This is a crazy-busy week for me so I’m opening up this paid-only post:
There are a lot of Professional Grown-Ups—editors-in-chief, deans and college presidents, heads of public agencies, executive directors, CEOs—out there who really hoped they could sit this one out without getting involved in what’s become a culture war. That’s understandable. Culture wars are torturous affairs and messengers get shot all the time. Believe me, I get why our side has a recruiting problem.
The thing is, in service of the decision to Sit This One Out, it’s clear that many Professional Grown-Ups have actively avoided knowledge. I realize I’m not coming across as all that sympathetic to their plight. But convince me that their ignorance is innocent at this point, when all the information anybody needs has been in the public domain for years and when so many people —people who are not so well-placed, not so credentialed, people with much less power to exercise over sectors and institutions that have slid into utter (and utterly obvious) madness—have taken it upon themselves to figure out what must now be broken (gently, diplomatically) to the Professional Grown-Ups. Most of these Professional Grown-Ups have advanced degrees. Many of them have research assistants and interns. Tell me they couldn’t have worked this out on their own five years ago if they’d had the slightest internal motivation to do so. Think about the thousands of ordinary people out there who didn’t need a sensitively-worded invitation to do the right thing.
So, the message for the Professional Grown-Ups is: We’ve got bad news. You don’t get to sit this one out. You have a responsibility to bring sanity back into your institutions. And you’re abdicating that responsibility every minute you stay conveniently uninformed and uncomfortably silent.
This is a message the intended audience has tried to tune out for years. It’s tempting to soften the blow and say: look, we know this issue is really complicated. There are no easy answers here. It’s tempting to offer middle ground that doesn’t exist, in the hopes of convincing a handful of cowards to budge a few inches.
EM’s Substacks for WAPO editorials! Your writing is coziest, most compelling indictment they could receive. One they might actually consider. How do we amplify your voice?!
Danish study (Glintborg, et al, European Journal of Endocrinology, Vol. 187, issue 3, Aug. 2022, Univ Odense, with "affirming" researchers) had alarming results of positives in men avg age 23 and women avg age 19 for blood clots, heart disease, high blood pressure and stroke when on wrong sex hormones. Statistically significant--2600 health records of "trans" subjects, data from 10 times that controls. My analysis of typical nonsensical pushback on Reddit by estrogen soaked dudes:
https://wordpress.com/post/uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com/6495