Recently I wrote Information Can Be Both Factually True and Very Misleading. If social media and highly politicized communications existed in the 1940s when antibiotics were introduced, many parents would have shied away from antibiotics just as they do covid vaccines, based on information that was technically “true” but also misleading.
I honestly don’t understand your objections very well, although I’m truly trying to understand.
My statements about antibiotics (in the other post) were a thought experiment. They were not intended to make factual claims about antibiotics (other than “used appropriately, antibiotics cure infections, save lives, and prevent bad long-term outcomes of untreated bacterial infections, so a parent would be foolish to reject them out of hand”).
That’s hardly a controversial view. Nor did I intend anyone to understand it to mean “antibiotics are always good for every ailment.” That would be quite silly.
The point was, many parents would be frightened by the (true but small) dangers of antibiotics, which are arguably greater than the (true but small) dangers of the covid vaccines, if antibiotics were introduced today with similar scare-mongering tactics as we see with the vaccines.
I stand by my points that true information can be at times misleading (the previous post) and false information can be misleading (this post).
I stand by my opinion that if there’s a problem you cannot solve yourself, if you want to maximize your overall outcomes in life you will do well to listen to reputable, credible experts.
A doctor, for example, will know better than a plumber when taking antibiotics would be safe and appropriate for your child or not.
The pediatrician who’s always looked after your child will know better than a random person on Twitter claiming to be a doctor about what treatments or vaccines your child needs.
That does not mean listening to experts is an infallible approach. That doesn’t mean you’ll always be pleased with the result. That doesn’t mean that you must suspend your own critical thinking.
It just means you’re probably better off believing a credible doctor who’s studied the treatment (whether antibiotics or vaccines) than a person on Twitter who posts a chart of true but misleading information from CDC.
These are not at all wild or controversial claims! It’s something, though, which some people might not have considered before or thought about -- ie, that they might be so frightened by information that might factually be true (but misleading) that they make bad choices.
There’s a place for “common sense” to be sure. That’s similar to “trusting your gut.” We are in agreement about common sense.
However, often common sense without expertise is wrong -- just as a plumber might think his child with a fever needs an antibiotic, because the last time his child had a fever the doctor prescribed an antibiotic. Common sense perhaps, but maybe this time the child has a viral illness that antibiotics won’t help. The plumber has common sense but he can’t diagnose the difference between a bacterial and viral illness.
I’m not going to get into a discussion on homeopathy. It’s water. Anyone who enjoys using homeopathy is welcome to continue!
You’re simply incorrect when you say there’s “a vast amount of evidence at this point about the dangerous effects of spike protein-based injection therapies.”
These are exactly the sorts of false conclusions, quite honestly, the previous post was trying to address.
The mRNA vaccines, like antibiotics, have some strong and useful effects. Like any strong medication or any strong vaccine, they have some negative effects. These negative effects must not be minimized or dismissed. Every medical treatment that works also carries risk.
But after billions and billions of doses being administered worldwide, the cost-benefit is clearly on the side of vaccines.
Could it really be the case that every government in the world is in cahoots with vaccine manufacturers, and all those governments are also so evil, without exception, that they’ll give dangerous vaccines to their people, including people in their own families? Not a single nation has sounded the alarm? What does that tell you? Here’s a good place for common sense! 😀
It’s not a reasonable logical leap from “mRNA vaccines, like all vaccines, have side effects” to “the vaccines are dangerous and the spike proteins are to blame.”
You are exposed to enormously greater quantities of spike protein every time you get sick with covid. The created antigen -- in this case the scary-sounding “spike protein” -- is what prompts your body to protect itself from infection. Every vaccine introduces some foreign thing into your body that prompts your body to protect itself from infection.
You are welcome to disagree about what an “expert” is, if you believe I characterized an expert in a way you dislike. I believe I’m using it in the commonly understood sense: we ask the doctor and not the plumber for medical advice.
My point about experts in this post is that there is no such thing as a gender expert, and I hope I’ve established my reasons for thinking so.
I’ll take the fact that my comment doesn’t appear anymore in the comments section as a compliment. It’s so very in line with the approach towards dissenting voices over the past few years.
Referring to data is not scaremongering, even if it scares you. It is still data. Arguing in favor of limiting exposure to and reliance on data is a dangerous authoritarian line of thinking. “The plumbers don’t understand antiobiotics, let’s not scare them with data”.
How do you reconcile your belief in “experts” with the fact that experts disagree? Experts are human beings, most of which are followers, not leaders, scared of loss of status, funding and jobs, scared of ostracism., tempted by money, status, power and hubris.
since the mRNA rollout, deaths of untold people after FDA approved drugs are released into the market.
Experts promised you that the mRNA therapy would prevent you from becoming infected with Covid after two shots, and here you are on your umpteenth “booster” with no end in sight for the shots you’ll need while almost 100% of the population has, still, now been infected.
If antibiotics were introduced today, what we should have is an open debate, with no picking or choosing of which expert gets to speak and which one gets censored so that we can ram through an agreed-upon narrative. We should have publication and analysis of data, both pre- and post marketing, and an honest subsequent analysis of who benefits when.
to cause exactly the kind of unwarranted fears that you claim the publishing actual facts would lead to.
I thank you for your thoughtful essays on other topics (where you for some reason don’t blindly trust experts) , but cannot continue to support an account that argues in favor of limiting individuals’ exposure to the truth (aka censorship) and argues in favor of acts that have been proven to cause so much harm to so many people. https://openvaers.com/covid-data
I did not remove your comment. In fact I replied to it at length, although I think there was some small glitch and the reply didn’t appear in the right place.
First, I need to share some background on myself: I have always aligned with liberal or Democrat policies and voted for them. I have had the Covid vaccine + 1 booster (other boosters delayed because I got Covid and followed the science on trying to maximize natural immunity + booster immunity that both wane after time). I worked to help others find the vaccine early when it first came out. I’ve very much lived by “follow the science” and “fact checking” by cross checking with “reliable sources” like media outlets rated as high in factuality (like NYT, NPR, and WaPo), looking at snopes, checking the cdc page, etc.
Then my adolescent daughter was hit with a mental health crisis and she found videos during the school closures when kids basically lived online telling her that transition would solve everything. Like always, I did my research. I read the studies, saw their weaknesses and limitations. I learned everything you are writing about in this post. Then I saw the split between what was being reported by the people I had been taught to trust for my fact checking vs what was being reported and what I was reading in these studies and what you detail in your post. The “bad guys” and the “disreputable sources” (Daily Mail, New York Post, Jesse Singal, etc) were where I found reporting that matched the studies and the reality. It was disorienting beyond belief.
Even worse, the experts I had been taught to trust - doctors, nurses, hospitals, and therapists - and who were involved in my daughter’s direct care were all stating the bad info as facts. And not just the experts. Also family, friends, and teachers.
Am I assuming correctly that you are not the parent of a child who has dealt with the medical and mental healthcare systems for a child questioning their gender identity? It is really hard to overstate how stressful it is to have a child self-harming and actively threatening and attempting suicide, literally trying to save your child, and hearing that this is the only option. And not just hearing it’s the only option, but getting threatened with everything from state intervention and loss of custody to not caring that your child is at high risk of dying because of you. Even if you have all your research, sources cited, and references to relevant laws - even if you have done all the research hat you are describing in your post, do you know how impossible it is to find a therapist, a treatment program, a hospital, anyone who will provide care and support based on the facts? Even those who share your concerns will tell you they have to follow policies by their employer or professional organization.
Also, once the you see and experience all this, seeing all the trusted, “highly factual,” media tell you that you are wrong (and a right wing bigoted hateful parent who thinks they know more than the experts), and everyone from your child’s teacher to the president of the United States telling you you’re wrong while being able to fact check and disprove what they’re saying (and while your daughter gets more and more unwell and nearly dies because no one is willing to consider that perhaps - just for her case - this isn’t working), you start to feel like the ground beneath you is shifting and everything you thought you knew and trusted maybe isn’t. What else are you being told that isn’t true but you don’t have the time to read and dissect every study about it? It’s extremely disorienting and trying to figure out how to walk the line is incredibly hard.
