People like this make me beyond furious. I never felt rage like this in my life before I was dropped into this hellscape and had to witness the innumerable buffoons adding their ignorant two cents to the discussion. Thanks, but I'm not okay with my son, or anyone else's child, being collateral damage just so that the medical community can continue to live in its pointless delusion and doesn't have to face the fact that they've destroyed the lives of young people and torn apart their families. And I hope with every fiber of my being that the Scott Alexanders of the world learn the hard way that they maybe should have given this just a bit more thought.
Why are you so certain that you are right? Why do you think you have a right to be angry with someone who came to the opposite conclusion about a complex issue than you did? On issues like this where there is so much debate and disagreement, it is generally better to be humble, and recognize that in the future you might well be the one who realizes they should have thought more about this.
Scott has written a lot the "absurdity heuristic," about how we have intuitions about how some things are completely "absurd," and how these intuitions are often mistaken and untrustworthy. Are you sure that that this "hellscape" that seems obviously absurd and ridiculous to you isn't actually totally sane and reasonable? Your sense of what is absurd and what isn't can't be trusted.
Also, it seems kind of strange to act like this is something the medical community is actively imposing on passive children, instead of something that children conclude themselves and then actively ask the medical community for help with. I know that we're all supposed to pretend that children are stupid, irresponsible, passive receptacles of ideas in order to justify infantilizing and controlling them, but I've encountered far too many buffoonish parents with brilliant kids to be able to stomach doing that any more.
>Also, it seems kind of strange to act like this is something the medical community is actively imposing on passive children, instead of something that children conclude themselves and then actively ask the medical community for help with
Should we allow children to drink alcohol? To smoke cigarettes? To have sexual relationships with people many years older than them? Should doctors automatically accede to any demands for medical interventions a child might have?
1. Yes, this hellscape is a pointless, destructive road to nowhere that affects a vulnerable population — young people with a range of comorbidities that make them more susceptible to the messaging that promotes the idea of an incorrectly aligned gender soul — an identity that doesn't adequately mirror the kind of outdated, homophobic, misogynistic, ridiculous sex stereotypes we've fought against for decades. This is ludicrous. It's not supported by any decent study. There is no evidence for this. None. It is not a medical diagnosis. There is no test for "gender identity". There is no standard protocol even for assessing whether anyone would benefit from blockers or hormones. Nor is there any assessment that has been proven to successfully discern this. There is no long-term evidence for the safety or efficacy of "gender affirming care," and no shortage of evidence of harm, which is why every country that has conducted a systematic evidence review has backed away for these treatments for minors. But by all means, if you know something that a wealth of experts in the field don't, I'm sure they would be interested to hear it. This isn't just my sense of the absurdity of this medical scandal, it's the conclusion of numerous international clinicians and researchers — as EM could well tell you, plus wherany rational person lands after about 5 minutes of objective, critical thought. This is a cult ideology that only works if everyone else ignores reality. It destroys young people and their families. At no point will we be saying, "Maybe we should have encouraged our kid's delusional thinking and his or her desire to escape the confusion and awkwardness of adolescence by self-harming."
2. In the face of the tremendous medical harm our kids are facing, being humble is about as far as you can get from what's needed. What's needed is to demand evidence-based medicine and an end to irreversible, damaging treatments that increase a range of health risks based on the lie that you can change sex and that spending the rest of your life constantly wondering if you've adequately fooled everyone is in any way healthy.
3. Children are not small adults. Have you actually raised one? Teens, especially, are impulsive and prone to risk-taking, and cannot comprehend the kind of long-term consequences that are necessary to consent to something as horrific as the "treatments" the medical community is pushing, because their prefrontal cortex hasn't matured. Saying you know "brilliant" kids, is just laughable in this context. The life experience a child has is insufficient to base life-changing, irreversible medical decisions on — decisions that affect their fertility, sexual function, and overall mental and physical health, raising their risks of some cancers, cardiovascular problems, and early onset dementia, among other issues. Ask a 16 year old male how he'll manage if he has a stroke at 32. Ask a 13 year old female if she plans on breastfeeding the child she may someday have. Teenagers are notoriously wise. That's why we allow them to do pretty much anything they want — drive, smoke, rent a car, get a hotel room, get tattoos, have sex with adults or create pornography… I can tell you with certainty that the "brilliant" kid you know has absolutely no clue about the impact a stroke has or the importance of breastfeeding a baby, let alone whether or not she will someday want to have one. If a 13 year old demands to have her breasts cut off as a way to make her feel better about herself — to escape the chaos of puberty, to escape the gaze of leering males or sexual assault, to escape a future where they're subjected to the kind of sex that is in the hardcore porn readily available now to any teen with a smart phone — in your world, we should honor this. Because kids are "brilliant". Cut off perfectly healthy, functional body parts because a teenager has been told it will help her. I can't think of a single good reason anyone with an ounce of understanding about how teens operate (or any sense at all, really) would consider this even remotely reasonable, even ignoring the lack of any evidence that shows long-term benefit. Maybe no one has mentioned this to you, but life at 14 isn't permanent. People change. They grow up. What seems like a great idea at 14 or 18 turns out to be idiotic at 30. What other branch of medicine do we do this in, let the patient dictate irreversible, experimental treatment? Let a child come in and tell the clinician what they need? This is a particularly hideous form of insanity and you see it in every "gender-affirming" clinician that testifies at a hearing.
As for whether clinicians are pushing this, really, you're just woefully uninformed. Gender clinics by and large offer no other treatment path for children because that's what "gender affirming care" means. If you haven't heard the phrase that almost every parent hears from a gender clinician, "Do you want a dead daughter or a live son?" (and vice versa for males), based on the equally evidence-free suicide myth, then you really need to get up to speed before engaging in these conversations. It's as tiresome as the drivel that came from Scott Alexander.
Not all, but many of the people who follow this substack have first-hand experience and are dealing with a child caught in this sick cult. The bulk of us spend an inordinate amount of our time reading the relevant studies, books and articles because we love our children deeply and we need to figure out how to end this lunacy for their sake and the sake of all the other children that will fall into this. Unfortunately, there are way too many blindingly stupid or easily swayed people who have bought into a warped social contagion that masquerades as a medical condition and a social justice issue. Maybe someone else has patience with the Scott Alexanders of the world and their dangerous, ignorant statements, but it sure as hell isn't me.
1. The idea that biomedical transition is not supported by any studies is a blatant falsehood. All you need to do is do a google search for "gender affirming care" and "meta analysis" and you will find a wealth of studies concluding that gender affirming care is helpful to most people who seek it and that regret is rare. These are meta-analyses, which means that they are overviews of large numbers of studies over many years. People have been undergoing biomedical transitions since Christine Jorgenson in the 1950s, so it's not like there's a dearth of data. Even when there is regret over transition, it is not regret at gender transitioning at all, it is regret at transitioning to the opposite gender instead of transitioning to a nonbinary identity, which often entails less severe medical intervention.
Treatment of adolescents in particular started more recently, about 25 years ago, so there is less data, but the data that does exist looks more positive than negative to me. Because there is less data I consider this to be an issue where good, reasonable people are capable of honest disagreement, although the weight of the evidence does seem to fall on the pro-gender-affirming care side. However, the idea that people on the opposing side are some sort of "cult" is ludicrous. Their beliefs are compelled by the evidence and quite reasonable considering the quality of the evidence there is. If there is anything I want you to get out of this exchange it is this, I do not expect to change your views on gender affirming care, but I do think you need to change your views on the character of its supporters. Pretending that they are deluded cultists instead of reasonable people is supremely arrogant and shows an extreme level of overconfidence in your position.
The concepts of gender dysphoria and gender dysphoria, as properly understood, does not condone or promote sexist/homophobic stereotypes. I think you are referring to the idea that children are often identified as trans because they engage in stereotypical behaviors of the opposite gender. This is not because those behaviors are intrinsic properties of that gender, you are correct that that is a sexist belief. What is going on is that many human beings are instinctively conformist, and often act to conform to the behavior of others of their gender. So if someone acts like a stereotypical member of the opposite gender, it may be their true gender (of course, that may not be the case at all, they might also just be a gender-nonconforming cis person, which is why this is not the sole criteria for concluding someone is trans).
2. Gender-affirming care is evidence-based. People demanded evidence-based medicine, they got it. The reason that clinics are "pushing" gender affirming care is that it's the only thing that works.
3. Children are not small adults. We are in complete agreement that toddlers and grade schoolers should not undergo biomedical transition. At most they should socially transition. However, the biomedical part of gender affirming care is generally done with adolescents. Another word for adolescent is literally "young adult." You are mistaking the statistical properties of teenagers for intrinsic properties. It is true that teenagers are statistically more likely to make bad decisions relative to adults, but that does not mean all teenagers are worse at making decisions than all adults, or that even most teenagers are. When assessing an individual teen for maturity you do not need to rely on statistics of how good the judgement of the average teen is. You can just assess their own judgement as a person, one-on-one. Which is something that gender-affirming care practitioners do.
Most teenagers I have known, and remember being, did spend time thinking about their long term future and made plans for it. Haven't you heard about the mental health crisis in teens that is caused by them stressing over preparing for their future colleges and careers? Generally when they do behave impulsively, it is often because adults infantilize them so they do not get adequate practice at behaving maturely.
That being said, surgical interventions in teenagers before the age of 18 are extraordinarily rare. I would agree with you that 18 is a reasonable age limit for surgery involving the genitals. For breast reductions I would use the same criteria medical professionals use for breast reductions that are not related to gender dysphoria. Breast reductions for teenage girls are sometimes performed for non-gender related reasons, and people like you don't seem to care about that at all (would you say that the child actress, Soleil Moon Frye, was "mutilated" because she chose to have a breast reduction at 15 because she thought having large breasts would get her typecast as "sexy" characters?)
Hormonal intervention is a more fraught issue because by the time someone turns 18 it is too late for it to be most effective. If that wasn't true, perhaps waiting until age 18 for that too would be wise, but that is sadly not the world we live in. A lot of trans people who transitioned later in life express regret that they were not able to take hormones when they were teens, so that their body is more the way they want it to be. Personally I have trouble not getting angry at the terrible parents who want to condemn their children to that sort of regret.
You also seem to be confused about what makes a body part "healthy" and "functional." If someone has gender dysphoria then the body part they wish to cut off is not healthy and functional, because it causes them distress. Your mind calls the shots when it comes to what a healthy and functional part of a body is. If humans started growing spider chelicerae out of their faces it would be perfectly reasonable for them to find this distressing and amputate them, even though those same chelicerae would be "healthy and functional" by the standards of a spider.
Again, the main point I want to make is that no one's child is "caught in a sick cult." Rather, their child has a medical condition and reasonable people disagree about the most effective way to treat it. There is a lot of evidence for the effectiveness of gender-affirming care, the only way one can deny that is if one is in a bubble full of "relevant studies, book, and articles" that have been cherry-picked to only affirm one's existing prejudices. No one is "buying into a warped social contagion," they are forming reasonable views by rationally assessing compelling evidence. Scott Alexander's statements are not dangerous or ignorant, they are quite reasonable to someone who looks at ALL the evidence instead of cherry-picking.
>If humans started growing spider chelicerae out of their faces it would be perfectly reasonable for them to find this distressing and amputate them, even though those same chelicerae would be "healthy and functional" by the standards of a spider.
I think if you have to use such a contrived analogy to make your point, it suggests that your argument isn't nearly as strong as you think it is. Shockingly, when treating a patient, we compare their body to what is normal and healthy for a healthy individual of that species. What is normal and healthy for a spider is not normal and healthy for a human being, congratulations on this penetrating insight of yours.
Even your contrived analogy isn't really favourable to your position. The reason we realise that spider chelicerae growing out of someone's face is not healthy or normal is precisely because it is atypical for a healthy human being. There is nothing atypical or unhealthy about a teenaged girl starting puberty and developing breasts. It is normal and expected. Your comparison of a teenaged girl developing breasts to the body horror scenario of spider chelicerae growing out of someone's face might be the most misogynistic thing I've read in weeks.
Really, this is not worth responding to. Most of it is utter nonsense, so I’m happy to let @FionnM have at it line by line for as long as she can stomach it. Show me a study that looks at sex-trait modification for the adolescent cohort that tracks the participants for more than 5 years, isn't based on worthless self-reported survey data, doesn’t have massive loss to follow-up, examines relevant variables, controls for confounding variables, and shows improvement in mental health — in other words, something that actually stands up to scrutiny unlike what's out there, which even the lunatics in WPATH admit is poor-quality. The Dutch study has not been reproduced and even their data is a mess and shows poor outcomes — on a patient population that was carefully screened for other mental health issues. And it's not even relevant to this cohort. Chen was supposed to be the big proof of how effective these treatments are and it is a disaster. (https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/15hhliu/the_chen_2023_paper_raises_serious_concerns_about/?rdt=63541). And again, every country that conducted a systematic evidence review has backed away from GAC and the fraud that it is. You ignore this. Not a convenient reality, is it.
Your paralleling of breast reduction with gender-based mastectomy is repulsive, and belies your ignorance of not only adolescent behavior and mindset, and the impact of the current cultural climate on youth, but of the importance of breastfeeding. How many young female detransitioners expressing heartbreaking regret at their loss of fertility and the ability to someday breastfeed a child is too many for you? Mothers understand how painful a loss that is. Your lack of insight is staggering but not surprising.
As for you anger toward parents who do what parents are supposed to do — protect their children from bad decisions until they are mature enough to comprehend the consequences, no one cares. Seethe away in your magnificent righteous indignation. You aren't in this world, have not raised a child caught up in this, are viewing this from the outside having consumed the ridiculous message that somehow living a life actively fooling people every day is healthy and better than the alternative — working through your discomfort, developing resilience and distress tolerance, accepting reality, and learning to love yourself without the need to damage your body in an effort to conform to an absurd stereotype (and as a bonus, not running roughshod over the rights of girls and women). The tragic truth is as Corinna Cohn clearly states: the kids will mature and realize what was done to them based on decisions they made as children. And they will want to know how the adults — clinicians and most of all their loving parents — could have allowed this to happen to them. It will be people like you who supported this horror show who will have to account for how they were so easily led to believe the patently unsupportable.
