) have taken puberty blockers, and, at 17, Jennings had the difficult and complex “bottom surgery”. Other papers report girls as young as 13 getting double mastectomies. In 2022, the organization WPATH, a villain in this narrative, recommended these things:
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health said hormones could be started at age 14, two years earlier than the group’s previous advice, and some surgeries done at age 15 or 17, a year or so earlier than previous guidance. The group acknowledged potential risks but said it is unethical and harmful to withhold early treatment.
Surgery at 15 and hormones at 14?
Note the “unethical” trope, as raised by Narayan above. As for “harmful to withhold early treatment,” it’s important to realize that the majority of adolescents and children who are not given affirmative treatment eventually come out as gay, so that neither surgery or hormone treatment needs to be done.
As I’ll mention in a minute, those treatments might damage people’s health, despite Narayan’s assertion, and we don’t know their long-term effects, except that post-puberty hormone treatment, as well as bottom surgery, can leave people without the ability to have a sex life that includes orgasms. Simply affirming a child’s self-diagnosis and giving them whatever hormones they want is bad practice without careful vetting, and certainly there are ages that are “too young” for that. (I’ve suggested a lower limit of 18, but even 21 may be okay.)
At any rate, there are a variety of studies showing the proportion of children with gender dysphoria who do not receive affirmative care and wind up deciding they’re gay. This varies from 39% to 80% among boys. Data from girls are sparser, but several studies of small samples say that untreated gender-dysphoric girls usually become lesbian or cisgender women. Given this, and the possible dangers of hormone treatment and demonstrated dangers of surgery, saying that no child is too young to be treated, and that they have a right to be treated the way they want, is, to me, both unethical and harmful. To foster the idea that there is no such thing as “too young” is pushing children to make decisions that they’re not ready to make—decisions that will change their lives and bodies forever.
As for the harm of puberty blockers when they are stopped, there is insufficient evidence about the long-term effects of puberty blockers on several traits, and some evidence that there are irreversible effects on bone density and height. As the Cass Report states:
There were no high-quality studies identified that used an appropriate study design to assess the outcomes of puberty suppression in adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria or incongruence. There is insufficient and/or inconsistent evidence about the effects of puberty suppression on gender dysphoria, mental and psychosocial health, cognitive development, cardio-metabolic risk, and fertility. There is consistent moderate-quality evidence, albeit from mainly pre-post studies, that bone density and height may be compromised during treatment.
There is a lack of high-quality research assessing the outcomes of hormones for masculinisation or feminisation in adolescents with gender dysphoria or incongruence and few studies that undertake long-term follow-up. There is little evidence regarding gender dysphoria, body satisfaction, psychosocial and cognitive outcomes, and fertility. There is moderate-quality evidence from mainly pre-post studies that hormone treatment may in the short-term improve some aspects of psychological health. There is inconsistent evidence about the effect of hormones on height/growth, bone health and cardiometabolic effects.
There is certainly not enough evidence to say that the effects of puberty blockers on the body are safe and fully reversible, although some of the phenotypic effects may be. The lack of firm evidence that blockers are irreversible and safe is one reason the puberty blockers (not approved, by the way by the FDA for blocking puberty, and always prescribed “off label”) are considered “experimental treatment” in the UK under 18, and are severely restricted in quite a few other countries like Sweden. Almost nowhere are they permitted to be given willy-nilly to children or adolescents at their request, as Narayan seems to feel.
3). Withholding affirmative care increases depression and suicidality. Affirmation is, as the article says, “life-saving”. Note that the AHA is very canny here, repeatedly using the word “suicidality” rather than “suicide”, although the general claim among gender activists is that withholding affirmative care increases suicide itself. But the American Psychological Association defines “suicidality” as “the risk of suicide, usually indicated by suicidal ideation or intent, especially as evident in the presence of a well-elaborated suicidal plan.”
The AHA says this:
Affirmation isn’t just emotional. It directly correlates with better mental health outcomes. A 2022 study in JAMA Network Open found that transgender youth who received gender-affirming care had significantly lower rates of depression and suicidality than those who did not. These effects persist into adulthood, with gender-affirming hormones and surgeries linked to improved quality of life and reduced psychological distress.