Briefly back to vaccines: vaccine expert Paul Offit - a true expert and a pro-vaccine educator and advocate - has said it may be time to reconsider how we are looking at the boosters and who should be getting them. There are many who would call this anti-vax rhetoric and claim that experts can become captured by right wing narratives and therefore should no longer be considered experts. So what do I do, someone who understands how the “experts” snd “reliable sources” got gender medicine so wrong? I don’t know. But I’m waiting and listening with an open mind with the hard won knowledge that there’s no easy, checklist manual for how to navigate it.
I’m really sorry for the horrible experience you have gone through and I wish you and your daughter health and a brighter future.
What you describe sounds quite familiar and I’ve heard about these terrible scenarios happening again and again -- even more so a few years ago.
This is exactly why I say this isn’t the parents’ fault. How could it be when the medical and health care community are aligned against them and telling them lies, and the media and nearly everyone to the left of Trump are insisting it’s the best thing to do?
I hope -- really hope -- that there are slightly more resources for questioning parents today than there were five years ago when I first felt like something was very wrong. Hardly anyone spoke up then. Now there’s SEGM, Genspect, podcasts, online support groups for parents, books (Abigail’s, Helen’s), more people who are slightly less timid than before about expressing public doubts --and there are even a few (few!) therapists who will do actual therapy with these kids and try to help them. There are entire countries that are saying “look, the evidence isn’t there.”
A parent who newly faces this problem today isn’t quite as alone as a parent who’s been struggling for quite a while.
None of the this matters, though, if it’s your own child who’s been struggling and suffering and getting sicker. I’m sure of that.
“and while your daughter gets more and more unwell and nearly dies because no one is willing to consider that perhaps - just for her case - this isn’t working.”
I can’t imagine how frustrating -- beyond frustrating: nightmarish -- that would be. There are no words.
And if you live in a jurisdiction where you could lose custody, it’s even worse.
You’re right that I’m not in this situation but if I were, I’d move to a state that wouldn’t take custody of my child, completely remove all access to the internet, enroll my kid in a school where this ideology is not taught (even if that meant a religious school that I completely don’t believe in -- because any religious Christian indoctrination would be less harmful than the religious gender indoctrination), and get on the waiting list of one of the few therapists that would help her.
I’m not saying this is possible for everyone, and I’m not saying failing to do these things is wrong. I’m not even sure those are the right things. Uprooting your family is a very serious thing. But I’m acknowledging how serious, how dangerous, how all-consuming this is, that I would completely uproot and disrupt my own life to address it.
Paul Offit is a guy I respect and he has a reasonable point of view about the vaccines although it’s not a view I necessarily completely agree with. If he’s coded right and as an “anti-vaxxed” for his views (the guy who developed a vaccine for kids) it’s a symptom of the problem we’re talking about. Politicization to an insane irrational degree.
This is why now, sadly, we often can’t trust what we hear, and more so than in generations past, we’re forced to make our own decisions even though we’re not experts.
I really appreciate your kind, thoughtful response.
I’d like to expand on something you said because it is so important for understanding the issue of experts you’re talking about:
I found all the info you’re referencing from Genspect, Abigail Shrier, Helen Joyce, SEGM, etc. when I tried to take that info to the people controlling my child’s care, I was told they were not “reliable sources.” I was told Genspect wasn’t reliable and that they were funded by far right christian groups. I was told Abigail Shrier’s book was hateful rhetoric that would kill kids (remember when ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio tweeted that stopping people from reading Shrier’s book was a hill he would die on?). Helen Joyce is dismissed as a TERF and not a legit source. If you google “SEGM legitimate group” you get articles calling it a fringe group with dodgy science that is not legitimate. If you are a parent asking questions and find genspect, SEGM, Shrier but then do your due diligence to determine if they are “legitimate sources” of info, the answer you get from the people you’ve been taught to trust is “no, this is fringe extremism, right wing dodgy science from hateful people.”
Even if you as the parent see that this is not true, how do you get the people treating your child, the hospitals, the schools, the volunteer on the suicide hotline your child called and who told her she’s start feeling better once she took testosterone, Joe Biden, Rachel Levine, every democrat from our two senators to our local representative to believe these are legitimate resources of information? In their view, you’re citing Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson, fascists and neo-Nazis. What does a parent do with that? Claiming that everyone from the government to the entire medical profession to all the media has gotten it wrong and you know better is the messaging used to refute climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers...heck, even flat earthers. Abbie Richards - the anti-extremist and misinformation educator on TikTok lumps or with belief in a “trans agenda” and puts it in the same category as holocaust denial. How is a researching parent to respond? How do you convince your child’s psychiatrist that has seen this kind of framing to take you seriously? How do you not start questioning other things? It’s truly disorienting and frightening
I know you’re not blaming parents - I just really want to communicate yes problem with talking about who are the experts and what are legit sources of info when there are dynamics (maybe even power structures?) that control what and who are considered legitimate sources of information.
Yes. Absolutely right now in the US the situation is terrible. Getting better (maybe? slowly? way too slowly for parents who are facing this crisis with their kids) but still terrible.
I have no doubt that all these things you tried to bring up were dismissed. I’m sure that’s true.
As I mentioned to Heyjude below, if an “expert” won’t address your questions about basic factual claims, how can that person be trusted to tell you what to do with your kid?
If they can’t explain why they follow WPATH when it’s based on nothing to the extent that it can’t even be given a TRUST scorecard, then why would anyone listen to their advice?
Obviously a parent in your situation can’t worry about helping the entire world, or hope to convince people who are ideologically brainwashed (because essentially that’s what it is) to believe as you do, or to consider SEGM a reliable group.
You can only worry about your own child.
But I think what these sources do provide for struggling families is another voice so they can (1) see that no, not everyone thinks affirmation and transition for all are the only correct route; and (2) have information sources that they can examine themselves, which can give them more confidence in their own (currently very unpopular) decision-making.
If a parent looks at Genspect’s or SEGM’s claims and reads the scholarly literature they support it with, and then compare that with WPATH’s, someone who really goes to enough trouble to examine it all will soon see who has facts and evidence and who does not.
This sort of crisis should not be a do-it-yourself at home project, but if everyone you approach for help tells you you’re bad and wrong and need to trans your kid, you will probably be better off cutting yourself off from those irrational fake-expert voices and finding help from the few people who are doing real therapy with those kids.
Easier said than done. And many parents -- again, these are people whom I don’t blame -- simply aren’t as skeptical as you or I, and their kids are paying a terrible cost from being misguided by fake experts.
The older I get, the more I think being skeptical and trying to ferret out information for yourself relates to some in-born personality trait.
And sometimes that in-born personality trait, which is probably often helpful, gets hijacked in service to things like homeopathy or Q-Anon. So even that is not a 100% reliable guide. Skeptical people sometimes end up believing some really wacky things.
It would be nice if the world agreed with us, didn’t think we’re evil and bigoted, and provided actual help for these kids. But that’s not the world we’re living in at present.
We are now living in a cult- the cult of the experts. Expertise is of course essential in an advanced society. But today claimed expertise is used for power and control. When any dissent from the established narrative is immediately shut down, you are no longer talking about experts concerned about helping people.
Branches of the cult of expertise:
Public health. Follow our dictates or people will die!
Gender health. Follow our dictates or children will die!
Climate change. Follow our dictates or the world will die!
Education. Only teachers know what children should learn. Follow our dictates or the oppressors will harm your children!
Politicians. Follow our dictates or democracy will die!
We need to start using our own ability to think and reason again. Yes, we need experts. We should respect and appreciate them. But we cannot allow our society to become a dictatorship of self proclaimed experts who allow no questions and refuse to show their proof.
I think a sign of real expertise is confidence in responding to challenges. Anyone who evades debate by claiming that counter arguments are dangerous loses my confidence in their proclamations.
That’s a really useful rule of thumb! That’s a lot of what Puzzle Therapy and other parents in this situation are experiencing, They’ll point to A, B, C conflicting sources of information and instead of engaging with the facts, the fake experts will just dismiss them as fringe and incorrect. If you want to convince someone that their sources of info are fringe or incorrect, you can’t just say that. You need to at the very least address their factual claims.