As for all of those poor adult male fetishists who, with 20/20 hindsight (and an entire, healthy adult life behind them, including having sired their adored children), wish they could have been masquerading as the opposite sex sooner, I have no sympathy. None of us get what we want all the time. As adults, we learn this. Erica Anderson is not suffering for it — he’s successful and fighting against willy-nilly sex trait modification for minors. And he knows a heck of a lot more about it than you do.
>Even when there is regret over transition, it is not regret at gender transitioning at all, it is regret at transitioning to the opposite gender instead of transitioning to a nonbinary identity, which often entails less severe medical intervention.
Well this is just an out-and-out lie. I've personally witnessed detransitioners express regret at having transitioned to the opposite gender and wishing they had never transitioned from their natal gender at all. See Kiera Bell.
>The reason that clinics are "pushing" gender affirming care is that it's the only thing that works.
Strange, then, that most cases of childhood gender dysphoria desist on their own without medical intervention, or that the number of subscribers to r/detrans has increased from a few hundred to 50,000 in a matter of years, or that so many European countries have recently, independently arrived at the conclusion that it DOESN'T work (or at best is far more experimental than how it is usually presented).
>Your mind calls the shots when it comes to what a healthy and functional part of a body is.
Umm, no? Just because a hypochondriac thinks they have a serious illness doesn't mean they do. That's what "hypochondria" means: an erroneous belief that there's something with your body when there objectively isn't.
>You can just assess their own judgement as a person, one-on-one. Which is something that gender-affirming care practitioners do.
If that's the case, shouldn't there be false positives? Shouldn't there be teenagers who believe they are trans but are mistaken?
You're saying that we should assess teenagers' own judgement on a one-to-one basis, but elsewhere in this thread you seem to be arguing that it's cruel to deny gender-affirming care to any teenager who demands it. Which one is it? You think that 100% of teenagers who seek out gender-affirming care are mature enough to make an informed decision on this matter, and there was literally never a teenager who made this decision in error? (Which is untrue on its face: just ask Keira Bell.)
With psychological disorders like gender dysphoria, just as with physical disorders, I think that the opinion of a professional is needed in order to understand what is really happening. Of course, that is no longer possible since all health-care professionals are now expected to give "affirming care" (puke). Our health-care professionals are no longer permitted to do what they were trained to do. How did the trans lobby ever get this powerful???
As to your general point (that the evidence supporting the efficacy of gender-affirming care in adults is robust, and the evidence for gender-affirming care in teenagers not as robust but still strong), I will offer the following counter-arguments. Feel free to accuse these studies of being "cherry-picked" if you must, but I think they present a rather disquieting portrait of the state of evidence in this field:
* A longitudinal study in Sweden followed trans people who underwent gender reassignment surgery (the experimental group) with trans people who didn't (the control group). After 30 years, the experimental group exhibited far higher mortality, particularly from suicide, and had a higher incidence of suicide attempts. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3043071/
* Consider Jesse Singal's article about a study which claimed to find that the mental health of gender-distressed adolescents who were prescribed puberty blockers/hormones improved relative to those who weren't, but the study in fact found nothing of the kind (https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/researchers-found-puberty-blockers).
* I strongly encourage you to read this British Medical Journal article (https://www.bmj.com/content/380/bmj.p382), which analyses numerous systematic reviews about the efficacy of gender-affirming care in teenagers. Key quotes:
** "The Endocrine Society commissioned two systematic reviews for its clinical practice guideline, Endocrine Treatment of Gender-Dysphoric/Gender-Incongruent Persons: one on the effects of sex steroids on lipids and cardiovascular outcomes, the other on their effects on bone health.3233 To indicate the quality of evidence underpinning its various guidelines, the Endocrine Society employed the GRADE system (grading of recommendations assessment, development, and evaluation) and judged the quality of evidence for all recommendations on adolescents as “low” or “very low.”"
** '... one of the commissioned systematic reviews found that the strength of evidence for the conclusions that hormonal treatment “may improve” quality of life, depression, and anxiety among transgender people was “low,” and it emphasised the need for more research, “especially among adolescents.”35 The reviewers also concluded that “it was impossible to draw conclusions about the effects of hormone therapy” on death by suicide.'
** 'Sweden conducted systematic reviews in 2015 and 2022 and found the evidence on hormonal treatment in adolescents “insufficient and inconclusive.”24 Its new guidelines note the importance of factoring the possibility that young people will detransition, in which case “gender confirming treatment thus may lead to a deteriorating of health and quality of life (i.e., harm).”'
** 'In 2022 the state of Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration commissioned an overview of systematic reviews looking at outcomes “important to patients” with gender dysphoria, including mental health, quality of life, and complications. Two health research methodologists at McMaster University carried out the work, analysing 61 systematic reviews and concluding that “there is great uncertainty about the effects of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries in young people.” The body of evidence, they said, was “not sufficient” to support treatment decisions.'
>However, the idea that people on the opposing side are some sort of "cult" is ludicrous.
I don't know how else to describe a movement which reflexively assumes that parents do not have the best interests of their own children at heart (to the point that teachers and school administrators feel entitled to keep secrets about children from the children's parents, of even when they have no good reason to believe the parents do not have their children's best interests at heart), which encourages people to cut ties with their parents if their parents do not unhesitatingly and unquestioningly affirm the person's conception of themselves (note that this description applies just as much to the "suppressive persons" doctrine in Scientology) and which routinely presents an invasive medical procedure as the silver bullet which will cure all of an individual's personal problems, and without which they are certain to commit suicide.
>For breast reductions I would use the same criteria medical professionals use for breast reductions that are not related to gender dysphoria.
We're not talking about breast reductions, we're talking about mastectomies. Other people can correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that, outside of gender dysphoria, mastectomies are generally only clinically indicated in the treatment of breast cancer.
>Haven't you heard about the mental health crisis in teens that is caused by them stressing over preparing for their future colleges and careers?
Which couldn't possibly be a contributing factor to the skyrocketing number of teenagers demanding to have healthy tissue removed from their bodies, perish the thought.
Sep 20, 2023·edited Sep 20, 2023Liked by Eliza Mondegreen
I didn't read the whole article because, admittedly, I was depressed at the prospect of reading someone's stupid opinion who doesn't care about kids, but I have to praise you for the title of this article -- “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.” It's so true! Common sense isn't always right -- especially if common sense is the only thing you have -- but if you don't have at least SOME common sense to balance out the sophistry, then your opinions will be completely untethered from reality. Some of the intellectuals who are addicted to sophistry think of themselves as the avant-garde of philosophy, but really they are just fantasizing. That is what the whole of "queer theory" is -- intellectual fantasies disassociated from reality.
I found a site of Orwell quotes; they are fabulous. I also found a recently posted article by someone who calls himself the Helpful Professor (helpfulprofessor.org) in which he says (seriously) that there are 81 genders (he actually lists them). So I sent him the Orwell quote.
Generally the reason people support gender-affirming care is because they DO care about kids. They genuinely and sincerely believe that trans kids who undergo gender-affirming care will end up happier and better-adjusted than ones who don't. I can personally attest that a lot of the reason I support gender-affirming care is that I am able to put myself in the shoes of trans kids and imagine how it feels to be denied gender affirming care.
The fact that you would even say someone who supports gender-affirming care "doesn't care about kids" really reinforces one of the beliefs I've developed about anti-trans activists after years of talking to them and reading their writing: They have no theory of mind. They are literally unable to imagine what their opponents believe. The idea that someone might sincerely believe that trans people are their stated gender identity is not something they can comprehend. So they sit around in armchairs making up motivations that they can comprehend, motivations that are naturally unflattering to those they are attributed. They imagine that their opponents don't care about kids, are just virtue signaling, are just exploiting deluded patients for money. Because imagining that their opponents really believe what they are saying, even for a second, is beyond them. I am more convinced than ever that the anti-trans movement are the ones untethered from reality, and not worth taking seriously.
Ghatanathoah, I am glad you decided to post here because it gives me an opportunity make some points.
Are you aware that being trans has become a fad among children? It has become a fad because children are being fed the idea (by trans activists on social media platforms and even by liberal teachers at their schools) that they have the right to choose their gender while still children, and worse, to TRANSITION while still children. But there are many things wrong with this. First, if a child has decided that she is trans because it has become a fad, that means the child wants to transition for the wrong reasons. Being trans is, after all, supposed to be innate, not a place you arrive at by being influenced. The children who transition for the wrong reasons are the ones who become detransitioners later. Second, it is well established that many kids who think they are trans grow out of those feelings once they hit puberty. That being the case, they should be given the opportunity to grow out of it if they can. Why? Because being trans, overall, is an unhappy life. The trans person exists in a gray area between male and female all his or her life, and that is not a happy place -- not to mention that bombarding the body with cross-sex hormones for decades does significant damage to the body. Third, children do not have the emotional maturity to make such drastic decisions for themselves. If we do not trust children to get tattoos, how can we trust them to take cross-sex hormones and have their breasts removed? Tell me, if you had a child with a powerful sweet tooth, would you give that child sweets at every meal? Of course not, because you know it wouldn't be good for the child. Children don't always want the right things for themselves.
You said this in your comment above: "Generally the reason people support gender-affirming care is because they DO care about kids. They genuinely and sincerely believe that trans kids who undergo gender-affirming care will end up happier and better-adjusted than ones who don't." That is a mostly false talking point that has come from transgender activists. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence that the moment children start to transition, they become moody and unhappy. The child, who may have been happy with herself before making this decision, has now become dissatisfied with herself. Her body is no longer "right" because it is female and not male. Also, she may feel estranged from her family, because her family probably doesn't support what she's doing. Kids (if you know them at all, which I am beginning to think you don't) are often prone to obsessions, and the idea that s/he has the need and right to transition becomes an obsession.
Ghat, there is much more going on with this issue than you seem to realize. Given that kids are being pressured to believe they are trans, I estimate that perhaps only 10% to 20% of the kids who decide to transition actually have gender dysphoria, and that is what you must have in order to go through the process. A child who transitions but does not have gender dysphoria is just adding another layer of problems to her life.
Gender identity is an idea that is only a few decades old. It is not proven to be real or true. The only people who believe in it are the ones who don't like their gender. It's a bad idea all around. For example, gender identity allows men to believe that they are REAL women (which a man can never be because of his male body), and that gives them permission to invade women's private spaces (sports, locker rooms, shelters, prisons). The truth is that our body determines our gender, whether we like that or not.
Ghat, the bottom line is that you have drunk the Koolaid, to use an expression -- i.e., you have accepted the propaganda coming from transgender activists without examining it closely. Certainly, in the case of children, transitioning often backfires and makes things much worse for them.
Arguments that someone has "Drunk the Kool Aid" are worthless because literally everyone who holds any view about anything says that about their opponents. Everyone says that the other guy is uncritically parroting the other view because of conformity or lack of thought. Even the people who really are uncritically parroting a view say it! I have just enough respect for you to avoid saying that you have drunk the Kool Aid of anti-trans ideologues.
You will have to take my word for it that I have given the ideas around gender tremendous thought. I have not listened excessively to activists, on the contrary I tend to find left wing activists of all sorts to be insufferably annoying. LGBT rights is one of the only issues where I am reliably left-wing, I am otherwise a fairly anti-woke small l libertarian.
I have instead arrived at my support of trans rights through other avenues. In particular I spend a lot of time thinking about the philosophy of personal identity in extreme hypothetical scenarios. For example, it seems clear to me that if we developed technology to transplant brains, the gender of the brain would remain unchanged regardless of what body it was transplanted into. If a mad scientist put a man's brain into a woman's body, or a sexless robot body, a man he would remain. This makes it clear to me that gender is something in the brain, not in the body. It is a short jump from there to realize that some people may be born with brains with different genders than their bodies, although that is thankfully rare.
The idea that transgenderism is a fad is one theory as to why it is so much more common among kids than before. You are overstating your case in treating the "fad" theory as an obvious fact. It's quite possible that there are more trans kids today for the same reason that there are more left-handed people than there were in the 19th century: people are less likely to be jerks to them!
The idea that trans activists and teachers are indoctrinating this fad into kids is obviously false. Adults, especially teachers, can't indoctrinate kids into doing anything. If they could then kids would be way better behaved then they currently are. There would be a new "fad" of always doing your homework and bringing your teacher presents! If you remember being a kid, or knew kids, you'd know that kids treat such attempts at indoctrination with derision or bemusement. Transness would be a lame thing old fogies tried to get you to do. I remember DARE at my school, not only did it not work, I think if anything it might have persuaded some kids to give drugs a try.
As to whether kids should be allowed to transition, it depends if you mean medical or social transition. Social transition seems like a clear-cut win-win, if the kid is trans it will be good for them, if they aren't it will likely hasten their desistance, since they will get to try out a different gender and see that it is not for them.
Medical transition is more fraught, obviously, however surgery is generally not performed until kids are at or near adulthood, when they have had plenty of time to think it over. (I should note that girls get breast reductions as teens for non gender dysphoroa reasonsall the time and people like you dont seem to care at all? Would you say Soleil Moon Frye should not have been allowed to get a breast reduction at 15 because she thought it would get her better acting roles?) The whole point of puberty blockers is to give kids more time to think, although the concerns about their effects on bone density are justified. It is definitely something to discuss with a medical professional. Fortunately medical professionals have not drunk any Kool Aid, their views are compelled by the evidence.
Let me start out by saying that that was the first time in my life that I ever used the Koolaid expression. I heard someone use it the other day, and I thought it sounded on point, so I decided to try it out.
