Truthful 'misinformation' and virtuous lies
If there were something going badly wrong in trans medicine, wouldn't trans activists want to be the first to know? Wouldn't fair and accurate reporting be in their interest -- because that reporting would expose bad practices and bad actors?
Another way to put this is: why are activist organizations like GLAAD afraid of sunlight?
I have some ideas about this. Some activists—operating inside and outside the medical profession—think they can't afford nuance, at least not right now. They feel like trans hormonal and surgical interventions are under attack.
They feel misunderstood by their critics. They don't trust policymakers or the public to put the work they do in the right light.
There's a risk that the public will look at life-saving reconstructive chest surgery for transmasculine minors and see the 'wrong' thing: doctors performing breast amputations on troubled teen girls.
Or that saving children from going through 'nonconsensual puberty' will look more like a risky experiment that shuts down a child's pituitary gland, with unknown effects on that child's cognitive, physical, and psychological development and wellbeing.
And then, on the basis of those terrible misunderstandings, policymakers and the public will intervene, blocking access to 'life-saving,' 'gender-affirming' surgeries and hormones.
So when reporters and legislators try to pin gender doctors down with questions like 'do you operate on minors?' clinicians dissemble. Sometimes they lie outright, as Jamie Reed reported her colleagues did.
My foray into the WPATH conference suggests this is the case for many gender clinicians. They feel they must protect the 'care' they provide at any cost. And if that includes lying to parents, lying to policymakers, and lying to the public, then so be it.
Parents, policymakers, and the public simply can't be trusted to see rightly (I would say: 'haven't been sufficiently indoctrinated to see rightly'). Therefore, they mustn't be allowed to see what's happening at all.
Perhaps in the future, when the public has been sufficiently reeducated—and that reeducation program is well underway—gender 'medicine' can come out into the open. But not now.
'Misinformation' thus applies to information that is accurate but may lead readers to the 'wrong' conclusions. So an outlet like the NYTimes can get the facts right but be accused of misinformation because some readers will react negatively to a clear presentation of what's actually happening. You don't know if something is a fact or misinformation until you know how the readers who encounter it will react.
So let's go back to double mastectomies for teenagers. Are these surgeries happening or not?
'Top surgeries' for transmasculine minors who 'know who they are' = happening. That's a fact.
Breast amputations for adolescent natal females with lots of comorbidities = not happening. That's misinformation.
These are two ways to describe the same interventions on the exact same patients. But one is ideologically compliant ("Gender medicine saves lives!), the other risks leading readers to the 'wrong' conclusions ("Something has gone badly wrong in gender medicine").
Gender clinicians—and their allies—argue that they alone have perfect knowledge of what they do. They alone can judge their actions. No one else is qualified.
But what if gender clinicians are wrong? What if their ability to see what they're actually doing has been compromised by an ideology that recasts girls as boys and fallible human beings as saviors?
If they were wrong—about anything or about everything—how would they know?
I always say that true "transphobia" (which should perhaps be renamed as "mistransia" like misandria and misogyny) is precisely that: treating gender non-conforming individuals who are distressed about their place in society (they have no place in some circles, and are not particularly welcome by many, as people tend to be made uncomfortable by sexual ambiguity for some reason that I wish was scientifically researched), as if their bodies were legitimate experimental grounds. Treating gender non-conforming individuals, many of whom are gay/lesbian/bi, as if their long-term health was less important than that of gender-conforming individuals. Treating gender non-conforming individuals' mental health as messed up to begin with, as so flawed, that they cannot benefit from regular talk therapy to find ways to live proudly and well as gender non-conforming individuals by focusing on the world and not on themselves, and focusing on being persons who do things, as opposed to persons who are things... Treating gender non-conforming individuals as if their endocrine systems were not as complex and as delicate as that of all other individuals. As if their ovaries, their testes, their uteruses, their breasts, their penises, the muscle tissue in their arms or legs, parts of their colons, etc., were harvestable/cuttable/extractable, based on their "self-diagnosis" or self-expressed desires, without any consideration for their knowledge or lack thereof, of the consequences of these interventions. Treating them as if their reproduction did not matter at all, as if their becoming sterilized were no big deal...
That is indeed, mistransia: the hatred of gender non-conforming individuals whose personhood and humanity is dismissed, disrespected and instrumentalized the moment they are cast as "trans".
There's no such thing as a "natal" female, just as there are no "natal" males, implying one can actually change sex beyond birth. There are females and males and some who cross-dress to try and appear as the opposite sex, and some who mutilate their bodies and take puberty blockers and hormones, but their sex has not changed. There's no such thing as "trans" kids or "transmasculine" kids. There are a few children, mostly male, with mental health problems (gender dysphoria) and there are children influenced by a social contagion and/or influenced by adults who will use and abuse them to make money.