If someone isn’t well-versed enough to engage on the level of factual claims, how much trust do you want to give them, right?
One of the points you hit on a couple of times that is so puzzling is how these "experts" think the answer is to essentially Truman Show these people: If we all will just pretend on the surface that
"sure you're a Real woman", or whatever else, that somehow will make it so. As you say, we would never do this with someone suffering a different form of psychological distress, we don't all agree to go around saying that the Schizophrenic man who believes that he's god is really god, that would be counterproductive for both him and us. (I completely support adults doing what they want and will address anyone the way that they wish to be addressed, within reason. But we can't abandon reason completely to temporarily placate the activist types.)
Really good essay. It's nice to see things laid out so clearly.
Yes— it seems actually cruel and counterproductive and harmful to go along with children in this way, and essentially expect the world to play pretend. It seems insulting and condescending too.
Would it not be more helpful and more kind to encourage a feminine little boy to embrace his femininity (preferences, clothing, toys, activities, friends) and encourage society to treat boys like him with kindness and respect?
Instead of this game of pretend? It’s almost like you are teaching this feminine boy to be ashamed of being a boy at all. No wonder he’s miserable and wishes he were a girl.
Maybe it’s not the boy who needs to change at all. Maybe other things in our culture must change to make room for him.
Thank you for writing this - it's certainly true that "trust experts" doesn't help in a domain where we haven't had the time and resources to build up proper expertise yet - there are no gender experts (although, possible plot twist later in this post).
I've been looking more into what might have happened at the Tavistock and found an old Sunday Times Magazine article, I'm afraid I don't have an exact date but it refers to the CQC (care quality commission) rating GIDS (gender identity and development services, that includes the Tavistock clinic) as inadequate "last year" and the Cass interim report (that investigated the Tavistock) "will be published this year". I'd guess that puts it around some time in late 2021? Here's my summary for any readers who are interested.
The Sunday Times is politically centre-right, I'd say; they certainly do not pander to a left-wing audience, so when they mention something that the left is always saying, that increases my confidence that it might be true. One of my main takeaways from the article is that in CAMHS (child and adult mental health services, part of the NHS), to put it politely, demand greatly outnumbers supply. In some sense this is true of the NHS as a whole (waiting times to see your GP or accident & emergency services are a staple of local news websites), and the official answer to that is - to decree targets, and where they can, link them to performance-based payments.
So imagine a child gets to their local GP or mental health service, and among other problems they mention gender identity or present in a not completely gender-typical way. A charitable explanation is the local service recognises they're not gender experts, and refers them to the national centre for that kind of thing. A less charitable explanation is their calendar is kind of full, but ticking the "referred to specialist service" box helps them to hit their targets - the article calls this "offloaded to GIDS".
GIDS goes from 72 referrals in 2009-10 to around 1800 in 2016-17 to 3000-ish at the time the article was written. A lot of the article is statements from current or former Tavistock/GIDS clinicians, and it seems that under pressure, protocol completely went out the window. One interviewee said that clinicians were supposed to work on cases in teams of two with at least one person in each team a senior clinician, but in practice you could have two junior clinicians matched up together as GIDS hired new juniors to deal with the backlog. In theory, GIDS followed the Dutch protocol (mentioned in the main article) but even that only allows prescribing puberty blockers together with regular check-up meetings and support. The GIDS protocol seems to have been more of a "here's your prescription, you're cured now, next please!" kind of thing. In once case mentioned, a child was prescribed Lupron (normally a chemical castration drug for sex offenders, but also blocks puberty) after their very first meeting with GIDS. So GIDS was not even properly implementing the Dutch protocol. Some of the clinicians knew that they were in uncharted territory - "We all worry. Of course we worry.", one is quoted as saying. "It was the blind leading the blind.", another said.
This is the background against which the supporters of purely "affirming" treatment were allowed to do whatever they like as long they hit their targets. But here's the twist - there were actually people working at GIDS initially who were the closest thing to a "gender expert" that exists, namely gay and lesbian clinicians who genuinely wanted the best for the next generation of rainbow youth, and this does not mean transition at all costs as soon as possible. They would, at least at first, see the feminine presenting boys and tomboy girls (many of whom reported homophobic bullying) and try their best to offer a combination of therapy and reassurance. One case mentioned was a girl who was called a dyke and bullied at school because she liked Thomas the Tank Engine as a child, and later on hated her periods. Back before there were 3000 cases on the waiting list, someone could sit down with her and talk her through how many girls felt this way - later she moved on to sixth form school and told them "her dysphoria was resolved" and she was no longer being bullied. She did not transition.
The article goes on to describe how the new leaders at the Tavistock accused anyone who didn't agree with them, but especially the old guard of gays and lesbians, of being transphobic. Especially when they pointed out they themselves had been effeminate or butch as kids and that didn't make them trans, but "trans clinicians were revered for having superior insight and authority ... the testimony of gay staff was dismissed as irrelevant, even transphobic". Some of them took the hint, and resigned. One clinician quotes a case of a girl diagnosed as trans because she liked to wear boxer shorts (clinician: "I said in the Nineties this was what girls wore with baggy jeans.") The pro-transition director of GIDS Polly Carmichael meanwhile explained that with puberty blockers "The good thing is, if you stop the injections, it's like pressing a start button and the body just carries on developing as it would if you hadn't taken the injection."
Other patients, in the opinion of the clinicians quoted, were clear cases of anorexia, or had family/financial problems, or were autistic - but in the words of one of the interviewees, their partner clinician in some cases "only wanted to talk about gender".
In summary, according to the article (at least my interpretation), what happened in the UK was a severe capacity problem hitting a severe ideology problem, even though there were people around with actual expertise, both in psychology and in lesbian/gay issues.
Thanks so much for this interesting info and replies!
I guess by “there is no such thing as a gender expert” I mean there is no evidence-based branch of psychology that studies gender and uses that information to help distressed children.
Re “ GIDS goes from 72 referrals in 2009-10 to around 1800 in 2016-17 to 3000-ish at the time the article was written.” That might indeed be a capacity problem and and offloading problem — an accelerating social contagion could also be playing a part in it. If suddenly you’ve got tons of these kids all latching onto the fad, are you going to try to handle them or send them to the “experts” at GIDS since you don’t know what’s going on?
I saw a couple of different interviews with David Bell (one of the guys who expressed concerns about GIDS) and he said that the Tavistock had the reputation of having wonderful services — until they got a bunch of new, young, (non-expert since there is no such branch of psychology) gender clinicians who starting shoving every kid down the trans conveyor belt.
Whether it was because they were crowded, or because the clinicians so assigned were inexperienced, or some other reason, it was a horrible mess over there. I’m glad the UK had come to its senses and I hope the US won’t be too far behind.
The profit motive here with all our health care complicated everything. As long as unscrupulous doctors can milk the cash cow of transition, they well.
The best thing would be for these all to be considered what they are: cosmetic procedures, payable by the individual. Most of the demand would evaporate overnight.
Great text. I just object to the characterization of Covid policies. For the most, experts recommended what was the majority consensus at the time. Politicians at times did a poor job of implementing the possible maximum of science based policies at a given time - which led to Yoyo politics in many countries. The basis of which was, I believe, that they had no idea of what they actually wanted to achieve.
Mind, that is no argument against politicians making those choices in the end. Who else could? An epidemologist can make recommendations, but hardly has any grasp of potential side effects of the policies he proposes. Likewise, an economist - another expert desperately needed as an advisor in that situation - hardly has any idea of potential side effects of economic proposals etc. etc. So, a responsible politician will end up with a lot of contradictory inputs about a pandemic and will have to try to balance things out to achieve an outcome that kills as few people as possible and halts or at least slows down the spreading of the disease.
Being a responsible politician necessarily includes to have an idea of how our complex societies work and how one wants a society to look like. By far most politicians in power in the Western world and probably much beyond meet neither of these criteria.
There’s a way in which the covid response was so very politicized, though -- with Democrats implying that Republicans who didn’t cooperate were stupid, unclean, ignorant of science or killing Grandma (or themselves) and Republicans implying that Democrats were robotic followers of authority, taking dangerous vaccines and destroying other people’s liberties and freedoms.