So what am I to say to you, Ghat? Besides using a ridiculous example of transplanted brains, you've repeated some things that are not true. First, from what I've read they have found very little that supports the idea of male and female brains. Second, there IS most definitely a fad under way among children. Bill Maher has made the point that there are many more trans kids in liberal communities than there are in conservative communities, and that's because it has become a fad. You are posting on an article by Eliza Mondegreen, and she is very meticulous about her research. She has found a ton of evidence to support the idea of a fad.
Regarding that, here is an article you should read:
Third, your contention that surgeries are not being performed on kids is totally false. That is something that pro-trans people like you tell themselves because, frankly, even people like you are horrified by the idea, BUT IT IS HAPPENING. It is still happening in the blue states that haven't passed laws against it. Pictures are available on the internet of teen girls with scars where their breasts used to be.
Regarding schools, it is now common for schools to carry books that encourage kids to question their gender. And yes, there ARE liberal teachers who are pushing the idea. I've read articles about them.
Ghat, the bottom line is that kids don't have the emotional maturity to make such life-long decisions about themselves. I certainly don't believe the same things I believed when I was 13, do you? Kids are by definition immature and changeable.
Listen, I have given you very good reasons why I am against transitioning by children. You just don't want to hear them. I think my reasons are more logical and realistic than yours are. For some reason you want to believe in some trans fantasy that doesn't actually exist. The best cure for that is to come to this Substack and read Eliza's articles. Eventually you will be convinced.
I think a major issue is that your idea of what is absurd and ridiculous is broken. Things that are completely reasonable, like gender transition, seem absurd to you. You don't really have any answer to my brain transplant hypothetical except to call it ridiculous, even though hypotheticals are the way philosophers refine and understand ideas. The fact is, if most people's brains were transplanted into a body of the opposite gender they would find it unpleasant and try to reverse it, even if doing so was very costly in terms of money and health. This indicates people have an innate sense of gender in their brains.
I have noticed that people seem quite willing to grant genders to all sorts of things that are not humans with chromosomes and functioning genitals. They write science fiction stories of robotic men and women. They call animals, and even boats by gendered pronouns. They see a science fiction TV show with a hermaphroditic alien slug monster, and think of him as a man with male pronouns because he is vaguely shaped like a man. It is clear that our concept of what makes something one gender and not the other is quite flexible and extends to all sorts of things. What is absurd is that we do not extend it a little further to trans people.
Bill Maher's point does not make a lot of sense because it ignores that fact that conservatives are famous for being cruel and sadistic towards trans people. It would be like if someone said there was a "fad" of criticizing Vladimir Putin in America, and that it has to be a fad because very few people in Russia speak out against Putin. I think we can both agree there is another explanation for why people in Russia rarely criticize Putin! Another apt analogy is left-handedness, which massively increased as soon as people stopped mistreating the lefthanded in the 20th century.
You seem confused about the motivations of these teachers and the librarians who place books in schools. They believe, correctly, that a certain percentage of kids are already trans. These kids will have many confused feelings and need help understand what is happening to them. Having books to read and teachers to talk to will help with this. They care deeply about those kids and want to help them.
The problem, again, is that you have no theory of mind and are not capable of imagining other people believing different facts than you do. You think that transness is caused by social contagion, you think that those books and teachers are causing cis kids to become trans, rather than simply informing kids who are already trans of what they already are. You cannot imagine anyone believes differently than you, so you imagine they must want to spread social contagion on purpose for nefarious reasons. This is false, they are doing this because they care about kids and want to help them.
That article you sent me a link to was clearly written by someone who cannot differentiate between correlation and causation. She lists all these random unpleasant things that happened to her son at around the same time her son started questioning his gender identity, and then concludes from that that they must have made her son trans. By that same logic beating MarioKart causes tornadoes, since I saw a tornado on the news happen the same night I beat MarioKart. There are many trans people who did not have the horrible experiences her son did, so it is unlikely that those experiences made her trans. The author also immediately discredits herself by referring to Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, a fake diagnosis made up in a now discredited paper. She also refers to porn addiction, another fictional thing that does not exist (people who call themselves "porn addicts" usually consume less porn than the average person, the reason it causes them distress is that authority figures in their life repeatedly tell them porn use is wrong). It is shocking that you consider anything in that article worth reading, it is clearly the ravings of someone who is deeply confused about how cause and effect work.
When talking about surgery I was talking specifically about surgery on the genitalia, which is very serious and nonreversal. Breast reduction and augmentation is more reversible and already performed on minors for a variety of reasons not related to gender dysphoria (elsewhere I cited the example of the child actress Soleil Moon Frye, who was afraid her large breasts would get her typecast in "sexy" roles and therefore had a breast reduction at age 15. Do you oppose that as well?). I think what is going on is that anti-trans activists started making hysterical claims that kid's genitals are having surgery performed on them. Then when this was disproven, they moved the goalposts and talked about breast reduction, and pretended this was what they meant all along.
In terms of the emotional maturity of kids, you are making a common mistake where you think emotional maturity is an intrinsic property of kids, rather than a statistical one. Saying that kids are less emotionally mature than adults is like saying that men are taller than women, it is something that is often true, but far from always true.
The fact that kids are changeable also does not prove what you think it does. Even if gender identity is one thing that does change, it is very irresponsible to bet on that! And what if it changes in the other direction? Cis kids are changeable too, would you prefer they be put on puberty blockers in case they change and become trans in the future? Should everyone just be given puberty blockers until they are old enough to make a decision at 18? That seems absurd to me, we can assume most cis kids will stay cis and most trans kids will stay trans.
You are also subscribing to black and white thinking, where either someone is mature enough or they aren't. This is not how maturity works. Generally there are a certain set of activities people agree kids are not mature enough for, another set people agree they are mature enough for, and a third set where kids are regarded as mature enough with supervision. That third set is the state of treatment for trans kids today, they are not allowed to just go to the store and buy hormones, they need to go through a treatment process supervised by professionals. You are right that kids are not mature enough to transition by themselves, but they are mature enough to do so with careful adult supervision, the same way a 16-year old is mature enough to drive if an adult is in the care monitoring them, but not mature enough to do so alone.
I'm getting tired of doing so much reading. Life is too short for this.
So MY idea of what is absurd and ridiculous is broken? MY IDEA AND NOT YOURS? Gender is a fixed thing; it can't be changed. All the drugs and operations in the world cannot change a body from one gender to another. All the treatments are cosmetic. Given this fact, how can you consider gender transition, with all of its invasiveness into the human body, to be completely reasonable? -- especially when all the person gets is the APPEARANCE of the opposite gender, and only when they are NAKED?
Do you also think that my belief that children do not have the emotional maturity to make such decisions is broken? Do you know any children at all? Are you not aware that people change from moment to moment, and certainly change enormously from their teen years?
Regarding the aggressive teachers who are pushing transgenderism on their students, don't you think they should be concerned about the collateral damage they are doing, meaning the students who adopt these ideas but don't actually have gender dysphoria? Shouldn't the trans activists on social media who are pushing transgenderism on anyone who will listen have similar concerns? They don't because they are selfish. They want to grow their numbers and become a powerful force in society. Trans activists don't want acceptance from society, they want to dominate society.
For every child who knows its own mind in the way that an adult does, there are a dozen who are given to trends and fads. If you don't know this, then you don't know anything about children.
The girls who have their breasts removed cannot restore them with breasts that give milk. And even if they could, by the time they got that far into the transition process, the testosterone would have made them infertile. There is no turning back from the harm that is being done.
You live in a fantasy world in which everything always goes according to plan, even in the most complicated process. I'm sorry to be blunt, but I see you as evil. The greatest evil in this world is when people become invested in bad ideas and then aggressively promote them or act upon them even though they are contrary to all logic. Putin is evil in the same way. His justification for destroying Ukraine is that Ukraine tolerates gay and trans people. He thinks it's perfectly reasonable to kill the whole country just because a few people are too liberal. (Talking about being liberal, I am a liberal gay man. I believe that trans people should have all the rights that everyone else has, except that they should leave children alone and stay out of women's private spaces.)
My position that children should wait for adulthood is the same position that doctors take (or should take): FIRST, DO NO HARM. You seem to be perfectly happy that many people are being harmed so that the tiny ONE-HALF OF ONE PERCENT can get what they want when they want it. You are divorced from reality. Your values are inhuman and skewed. The whole idea that children should have to wait until 18 is perfectly reasonable, and yet you won't accept even that one reasonable idea.
I believe that you are a trans person, and worse, a trans activist, which makes you a very selfish person indeed. You will believe in any lie to further your cause.
This exchange of comments is now over. You know what they stay: "When you study evil, evil studies you." As of this moment, I have talked to this particular demon for as long as I care to.
By the way, stop talking about "theories of mind" (whatever that means). You are the one who believes in theories over reality. I believe in reality.
I was so disappointed by that article. He says that "it’s suspicious and bad that everyone is suddenly becoming transgender, and I support efforts to figure out why and stop it at the root", but also says that if trans activists are trying to destroy your life because of your opinions on trans issues, you should just put your head down and keep mum. So where does that leave researchers like Lisa Littman, who are trying to figure out why everyone's becoming transgender, and are facing cancellation efforts for the crime of doing so? You can't have it both ways.
As soon as he said "I’m not an expert in this topic and this should be considered my amateur opinion only", my immediate reaction was:
2) you ARE an expert on this topic - you're a qualified psychiatrist! Sure, you don't specialise in youth gender medicine, but you're still far more qualified to express an informed opinion than most of the highly opinionated lay people who weigh in on this topic.
The Scott I used to know would have done a deep dive into all of the available research and data and expressed a confident opinion on the matter one way or the other, indifferent to whose toes he stepped on in the process. This weaselly approach of "I'm not an expert here so take my opinion with a grain of salt" - this is the behaviour of a man who strongly suspects the data might not give him the answer he wants, so rather than finding out he's just going to look the other way instead. I'm reminded, in fact, of one of his best posts from years ago (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/).
That article is so bad, and so completely out of character, I think he’s just literally doing the thing in the article you linked. I’m like the last person to claim “5-D chess!” But the whole thing feels very Straussian.
He’s been burned before and learned his lesson, so he’s being strategically ignorant so he can’t be accused of being a whatever-phobe flavor of the day villain.
When I was in college I noticed that the Isreal-Palestine question bore almost all heat and no light, and that the people who knew the most about it were the most intense, regardless their position, and I adopted strategic ignorance until or unless I had the time and will to examine it, very cautiously, myself. So I can see another lurking motive: "even if one side is firmly in the right, people who arrive at that position tend to abandon all their other interests and obsess about this to the detriment of their intellectual and social lives and I'd rather that not happen to me".
But I also *told people that's was my considered stance* when the question arose, and I certainly didn't absentmindedly pontificate about it from a place of first principles. I wasn't an intellectual public figure, but that cuts both ways; no one was going to pester me to the ends of the earth to find out if I had a secret view lurking beneath that posture, but if I *had* absentmindedly pontificated, no one would have cared much, either. I had no special responsibilities to fulfill. I wasn't anybody's intellectual hero, and no one was literally paying me for my thoughts.
I don't know which I think I worse--Alexander getting this question so badly wrong at a glance that I have to steeply downgrade how much credence I give the rest of his off the cuff musings and shallow dives, or Alexander adopting the strategy of ignorance and deceiving his audience about it, while simultaneously throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall on the topic like it's a puff of smoke he can vanish in.
Honestly, if Scott just refused to address the issue at all and requested that people in the comments not bring it up because it's such a heated issue that pulls everything towards it like a black hole, I wouldn't really have a problem with that. Perhaps he ought to adopt the same approach he takes towards HBD. From reading his review of "The Cult of Smart" (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-cult-of-smart) one gets the strong impression that he has some opinions on that topic which might get him into trouble, but he's essentially just avoiding the issue entirely.
But this mealy-mouthed halfway house approach he's adopting on the trans issue - where he acknowledges that social contagion is real, says he doesn't know that much about youth gender medicine but defers to the expert consensus (when does he EVER defer to the expert consensus on anything?), refuses to investigate the question himself in case the data isn't as rosy as he might have thought, plays the whataboutism card, admits that gender-critical people have some legitimate concerns but then calls them sad losers for bringing those concerns up and urges them to touch grass™ instead - this is the worst of both worlds, it serves nobody's interests, and he's better than this.
It's idle curiosity but I've been speculating why the stuff has lost its luster.
To my mind, Scott's best work was anchored first in insight, second in synthetic observation, and third in moral clarity (the real kind, you goons in the back). Maybe Scott's aging out of his peak abilities in the first category, making the kinds of slow gains you tend to make with time on the second, and suffering the losses that age tends to bring in the third. (The "cranky old man" hypothesis.)
Of course, now he has a wife, a career, plans for kids IIRC, a lot of money most likely, and a semi-public reputation with his real name on the line. He might be doing a strategic withdrawal on ACX and putting his heart into other things. (The "phoning it in/too much to lose" hypothesis. This one doesn't so much explain what's looks to me like less-good judgment, though.)
I also don't think the move to Substack has done him any favors. Maybe having to absorb and process the lower quality of the commentariat's output is putting too much chewing gum in his gears. (The "Scott is dead, and we killed him" hypothesis.)
Not that I'm really complaining. It would be pretty crass to demand more from someone who's already put out so much excellence for comparatively little. He's entitled not to have to fire on all cylinders for the rest of his life. Etc. But still. A little saddening.
He's clearly a deeply neurotic person, and it's obvious that even the relatively minor cancellation efforts made by nobodies on Twitter and Reddit upset him deeply. I can't imagine how upsetting it must have been for him when the literal New York Times tries to destroy your life. I mean, that'd be upsetting for anyone, but particularly for such a neurotic person as Scott. Hard to blame him for making a conscious decision to avoid courting controversy to the same extent, given its demonstrable impact on his mental health.