The link given doesn’t go to an article I can find, but I do know of one good study that seems to me the gold standard of the relation between gender dysphoria and suicide itself. And it shows that, when you disentangle the effects of psychiatric problems not related to gender dysphoria from the data, there is no difference in the suicide rates of adolescents without gender dysphoria compared to those either presenting for treatment for gender dysphoria or going on to gender reassignment via surgery and hormones. That is, dysphoria and its affirmative treatment doesn’t increase suicidality or suicide itself. You can find this 2024 study below, published last year in the BMJ [British Medical Journal] Mental Health; click on screenshot to read. If you’re blocked, click here to see the full text or here to get the pdf:
The study is the best because it had a large sample, lasted over 23 years into adulthood, and, moreover, was conducted in Finland, where every individual is numbered and their doctor and psychiatric visits tallied. The sample was of 2,083 adolescents who sought gender-identity assessments and/ir desired gender reassignment (GR). For each of these target individuals, EIGHT control individuals were assigned, matched by age and sex. The results were that, without multivariate analysis, there was a slight but nonsignificantly higher rate of suicide among the 2,083 “GR” (gender-referred) children, some of which went on to full transition. But that difference completely disappeared when the authors controlled for other psychiatric issues. As the paper says (my bolding):
Most importantly, when psychiatric treatment needs, sex, birth year and differences in follow-up times were accounted for, the suicide mortality of both those who proceeded and did not proceed to GR did not statistically significantly differ from that of controls. This does not support the claims that GR is necessary in order to prevent suicide. GR has also not been shown to reduce even suicidal ideation, and suicidal ideation is not equal to actual suicide risk. To the best of our knowledge, the impact of GR on suicide mortality among gender-referred adolescents has not been reported in earlier studies. In an earlier study by Dhejne et al,11 even when psychiatric morbidity was controlled for, participants diagnosed as transsexual in adulthood who had undergone both hormonal and surgical GR displayed increased suicide mortality compared with matched population controls. Nonetheless, these authors focused on patients treated before 2002. More recent cohorts, particularly adolescents, may differ from those in earlier decades, and stress related to gender identity itself may be lower presently because of decreasing prejudice.
In other words, gender-dysphoric youth who sought help but did not proceed to gender reassignment did not differ in suicidality from those who went on to gender reassignment. Further, when psychiatric difficulties were taken into account (number of visits to psychiatrists), neither of these differed in either suicidality or suicidal rates from controls. The finding that there was a difference in earlier studies may have been due to the conflating effects of psychiatric difficulties, since those seeking help for gender dysphoria, or proceeding to gender reassignment, apparently have more such difficulties (unconnected to dysphoria) than those who don’t, and psychiatric difficulties greatly increase the rate of suicide.
What all this means is that neither “suicidality” nor suicide itself differs in rate among control children lacking gender dysphoria, whether or not they go on to gender reassignment treatment. The argument for affirmative care that says, “you can have either a dead daughter or a live son” is not borne out, at least by this study. Have a look at it; I was impressed by the quality of the work, which would not be possible in countries where every individual is tracked for both medical and psychiatric care.
The AHA, then, is, to my mind, grossly distorting what we know about suicidality, affirmative care, and the risks of gender dysphoria. It is not known to be safe to give adolescents puberty blockers; there should be a lower age limit; and you are not preventing suicides by giving “affirmative care.” In this sense I consider the article misleading and irresponsible.
So many skeptical/humanist/atheist organizations lose their skepticism when it comes to gender issues! The only one I trust, because it’s published articles on gender like this and this, is the Center for Inquiry, which appears to be the only one that is strongly based on evidence.
But read for yourself, and, if you have time, do a scan of the literature, including the Cass Review.
Tomorrow I’ll publish a letter to the AHA from a disaffected member who took strong issue with the article above, and will say a few words about their response, which I won’t publish as I didn’t ask permission. Thanks to that reader for calling this article to my attention.
Let me finish by saying I have nothing against adolescents or children who feel that they are trapped in the wrong body, nor should there be discrimination (except in sports or things like jails) affecting transgender adults. I’m glad to call anybody whatever pronoun they want, and abhor those who really do dislike or denigrate trans individuals. All I ask for is rationality when it comes to treating young people, and that that treatment should always, like all medical treatment, be based on evidence.