Instead of leaders leading in a crisis: “Hey Americans, we’re all in this together: let’s put our petty political differences aside and do our best to achieve the best ongoing consensus we can, regardless of politics,” we didn’t come together as one people with one common goal in the crisis. It was unbelievable really.
Politically, covid was a shitshow when it didn’t have to be that way and indeed in many other places it was not. The politicization of covid in fact (I feel pretty confident) was part of the reason that deaths in the US were so very high compared to a lot of other places where the goal regardless of politics was to take care of people. To work together. To beat the virus.
In other crises -- and i don’t know if the difference was that they were pre social media -- Americans pulled together: we’re all in this together. (Pearl Harbor, 9/11). In fact how could anything be less controversial than “us against the virus”? There’s no one on Team Virus. And yet our leaders, instead of setting politics aside and banding together, showing Americans a united front on a crisis that truly transcended (or should have transcended) politics, milked it for political points. Over and over. Constantly. Every day.
It was truly one of the most disillusioning, disappointing experiences of my life, to see that our leaders (“leaders”) had sunk so far into selfishness, venality, and complete uselessness that they would milk a crisis that killed a million of us to see what political points they could win.
I respectfully disagree that epidemiologists would not have a grasp of the side effects of the proposal to lock down economies worldwide. It doesn't take a degree in economics to understand that the repercussions will be severe.
We have spent billions on CDC, NIH, WHO over the last decades. I would think that what to do in a pandemic should have been a topic of study and planning. They could have and should have consulted with experts in many fields to explore the possible ramifications of various containment strategies. Instead, we were given studies of racism as a public health problem. When it really counted, our investments in public health did not pay off very well.
I think people are looking back on the beginning and the height of the pandemic as if the conditions that exist today are the same as three years ago. They’re totally different.
Of course everyone knew that there would be horrible economic and social repercussions from the shutdowns.
But it was the best choice among bad choices. This was a global disaster. Hopefully a once-in-a-lifetime event. It was going to be horrible for everyone no matter what we did. There was no way to make this global disaster okay, or to maintain business as usual. There was not.
At the beginning, even pulmonary experts had NO idea how to save these people. At the beginning even doctors were getting sick and dying before they knew the appropriate PPE that would protect them. No one knew how the virus spread. No one knew if it passed through touching items like countertops or groceries. No one knew if masks would work, or which type of masks. No one knew if it spread indoors or outdoors or both. There is so much about this virus that we didn’t know that it’s hard to remember what that was like. But it was scary.
This was a bizarre new virus with completely unpredictable effects, which caused a weird and unique (and deadly) pneumonia, which caused all sorts of strange clotting disorders, heart attacks, strokes, pulmonary emboli, brain fog, or just plain “sudden death” -- a virus which caused autoimmune disease in children -- a virus which caused a really odd phenomenon where people would walk in with an O2 sat of 70 (apparently not realizing that they were at death’s door) but it explained why people often died quickly: by the time they realized something was badly wrong they were beyond help. And a lot of them died quickly.
We didn’t know how to help these sick people because we had never seen anything like this weird disease. We eventually learned quite unexpectedly that sticking them on ventilators wasn’t good. We didn’t have the monoclonal antibodies then. We didn’t have Paxlovid or any vaccines for a year. We experimented with convalescent plasma, with a lot of drugs that turned out not to be useful, and finally stumbled across one that seemed to save some lives (dexamethasone).
Before the knowledge and tools of, say, the first year made the disease more treatable and preventable, there were families who lost both healthy parents and there was nothing you could do to prevent it other than avoid going out -- there was a lot of death -- but you couldn’t visit your loved ones in the hospital to say goodbye. It was truly horrible AND it was the right thing to do at the time. You couldn’t gather for funerals. That, too, was truly horrible AND it was the right thing to do at the time.
Nearly three years later, with vaccines, various medications, and a better understanding of what the virus does and how to treat it, YES it is fine for everything to be open again. But you can’t compare now and three years ago. Apples and oranges. It was right to shut everything down. It was horrible for everyone AND it was right.
Contrary to the beliefs of those who thought the disease was simply a pretext to control them, when the disease was under better control, people went back to their regular lives.
It really comes down to this. A global disaster is never going to be comfortable, fun, or easy event for anyone.
I hope none of us ever has to endure another such one.
Nobody expects it to be comfortable, easy or fun - although the people who could work from home via Zoom sure tried to make it seem like we were "all in this together" at some kind of virtue-signalling sabbatical.
I thought we funded research at Wuhan to study coronaviruses. But somehow we didn't know how it was transmitted? We knew from very early on that the virus was most dangerous to older people and people with comorbidities, but public health officials refused to tailor the response to better target those most at risk. They shut down discussion of alternatives as deranged and dangerous, even though some of the proposals came from experts at Stanford, Harvard and Johns Hopkins.
I agree that 3 years later the situation looks very different. And maybe it was necessary to impose all the restrictions and mandates. It certainly would be worthwhile to evaluate the response, and the tradeoffs that were made. Contrary to the beliefs of those who think that everything can be shut down for months and then people just go back to their regular lives, there were real costs incurred that will be borne well into the future.
To think that there will be repercussions is not the same thing as understanding what these repercussions will be.
Also, even in the most severe of lockdowns there will be people who will have to work. It's not epidemiologist's job to think about them or to make proposals how to minimize their infection risks beyond, say, protective masks and/or suits. It takes a logistician to figure that out, or someone specialized in labor economics, that sort of thing. Just think about measures like shortening shifts, but then again, this will result in labor shortage in those sectors. So you have to figure out if you can recruit additional people for at least certain tasks, and where and how to do that. Etc. etc.
Likewise, an epidemiologist does not have to worry about how to enforce measures. Some measures will just prove to be unenforcable in certain environments. So you have to weigh risks of not enforcing against risks of overenforcing etc. In both cases, you may end up with damaging the credibility of overall measures.
With all due respect, you are making a lot of statements that are neither factually correct nor true, demonstrating the danger of thinking that originates in false, unexamined axioms.
“Experts” do not know or understand issues more broadly, but only more deeply ( and therefore by necessity more narrowly). In biomedical research experts base their statements and beliefs largely on published scientific papers. The editors of several major scientific journals having stated that this research cannot be trusted should prompt you to rethink your deep trust in such “experts “. As a matter of fact, deep expertise in one area (coupled sometimes with emotional confirmation bias) can blind you to dangers that are created when proceeding without understanding associated areas, and what is often referred to as “common sense”, ie dispassionate logical reasoning, can therefore often result in better decision making. This has most certainly been shown throughout the Covid “vaccination” fiasco.
You also make an incorrect statement about homeopathic remedies. While generally safe when chosen and dosed appropriately, they can most certainly have adverse effects. Such an adverse effect is sometimes referred to as a proving.
There is most certainly a vast amount of evidence at this point about the dangerous effects of spike protein-based injection therapies. There is also an immoral amount of lying and deceit from “expert”-manned government agencies. If the scientific aspect feels overwhelming to wade through and you therefore chose to get your information second hand through “experts” such as the aforementioned groups, you might see the recent Rasmussen poll about the ubiquity of severe side effects from these therapies.
Lastly, you argue by creating false dichotomies. There is, for example, never reason to choose to either always use antibiotics or never use antibiotics. Understanding both the potential benefits and significant dangers of using pharmaceutical antibiotics can guide the appropriate use of them. The fake tweets create an unnecessary strawman argument which you would not have needed to include were your claims more factually-based and your arguments on more solid ground.
It is impossible to be born in the wrong body and to recommend extreme body modifications for emotional distress doesn’t seem like a successful strategy.
I guess that’s what the UK, Sweden and Finland discovered too.
As with many things, we are even more extreme in the US. Can’t wait for us to catch up.
I honestly don’t understand your objections very well, although I’m truly trying to understand.
My statements about antibiotics (in the other post) were a thought experiment. They were not intended to make factual claims about antibiotics (other than “used appropriately, antibiotics cure infections, save lives, and prevent bad long-term outcomes of untreated bacterial infections, so a parent would be foolish to reject them out of hand”).