A lot of it seems to come down to the circles in which you move. Scott isn't woke himself, but it seems most of his social circle is, and he's open about having dated trans people in the past. I get the distinct impression that in woke circles, while certain tenets of the ideology (support for BLM, underrepresentation of women in STEM caused by sexism etc.) can still be essentially debated as POLITICAL issues, the trans thing specifically has taken on a tenor more akin to religious fervour. Even asking a trans rights activist an innocuous-seeming question like "isn't the evidence base for the efficacy of puberty blockers decidedly mixed?" is akin to questioning Christ's divinity in front of an observant Catholic - they will broker no dissent. It's very telling that neither Scott nor Freddie deBoer seem willing to challenge gender ideology with any of the rigour and ferocity they apply to, for example, BLM.
I do think being effectively "doxxed" plays some part in this. One of the reasons he was so averse to the Times revealing his real name in their article is because he wanted to maintain some professional distance between his writing and his practice as a psychiatrist - he didn't want his patients to be put off by his writing, especially given that he occasionally wrote about his patients in anonymised form. But the cat's out of the bag now and there's no way to unring the bell, so maybe he feels forced to play it safe across the board. Off the top of my head, I can't remember him writing about any of his patients since the move to Substack, although I haven't been following his writing as closely since then either.
This whole piece of his struck me as evasive and dishonest and pissed me off when I read it. (Even more infuriating was Roger Pielke's straight-up idiotic defense of trans inclusion in women's sports because 'society's understanding of gender is changing.' The man's climate blog is called "The Honest Broker," for fuck's sake.)
Is it really Scott's concern for different numerical markers of human misery and death that accounts for the difference between, on the one hand, his *practically endless* meta-analysis of ivermectin studies, and on the other his not even looking at the crappiness of gender treatment outcomes data? (I mean, I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt that he chose not to look, rather than just stubbornly ignoring what everyone honest has finally begun to recognize is compelling.)
And my God, the dumb whataboutism. I was reminded of those apologists for Islamist terrorism who insisted after 9/11 that a few thousand dead civilians compared favorably to annual US auto accident deaths.
That was an interesting article. I can see why he is a popular writer. He wrote, “The more curiosity someone has about the world, and the more they feel deep in their gut that Nature ought to fit together”. Yes, which explains why so many people have gone through the rabbit hole into the warren of gender ideology to try to find answers. It seems that he has lost his curiosity or maybe the courage to pursue it.
The funny thing is, he's just as courageous as ever when it comes to certain potentially controversial topics, like when he published an article last year saying "the murder spike in 2020 was caused by BLM protests and police pullback, and the mainstream media is lying when they say it was caused by Covid or increased gun sales". But here, it seems, his courage falters.
There is no reliable data for puberty blocker efficacy. The countries who have curtailed their support don't want to pay for ineffective treatment. It's not a decision based on morals.
I'll never understand these kind of blithe comments about blockers. There are no time machines, much less any in pill form. You can't go back in time and relive adolescence. Bodies, and reality, don't work that way.
You would think that Alexander, in all his endless knowledge and intellectualism, would recognize that his essay is a fantastic - and rather large - collection of examples of logical fallacies and cognitive biases. I guess he somehow missed out on learning about those in all his readings? He is a perfect example of someone who is so poorly informed about the topic he opining so authoritatively about that he doesn’t even know enough to know what he doesn’t know. It takes some serious chutzpah (and perhaps some “low-key” antisocial narcissism) to make a statement like “2,500 children having their lives low-key ruined is nothing” on a topic you admit you’re not an expert on.
Scott is an expert on how bad medical policies, he's written a lot about how devastating things like bad IRB policies can be. The point he was making is that it seems weird for people to make a big deal about gender-affirming care in particular. Why do they care about the lives it's "ruined," but not care about all the other medical policies that ruin even more lives?
If that is, in fact, the point Scott is trying to make, it’s an incredibly weak, bad faith straw man argument. Where has anyone who expresses concerns about the number of children harmed by puberty blockers (along with the even larger number of young people harmed by other aspects of this approach) ever said they *only* care about those children and don’t care about other policies that ruin more lives? Does Scott also write about how weird it is that the people who are advocating for more funding for childhood cancers don’t care about the significantly larger numbers of adults who get cancer? What about Scott focusing on bad IRB policies? What’s his deal focusing on that when there are so many other policies that harm more people? Seems weird to me that he keeps talking about bad IRB policies. Also seems weird that he thinks that expressing concern for one group of people means you don’t care about other groups, or that someone is not allowed to have strong feelings about or focus on a problem if there’s another problem that affects more people. Even with this interpretation of what he meant by that comment, it’s weak and bad faith, a straw man
People are allowed to have a strong focus on a problem that isn't the objectively worst problem in the world, but it's also important to be able to put that problem into perspective. In addition, people hyperfocusing on certain types of problems can make you suspicious of their motives. For example, if someone were to hyperfocus on muggings committed by black people against white people, and not care about muggings committed by white people against other white people, black people against other black people, or white people against black people, you might suspect the reason they have strong feelings and focus on the problem is because of an unsavory motive like racism. Similarly, I can't help but suspect that hostility to transgender treatments is part of a great hostility to gender noncomforming people in general, likely motivated by oppositional sexism.
You are making a lot of assumptions. That is a very weak way to address the process of learning and understanding. Add in the errors of mind-reading, overgeneralizing, and straw man arguments. Nothing you have written even remotely comes near the reasons I care about this issue.
Sep 20, 2023·edited Sep 20, 2023Liked by Eliza Mondegreen
The "suspicious and bad" line is very interesting; it doesn't seem like something he'd be allowed/willing to say, given his social circle. Strange as it is, are we sure he's not being ironic in some way?
I mean, this is a community whose luminaries have been saying stuff like this for almost a decade:
"Still, for people roughly similar to the Bay Area / European mix, I think I'm over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women."
I think his social circle allow him to say stuff like that because they're very tolerant of dissenting opinions. The reason so many of them are supportive of trans stuff is that trans stuff happens to be correct, not because of conformity.
Ah yes, woke people living in the Bay Area, famed around the world for their tolerant and accepting attitude towards dissenting views on matters pertaining to race and sex.
IMO, enabling (either actively or passively) the brainwashing of children so that their lives get ruined is immoral enough. But it's also unconscionable to help (actively or passively) convince "regular" people to deny what they believe to be real and/or have always considered reality to be, and thereby fomenting mental illness in regular people and mass mental illness in a society. People like Alexander have what I call CDD - Conscience Deficit Disorder. They're dangerous. Not that they should be censored, but what they put out should be critically examined in the same way we would critically examine the speech of someone who encourages people to smoke lots of cigarettes.
"98% of children who take puberty blockers do later go on to transition ... I assume something is wrong with this study ... an optimistic interpretation is that the screening process is very good and they’re only given to people who really want them ... I don’t think whatever 'pushing' doctors can do is enough to produce these kinds of numbers ... so I lean towards the optimistic interpretation."
Pulling my hair out. Not "let's further examine the study that I think there must something wrong with" not "let's look at the screening process and see if it really is that good," he really is just like "Well, either the screening process is great or this treatment pushes kids further down the transgender path, and those are the only two options and I don't think the second one is likely so I guess it's the first" and from there it doesn't matter how well he reasons because it's all built on a flawed premise.
That's the kind of desperate, motivated leap you make when you're clinging to a conclusion that you're starting to fear isn't consistent with reality.
But.. but... am I missing something or is the "irreversible thing" he repeatedly refers to not in fact not using puberty blockers? That is: the terrible, irreversible option is just: allowing what happens normally, naturally, to: happen: ??
Right? Will my insurance company soon pay for a face lift, tummy tuck, liposuction and breast lift because despite being in my mid 50s, I actually feel like I’m 25. And by the way, everyone around me must agree that I’m 25 and therefore entitled to all privileges and benefits of youth.
I was also shocked that he considered puberty blockers to be the course recommended by the precautionary principle, of all things. So shocked that I agree with others that he's either dissembling or he truly hasn't even dipped his toe into the kiddie pool on the topic.
Why are you acting like that is so absurd? He's right. Have you ever seen pictures of Nicole Maines and her twin brother? It's truly amazing the difference it makes when a trans kid is allowed to undergo the puberty they want instead of having the "normal" "natural" one forced on them. Normal and natural are not the same thing as good.
Not sure it’s a perfect application, but by the same logic, 330 children were killed or injured in school shootings in 2022. So, it’s silly to waste our time worrying about that?Sure, the families impacted are suffering, too. But not even 500?! That’s NBD. 😒
I'm gonna bite the bullet (so to speak) and say that the amount of money spent on active shooter drills is WAY out of proportion to the actual likelihood of a school shooting taking place in a particular school. These drills are extremely upsetting for the children and educators involved, disruptive to the students' education, and for no measurable gain. Some of the things children learn in these drills are not merely useless but actively unhelpful i.e. make it more (rather than less) likely that the child will be killed in the extremely unlikely event that the child is caught in a school shooting.
I can’t claim to fully buy the response to school shootings, but I can say that seeing a certain cohort meltdown over school shootings but shrug their shoulders at children’s potential to be harmed by invasive medical interventions perpetuated by a dangerous ideology is just stunning to me.
Pretty sure Scott (and I) would unironically agree that school shootings aren't a big deal in the big picture and there are more productive problems to focus on, especially since school shootings are probably a memetic phenomenon that gets worse the more attention it gets.
I actually can see the value on some of his points, IF you read it with the knowledge that our system is imperfect (to put it nicely) and far too big to become perfect any time soon. And that this is a topic we simply don't know what to do with-meaning we have little knowledge (or, at least, little empirical evidence) as to what is actually going on with the rising numbers of trans identifying kids (or adults for that matter).
So, when he says things like 2500 kids is not a lot given the medical system as a whole, or that the 2% being not-helped is actually a great number, he is right in a sense. Given that our system obviously just doesn't know how to reliably alleviate the suffering of these kids, those actually are pretty good numbers compared to other psychiatric interventions for other psychiatric issues. Look at addiction: if "only" 2% or 2500 people a year came out of addiction treatment to relapse and potentially die, we would be doing far better than we are today.
The problem with the article, and his tone, is that of course EVERY person matters. And we really need to focus on how to best help the individual in front of us. I think that's what he was going for when he talked about how we should investigate the root but then still have to apply one of our very imperfect current options to the current patients in front of us. I can see how that would sound incredibly offensive to parents whose kids need help now. And it's a sad state of affairs that is depressingly common in medicine and especially psych. (For the record, I think that's what the European countries are trying to do with their more conservative policies: from what I've read, all the countries mentioned have still allowed for medications and such in some cases, if it's felt to be the best option for the individual, and in some countries with the caveat that they must be enrolled in research to help understand the problem and the intervention. They haven't, to my knowledge, completely shut the door. They are simply trying to better regulate who goes through it-which I think is the right approach.).
I think the best point he raises is that we simply don't know enough about the problem (I would add also that we need much better outcomes data on the current interventions). And that, unfortunately, we still have kids who have the problem now and we have to deal with them somehow. And unfortunately no matter what we do some will not get the right help for them.
I discovered that blog recently and at first was overawed by the guy's intelligence and seemingly vast breadth of knowledge. But yeah, reading stuff like this makes me think he's merely a good writer who's very opinionated and has a large audience with wide-ranging tastes. Nobody working full-time could write with genuine authority on so many topics. While I still enjoy many of his posts, I definitely take them with a pinch of salt.
Well, I'm here in Brooklyn to help a friend with an actual, real, unavoidable medical situation, and I am peaking women in their late 20s and 30s every day. I go to cafe in the mid afternoon when the lunch rush is done and talk to my servers, typically young women in their 20s or 30s. They can tell right away that a conversation with a little old lady is going to get them a nice tip. Odd, how in a super woke nabe adjacent to Park Slope, Brooklyn, young adult women do not know that there are so many detransitioners, they do not know that men like my ex-husband claim to be the mothers of the children they fathered, and these dudes then go on to lie about employment when they want more accessories and less child support payments. They donate the extra money to the orgs that pay young confused cross-sex ideating people to go into schools to tell 5 year olds they might be a mermaid, a unicorn, a gingerbread cookie or the opposite sex. And. . . . peaked!
Imagine: A real life book club meet up at a trendy restaurant. A lively and increasingly louder discussion (civilized of course) about important things, the rest of the patrons get more curious and start to listen in. Minds are changed. Maybe it’s just a fantasy. I’ve been able to peak a few friends in my world but people still don’t want to think or talk about “gender stuff”.
People like this make me beyond furious. I never felt rage like this in my life before I was dropped into this hellscape and had to witness the innumerable buffoons adding their ignorant two cents to the discussion. Thanks, but I'm not okay with my son, or anyone else's child, being collateral damage just so that the medical community can continue to live in its pointless delusion and doesn't have to face the fact that they've destroyed the lives of young people and torn apart their families. And I hope with every fiber of my being that the Scott Alexanders of the world learn the hard way that they maybe should have given this just a bit more thought.
I haven't even got to the end of the piece and I'm furious, too. Thank you for writing this comment.
I couldn't read anymore to protect my own mental health and wellbeing. I could feel my muscles tense and my anger and stress levels rising.
Why are you so certain that you are right? Why do you think you have a right to be angry with someone who came to the opposite conclusion about a complex issue than you did? On issues like this where there is so much debate and disagreement, it is generally better to be humble, and recognize that in the future you might well be the one who realizes they should have thought more about this.
Scott has written a lot the "absurdity heuristic," about how we have intuitions about how some things are completely "absurd," and how these intuitions are often mistaken and untrustworthy. Are you sure that that this "hellscape" that seems obviously absurd and ridiculous to you isn't actually totally sane and reasonable? Your sense of what is absurd and what isn't can't be trusted.