First of all, it is a principle in our law that children can’t consent. That’s why there are statutory rape laws and laws against child pornography. I don’t think anyone has said it better than Bill Maher when he said that, when he was a kid he wanted to be a pirate, but it would have been wrong to put out one of his eyes and cut off one of his legs because that’s what a child wanted. “Affirmative care” seems to wreak havoc on children, scarring their bodies permanently and often leaving them as sexual cripples. No parent should agree to that for their children, and it is hard to see how it shouldn’t be considered child abuse. One of the reasons children can’t consent is that it is felt that adults have too much influence and children too little understanding. That seems to apply here.
Sexual cripples and actual cripples. Bone density is a BIG DEAL if you don’t have it due to x-sex hormones and blockers. Anecdotally… look at all the canes and wheelchairs and limps at TRA demos. Looks like a land mine tester meet-up.
Also effects on IQ which is WHY when given to precocious puberty patients (usually overweight pre-teen girls) they prescribe it for as short a time as possible.
I’ve been neck deep into troontown since about 2018, 4 years before, coincidentally, it collided with my life in a big way. Everything the boss says above is 100% on the money, and more.
Sadly I won’t be able to attend the GENSPECT conference in NM this month but I know quite a few of the people. hahaha And they like me b/c I donate. 🙂
This is by far the worst medical scandal since lobotomy (which it resembles) and the thalidomide/DES cases.
D.A.
NYC
An extreme emphasis on patient autonomy (and deemphasis on safety & efficacy) was the excuse given by researchers at McMaster University for ignoring their own results after they carried out a series of systematic reviews of five areas of youth gender medicine and found no good evidence justifying this form of “care”. The researchers were vilified by the SPLC and other activists, mainly by smearing the source of their research funding (the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine). Their leader, Gordon Guyatt, was a world expert in developing tools for evidence-based medicine, but has now declared that in this one area of medicine evidence matters less than patient autonomy. In a gender clinic the customer is always right.
Jesse Singal’s interview with Guyatt.
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/the-disaster-at-mcmaster-part-2-my
All professionally done systematic reviews (excluding narrative reviews that abstain from grading studies based on their methodological strengths and weaknesses, like the review that recently came out of Utah) agree that we have no good evidence for the benefits of puberty blockers and for the benefits of cross-sex hormones when given to minors. This already implies that health insurance should not cover these treatements (or should only cover them when they are given within a properly designed clinical trial). So patient autonomy does not get you insurance coverage in the absence of good evidence for treatment efficacy.
With puberty blockers the evidence we have contradicts the story that they have no irreversible effects. In at least two clinical studies, almost all patients who went on blockers then went on to get cross-sex hormones. The negative consequences of this treatment sequence are infertility, anorgasmia and micro penis (a penis the size of a pre-pubescent child, because the male patient did not go through puberty). Infertility and degraded sexual functioning are significant negative side effects that, taken together with the absence of good evidence for efficacy, justify a ban on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for children (under age 18, at least).
I agree with the comments in this thread as far as self-determination is concerned.
[bold added]
“And in this sequence, as one of the most grandiose of the new formulations of the meaning of existence, belongs gnosticism.
Of the profusion of gnostic experiences and symbolic expressions, one feature may be singled out as the central element in this varied and extensive creation of meaning: the experience of the world as an alien place into which man has strayed and from which he must find his way back home to the other world of his origin.”
Science, Politics, and Gnosticism
Eric Voegelin
1968, 1997
Regenery Press, Chicago;
Washington D.C.
… I see that the transparently New Age religious ten commitments of the AHA give zero credit to Enlightenment values – an omission that would be consistent with New Age religion, or Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s transformational notion of “progress”. As if the knowledge was revealed, somehow, to the wizard council.
Thank you, PCC, for cutting through the hysteria that surrounds this subject and restoring sanity and science to the discussion. In a few decades we will look back and wonder how could educated people go so far off the deep end in their handling of these issues.
I found this statement particularly obnoxious , “ self-determination is not a privilege, but a right.”. Based on what precisely? This deliberate attempt to depict it as a civil rights movement is totally disingenuous.
The whole thing stinks to high heaven and is the furtherest thing from any sort of compassion.
But it is a civil-rights movement. As soon as someone says trans people ought not to be discriminated against (in hiring or renting or provision of services to the public or even in dating apps), it is by definition a civil-rights claim. “You can’t join our dating app as a woman because we can clock you as really a man,” becomes an actionable violation with legal punishment. (Giggle vs Tickle) Misgendering — denying self-identification — is at the base of it. If they tolerate misgendering, even to yield on the commonsense areas like jails and sport, they lose the whole battle. A woman is whoever she says she is. No exceptions.