That’s hardly a controversial view. Nor did I intend anyone to understand it to mean “antibiotics are always good for every ailment.” That would be quite silly.
The point was, many parents would be frightened by the (true but small) dangers of antibiotics, which are arguably greater than the (true but small) dangers of the covid vaccines, if antibiotics were introduced today with similar scare-mongering tactics as we see with the vaccines.
I stand by my points that true information can be at times misleading (the previous post) and false information can be misleading (this post).
I stand by my opinion that if there’s a problem you cannot solve yourself, if you want to maximize your overall outcomes in life you will do well to listen to reputable, credible experts.
A doctor, for example, will know better than a plumber when taking antibiotics would be safe and appropriate for your child or not.
The pediatrician who’s always looked after your child will know better than a random person on Twitter claiming to be a doctor about what treatments or vaccines your child needs.
That does not mean listening to experts is an infallible approach. That doesn’t mean you’ll always be pleased with the result. That doesn’t mean that you must suspend your own critical thinking.
It just means you’re probably better off believing a credible doctor who’s studied the treatment (whether antibiotics or vaccines) than a person on Twitter who posts a chart of true but misleading information from CDC.
These are not at all wild or controversial claims! It’s something, though, which some people might not have considered before or thought about -- ie, that they might be so frightened by information that might factually be true (but misleading) that they make bad choices.
There’s a place for “common sense” to be sure. That’s similar to “trusting your gut.” We are in agreement about common sense.
However, often common sense without expertise is wrong -- just as a plumber might think his child with a fever needs an antibiotic, because the last time his child had a fever the doctor prescribed an antibiotic. Common sense perhaps, but maybe this time the child has a viral illness that antibiotics won’t help. The plumber has common sense but he can’t diagnose the difference between a bacterial and viral illness.
I’m not going to get into a discussion on homeopathy. It’s water. Anyone who enjoys using homeopathy is welcome to continue!
You’re simply incorrect when you say there’s “a vast amount of evidence at this point about the dangerous effects of spike protein-based injection therapies.”
These are exactly the sorts of false conclusions, quite honestly, the previous post was trying to address.
The mRNA vaccines, like antibiotics, have some strong and useful effects. Like any strong medication or any strong vaccine, they have some negative effects. These negative effects must not be minimized or dismissed. Every medical treatment that works also carries risk.
But after billions and billions of doses being administered worldwide, the cost-benefit is clearly on the side of vaccines.
Could it really be the case that every government in the world is in cahoots with vaccine manufacturers, and all those governments are also so evil, without exception, that they’ll give dangerous vaccines to their people, including people in their own families? Not a single nation has sounded the alarm? What does that tell you? Here’s a good place for common sense! 😀
It’s not a reasonable logical leap from “mRNA vaccines, like all vaccines, have side effects” to “the vaccines are dangerous and the spike proteins are to blame.”
You are exposed to enormously greater quantities of spike protein every time you get sick with covid. The created antigen -- in this case the scary-sounding “spike protein” -- is what prompts your body to protect itself from infection. Every vaccine introduces some foreign thing into your body that prompts your body to protect itself from infection.
You are welcome to disagree about what an “expert” is, if you believe I characterized an expert in a way you dislike. I believe I’m using it in the commonly understood sense: we ask the doctor and not the plumber for medical advice.
My point about experts in this post is that there is no such thing as a gender expert, and I hope I’ve established my reasons for thinking so.
Be well!
I’ll take the fact that my comment doesn’t appear anymore in the comments section as a compliment. It’s so very in line with the approach towards dissenting voices over the past few years.
Referring to data is not scaremongering, even if it scares you. It is still data. Arguing in favor of limiting exposure to and reliance on data is a dangerous authoritarian line of thinking. “The plumbers don’t understand antiobiotics, let’s not scare them with data”.
How do you reconcile your belief in “experts” with the fact that experts disagree? Experts are human beings, most of which are followers, not leaders, scared of loss of status, funding and jobs, scared of ostracism., tempted by money, status, power and hubris.
Who is your expert to be trusted when prominent experts are calling for an end to the mRNA experiment and others are not?https://www.audacy.com/podcasts/american-thought-leaders-29539/exclusive-dr-peter-mccullough-and-dr-aseem-malhotra-how-the-covid-19-vaccines-impact-the-heart-1543975943q
Expert opinion (considered the lowest form of evidence in science, btw) has led to the epidemic of antibiotic resistance https://www.cdc.gov/drugresistance/about.html ,
an increased death rate of 40% in working age people https://www.wfyi.org/news/articles/insurance-death-rates-working-age-people-up-40-percent
since the mRNA rollout, deaths of untold people after FDA approved drugs are released into the market.
Experts promised you that the mRNA therapy would prevent you from becoming infected with Covid after two shots, and here you are on your umpteenth “booster” with no end in sight for the shots you’ll need while almost 100% of the population has, still, now been infected.
If antibiotics were introduced today, what we should have is an open debate, with no picking or choosing of which expert gets to speak and which one gets censored so that we can ram through an agreed-upon narrative. We should have publication and analysis of data, both pre- and post marketing, and an honest subsequent analysis of who benefits when.
The events of the past few years have been frighteningly far from that. The serious harms https://www.clarkcountytoday.com/news/poll-12-million-americans-have-suffered-major-side-effect-from-covid-shots/ of the shots have been hidden and neglected and the injured ones left without help or compensation. Young people at no risk of harm from Covid have unnecessarily been exposed to the unknown dangers of a barely studied therapeutic that failed already in the study phase, while the IFR has been grossly overestimated https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341505353_The_infection_fatality_rate_of_COVID-19_inferred_from_seroprevalence_data
to cause exactly the kind of unwarranted fears that you claim the publishing actual facts would lead to.
I thank you for your thoughtful essays on other topics (where you for some reason don’t blindly trust experts) , but cannot continue to support an account that argues in favor of limiting individuals’ exposure to the truth (aka censorship) and argues in favor of acts that have been proven to cause so much harm to so many people. https://openvaers.com/covid-data
I did not remove your comment. In fact I replied to it at length, although I think there was some small glitch and the reply didn’t appear in the right place.
First, I need to share some background on myself: I have always aligned with liberal or Democrat policies and voted for them. I have had the Covid vaccine + 1 booster (other boosters delayed because I got Covid and followed the science on trying to maximize natural immunity + booster immunity that both wane after time). I worked to help others find the vaccine early when it first came out. I’ve very much lived by “follow the science” and “fact checking” by cross checking with “reliable sources” like media outlets rated as high in factuality (like NYT, NPR, and WaPo), looking at snopes, checking the cdc page, etc.
Then my adolescent daughter was hit with a mental health crisis and she found videos during the school closures when kids basically lived online telling her that transition would solve everything. Like always, I did my research. I read the studies, saw their weaknesses and limitations. I learned everything you are writing about in this post. Then I saw the split between what was being reported by the people I had been taught to trust for my fact checking vs what was being reported and what I was reading in these studies and what you detail in your post. The “bad guys” and the “disreputable sources” (Daily Mail, New York Post, Jesse Singal, etc) were where I found reporting that matched the studies and the reality. It was disorienting beyond belief.
Even worse, the experts I had been taught to trust - doctors, nurses, hospitals, and therapists - and who were involved in my daughter’s direct care were all stating the bad info as facts. And not just the experts. Also family, friends, and teachers.
Am I assuming correctly that you are not the parent of a child who has dealt with the medical and mental healthcare systems for a child questioning their gender identity? It is really hard to overstate how stressful it is to have a child self-harming and actively threatening and attempting suicide, literally trying to save your child, and hearing that this is the only option. And not just hearing it’s the only option, but getting threatened with everything from state intervention and loss of custody to not caring that your child is at high risk of dying because of you. Even if you have all your research, sources cited, and references to relevant laws - even if you have done all the research hat you are describing in your post, do you know how impossible it is to find a therapist, a treatment program, a hospital, anyone who will provide care and support based on the facts? Even those who share your concerns will tell you they have to follow policies by their employer or professional organization.