Also, it seems kind of strange to act like this is something the medical community is actively imposing on passive children, instead of something that children conclude themselves and then actively ask the medical community for help with. I know that we're all supposed to pretend that children are stupid, irresponsible, passive receptacles of ideas in order to justify infantilizing and controlling them, but I've encountered far too many buffoonish parents with brilliant kids to be able to stomach doing that any more.
>Also, it seems kind of strange to act like this is something the medical community is actively imposing on passive children, instead of something that children conclude themselves and then actively ask the medical community for help with
Should we allow children to drink alcohol? To smoke cigarettes? To have sexual relationships with people many years older than them? Should doctors automatically accede to any demands for medical interventions a child might have?
Where to start…
1. Yes, this hellscape is a pointless, destructive road to nowhere that affects a vulnerable population — young people with a range of comorbidities that make them more susceptible to the messaging that promotes the idea of an incorrectly aligned gender soul — an identity that doesn't adequately mirror the kind of outdated, homophobic, misogynistic, ridiculous sex stereotypes we've fought against for decades. This is ludicrous. It's not supported by any decent study. There is no evidence for this. None. It is not a medical diagnosis. There is no test for "gender identity". There is no standard protocol even for assessing whether anyone would benefit from blockers or hormones. Nor is there any assessment that has been proven to successfully discern this. There is no long-term evidence for the safety or efficacy of "gender affirming care," and no shortage of evidence of harm, which is why every country that has conducted a systematic evidence review has backed away for these treatments for minors. But by all means, if you know something that a wealth of experts in the field don't, I'm sure they would be interested to hear it. This isn't just my sense of the absurdity of this medical scandal, it's the conclusion of numerous international clinicians and researchers — as EM could well tell you, plus wherany rational person lands after about 5 minutes of objective, critical thought. This is a cult ideology that only works if everyone else ignores reality. It destroys young people and their families. At no point will we be saying, "Maybe we should have encouraged our kid's delusional thinking and his or her desire to escape the confusion and awkwardness of adolescence by self-harming."
2. In the face of the tremendous medical harm our kids are facing, being humble is about as far as you can get from what's needed. What's needed is to demand evidence-based medicine and an end to irreversible, damaging treatments that increase a range of health risks based on the lie that you can change sex and that spending the rest of your life constantly wondering if you've adequately fooled everyone is in any way healthy.
3. Children are not small adults. Have you actually raised one? Teens, especially, are impulsive and prone to risk-taking, and cannot comprehend the kind of long-term consequences that are necessary to consent to something as horrific as the "treatments" the medical community is pushing, because their prefrontal cortex hasn't matured. Saying you know "brilliant" kids, is just laughable in this context. The life experience a child has is insufficient to base life-changing, irreversible medical decisions on — decisions that affect their fertility, sexual function, and overall mental and physical health, raising their risks of some cancers, cardiovascular problems, and early onset dementia, among other issues. Ask a 16 year old male how he'll manage if he has a stroke at 32. Ask a 13 year old female if she plans on breastfeeding the child she may someday have. Teenagers are notoriously wise. That's why we allow them to do pretty much anything they want — drive, smoke, rent a car, get a hotel room, get tattoos, have sex with adults or create pornography… I can tell you with certainty that the "brilliant" kid you know has absolutely no clue about the impact a stroke has or the importance of breastfeeding a baby, let alone whether or not she will someday want to have one. If a 13 year old demands to have her breasts cut off as a way to make her feel better about herself — to escape the chaos of puberty, to escape the gaze of leering males or sexual assault, to escape a future where they're subjected to the kind of sex that is in the hardcore porn readily available now to any teen with a smart phone — in your world, we should honor this. Because kids are "brilliant". Cut off perfectly healthy, functional body parts because a teenager has been told it will help her. I can't think of a single good reason anyone with an ounce of understanding about how teens operate (or any sense at all, really) would consider this even remotely reasonable, even ignoring the lack of any evidence that shows long-term benefit. Maybe no one has mentioned this to you, but life at 14 isn't permanent. People change. They grow up. What seems like a great idea at 14 or 18 turns out to be idiotic at 30. What other branch of medicine do we do this in, let the patient dictate irreversible, experimental treatment? Let a child come in and tell the clinician what they need? This is a particularly hideous form of insanity and you see it in every "gender-affirming" clinician that testifies at a hearing.
As for whether clinicians are pushing this, really, you're just woefully uninformed. Gender clinics by and large offer no other treatment path for children because that's what "gender affirming care" means. If you haven't heard the phrase that almost every parent hears from a gender clinician, "Do you want a dead daughter or a live son?" (and vice versa for males), based on the equally evidence-free suicide myth, then you really need to get up to speed before engaging in these conversations. It's as tiresome as the drivel that came from Scott Alexander.
Not all, but many of the people who follow this substack have first-hand experience and are dealing with a child caught in this sick cult. The bulk of us spend an inordinate amount of our time reading the relevant studies, books and articles because we love our children deeply and we need to figure out how to end this lunacy for their sake and the sake of all the other children that will fall into this. Unfortunately, there are way too many blindingly stupid or easily swayed people who have bought into a warped social contagion that masquerades as a medical condition and a social justice issue. Maybe someone else has patience with the Scott Alexanders of the world and their dangerous, ignorant statements, but it sure as hell isn't me.
1. The idea that biomedical transition is not supported by any studies is a blatant falsehood. All you need to do is do a google search for "gender affirming care" and "meta analysis" and you will find a wealth of studies concluding that gender affirming care is helpful to most people who seek it and that regret is rare. These are meta-analyses, which means that they are overviews of large numbers of studies over many years. People have been undergoing biomedical transitions since Christine Jorgenson in the 1950s, so it's not like there's a dearth of data. Even when there is regret over transition, it is not regret at gender transitioning at all, it is regret at transitioning to the opposite gender instead of transitioning to a nonbinary identity, which often entails less severe medical intervention.
Treatment of adolescents in particular started more recently, about 25 years ago, so there is less data, but the data that does exist looks more positive than negative to me. Because there is less data I consider this to be an issue where good, reasonable people are capable of honest disagreement, although the weight of the evidence does seem to fall on the pro-gender-affirming care side. However, the idea that people on the opposing side are some sort of "cult" is ludicrous. Their beliefs are compelled by the evidence and quite reasonable considering the quality of the evidence there is. If there is anything I want you to get out of this exchange it is this, I do not expect to change your views on gender affirming care, but I do think you need to change your views on the character of its supporters. Pretending that they are deluded cultists instead of reasonable people is supremely arrogant and shows an extreme level of overconfidence in your position.
The concepts of gender dysphoria and gender dysphoria, as properly understood, does not condone or promote sexist/homophobic stereotypes. I think you are referring to the idea that children are often identified as trans because they engage in stereotypical behaviors of the opposite gender. This is not because those behaviors are intrinsic properties of that gender, you are correct that that is a sexist belief. What is going on is that many human beings are instinctively conformist, and often act to conform to the behavior of others of their gender. So if someone acts like a stereotypical member of the opposite gender, it may be their true gender (of course, that may not be the case at all, they might also just be a gender-nonconforming cis person, which is why this is not the sole criteria for concluding someone is trans).
2. Gender-affirming care is evidence-based. People demanded evidence-based medicine, they got it. The reason that clinics are "pushing" gender affirming care is that it's the only thing that works.
3. Children are not small adults. We are in complete agreement that toddlers and grade schoolers should not undergo biomedical transition. At most they should socially transition. However, the biomedical part of gender affirming care is generally done with adolescents. Another word for adolescent is literally "young adult." You are mistaking the statistical properties of teenagers for intrinsic properties. It is true that teenagers are statistically more likely to make bad decisions relative to adults, but that does not mean all teenagers are worse at making decisions than all adults, or that even most teenagers are. When assessing an individual teen for maturity you do not need to rely on statistics of how good the judgement of the average teen is. You can just assess their own judgement as a person, one-on-one. Which is something that gender-affirming care practitioners do.
Most teenagers I have known, and remember being, did spend time thinking about their long term future and made plans for it. Haven't you heard about the mental health crisis in teens that is caused by them stressing over preparing for their future colleges and careers? Generally when they do behave impulsively, it is often because adults infantilize them so they do not get adequate practice at behaving maturely.
That being said, surgical interventions in teenagers before the age of 18 are extraordinarily rare. I would agree with you that 18 is a reasonable age limit for surgery involving the genitals. For breast reductions I would use the same criteria medical professionals use for breast reductions that are not related to gender dysphoria. Breast reductions for teenage girls are sometimes performed for non-gender related reasons, and people like you don't seem to care about that at all (would you say that the child actress, Soleil Moon Frye, was "mutilated" because she chose to have a breast reduction at 15 because she thought having large breasts would get her typecast as "sexy" characters?)
Hormonal intervention is a more fraught issue because by the time someone turns 18 it is too late for it to be most effective. If that wasn't true, perhaps waiting until age 18 for that too would be wise, but that is sadly not the world we live in. A lot of trans people who transitioned later in life express regret that they were not able to take hormones when they were teens, so that their body is more the way they want it to be. Personally I have trouble not getting angry at the terrible parents who want to condemn their children to that sort of regret.
You also seem to be confused about what makes a body part "healthy" and "functional." If someone has gender dysphoria then the body part they wish to cut off is not healthy and functional, because it causes them distress. Your mind calls the shots when it comes to what a healthy and functional part of a body is. If humans started growing spider chelicerae out of their faces it would be perfectly reasonable for them to find this distressing and amputate them, even though those same chelicerae would be "healthy and functional" by the standards of a spider.
Again, the main point I want to make is that no one's child is "caught in a sick cult." Rather, their child has a medical condition and reasonable people disagree about the most effective way to treat it. There is a lot of evidence for the effectiveness of gender-affirming care, the only way one can deny that is if one is in a bubble full of "relevant studies, book, and articles" that have been cherry-picked to only affirm one's existing prejudices. No one is "buying into a warped social contagion," they are forming reasonable views by rationally assessing compelling evidence. Scott Alexander's statements are not dangerous or ignorant, they are quite reasonable to someone who looks at ALL the evidence instead of cherry-picking.
>If humans started growing spider chelicerae out of their faces it would be perfectly reasonable for them to find this distressing and amputate them, even though those same chelicerae would be "healthy and functional" by the standards of a spider.
I think if you have to use such a contrived analogy to make your point, it suggests that your argument isn't nearly as strong as you think it is. Shockingly, when treating a patient, we compare their body to what is normal and healthy for a healthy individual of that species. What is normal and healthy for a spider is not normal and healthy for a human being, congratulations on this penetrating insight of yours.
Even your contrived analogy isn't really favourable to your position. The reason we realise that spider chelicerae growing out of someone's face is not healthy or normal is precisely because it is atypical for a healthy human being. There is nothing atypical or unhealthy about a teenaged girl starting puberty and developing breasts. It is normal and expected. Your comparison of a teenaged girl developing breasts to the body horror scenario of spider chelicerae growing out of someone's face might be the most misogynistic thing I've read in weeks.
Really, this is not worth responding to. Most of it is utter nonsense, so I’m happy to let @FionnM have at it line by line for as long as she can stomach it. Show me a study that looks at sex-trait modification for the adolescent cohort that tracks the participants for more than 5 years, isn't based on worthless self-reported survey data, doesn’t have massive loss to follow-up, examines relevant variables, controls for confounding variables, and shows improvement in mental health — in other words, something that actually stands up to scrutiny unlike what's out there, which even the lunatics in WPATH admit is poor-quality. The Dutch study has not been reproduced and even their data is a mess and shows poor outcomes — on a patient population that was carefully screened for other mental health issues. And it's not even relevant to this cohort. Chen was supposed to be the big proof of how effective these treatments are and it is a disaster. (https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/15hhliu/the_chen_2023_paper_raises_serious_concerns_about/?rdt=63541). And again, every country that conducted a systematic evidence review has backed away from GAC and the fraud that it is. You ignore this. Not a convenient reality, is it.
Your paralleling of breast reduction with gender-based mastectomy is repulsive, and belies your ignorance of not only adolescent behavior and mindset, and the impact of the current cultural climate on youth, but of the importance of breastfeeding. How many young female detransitioners expressing heartbreaking regret at their loss of fertility and the ability to someday breastfeed a child is too many for you? Mothers understand how painful a loss that is. Your lack of insight is staggering but not surprising.
As for you anger toward parents who do what parents are supposed to do — protect their children from bad decisions until they are mature enough to comprehend the consequences, no one cares. Seethe away in your magnificent righteous indignation. You aren't in this world, have not raised a child caught up in this, are viewing this from the outside having consumed the ridiculous message that somehow living a life actively fooling people every day is healthy and better than the alternative — working through your discomfort, developing resilience and distress tolerance, accepting reality, and learning to love yourself without the need to damage your body in an effort to conform to an absurd stereotype (and as a bonus, not running roughshod over the rights of girls and women). The tragic truth is as Corinna Cohn clearly states: the kids will mature and realize what was done to them based on decisions they made as children. And they will want to know how the adults — clinicians and most of all their loving parents — could have allowed this to happen to them. It will be people like you who supported this horror show who will have to account for how they were so easily led to believe the patently unsupportable.
As for all of those poor adult male fetishists who, with 20/20 hindsight (and an entire, healthy adult life behind them, including having sired their adored children), wish they could have been masquerading as the opposite sex sooner, I have no sympathy. None of us get what we want all the time. As adults, we learn this. Erica Anderson is not suffering for it — he’s successful and fighting against willy-nilly sex trait modification for minors. And he knows a heck of a lot more about it than you do.
>Even when there is regret over transition, it is not regret at gender transitioning at all, it is regret at transitioning to the opposite gender instead of transitioning to a nonbinary identity, which often entails less severe medical intervention.
Well this is just an out-and-out lie. I've personally witnessed detransitioners express regret at having transitioned to the opposite gender and wishing they had never transitioned from their natal gender at all. See Kiera Bell.
>The reason that clinics are "pushing" gender affirming care is that it's the only thing that works.