The more commonsense actions the activists can make illegal by making them civil-rights claims, the more they can “queer” society. The whole point is to be disruptive, to insert friction into the manner of people getting along and make us dislike one another.
As a humanist, I assume that not all the humanist members of AHA are in agreement with this article, since the Pursuit of Truth is a key principle of Humanism (“We are committed to the application of reason and science to the understanding of the universe and to the solving of human problems.”) Before we tackle how much risk is allowable in so-called Gender Affirming Care then, we probably ought to use some reason to consider whether there’s a genuine problem in need of such a drastic cure – and whether what we know about not just human reliability, but the self-diagnostic reliability of children and teenagers, should be thrown out the window because it’s all just so certain
No, we are not talking about “gender diversity,” which involves feminine men, masculine women, and homosexuality. Nor is this a matter of morals.
Trans Rights Activists are claiming that the category of “men” includes both males AND females — and the category of “women” includes both females AND males. In order to do this, “men” are a gender which includes both masculinity and femininity-but-done-as-a-man (?) — and “women” are a gender which includes both femininity and masculinity-but-done-as-a-woman(?) We all fall somewhere on a spectrum between two end points which appear to be virtually identical.
In other words, it’s a muddled mess. If people are claiming this “for themselves” it’s no more a matter of self-determination than claiming to be a Child of God, a mystical psychic, or an Ascended Being Operating in 9 Dimensions. They’re all assuming facts that go beyond “here’s what I believe (or imagine) about myself.” We can respect, even honor, the person without accepting the claim.
Thanks for posting this analysis PCC.
“All I ask for is rationality when it comes to treating young people, and that that treatment should always, like all medical treatment, be based on evidence.”
And I would simply add “and medical ethics.” It should be illegal for any medical professional to suggest to parents of gender dysphoric youth that denying gender transition (i.e. “gender-affirming care” Newspeak) risks their child committing suicide. As you correctly cite above – no, it doesn’t. Emotional blackmail like this for minors should be illegal and prosecutable.
I am horrified that the AMA and APS have been complicit in this issue which overtly violates the Hippocratic Oath, the bedrock of medical ethics to do no harm (or have a proven risk-to-benefit ratio), by disfiguring developmentally normal children and minors. It is scandalous. All drugs used to transition are prescibed “off-label”, i.e. no successful clinical trial data support their use for that disorder and all cosmetic surgeries are medically unnecessary, a choice that is not a treatment for anything, and surely risk “harming” normal bodies for no benefit because reductions in suicide incidence is untrue. Ergo, it just becomes harm…and is indefensible.
Wait until 18 to do any of this nonsense. No one has a right to get these treatments which should be banned in minors, period, the end. After that, do what you want I suppose but I still have an issue with using drugs for gender transition which is NOT why they were developed.
Hi Jerry,
This is Fish Stark, Executive Director of the AHA.
You of all people should know very well that an opinion piece that’s published in an organization’s magazine is not the same thing as an official statement from that organization.
You don’t have to guess at what we think about these issues. We wrote it down here:
https://americanhumanist.org/featured/statement-from-american-atheist-humanist-freethought-and-secular-groups-affirming-commitment-to-protecting-lgbtq-rights/
We have only received one complaint about the piece, which I personally responded to. To be very clear – since I hear you like facts – this person is not a member of the AHA, nor have they ever been, so I hope you’ll correct this.
Regardless, I encourage you to publish my response in full; I stand by it.
Best,
Fish
Well, in fact the statement you mention by the AHA says exactly NOTHING about these issues, so no, the statement does not enlighten me at all. The statement is simply supporting LGBTQ+ rights, something I already said I supported. And, in fact, in this comment you say nothing about the issues I discuss in my piece.
And if the AHA disagrees with what Narayan said, which is very important given the potential harm of affirmative care, I think you should enlighten us all by telling us IN THE MAGAZINE.
I stand corrected on whether the person who wrote you was a member of the AHA, but that is largely irrelevant. What is relevant is that your organization published what is in effect an op-ed that puts its imprimatur on affirmative care of the most aggressive sort. And you should have at least done some fact-checking of your op-ed pieces. That piece was unforgivably sloppy and left out a bunch of relevant material (i.e., most non-treated GD people actually come out as gay, there is no good evidence for elevated suicide rates, etc) that a decent editor would have caught. I think you should be ashamed of what you published because it could potentially cause harm.