Also, once the you see and experience all this, seeing all the trusted, “highly factual,” media tell you that you are wrong (and a right wing bigoted hateful parent who thinks they know more than the experts), and everyone from your child’s teacher to the president of the United States telling you you’re wrong while being able to fact check and disprove what they’re saying (and while your daughter gets more and more unwell and nearly dies because no one is willing to consider that perhaps - just for her case - this isn’t working), you start to feel like the ground beneath you is shifting and everything you thought you knew and trusted maybe isn’t. What else are you being told that isn’t true but you don’t have the time to read and dissect every study about it? It’s extremely disorienting and trying to figure out how to walk the line is incredibly hard.
Briefly back to vaccines: vaccine expert Paul Offit - a true expert and a pro-vaccine educator and advocate - has said it may be time to reconsider how we are looking at the boosters and who should be getting them. There are many who would call this anti-vax rhetoric and claim that experts can become captured by right wing narratives and therefore should no longer be considered experts. So what do I do, someone who understands how the “experts” snd “reliable sources” got gender medicine so wrong? I don’t know. But I’m waiting and listening with an open mind with the hard won knowledge that there’s no easy, checklist manual for how to navigate it.
I’m really sorry for the horrible experience you have gone through and I wish you and your daughter health and a brighter future.
What you describe sounds quite familiar and I’ve heard about these terrible scenarios happening again and again -- even more so a few years ago.
This is exactly why I say this isn’t the parents’ fault. How could it be when the medical and health care community are aligned against them and telling them lies, and the media and nearly everyone to the left of Trump are insisting it’s the best thing to do?
I hope -- really hope -- that there are slightly more resources for questioning parents today than there were five years ago when I first felt like something was very wrong. Hardly anyone spoke up then. Now there’s SEGM, Genspect, podcasts, online support groups for parents, books (Abigail’s, Helen’s), more people who are slightly less timid than before about expressing public doubts --and there are even a few (few!) therapists who will do actual therapy with these kids and try to help them. There are entire countries that are saying “look, the evidence isn’t there.”
A parent who newly faces this problem today isn’t quite as alone as a parent who’s been struggling for quite a while.
None of the this matters, though, if it’s your own child who’s been struggling and suffering and getting sicker. I’m sure of that.
“and while your daughter gets more and more unwell and nearly dies because no one is willing to consider that perhaps - just for her case - this isn’t working.”
I can’t imagine how frustrating -- beyond frustrating: nightmarish -- that would be. There are no words.
And if you live in a jurisdiction where you could lose custody, it’s even worse.
You’re right that I’m not in this situation but if I were, I’d move to a state that wouldn’t take custody of my child, completely remove all access to the internet, enroll my kid in a school where this ideology is not taught (even if that meant a religious school that I completely don’t believe in -- because any religious Christian indoctrination would be less harmful than the religious gender indoctrination), and get on the waiting list of one of the few therapists that would help her.
I’m not saying this is possible for everyone, and I’m not saying failing to do these things is wrong. I’m not even sure those are the right things. Uprooting your family is a very serious thing. But I’m acknowledging how serious, how dangerous, how all-consuming this is, that I would completely uproot and disrupt my own life to address it.
Paul Offit is a guy I respect and he has a reasonable point of view about the vaccines although it’s not a view I necessarily completely agree with. If he’s coded right and as an “anti-vaxxed” for his views (the guy who developed a vaccine for kids) it’s a symptom of the problem we’re talking about. Politicization to an insane irrational degree.
This is why now, sadly, we often can’t trust what we hear, and more so than in generations past, we’re forced to make our own decisions even though we’re not experts.
Thanks for your comments!
I really appreciate your kind, thoughtful response.
I’d like to expand on something you said because it is so important for understanding the issue of experts you’re talking about:
I found all the info you’re referencing from Genspect, Abigail Shrier, Helen Joyce, SEGM, etc. when I tried to take that info to the people controlling my child’s care, I was told they were not “reliable sources.” I was told Genspect wasn’t reliable and that they were funded by far right christian groups. I was told Abigail Shrier’s book was hateful rhetoric that would kill kids (remember when ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio tweeted that stopping people from reading Shrier’s book was a hill he would die on?). Helen Joyce is dismissed as a TERF and not a legit source. If you google “SEGM legitimate group” you get articles calling it a fringe group with dodgy science that is not legitimate. If you are a parent asking questions and find genspect, SEGM, Shrier but then do your due diligence to determine if they are “legitimate sources” of info, the answer you get from the people you’ve been taught to trust is “no, this is fringe extremism, right wing dodgy science from hateful people.”
Even if you as the parent see that this is not true, how do you get the people treating your child, the hospitals, the schools, the volunteer on the suicide hotline your child called and who told her she’s start feeling better once she took testosterone, Joe Biden, Rachel Levine, every democrat from our two senators to our local representative to believe these are legitimate resources of information? In their view, you’re citing Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson, fascists and neo-Nazis. What does a parent do with that? Claiming that everyone from the government to the entire medical profession to all the media has gotten it wrong and you know better is the messaging used to refute climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers...heck, even flat earthers. Abbie Richards - the anti-extremist and misinformation educator on TikTok lumps or with belief in a “trans agenda” and puts it in the same category as holocaust denial. How is a researching parent to respond? How do you convince your child’s psychiatrist that has seen this kind of framing to take you seriously? How do you not start questioning other things? It’s truly disorienting and frightening
I know you’re not blaming parents - I just really want to communicate yes problem with talking about who are the experts and what are legit sources of info when there are dynamics (maybe even power structures?) that control what and who are considered legitimate sources of information.
Yes. Absolutely right now in the US the situation is terrible. Getting better (maybe? slowly? way too slowly for parents who are facing this crisis with their kids) but still terrible.
I have no doubt that all these things you tried to bring up were dismissed. I’m sure that’s true.
As I mentioned to Heyjude below, if an “expert” won’t address your questions about basic factual claims, how can that person be trusted to tell you what to do with your kid?
If they can’t explain why they follow WPATH when it’s based on nothing to the extent that it can’t even be given a TRUST scorecard, then why would anyone listen to their advice?
Obviously a parent in your situation can’t worry about helping the entire world, or hope to convince people who are ideologically brainwashed (because essentially that’s what it is) to believe as you do, or to consider SEGM a reliable group.
You can only worry about your own child.
But I think what these sources do provide for struggling families is another voice so they can (1) see that no, not everyone thinks affirmation and transition for all are the only correct route; and (2) have information sources that they can examine themselves, which can give them more confidence in their own (currently very unpopular) decision-making.
If a parent looks at Genspect’s or SEGM’s claims and reads the scholarly literature they support it with, and then compare that with WPATH’s, someone who really goes to enough trouble to examine it all will soon see who has facts and evidence and who does not.
This sort of crisis should not be a do-it-yourself at home project, but if everyone you approach for help tells you you’re bad and wrong and need to trans your kid, you will probably be better off cutting yourself off from those irrational fake-expert voices and finding help from the few people who are doing real therapy with those kids.
Easier said than done. And many parents -- again, these are people whom I don’t blame -- simply aren’t as skeptical as you or I, and their kids are paying a terrible cost from being misguided by fake experts.
The older I get, the more I think being skeptical and trying to ferret out information for yourself relates to some in-born personality trait.
And sometimes that in-born personality trait, which is probably often helpful, gets hijacked in service to things like homeopathy or Q-Anon. So even that is not a 100% reliable guide. Skeptical people sometimes end up believing some really wacky things.
It would be nice if the world agreed with us, didn’t think we’re evil and bigoted, and provided actual help for these kids. But that’s not the world we’re living in at present.
I feel so much for parents in this situation.
We are now living in a cult- the cult of the experts. Expertise is of course essential in an advanced society. But today claimed expertise is used for power and control. When any dissent from the established narrative is immediately shut down, you are no longer talking about experts concerned about helping people.
Branches of the cult of expertise:
Public health. Follow our dictates or people will die!
Gender health. Follow our dictates or children will die!
Climate change. Follow our dictates or the world will die!
Education. Only teachers know what children should learn. Follow our dictates or the oppressors will harm your children!
Politicians. Follow our dictates or democracy will die!
We need to start using our own ability to think and reason again. Yes, we need experts. We should respect and appreciate them. But we cannot allow our society to become a dictatorship of self proclaimed experts who allow no questions and refuse to show their proof.