Strange, then, that most cases of childhood gender dysphoria desist on their own without medical intervention, or that the number of subscribers to r/detrans has increased from a few hundred to 50,000 in a matter of years, or that so many European countries have recently, independently arrived at the conclusion that it DOESN'T work (or at best is far more experimental than how it is usually presented).
>Your mind calls the shots when it comes to what a healthy and functional part of a body is.
Umm, no? Just because a hypochondriac thinks they have a serious illness doesn't mean they do. That's what "hypochondria" means: an erroneous belief that there's something with your body when there objectively isn't.
>You can just assess their own judgement as a person, one-on-one. Which is something that gender-affirming care practitioners do.
If that's the case, shouldn't there be false positives? Shouldn't there be teenagers who believe they are trans but are mistaken?
You're saying that we should assess teenagers' own judgement on a one-to-one basis, but elsewhere in this thread you seem to be arguing that it's cruel to deny gender-affirming care to any teenager who demands it. Which one is it? You think that 100% of teenagers who seek out gender-affirming care are mature enough to make an informed decision on this matter, and there was literally never a teenager who made this decision in error? (Which is untrue on its face: just ask Keira Bell.)
With psychological disorders like gender dysphoria, just as with physical disorders, I think that the opinion of a professional is needed in order to understand what is really happening. Of course, that is no longer possible since all health-care professionals are now expected to give "affirming care" (puke). Our health-care professionals are no longer permitted to do what they were trained to do. How did the trans lobby ever get this powerful???
As to your general point (that the evidence supporting the efficacy of gender-affirming care in adults is robust, and the evidence for gender-affirming care in teenagers not as robust but still strong), I will offer the following counter-arguments. Feel free to accuse these studies of being "cherry-picked" if you must, but I think they present a rather disquieting portrait of the state of evidence in this field:
* A longitudinal study in Sweden followed trans people who underwent gender reassignment surgery (the experimental group) with trans people who didn't (the control group). After 30 years, the experimental group exhibited far higher mortality, particularly from suicide, and had a higher incidence of suicide attempts. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3043071/
* Consider Jesse Singal's article about a study which claimed to find that the mental health of gender-distressed adolescents who were prescribed puberty blockers/hormones improved relative to those who weren't, but the study in fact found nothing of the kind (https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/researchers-found-puberty-blockers).
* Consider another article by Jesse about a study which conducted mastectomies on people aged 13-24, surveyed them about their gender dysphoria to see if there was any observable improvement pre- and post-op, and then simply neglected to include the results in their article when they didn't get the answer they wanted (https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/heres-more-evidence-that-youth-gender). Something very similar happened here (https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/on-scientific-transparency-researcher), in the context of hormones rather than mastectomies.
* Anywhere from 20% (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35052285/) to 30% (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35452119/) of teenagers who start on cross-sex hormones will later stop taking them, citing regret as their reason for doing so.
* I strongly encourage you to read this British Medical Journal article (https://www.bmj.com/content/380/bmj.p382), which analyses numerous systematic reviews about the efficacy of gender-affirming care in teenagers. Key quotes:
** "The Endocrine Society commissioned two systematic reviews for its clinical practice guideline, Endocrine Treatment of Gender-Dysphoric/Gender-Incongruent Persons: one on the effects of sex steroids on lipids and cardiovascular outcomes, the other on their effects on bone health.3233 To indicate the quality of evidence underpinning its various guidelines, the Endocrine Society employed the GRADE system (grading of recommendations assessment, development, and evaluation) and judged the quality of evidence for all recommendations on adolescents as “low” or “very low.”"
** '... one of the commissioned systematic reviews found that the strength of evidence for the conclusions that hormonal treatment “may improve” quality of life, depression, and anxiety among transgender people was “low,” and it emphasised the need for more research, “especially among adolescents.”35 The reviewers also concluded that “it was impossible to draw conclusions about the effects of hormone therapy” on death by suicide.'
** 'Sweden conducted systematic reviews in 2015 and 2022 and found the evidence on hormonal treatment in adolescents “insufficient and inconclusive.”24 Its new guidelines note the importance of factoring the possibility that young people will detransition, in which case “gender confirming treatment thus may lead to a deteriorating of health and quality of life (i.e., harm).”'
** 'In 2022 the state of Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration commissioned an overview of systematic reviews looking at outcomes “important to patients” with gender dysphoria, including mental health, quality of life, and complications. Two health research methodologists at McMaster University carried out the work, analysing 61 systematic reviews and concluding that “there is great uncertainty about the effects of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries in young people.” The body of evidence, they said, was “not sufficient” to support treatment decisions.'
* A lengthy rebuttal of Jack Turban's claims about the efficacy of gender-affirming care in teenagers (https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/the-distortions-in-jack-turbans-psychology).
From where I'm standing, frankly, this looks like a medical scandal about to explode any day now.
>However, the idea that people on the opposing side are some sort of "cult" is ludicrous.
I don't know how else to describe a movement which reflexively assumes that parents do not have the best interests of their own children at heart (to the point that teachers and school administrators feel entitled to keep secrets about children from the children's parents, of even when they have no good reason to believe the parents do not have their children's best interests at heart), which encourages people to cut ties with their parents if their parents do not unhesitatingly and unquestioningly affirm the person's conception of themselves (note that this description applies just as much to the "suppressive persons" doctrine in Scientology) and which routinely presents an invasive medical procedure as the silver bullet which will cure all of an individual's personal problems, and without which they are certain to commit suicide.
>If someone has gender dysphoria then the body part they wish to cut off is not healthy and functional, because it causes them distress.
This argument implies that we should surgically amputate one or more limbs of people suffering from body integrity disorder.
>For breast reductions I would use the same criteria medical professionals use for breast reductions that are not related to gender dysphoria.
We're not talking about breast reductions, we're talking about mastectomies. Other people can correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that, outside of gender dysphoria, mastectomies are generally only clinically indicated in the treatment of breast cancer.
>Haven't you heard about the mental health crisis in teens that is caused by them stressing over preparing for their future colleges and careers?
Which couldn't possibly be a contributing factor to the skyrocketing number of teenagers demanding to have healthy tissue removed from their bodies, perish the thought.
>Why do you think you have a right to be angry with someone who came to the opposite conclusion about a complex issue than you did?
Everyone has the right to be angry with whoever they please for whatever reason. How they express that anger is another matter.
Fionn, I'll need to read your comments more closely. You are very insightful.
I didn't read the whole article because, admittedly, I was depressed at the prospect of reading someone's stupid opinion who doesn't care about kids, but I have to praise you for the title of this article -- “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.” It's so true! Common sense isn't always right -- especially if common sense is the only thing you have -- but if you don't have at least SOME common sense to balance out the sophistry, then your opinions will be completely untethered from reality. Some of the intellectuals who are addicted to sophistry think of themselves as the avant-garde of philosophy, but really they are just fantasizing. That is what the whole of "queer theory" is -- intellectual fantasies disassociated from reality.
That's the Orwell quote
I found a site of Orwell quotes; they are fabulous. I also found a recently posted article by someone who calls himself the Helpful Professor (helpfulprofessor.org) in which he says (seriously) that there are 81 genders (he actually lists them). So I sent him the Orwell quote.
A lot of Orwell's short essays are in the public domain, and many are still strikingly relevant today. Here are some of my favourites:
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/notes-on-nationalism/
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-prevention-of-literature/
Generally the reason people support gender-affirming care is because they DO care about kids. They genuinely and sincerely believe that trans kids who undergo gender-affirming care will end up happier and better-adjusted than ones who don't. I can personally attest that a lot of the reason I support gender-affirming care is that I am able to put myself in the shoes of trans kids and imagine how it feels to be denied gender affirming care.
The fact that you would even say someone who supports gender-affirming care "doesn't care about kids" really reinforces one of the beliefs I've developed about anti-trans activists after years of talking to them and reading their writing: They have no theory of mind. They are literally unable to imagine what their opponents believe. The idea that someone might sincerely believe that trans people are their stated gender identity is not something they can comprehend. So they sit around in armchairs making up motivations that they can comprehend, motivations that are naturally unflattering to those they are attributed. They imagine that their opponents don't care about kids, are just virtue signaling, are just exploiting deluded patients for money. Because imagining that their opponents really believe what they are saying, even for a second, is beyond them. I am more convinced than ever that the anti-trans movement are the ones untethered from reality, and not worth taking seriously.
Ghatanathoah, I am glad you decided to post here because it gives me an opportunity make some points.
Are you aware that being trans has become a fad among children? It has become a fad because children are being fed the idea (by trans activists on social media platforms and even by liberal teachers at their schools) that they have the right to choose their gender while still children, and worse, to TRANSITION while still children. But there are many things wrong with this. First, if a child has decided that she is trans because it has become a fad, that means the child wants to transition for the wrong reasons. Being trans is, after all, supposed to be innate, not a place you arrive at by being influenced. The children who transition for the wrong reasons are the ones who become detransitioners later. Second, it is well established that many kids who think they are trans grow out of those feelings once they hit puberty. That being the case, they should be given the opportunity to grow out of it if they can. Why? Because being trans, overall, is an unhappy life. The trans person exists in a gray area between male and female all his or her life, and that is not a happy place -- not to mention that bombarding the body with cross-sex hormones for decades does significant damage to the body. Third, children do not have the emotional maturity to make such drastic decisions for themselves. If we do not trust children to get tattoos, how can we trust them to take cross-sex hormones and have their breasts removed? Tell me, if you had a child with a powerful sweet tooth, would you give that child sweets at every meal? Of course not, because you know it wouldn't be good for the child. Children don't always want the right things for themselves.
You said this in your comment above: "Generally the reason people support gender-affirming care is because they DO care about kids. They genuinely and sincerely believe that trans kids who undergo gender-affirming care will end up happier and better-adjusted than ones who don't." That is a mostly false talking point that has come from transgender activists. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence that the moment children start to transition, they become moody and unhappy. The child, who may have been happy with herself before making this decision, has now become dissatisfied with herself. Her body is no longer "right" because it is female and not male. Also, she may feel estranged from her family, because her family probably doesn't support what she's doing. Kids (if you know them at all, which I am beginning to think you don't) are often prone to obsessions, and the idea that s/he has the need and right to transition becomes an obsession.
Ghat, there is much more going on with this issue than you seem to realize. Given that kids are being pressured to believe they are trans, I estimate that perhaps only 10% to 20% of the kids who decide to transition actually have gender dysphoria, and that is what you must have in order to go through the process. A child who transitions but does not have gender dysphoria is just adding another layer of problems to her life.
Gender identity is an idea that is only a few decades old. It is not proven to be real or true. The only people who believe in it are the ones who don't like their gender. It's a bad idea all around. For example, gender identity allows men to believe that they are REAL women (which a man can never be because of his male body), and that gives them permission to invade women's private spaces (sports, locker rooms, shelters, prisons). The truth is that our body determines our gender, whether we like that or not.
Ghat, the bottom line is that you have drunk the Koolaid, to use an expression -- i.e., you have accepted the propaganda coming from transgender activists without examining it closely. Certainly, in the case of children, transitioning often backfires and makes things much worse for them.
Arguments that someone has "Drunk the Kool Aid" are worthless because literally everyone who holds any view about anything says that about their opponents. Everyone says that the other guy is uncritically parroting the other view because of conformity or lack of thought. Even the people who really are uncritically parroting a view say it! I have just enough respect for you to avoid saying that you have drunk the Kool Aid of anti-trans ideologues.
You will have to take my word for it that I have given the ideas around gender tremendous thought. I have not listened excessively to activists, on the contrary I tend to find left wing activists of all sorts to be insufferably annoying. LGBT rights is one of the only issues where I am reliably left-wing, I am otherwise a fairly anti-woke small l libertarian.
I have instead arrived at my support of trans rights through other avenues. In particular I spend a lot of time thinking about the philosophy of personal identity in extreme hypothetical scenarios. For example, it seems clear to me that if we developed technology to transplant brains, the gender of the brain would remain unchanged regardless of what body it was transplanted into. If a mad scientist put a man's brain into a woman's body, or a sexless robot body, a man he would remain. This makes it clear to me that gender is something in the brain, not in the body. It is a short jump from there to realize that some people may be born with brains with different genders than their bodies, although that is thankfully rare.
The idea that transgenderism is a fad is one theory as to why it is so much more common among kids than before. You are overstating your case in treating the "fad" theory as an obvious fact. It's quite possible that there are more trans kids today for the same reason that there are more left-handed people than there were in the 19th century: people are less likely to be jerks to them!
The idea that trans activists and teachers are indoctrinating this fad into kids is obviously false. Adults, especially teachers, can't indoctrinate kids into doing anything. If they could then kids would be way better behaved then they currently are. There would be a new "fad" of always doing your homework and bringing your teacher presents! If you remember being a kid, or knew kids, you'd know that kids treat such attempts at indoctrination with derision or bemusement. Transness would be a lame thing old fogies tried to get you to do. I remember DARE at my school, not only did it not work, I think if anything it might have persuaded some kids to give drugs a try.
As to whether kids should be allowed to transition, it depends if you mean medical or social transition. Social transition seems like a clear-cut win-win, if the kid is trans it will be good for them, if they aren't it will likely hasten their desistance, since they will get to try out a different gender and see that it is not for them.
Medical transition is more fraught, obviously, however surgery is generally not performed until kids are at or near adulthood, when they have had plenty of time to think it over. (I should note that girls get breast reductions as teens for non gender dysphoroa reasonsall the time and people like you dont seem to care at all? Would you say Soleil Moon Frye should not have been allowed to get a breast reduction at 15 because she thought it would get her better acting roles?) The whole point of puberty blockers is to give kids more time to think, although the concerns about their effects on bone density are justified. It is definitely something to discuss with a medical professional. Fortunately medical professionals have not drunk any Kool Aid, their views are compelled by the evidence.
