My latest for UnHerd… excerpt:
Detransition is the third rail of gender politics and reporting because detransitioners raise fundamental questions about gender dysphoria, transgender identification, and the gender-affirming care model. If patients can be mistaken, how can clinicians who defer to patient self-identification and “embodiment goals” possibly avoid causing harm?
This is a deeply moving piece that goes much further in its implications than anything the New York Times has run before. There are, however, also curiosities surrounding Pamela Paul’s piece, like the editorial decision to relegate her reporting to the opinion pages, and to run an apologia of sorts by Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury, in which she suggests, in the mildest possible terms, that more conversation is a good thing for “humanity, nuance and empathy,” and that gender medicine is full of “complexities.”
Doctors, activists, and reporters alike have treated the subject of gender as an utter exception. Gender clinicians are meant to jettison everything they know about child and adolescent development, about the ways distress finds expression in our bodies, about how dangerous ideas can spread like wildfire. Activists have insisted that the whole world observe their taboos and echo their mantras. And media outlets like the Times have too often abandoned their responsibility to inform themselves and their readers, to bring the facts to light without fear or favor. There has been far too much fear and far too many favours to activists, who never should have been allowed to control the narrative.
The New York Times is still trying to tell a contained story of what has gone wrong in the field of gender medicine, but Pamela Paul’s piece lays out — much more clearly than anything the paper has dared to print before — just how deep and vast the scandal is, and just how much harm has been done.
I am an older former trans identified adult male who after hormones,surgery, and legal id was to discover it was all for nothing. I became guilt ridden because I was not living in truth. I returned to my born male sex approx. 12 yrs. ago. and thought I had left trans behind. Then I happened to watch some video of young teenage girls who had top surgery and regretting it. I was alarmed as these young girls were basically saying the same thing as I had once believed. Although I gender transitioned as an adult my inferiority complexes began as an awkward bullied child. I know there are some with genuine gender dysphoria however in most cases trans affirming care is a dangerous misdiagnosis that I fear will destroy many young lives as well as their families. Gender theory is pseudoscience; a strong delusion and a deception.
I just wish my adult son could read these things with an open mind instead of believing heart and soul everything Erin Reed writes..........He has discarded his family in favor of all this because we don't believe people can change sex