Hi Heyjude thanks for your comments! You’re describing untrustworthy, politicized fake-expertise to a T.
In all these areas you list, there are some real and not politicized experts who are speaking based on evidence.
A real expert speaks based on facts and evidence.
Fake experts undermine the credibility of real ones, especially when political leaders give them a large platform for their own selfish reasons:
It’s a definite problem we face.
I think a sign of real expertise is confidence in responding to challenges. Anyone who evades debate by claiming that counter arguments are dangerous loses my confidence in their proclamations.
That’s a really useful rule of thumb! That’s a lot of what Puzzle Therapy and other parents in this situation are experiencing, They’ll point to A, B, C conflicting sources of information and instead of engaging with the facts, the fake experts will just dismiss them as fringe and incorrect. If you want to convince someone that their sources of info are fringe or incorrect, you can’t just say that. You need to at the very least address their factual claims.
If someone isn’t well-versed enough to engage on the level of factual claims, how much trust do you want to give them, right?
One of the points you hit on a couple of times that is so puzzling is how these "experts" think the answer is to essentially Truman Show these people: If we all will just pretend on the surface that
"sure you're a Real woman", or whatever else, that somehow will make it so. As you say, we would never do this with someone suffering a different form of psychological distress, we don't all agree to go around saying that the Schizophrenic man who believes that he's god is really god, that would be counterproductive for both him and us. (I completely support adults doing what they want and will address anyone the way that they wish to be addressed, within reason. But we can't abandon reason completely to temporarily placate the activist types.)
Really good essay. It's nice to see things laid out so clearly.
Thanks very much, Louis, for the kind remarks.
Yes— it seems actually cruel and counterproductive and harmful to go along with children in this way, and essentially expect the world to play pretend. It seems insulting and condescending too.
Would it not be more helpful and more kind to encourage a feminine little boy to embrace his femininity (preferences, clothing, toys, activities, friends) and encourage society to treat boys like him with kindness and respect?
Instead of this game of pretend? It’s almost like you are teaching this feminine boy to be ashamed of being a boy at all. No wonder he’s miserable and wishes he were a girl.
Maybe it’s not the boy who needs to change at all. Maybe other things in our culture must change to make room for him.
Thank you for writing this - it's certainly true that "trust experts" doesn't help in a domain where we haven't had the time and resources to build up proper expertise yet - there are no gender experts (although, possible plot twist later in this post).
I've been looking more into what might have happened at the Tavistock and found an old Sunday Times Magazine article, I'm afraid I don't have an exact date but it refers to the CQC (care quality commission) rating GIDS (gender identity and development services, that includes the Tavistock clinic) as inadequate "last year" and the Cass interim report (that investigated the Tavistock) "will be published this year". I'd guess that puts it around some time in late 2021? Here's my summary for any readers who are interested.
The Sunday Times is politically centre-right, I'd say; they certainly do not pander to a left-wing audience, so when they mention something that the left is always saying, that increases my confidence that it might be true. One of my main takeaways from the article is that in CAMHS (child and adult mental health services, part of the NHS), to put it politely, demand greatly outnumbers supply. In some sense this is true of the NHS as a whole (waiting times to see your GP or accident & emergency services are a staple of local news websites), and the official answer to that is - to decree targets, and where they can, link them to performance-based payments.
So imagine a child gets to their local GP or mental health service, and among other problems they mention gender identity or present in a not completely gender-typical way. A charitable explanation is the local service recognises they're not gender experts, and refers them to the national centre for that kind of thing. A less charitable explanation is their calendar is kind of full, but ticking the "referred to specialist service" box helps them to hit their targets - the article calls this "offloaded to GIDS".
GIDS goes from 72 referrals in 2009-10 to around 1800 in 2016-17 to 3000-ish at the time the article was written. A lot of the article is statements from current or former Tavistock/GIDS clinicians, and it seems that under pressure, protocol completely went out the window. One interviewee said that clinicians were supposed to work on cases in teams of two with at least one person in each team a senior clinician, but in practice you could have two junior clinicians matched up together as GIDS hired new juniors to deal with the backlog. In theory, GIDS followed the Dutch protocol (mentioned in the main article) but even that only allows prescribing puberty blockers together with regular check-up meetings and support. The GIDS protocol seems to have been more of a "here's your prescription, you're cured now, next please!" kind of thing. In once case mentioned, a child was prescribed Lupron (normally a chemical castration drug for sex offenders, but also blocks puberty) after their very first meeting with GIDS. So GIDS was not even properly implementing the Dutch protocol. Some of the clinicians knew that they were in uncharted territory - "We all worry. Of course we worry.", one is quoted as saying. "It was the blind leading the blind.", another said.
This is the background against which the supporters of purely "affirming" treatment were allowed to do whatever they like as long they hit their targets. But here's the twist - there were actually people working at GIDS initially who were the closest thing to a "gender expert" that exists, namely gay and lesbian clinicians who genuinely wanted the best for the next generation of rainbow youth, and this does not mean transition at all costs as soon as possible. They would, at least at first, see the feminine presenting boys and tomboy girls (many of whom reported homophobic bullying) and try their best to offer a combination of therapy and reassurance. One case mentioned was a girl who was called a dyke and bullied at school because she liked Thomas the Tank Engine as a child, and later on hated her periods. Back before there were 3000 cases on the waiting list, someone could sit down with her and talk her through how many girls felt this way - later she moved on to sixth form school and told them "her dysphoria was resolved" and she was no longer being bullied. She did not transition.
The article goes on to describe how the new leaders at the Tavistock accused anyone who didn't agree with them, but especially the old guard of gays and lesbians, of being transphobic. Especially when they pointed out they themselves had been effeminate or butch as kids and that didn't make them trans, but "trans clinicians were revered for having superior insight and authority ... the testimony of gay staff was dismissed as irrelevant, even transphobic". Some of them took the hint, and resigned. One clinician quotes a case of a girl diagnosed as trans because she liked to wear boxer shorts (clinician: "I said in the Nineties this was what girls wore with baggy jeans.") The pro-transition director of GIDS Polly Carmichael meanwhile explained that with puberty blockers "The good thing is, if you stop the injections, it's like pressing a start button and the body just carries on developing as it would if you hadn't taken the injection."
Other patients, in the opinion of the clinicians quoted, were clear cases of anorexia, or had family/financial problems, or were autistic - but in the words of one of the interviewees, their partner clinician in some cases "only wanted to talk about gender".
In summary, according to the article (at least my interpretation), what happened in the UK was a severe capacity problem hitting a severe ideology problem, even though there were people around with actual expertise, both in psychology and in lesbian/gay issues.
Thanks so much for this interesting info and replies!
I guess by “there is no such thing as a gender expert” I mean there is no evidence-based branch of psychology that studies gender and uses that information to help distressed children.
Re “ GIDS goes from 72 referrals in 2009-10 to around 1800 in 2016-17 to 3000-ish at the time the article was written.” That might indeed be a capacity problem and and offloading problem — an accelerating social contagion could also be playing a part in it. If suddenly you’ve got tons of these kids all latching onto the fad, are you going to try to handle them or send them to the “experts” at GIDS since you don’t know what’s going on?
I saw a couple of different interviews with David Bell (one of the guys who expressed concerns about GIDS) and he said that the Tavistock had the reputation of having wonderful services — until they got a bunch of new, young, (non-expert since there is no such branch of psychology) gender clinicians who starting shoving every kid down the trans conveyor belt.
Whether it was because they were crowded, or because the clinicians so assigned were inexperienced, or some other reason, it was a horrible mess over there. I’m glad the UK had come to its senses and I hope the US won’t be too far behind.
The profit motive here with all our health care complicated everything. As long as unscrupulous doctors can milk the cash cow of transition, they well.
The best thing would be for these all to be considered what they are: cosmetic procedures, payable by the individual. Most of the demand would evaporate overnight.
Great text. I just object to the characterization of Covid policies. For the most, experts recommended what was the majority consensus at the time. Politicians at times did a poor job of implementing the possible maximum of science based policies at a given time - which led to Yoyo politics in many countries. The basis of which was, I believe, that they had no idea of what they actually wanted to achieve.