Every decent newspaper vets its op-eds rigorously: I ought to know because I have written enough of them. The AHA apparently does not, and so I was forced to take issue with it.
The American Humanist Association playing it safe here, doing the same as (for example) Humanists UK, and the Norwegian Humanist Association (HEF) when the Cass report came out. Not a word from these organizations about this report. Just: we support LGBTQ+ rights….bla bla…
Humanist UK leader Adam Rutherford was asked directly about his stand on his report on X on several occacions, no proper answer were given…just: I really don’t know much about this……bla, bla.
Likewise in Norway, when UKOM (Norway’s National Commission) labeled gender-affirming care for minors as experimental in 2023 not a word from HEF, just: we support LGBTQ+ rights….bla bla…
Despite their vocal support for LGBTQ+ rights, these organizations have said little as several European countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the UK) restrict gender-affirming care due to insufficient evidence of its benefits.
Why the silence? Are they wary of backlash from trans activists within their membership?
Ah. So you were one of the goons responsible for withdrawing Richard Dawkins’ “Humanist of the Year” award…
The AHA is an utter embarrassment.
“LGBTQ+” is the synthetic identity of a Gnostic New Age religion organized around sexual experience which aims to sublate the revolutionary dead-end of same-sex marriage law with the sexual interests of Michel Foucault, John Money, Judith Butler, Gayle Rubin, David M. Halperin, et. al.
It is an “identity without an essence” (Halperin), which explains why “Queer Futurity” (J. E. Muñoz) evades any skepticism or justification whatsoever and enjoys mass support – because it sounds like gay rights but in fact is entirely “UNLIKE gay identity” (Halperin).
“Gay” refers to attraction, which is innate and involuntary. “Trans” refers to beliefs, which are learned and voluntary. Big difference there.
Dear Fish, would you be willing to publish an opinion piece that argues that the evidence is against “affirmative care” for children, seeing this as doing more harm than good? If so, I’d be happy to recommend people who could write such a piece.
This stance seems to assume that all people against degrader ideology and gender affirming ideology are part of a “White Christian Nationalist ideology” and that they have bo other grounds for questioning or rejecting gender ideology. On what basis do you ground this assumption? I for one accept (or in modern lingo so it is clearer perhaps for some, do not identify as) none of those epithets, in conjunction or individually, yet I strongly question the legitimacy and influence of gender ideology.
Surely you do understand that the question of rights is a normative one and the question of the correctness of gender ideology is an empirical question. It seems very dishonest to frame this issue as simply one of rights (and at that simply the right son one group and thereby disregarding the rights of all those not within that group whose rights are also affected) and not one of science as well as bio- and medical ethics.
Surely ‘affirmative care’ with respect to any mental illness is an oxymoron?
I would not characterize gender dysphoria as a mental illness, as I think that is fairly harsh, and it often goes away on its own. Rather, it is often mixed up with other forms of mental distress, shall we say, as the Finnish data show. But I agree that there is far too much kneejerk ‘affirmative care’ dispensed to young people.
Could I disagree with our host on this? As so many social justice advocates in the area of critical disability studies have argued, there should be no stigma attached to mental illness. If we successfully remove such stigma (that would be a good thing), then there would be nothing harsh about saying that gender dysphoria is a mental illness. That it develops alongside depression and anxiety and autism (and may be triggered by sexual assault or homophobia) says nothing about how it should be treated: with kindness and compassion, as a mental illness, addressed through counselling.
+1
You make a good point. It’s interesting that many of the people who think gender dysphoria being classified as a mental illness is “dehumanizing” and “degrading” also believe that having a mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of. It doesn’t necessarily diminish one’s life. The mentally ill are often productive, interesting, creative, loving, and valuable members of society, families, and relationships.
The horrified rejection of one’s sexed body, when accompanied by depression, suicidality, and/or an obsessive preoccupation with how one presents or appears to others, would seem to me to be a form of mental illness. That says nothing about that person’s worth or inherent dignity.
Perhaps, but most of us avoid hiring or forming romantic relationships with mentally ill people if we possibly can. Things can go horribly wrong that we would rather someone else have to deal with, not us. Whether the person who appears to others to be mentally ill agrees, or doesn’t, that he indeed has a mental illness is of little concern to us others. Either way we don’t want to put ourselves in a situation where we have to depend on him, or have him become dependent on us. Long-suffering relatives may not have any choice in the matter.