Let me start out by saying that that was the first time in my life that I ever used the Koolaid expression. I heard someone use it the other day, and I thought it sounded on point, so I decided to try it out.
So what am I to say to you, Ghat? Besides using a ridiculous example of transplanted brains, you've repeated some things that are not true. First, from what I've read they have found very little that supports the idea of male and female brains. Second, there IS most definitely a fad under way among children. Bill Maher has made the point that there are many more trans kids in liberal communities than there are in conservative communities, and that's because it has become a fad. You are posting on an article by Eliza Mondegreen, and she is very meticulous about her research. She has found a ton of evidence to support the idea of a fad.
Regarding that, here is an article you should read:
https://pitt.substack.com/p/transgenders-connection-with-pornography
Third, your contention that surgeries are not being performed on kids is totally false. That is something that pro-trans people like you tell themselves because, frankly, even people like you are horrified by the idea, BUT IT IS HAPPENING. It is still happening in the blue states that haven't passed laws against it. Pictures are available on the internet of teen girls with scars where their breasts used to be.
Regarding schools, it is now common for schools to carry books that encourage kids to question their gender. And yes, there ARE liberal teachers who are pushing the idea. I've read articles about them.
Ghat, the bottom line is that kids don't have the emotional maturity to make such life-long decisions about themselves. I certainly don't believe the same things I believed when I was 13, do you? Kids are by definition immature and changeable.
Listen, I have given you very good reasons why I am against transitioning by children. You just don't want to hear them. I think my reasons are more logical and realistic than yours are. For some reason you want to believe in some trans fantasy that doesn't actually exist. The best cure for that is to come to this Substack and read Eliza's articles. Eventually you will be convinced.
It is time for you to come to your senses.
I think a major issue is that your idea of what is absurd and ridiculous is broken. Things that are completely reasonable, like gender transition, seem absurd to you. You don't really have any answer to my brain transplant hypothetical except to call it ridiculous, even though hypotheticals are the way philosophers refine and understand ideas. The fact is, if most people's brains were transplanted into a body of the opposite gender they would find it unpleasant and try to reverse it, even if doing so was very costly in terms of money and health. This indicates people have an innate sense of gender in their brains.
I have noticed that people seem quite willing to grant genders to all sorts of things that are not humans with chromosomes and functioning genitals. They write science fiction stories of robotic men and women. They call animals, and even boats by gendered pronouns. They see a science fiction TV show with a hermaphroditic alien slug monster, and think of him as a man with male pronouns because he is vaguely shaped like a man. It is clear that our concept of what makes something one gender and not the other is quite flexible and extends to all sorts of things. What is absurd is that we do not extend it a little further to trans people.
Bill Maher's point does not make a lot of sense because it ignores that fact that conservatives are famous for being cruel and sadistic towards trans people. It would be like if someone said there was a "fad" of criticizing Vladimir Putin in America, and that it has to be a fad because very few people in Russia speak out against Putin. I think we can both agree there is another explanation for why people in Russia rarely criticize Putin! Another apt analogy is left-handedness, which massively increased as soon as people stopped mistreating the lefthanded in the 20th century.
You seem confused about the motivations of these teachers and the librarians who place books in schools. They believe, correctly, that a certain percentage of kids are already trans. These kids will have many confused feelings and need help understand what is happening to them. Having books to read and teachers to talk to will help with this. They care deeply about those kids and want to help them.
The problem, again, is that you have no theory of mind and are not capable of imagining other people believing different facts than you do. You think that transness is caused by social contagion, you think that those books and teachers are causing cis kids to become trans, rather than simply informing kids who are already trans of what they already are. You cannot imagine anyone believes differently than you, so you imagine they must want to spread social contagion on purpose for nefarious reasons. This is false, they are doing this because they care about kids and want to help them.
That article you sent me a link to was clearly written by someone who cannot differentiate between correlation and causation. She lists all these random unpleasant things that happened to her son at around the same time her son started questioning his gender identity, and then concludes from that that they must have made her son trans. By that same logic beating MarioKart causes tornadoes, since I saw a tornado on the news happen the same night I beat MarioKart. There are many trans people who did not have the horrible experiences her son did, so it is unlikely that those experiences made her trans. The author also immediately discredits herself by referring to Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, a fake diagnosis made up in a now discredited paper. She also refers to porn addiction, another fictional thing that does not exist (people who call themselves "porn addicts" usually consume less porn than the average person, the reason it causes them distress is that authority figures in their life repeatedly tell them porn use is wrong). It is shocking that you consider anything in that article worth reading, it is clearly the ravings of someone who is deeply confused about how cause and effect work.
When talking about surgery I was talking specifically about surgery on the genitalia, which is very serious and nonreversal. Breast reduction and augmentation is more reversible and already performed on minors for a variety of reasons not related to gender dysphoria (elsewhere I cited the example of the child actress Soleil Moon Frye, who was afraid her large breasts would get her typecast in "sexy" roles and therefore had a breast reduction at age 15. Do you oppose that as well?). I think what is going on is that anti-trans activists started making hysterical claims that kid's genitals are having surgery performed on them. Then when this was disproven, they moved the goalposts and talked about breast reduction, and pretended this was what they meant all along.
In terms of the emotional maturity of kids, you are making a common mistake where you think emotional maturity is an intrinsic property of kids, rather than a statistical one. Saying that kids are less emotionally mature than adults is like saying that men are taller than women, it is something that is often true, but far from always true.
The fact that kids are changeable also does not prove what you think it does. Even if gender identity is one thing that does change, it is very irresponsible to bet on that! And what if it changes in the other direction? Cis kids are changeable too, would you prefer they be put on puberty blockers in case they change and become trans in the future? Should everyone just be given puberty blockers until they are old enough to make a decision at 18? That seems absurd to me, we can assume most cis kids will stay cis and most trans kids will stay trans.
You are also subscribing to black and white thinking, where either someone is mature enough or they aren't. This is not how maturity works. Generally there are a certain set of activities people agree kids are not mature enough for, another set people agree they are mature enough for, and a third set where kids are regarded as mature enough with supervision. That third set is the state of treatment for trans kids today, they are not allowed to just go to the store and buy hormones, they need to go through a treatment process supervised by professionals. You are right that kids are not mature enough to transition by themselves, but they are mature enough to do so with careful adult supervision, the same way a 16-year old is mature enough to drive if an adult is in the care monitoring them, but not mature enough to do so alone.
I'm getting tired of doing so much reading. Life is too short for this.
So MY idea of what is absurd and ridiculous is broken? MY IDEA AND NOT YOURS? Gender is a fixed thing; it can't be changed. All the drugs and operations in the world cannot change a body from one gender to another. All the treatments are cosmetic. Given this fact, how can you consider gender transition, with all of its invasiveness into the human body, to be completely reasonable? -- especially when all the person gets is the APPEARANCE of the opposite gender, and only when they are NAKED?
Do you also think that my belief that children do not have the emotional maturity to make such decisions is broken? Do you know any children at all? Are you not aware that people change from moment to moment, and certainly change enormously from their teen years?
Regarding the aggressive teachers who are pushing transgenderism on their students, don't you think they should be concerned about the collateral damage they are doing, meaning the students who adopt these ideas but don't actually have gender dysphoria? Shouldn't the trans activists on social media who are pushing transgenderism on anyone who will listen have similar concerns? They don't because they are selfish. They want to grow their numbers and become a powerful force in society. Trans activists don't want acceptance from society, they want to dominate society.
For every child who knows its own mind in the way that an adult does, there are a dozen who are given to trends and fads. If you don't know this, then you don't know anything about children.
The girls who have their breasts removed cannot restore them with breasts that give milk. And even if they could, by the time they got that far into the transition process, the testosterone would have made them infertile. There is no turning back from the harm that is being done.
You live in a fantasy world in which everything always goes according to plan, even in the most complicated process. I'm sorry to be blunt, but I see you as evil. The greatest evil in this world is when people become invested in bad ideas and then aggressively promote them or act upon them even though they are contrary to all logic. Putin is evil in the same way. His justification for destroying Ukraine is that Ukraine tolerates gay and trans people. He thinks it's perfectly reasonable to kill the whole country just because a few people are too liberal. (Talking about being liberal, I am a liberal gay man. I believe that trans people should have all the rights that everyone else has, except that they should leave children alone and stay out of women's private spaces.)
My position that children should wait for adulthood is the same position that doctors take (or should take): FIRST, DO NO HARM. You seem to be perfectly happy that many people are being harmed so that the tiny ONE-HALF OF ONE PERCENT can get what they want when they want it. You are divorced from reality. Your values are inhuman and skewed. The whole idea that children should have to wait until 18 is perfectly reasonable, and yet you won't accept even that one reasonable idea.
I believe that you are a trans person, and worse, a trans activist, which makes you a very selfish person indeed. You will believe in any lie to further your cause.
This exchange of comments is now over. You know what they stay: "When you study evil, evil studies you." As of this moment, I have talked to this particular demon for as long as I care to.
By the way, stop talking about "theories of mind" (whatever that means). You are the one who believes in theories over reality. I believe in reality.
I was so disappointed by that article. He says that "it’s suspicious and bad that everyone is suddenly becoming transgender, and I support efforts to figure out why and stop it at the root", but also says that if trans activists are trying to destroy your life because of your opinions on trans issues, you should just put your head down and keep mum. So where does that leave researchers like Lisa Littman, who are trying to figure out why everyone's becoming transgender, and are facing cancellation efforts for the crime of doing so? You can't have it both ways.
As soon as he said "I’m not an expert in this topic and this should be considered my amateur opinion only", my immediate reaction was:
1) when has not being an expert on something ever stopped you from weighing in before? You're not a criminologist, but that didn't stop you weighing on why the mainstream media was wrong about the causes of the 2020 homicide spike (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-homicide-spike); you're not an expert in treating infectious diseases, but that didn't stop you weighing in on ivermectin (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-you-wanted).
2) you ARE an expert on this topic - you're a qualified psychiatrist! Sure, you don't specialise in youth gender medicine, but you're still far more qualified to express an informed opinion than most of the highly opinionated lay people who weigh in on this topic.
The Scott I used to know would have done a deep dive into all of the available research and data and expressed a confident opinion on the matter one way or the other, indifferent to whose toes he stepped on in the process. This weaselly approach of "I'm not an expert here so take my opinion with a grain of salt" - this is the behaviour of a man who strongly suspects the data might not give him the answer he wants, so rather than finding out he's just going to look the other way instead. I'm reminded, in fact, of one of his best posts from years ago (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/).
That article is so bad, and so completely out of character, I think he’s just literally doing the thing in the article you linked. I’m like the last person to claim “5-D chess!” But the whole thing feels very Straussian.
He’s been burned before and learned his lesson, so he’s being strategically ignorant so he can’t be accused of being a whatever-phobe flavor of the day villain.
When I was in college I noticed that the Isreal-Palestine question bore almost all heat and no light, and that the people who knew the most about it were the most intense, regardless their position, and I adopted strategic ignorance until or unless I had the time and will to examine it, very cautiously, myself. So I can see another lurking motive: "even if one side is firmly in the right, people who arrive at that position tend to abandon all their other interests and obsess about this to the detriment of their intellectual and social lives and I'd rather that not happen to me".
But I also *told people that's was my considered stance* when the question arose, and I certainly didn't absentmindedly pontificate about it from a place of first principles. I wasn't an intellectual public figure, but that cuts both ways; no one was going to pester me to the ends of the earth to find out if I had a secret view lurking beneath that posture, but if I *had* absentmindedly pontificated, no one would have cared much, either. I had no special responsibilities to fulfill. I wasn't anybody's intellectual hero, and no one was literally paying me for my thoughts.
I don't know which I think I worse--Alexander getting this question so badly wrong at a glance that I have to steeply downgrade how much credence I give the rest of his off the cuff musings and shallow dives, or Alexander adopting the strategy of ignorance and deceiving his audience about it, while simultaneously throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall on the topic like it's a puff of smoke he can vanish in.
Honestly, if Scott just refused to address the issue at all and requested that people in the comments not bring it up because it's such a heated issue that pulls everything towards it like a black hole, I wouldn't really have a problem with that. Perhaps he ought to adopt the same approach he takes towards HBD. From reading his review of "The Cult of Smart" (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-cult-of-smart) one gets the strong impression that he has some opinions on that topic which might get him into trouble, but he's essentially just avoiding the issue entirely.
But this mealy-mouthed halfway house approach he's adopting on the trans issue - where he acknowledges that social contagion is real, says he doesn't know that much about youth gender medicine but defers to the expert consensus (when does he EVER defer to the expert consensus on anything?), refuses to investigate the question himself in case the data isn't as rosy as he might have thought, plays the whataboutism card, admits that gender-critical people have some legitimate concerns but then calls them sad losers for bringing those concerns up and urges them to touch grass™ instead - this is the worst of both worlds, it serves nobody's interests, and he's better than this.
It's idle curiosity but I've been speculating why the stuff has lost its luster.
To my mind, Scott's best work was anchored first in insight, second in synthetic observation, and third in moral clarity (the real kind, you goons in the back). Maybe Scott's aging out of his peak abilities in the first category, making the kinds of slow gains you tend to make with time on the second, and suffering the losses that age tends to bring in the third. (The "cranky old man" hypothesis.)
Of course, now he has a wife, a career, plans for kids IIRC, a lot of money most likely, and a semi-public reputation with his real name on the line. He might be doing a strategic withdrawal on ACX and putting his heart into other things. (The "phoning it in/too much to lose" hypothesis. This one doesn't so much explain what's looks to me like less-good judgment, though.)
I also don't think the move to Substack has done him any favors. Maybe having to absorb and process the lower quality of the commentariat's output is putting too much chewing gum in his gears. (The "Scott is dead, and we killed him" hypothesis.)
Not that I'm really complaining. It would be pretty crass to demand more from someone who's already put out so much excellence for comparatively little. He's entitled not to have to fire on all cylinders for the rest of his life. Etc. But still. A little saddening.