The helping industries and the legal profession profess to support the worth and inherent dignity of the mentally ill — they are grist for their advocacy mills — but trans people themselves don’t want to be considered mentally ill. Homosexuality was destigmatized when the psychiatrists (under pressure from activists) removed it from the DSM. Trans activists would not take kindly to their thing being put back on it. They think they have a disorder in which their mentally healthy brain is distressed from having to contend with a body that has developed as the “wrong” sex. Being trans isn’t a mental illness, they insist, but mental anguish over our wrong body is a good enough diagnosis to get insurance to pay for the treatment that will relieve it.
That’s why they are so down on conversion therapy or anything that doesn’t immediately affirm this view of themselves. Focus instead on changing the body to match the healthy mind, they say. After all, what man born with a uterus wouldn’t want it removed? If I was the only adolescent boy in my high school who started to bleed from my “front hole”* every month, damn right I’d want that uterus gone. This is the language of trans rights that the AHA is endorsing. Self-identification all the way down.
(*Actual technical clinical term mandated for medical discussions with trans men. I’m not being disrespectful.)
You are welcome to disagree, as you did so with civility. And you do have a point. I was trying to avoid that kind of stigmatizing but you are correct. But how it should be treated does differ from how it is treated.
Quite right! The DSM 5 regards gender dysphoria as a disorder as it causes significant distress. But since it is clear that the vast majority of cases resolve spontaneously (with the person deciding they are gay), it seems unjustified to subject a sufferer to lifelong hormones (with associated stroke, thromboembolic, myocardial infarction, osteoporosis, and cancer risks), mutilating surgery, sterility and sexual dysfunction when the condition is going to go away all by itself.
However, “the vast majority of cases” is not the totality of cases. There are intensely gender-dysphoric people who cannot be helped other than by hormonal and surgical body modification.
Yes, that is understood, and nobody is objecting to that so long as the people make the decision after they are 18 years old.
The gender activists reject that argument, Jerry and Christopher. They, and the AHA, insist that adolescents know themselves and don’t desist unless they are brainwashed by conversion therapy practitioners, or forced by religious legislation or parental terrorizing to do without the treatment they know they need, until they give up in despair as the puberty clock ticks on. As evidence they cite the statistics that 98% of adolescents “paused” on puberty blockers go on to cross-sex hormones — they hit “Play” not “Rewind” after their “time to think” —, and claim only 3% who start hormones or have surgery decide later to detransition out of regret. (As an aside, there is therefore no evidence that drugs given to block normally timed puberty are at all reversible. The only “puberty” that “resumes” when lupreolide is stopped is pharmaceutically ersatz and physiologically the wrong one.)
Forcing an adolescent who knows she is a girl to go through unwanted male puberty condemns her to a lifetime of multiple plastic surgeries attempting with middling success to allow her to sort-of pass, not to mention the distress of having a cracking voice and a growing genital organ with a mind of its own between her legs where her clitoris should be, all through her teen years. Treating her before puberty gets going spares her all that. These kids want their treatment to make them sexually inert because a penile erection and ejaculation makes a teenaged girl more dysphoric. She doesn’t want sexual pleasure from it. OK the suicide thing was a lie, but we aren’t lying about teen angst or anything else, honest!
The activist doctors — real MDs, not oppression-studies majors — say all this as if they sincerely believe it, and few doctors will dare to disparage their disciplinary regulator’s endorsement of it as an expected standard of care, so what can the rest of us do except as I think you endorse, which is to get our legislatures to prohibit this care before adulthood? The activists bitterly oppose such efforts. Minors are the battlefield and the prize, just because that is where legislators are daring to make law. We have to defeat the activists politically if we want this treatment curtailed; they won’t cede in the spirit of viewpoint diversity or compromise, any more than they’ll cede on women’s sport, bathrooms, and jails. Doctors won’t police themselves. I think the lawmakers and the activists both know, as with cigarette smoking, if you don’t take up trans as an adolescent, you never will….with the few exceptions Oliver S. cites, who will just have to grin and bear it that they can get their genitals amputated, as adults, if they can find a surgeon to do it, but will never pass as women.
“self-determination is not a privilege, but a right.”
So according to this logic, Dolezal should be retained as head of the NAACP chapter she was fired from, as she self-IDs as black despite being white. Further, schizophrenics who self-ID as Jesus or Napoleon should be treated with due reverence by everyone as if they literally are those figures. Someone who feels a perfectly healthy limb is not theirs should be able to have that limb amputated by a qualified surgeon. An anorexic who identifies as obese should be allowed to starve, etc. etc. Insane!
Good points, esp. about Dolezal, which was one of the factors that led the AHA to its reprehensible behavior with respect to Dawkins.
You are welcome to disagree, as you did so with civility. And you do have a point. I was trying to avoid that kind of stigmatizing but you are correct. But how it should be treated does differ from how it is treated.
The stance upheld by the AHA article goes beyond that self-determination is a right; it is that self-determination should outweigh objective facts. For this stance, we can thank the academic fad of postmodernism. Adding some technology into it, we get the “affirmation” of using technology to change objective facts (or a few of them) to roughly line up with self-determination, in a manner much like cosmetic surgery.
I propose naming this outlook—that self-determination trumps facts —after one notable exemplar: let us name it Trumpism.
If you can withdraw an award to Dawkins based on a (miss)interpretation of tweets, you cannot take cover behind the formality that a piece published in your site doesn’t really mean much as to what you support…
The test would be: Would you publish an opinion piece highly critical of transgenderism and “affirmative care”? Obviously not. So your editorial choice, while not necessarily reflecting a 100% agreement, does say something about your views. Let’s not be disingenuous.
To be fair to the AHA, the tweets were pretty clearly intended as a rhetoric attack. The only two logically consistent stances* are
Rachel Dolezal and Transsexuals both make fraudulent claims
Rachel Dolezal and Transsexuals are both valid
I assume that doing nothing wasn’t an option because… reasons, I suppose, and picking either option would put the AHA in rather hot water with activists, so it went with the convenient, but inconsistent option that didn’t threaten it short-term. Long term is a different matter, of course.
*sort of. It is, after all, possible for phenotypically distinct ethnicities to breed and thus create mixed individuals; beyond that, the ‘Race is a Social Construct’ concept fundamentally legitimises people identifying as a different ‘Race’. By rejecting Rachel Dolezal’s claim, one automatically rejects the axiom that race is a social construct. I.e. Rachel Dolezal has more, not less ground to stand on than the transsexual rights movement.
And at that point, one might start to wonder about why the transsexual rights movement rejects transracials, and might start to wonder if it isn’t about rights but rather privileges. A white woman claiming to be black can be constructed as stolen valor, as placing oneself higher on the oppression scale without having done the ‘Work’ of being born into an underprivileged class for it.
A white man claiming to be a woman and demanding access to women’s spaces, be they sports, lesbian dating apps or grants, could then be constructed not as a thirty-something white male with middle class parents in a white middle class neighbourhood graduated from a private school, with a college degree and a stable job actually being part of the single most oppressed and underprivileged class of people there is, but, y’know…
Thus, this association must be avoided at all costs.
The tweets were not aimed at the AHA and thus couldn’t be construed as a “rhetoric [sic] attack.” As Dawkins explained, it’s a thought question: one that was the subject of Rebecca Tuvel’s paper in Hypatia that got people all stirred up. It is in fact a good discussion question. So who was he attacking? The AHA construed it not as an attack on their organization, but as a form of “transphobia” by Dawkins, which was ridiculous.
To be clear, I didn’t mean a rhetorical attack on the AHA (as noted, the option to do nothing was there, but not taken because… reasons), but a rhetorical attack on the transgender discourse. I suppose the ‘To be fair’ intro might’ve given the wrong impression there.
‘Attack’ in this context isn’t meant to have a negative connotation, either, it’s an inherent part of the discourse. Similar to, say, Thomas Henry Huxley as ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ (doesn’t have the word ‘attack’ in it, but I should think the implication is clear).
So to clarify, it was clearly not meant as an appeasing statement, but as an example pointing out hypocrisy, hence as an attack on the (lack of) logic in the prevailing transgender discourse.
Transsexualism and nonbinaryism has clearly become a fad. It’s a way to feel special and to become a part of a community in an increasingly isolated world. For adolescent girls, it’s a way to deal with anxiety about one’s changing body. One of my husband’s cousins, who was the girliest of little girls, transitioned to a “man” as a teen with full parental support. I learned recently she has detransitioned. I only hope she didn’t do permanent damage to herself during her trans phase.