He's clearly a deeply neurotic person, and it's obvious that even the relatively minor cancellation efforts made by nobodies on Twitter and Reddit upset him deeply. I can't imagine how upsetting it must have been for him when the literal New York Times tries to destroy your life. I mean, that'd be upsetting for anyone, but particularly for such a neurotic person as Scott. Hard to blame him for making a conscious decision to avoid courting controversy to the same extent, given its demonstrable impact on his mental health.
A lot of it seems to come down to the circles in which you move. Scott isn't woke himself, but it seems most of his social circle is, and he's open about having dated trans people in the past. I get the distinct impression that in woke circles, while certain tenets of the ideology (support for BLM, underrepresentation of women in STEM caused by sexism etc.) can still be essentially debated as POLITICAL issues, the trans thing specifically has taken on a tenor more akin to religious fervour. Even asking a trans rights activist an innocuous-seeming question like "isn't the evidence base for the efficacy of puberty blockers decidedly mixed?" is akin to questioning Christ's divinity in front of an observant Catholic - they will broker no dissent. It's very telling that neither Scott nor Freddie deBoer seem willing to challenge gender ideology with any of the rigour and ferocity they apply to, for example, BLM.
I do think being effectively "doxxed" plays some part in this. One of the reasons he was so averse to the Times revealing his real name in their article is because he wanted to maintain some professional distance between his writing and his practice as a psychiatrist - he didn't want his patients to be put off by his writing, especially given that he occasionally wrote about his patients in anonymised form. But the cat's out of the bag now and there's no way to unring the bell, so maybe he feels forced to play it safe across the board. Off the top of my head, I can't remember him writing about any of his patients since the move to Substack, although I haven't been following his writing as closely since then either.
Exactly my reading of it.
“Strongly suspects the data might not give him the answer he wants”
That is it right there
Oh, that's dead on.
This whole piece of his struck me as evasive and dishonest and pissed me off when I read it. (Even more infuriating was Roger Pielke's straight-up idiotic defense of trans inclusion in women's sports because 'society's understanding of gender is changing.' The man's climate blog is called "The Honest Broker," for fuck's sake.)
Is it really Scott's concern for different numerical markers of human misery and death that accounts for the difference between, on the one hand, his *practically endless* meta-analysis of ivermectin studies, and on the other his not even looking at the crappiness of gender treatment outcomes data? (I mean, I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt that he chose not to look, rather than just stubbornly ignoring what everyone honest has finally begun to recognize is compelling.)
And my God, the dumb whataboutism. I was reminded of those apologists for Islamist terrorism who insisted after 9/11 that a few thousand dead civilians compared favorably to annual US auto accident deaths.
That was an interesting article. I can see why he is a popular writer. He wrote, “The more curiosity someone has about the world, and the more they feel deep in their gut that Nature ought to fit together”. Yes, which explains why so many people have gone through the rabbit hole into the warren of gender ideology to try to find answers. It seems that he has lost his curiosity or maybe the courage to pursue it.
The funny thing is, he's just as courageous as ever when it comes to certain potentially controversial topics, like when he published an article last year saying "the murder spike in 2020 was caused by BLM protests and police pullback, and the mainstream media is lying when they say it was caused by Covid or increased gun sales". But here, it seems, his courage falters.
You've got to learn to read more critically. Scott is just signaling, "I'm a coward! Leave me alone!" The content of his post is quite unimportant.
WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE! Yes, it's greengrocer stuff.
And it's disappointing coming from someone who used to be so fearless.
There is no reliable data for puberty blocker efficacy. The countries who have curtailed their support don't want to pay for ineffective treatment. It's not a decision based on morals.
I'll never understand these kind of blithe comments about blockers. There are no time machines, much less any in pill form. You can't go back in time and relive adolescence. Bodies, and reality, don't work that way.
You would think that Alexander, in all his endless knowledge and intellectualism, would recognize that his essay is a fantastic - and rather large - collection of examples of logical fallacies and cognitive biases. I guess he somehow missed out on learning about those in all his readings? He is a perfect example of someone who is so poorly informed about the topic he opining so authoritatively about that he doesn’t even know enough to know what he doesn’t know. It takes some serious chutzpah (and perhaps some “low-key” antisocial narcissism) to make a statement like “2,500 children having their lives low-key ruined is nothing” on a topic you admit you’re not an expert on.
Scott is an expert on how bad medical policies, he's written a lot about how devastating things like bad IRB policies can be. The point he was making is that it seems weird for people to make a big deal about gender-affirming care in particular. Why do they care about the lives it's "ruined," but not care about all the other medical policies that ruin even more lives?
If that is, in fact, the point Scott is trying to make, it’s an incredibly weak, bad faith straw man argument. Where has anyone who expresses concerns about the number of children harmed by puberty blockers (along with the even larger number of young people harmed by other aspects of this approach) ever said they *only* care about those children and don’t care about other policies that ruin more lives? Does Scott also write about how weird it is that the people who are advocating for more funding for childhood cancers don’t care about the significantly larger numbers of adults who get cancer? What about Scott focusing on bad IRB policies? What’s his deal focusing on that when there are so many other policies that harm more people? Seems weird to me that he keeps talking about bad IRB policies. Also seems weird that he thinks that expressing concern for one group of people means you don’t care about other groups, or that someone is not allowed to have strong feelings about or focus on a problem if there’s another problem that affects more people. Even with this interpretation of what he meant by that comment, it’s weak and bad faith, a straw man
People are allowed to have a strong focus on a problem that isn't the objectively worst problem in the world, but it's also important to be able to put that problem into perspective. In addition, people hyperfocusing on certain types of problems can make you suspicious of their motives. For example, if someone were to hyperfocus on muggings committed by black people against white people, and not care about muggings committed by white people against other white people, black people against other black people, or white people against black people, you might suspect the reason they have strong feelings and focus on the problem is because of an unsavory motive like racism. Similarly, I can't help but suspect that hostility to transgender treatments is part of a great hostility to gender noncomforming people in general, likely motivated by oppositional sexism.
You are making a lot of assumptions. That is a very weak way to address the process of learning and understanding. Add in the errors of mind-reading, overgeneralizing, and straw man arguments. Nothing you have written even remotely comes near the reasons I care about this issue.
The "suspicious and bad" line is very interesting; it doesn't seem like something he'd be allowed/willing to say, given his social circle. Strange as it is, are we sure he's not being ironic in some way?
I mean, this is a community whose luminaries have been saying stuff like this for almost a decade:
"Still, for people roughly similar to the Bay Area / European mix, I think I'm over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women."
https://facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10154078468809228&id=509414227
I think his social circle allow him to say stuff like that because they're very tolerant of dissenting opinions. The reason so many of them are supportive of trans stuff is that trans stuff happens to be correct, not because of conformity.
Ah yes, woke people living in the Bay Area, famed around the world for their tolerant and accepting attitude towards dissenting views on matters pertaining to race and sex.
Exactly.
Great critique Eliza. Thank you!
IMO, enabling (either actively or passively) the brainwashing of children so that their lives get ruined is immoral enough. But it's also unconscionable to help (actively or passively) convince "regular" people to deny what they believe to be real and/or have always considered reality to be, and thereby fomenting mental illness in regular people and mass mental illness in a society. People like Alexander have what I call CDD - Conscience Deficit Disorder. They're dangerous. Not that they should be censored, but what they put out should be critically examined in the same way we would critically examine the speech of someone who encourages people to smoke lots of cigarettes.
A doozy:
"98% of children who take puberty blockers do later go on to transition ... I assume something is wrong with this study ... an optimistic interpretation is that the screening process is very good and they’re only given to people who really want them ... I don’t think whatever 'pushing' doctors can do is enough to produce these kinds of numbers ... so I lean towards the optimistic interpretation."
Pulling my hair out. Not "let's further examine the study that I think there must something wrong with" not "let's look at the screening process and see if it really is that good," he really is just like "Well, either the screening process is great or this treatment pushes kids further down the transgender path, and those are the only two options and I don't think the second one is likely so I guess it's the first" and from there it doesn't matter how well he reasons because it's all built on a flawed premise.
That's the kind of desperate, motivated leap you make when you're clinging to a conclusion that you're starting to fear isn't consistent with reality.
This quote may explain the entire problem and how it begins, and continues, with the elite.
But.. but... am I missing something or is the "irreversible thing" he repeatedly refers to not in fact not using puberty blockers? That is: the terrible, irreversible option is just: allowing what happens normally, naturally, to: happen: ??
The irreversible thing is... puberty. Activist talking point of about one year.
Wait till he hears about aging!
Right? Will my insurance company soon pay for a face lift, tummy tuck, liposuction and breast lift because despite being in my mid 50s, I actually feel like I’m 25. And by the way, everyone around me must agree that I’m 25 and therefore entitled to all privileges and benefits of youth.
https://mustsharenews.com/japanese-trans-age-man/
Society has already arrived here.
I was also shocked that he considered puberty blockers to be the course recommended by the precautionary principle, of all things. So shocked that I agree with others that he's either dissembling or he truly hasn't even dipped his toe into the kiddie pool on the topic.
Why are you acting like that is so absurd? He's right. Have you ever seen pictures of Nicole Maines and her twin brother? It's truly amazing the difference it makes when a trans kid is allowed to undergo the puberty they want instead of having the "normal" "natural" one forced on them. Normal and natural are not the same thing as good.
Not sure it’s a perfect application, but by the same logic, 330 children were killed or injured in school shootings in 2022. So, it’s silly to waste our time worrying about that?Sure, the families impacted are suffering, too. But not even 500?! That’s NBD. 😒
I'm gonna bite the bullet (so to speak) and say that the amount of money spent on active shooter drills is WAY out of proportion to the actual likelihood of a school shooting taking place in a particular school. These drills are extremely upsetting for the children and educators involved, disruptive to the students' education, and for no measurable gain. Some of the things children learn in these drills are not merely useless but actively unhelpful i.e. make it more (rather than less) likely that the child will be killed in the extremely unlikely event that the child is caught in a school shooting.
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/against-active-shooter-drills
I can’t claim to fully buy the response to school shootings, but I can say that seeing a certain cohort meltdown over school shootings but shrug their shoulders at children’s potential to be harmed by invasive medical interventions perpetuated by a dangerous ideology is just stunning to me.
Pretty sure Scott (and I) would unironically agree that school shootings aren't a big deal in the big picture and there are more productive problems to focus on, especially since school shootings are probably a memetic phenomenon that gets worse the more attention it gets.
I actually can see the value on some of his points, IF you read it with the knowledge that our system is imperfect (to put it nicely) and far too big to become perfect any time soon. And that this is a topic we simply don't know what to do with-meaning we have little knowledge (or, at least, little empirical evidence) as to what is actually going on with the rising numbers of trans identifying kids (or adults for that matter).
So, when he says things like 2500 kids is not a lot given the medical system as a whole, or that the 2% being not-helped is actually a great number, he is right in a sense. Given that our system obviously just doesn't know how to reliably alleviate the suffering of these kids, those actually are pretty good numbers compared to other psychiatric interventions for other psychiatric issues. Look at addiction: if "only" 2% or 2500 people a year came out of addiction treatment to relapse and potentially die, we would be doing far better than we are today.
The problem with the article, and his tone, is that of course EVERY person matters. And we really need to focus on how to best help the individual in front of us. I think that's what he was going for when he talked about how we should investigate the root but then still have to apply one of our very imperfect current options to the current patients in front of us. I can see how that would sound incredibly offensive to parents whose kids need help now. And it's a sad state of affairs that is depressingly common in medicine and especially psych. (For the record, I think that's what the European countries are trying to do with their more conservative policies: from what I've read, all the countries mentioned have still allowed for medications and such in some cases, if it's felt to be the best option for the individual, and in some countries with the caveat that they must be enrolled in research to help understand the problem and the intervention. They haven't, to my knowledge, completely shut the door. They are simply trying to better regulate who goes through it-which I think is the right approach.).
I think the best point he raises is that we simply don't know enough about the problem (I would add also that we need much better outcomes data on the current interventions). And that, unfortunately, we still have kids who have the problem now and we have to deal with them somehow. And unfortunately no matter what we do some will not get the right help for them.
That "2% being not-helped" is pulled out of someone else's ass, and I doubt he even knows whose ass it was
I discovered that blog recently and at first was overawed by the guy's intelligence and seemingly vast breadth of knowledge. But yeah, reading stuff like this makes me think he's merely a good writer who's very opinionated and has a large audience with wide-ranging tastes. Nobody working full-time could write with genuine authority on so many topics. While I still enjoy many of his posts, I definitely take them with a pinch of salt.
Well, I'm here in Brooklyn to help a friend with an actual, real, unavoidable medical situation, and I am peaking women in their late 20s and 30s every day. I go to cafe in the mid afternoon when the lunch rush is done and talk to my servers, typically young women in their 20s or 30s. They can tell right away that a conversation with a little old lady is going to get them a nice tip. Odd, how in a super woke nabe adjacent to Park Slope, Brooklyn, young adult women do not know that there are so many detransitioners, they do not know that men like my ex-husband claim to be the mothers of the children they fathered, and these dudes then go on to lie about employment when they want more accessories and less child support payments. They donate the extra money to the orgs that pay young confused cross-sex ideating people to go into schools to tell 5 year olds they might be a mermaid, a unicorn, a gingerbread cookie or the opposite sex. And. . . . peaked!
This sounds like great fun, honestly.
Imagine: A real life book club meet up at a trendy restaurant. A lively and increasingly louder discussion (civilized of course) about important things, the rest of the patrons get more curious and start to listen in. Minds are changed. Maybe it’s just a fantasy. I’ve been able to peak a few friends in my world but people still don’t want to think or talk about “gender stuff”.
I've known quite a few gingerbread cookies in my time
Eliza, I love your substacks!! Thanks! 💜