Mind, that is no argument against politicians making those choices in the end. Who else could? An epidemologist can make recommendations, but hardly has any grasp of potential side effects of the policies he proposes. Likewise, an economist - another expert desperately needed as an advisor in that situation - hardly has any idea of potential side effects of economic proposals etc. etc. So, a responsible politician will end up with a lot of contradictory inputs about a pandemic and will have to try to balance things out to achieve an outcome that kills as few people as possible and halts or at least slows down the spreading of the disease.
Being a responsible politician necessarily includes to have an idea of how our complex societies work and how one wants a society to look like. By far most politicians in power in the Western world and probably much beyond meet neither of these criteria.
There’s a way in which the covid response was so very politicized, though -- with Democrats implying that Republicans who didn’t cooperate were stupid, unclean, ignorant of science or killing Grandma (or themselves) and Republicans implying that Democrats were robotic followers of authority, taking dangerous vaccines and destroying other people’s liberties and freedoms.
Instead of leaders leading in a crisis: “Hey Americans, we’re all in this together: let’s put our petty political differences aside and do our best to achieve the best ongoing consensus we can, regardless of politics,” we didn’t come together as one people with one common goal in the crisis. It was unbelievable really.
Politically, covid was a shitshow when it didn’t have to be that way and indeed in many other places it was not. The politicization of covid in fact (I feel pretty confident) was part of the reason that deaths in the US were so very high compared to a lot of other places where the goal regardless of politics was to take care of people. To work together. To beat the virus.
In other crises -- and i don’t know if the difference was that they were pre social media -- Americans pulled together: we’re all in this together. (Pearl Harbor, 9/11). In fact how could anything be less controversial than “us against the virus”? There’s no one on Team Virus. And yet our leaders, instead of setting politics aside and banding together, showing Americans a united front on a crisis that truly transcended (or should have transcended) politics, milked it for political points. Over and over. Constantly. Every day.
It was truly one of the most disillusioning, disappointing experiences of my life, to see that our leaders (“leaders”) had sunk so far into selfishness, venality, and complete uselessness that they would milk a crisis that killed a million of us to see what political points they could win.
I respectfully disagree that epidemiologists would not have a grasp of the side effects of the proposal to lock down economies worldwide. It doesn't take a degree in economics to understand that the repercussions will be severe.
We have spent billions on CDC, NIH, WHO over the last decades. I would think that what to do in a pandemic should have been a topic of study and planning. They could have and should have consulted with experts in many fields to explore the possible ramifications of various containment strategies. Instead, we were given studies of racism as a public health problem. When it really counted, our investments in public health did not pay off very well.
I think people are looking back on the beginning and the height of the pandemic as if the conditions that exist today are the same as three years ago. They’re totally different.
Of course everyone knew that there would be horrible economic and social repercussions from the shutdowns.
But it was the best choice among bad choices. This was a global disaster. Hopefully a once-in-a-lifetime event. It was going to be horrible for everyone no matter what we did. There was no way to make this global disaster okay, or to maintain business as usual. There was not.
At the beginning, even pulmonary experts had NO idea how to save these people. At the beginning even doctors were getting sick and dying before they knew the appropriate PPE that would protect them. No one knew how the virus spread. No one knew if it passed through touching items like countertops or groceries. No one knew if masks would work, or which type of masks. No one knew if it spread indoors or outdoors or both. There is so much about this virus that we didn’t know that it’s hard to remember what that was like. But it was scary.
This was a bizarre new virus with completely unpredictable effects, which caused a weird and unique (and deadly) pneumonia, which caused all sorts of strange clotting disorders, heart attacks, strokes, pulmonary emboli, brain fog, or just plain “sudden death” -- a virus which caused autoimmune disease in children -- a virus which caused a really odd phenomenon where people would walk in with an O2 sat of 70 (apparently not realizing that they were at death’s door) but it explained why people often died quickly: by the time they realized something was badly wrong they were beyond help. And a lot of them died quickly.
We didn’t know how to help these sick people because we had never seen anything like this weird disease. We eventually learned quite unexpectedly that sticking them on ventilators wasn’t good. We didn’t have the monoclonal antibodies then. We didn’t have Paxlovid or any vaccines for a year. We experimented with convalescent plasma, with a lot of drugs that turned out not to be useful, and finally stumbled across one that seemed to save some lives (dexamethasone).
Before the knowledge and tools of, say, the first year made the disease more treatable and preventable, there were families who lost both healthy parents and there was nothing you could do to prevent it other than avoid going out -- there was a lot of death -- but you couldn’t visit your loved ones in the hospital to say goodbye. It was truly horrible AND it was the right thing to do at the time. You couldn’t gather for funerals. That, too, was truly horrible AND it was the right thing to do at the time.
Nearly three years later, with vaccines, various medications, and a better understanding of what the virus does and how to treat it, YES it is fine for everything to be open again. But you can’t compare now and three years ago. Apples and oranges. It was right to shut everything down. It was horrible for everyone AND it was right.
Contrary to the beliefs of those who thought the disease was simply a pretext to control them, when the disease was under better control, people went back to their regular lives.
It really comes down to this. A global disaster is never going to be comfortable, fun, or easy event for anyone.
I hope none of us ever has to endure another such one.
Nobody expects it to be comfortable, easy or fun - although the people who could work from home via Zoom sure tried to make it seem like we were "all in this together" at some kind of virtue-signalling sabbatical.
I thought we funded research at Wuhan to study coronaviruses. But somehow we didn't know how it was transmitted? We knew from very early on that the virus was most dangerous to older people and people with comorbidities, but public health officials refused to tailor the response to better target those most at risk. They shut down discussion of alternatives as deranged and dangerous, even though some of the proposals came from experts at Stanford, Harvard and Johns Hopkins.
I agree that 3 years later the situation looks very different. And maybe it was necessary to impose all the restrictions and mandates. It certainly would be worthwhile to evaluate the response, and the tradeoffs that were made. Contrary to the beliefs of those who think that everything can be shut down for months and then people just go back to their regular lives, there were real costs incurred that will be borne well into the future.
To think that there will be repercussions is not the same thing as understanding what these repercussions will be.
Also, even in the most severe of lockdowns there will be people who will have to work. It's not epidemiologist's job to think about them or to make proposals how to minimize their infection risks beyond, say, protective masks and/or suits. It takes a logistician to figure that out, or someone specialized in labor economics, that sort of thing. Just think about measures like shortening shifts, but then again, this will result in labor shortage in those sectors. So you have to figure out if you can recruit additional people for at least certain tasks, and where and how to do that. Etc. etc.
Likewise, an epidemiologist does not have to worry about how to enforce measures. Some measures will just prove to be unenforcable in certain environments. So you have to weigh risks of not enforcing against risks of overenforcing etc. In both cases, you may end up with damaging the credibility of overall measures.
With all due respect, you are making a lot of statements that are neither factually correct nor true, demonstrating the danger of thinking that originates in false, unexamined axioms.
“Experts” do not know or understand issues more broadly, but only more deeply ( and therefore by necessity more narrowly). In biomedical research experts base their statements and beliefs largely on published scientific papers. The editors of several major scientific journals having stated that this research cannot be trusted should prompt you to rethink your deep trust in such “experts “. As a matter of fact, deep expertise in one area (coupled sometimes with emotional confirmation bias) can blind you to dangers that are created when proceeding without understanding associated areas, and what is often referred to as “common sense”, ie dispassionate logical reasoning, can therefore often result in better decision making. This has most certainly been shown throughout the Covid “vaccination” fiasco.
You also make an incorrect statement about homeopathic remedies. While generally safe when chosen and dosed appropriately, they can most certainly have adverse effects. Such an adverse effect is sometimes referred to as a proving.
There is most certainly a vast amount of evidence at this point about the dangerous effects of spike protein-based injection therapies. There is also an immoral amount of lying and deceit from “expert”-manned government agencies. If the scientific aspect feels overwhelming to wade through and you therefore chose to get your information second hand through “experts” such as the aforementioned groups, you might see the recent Rasmussen poll about the ubiquity of severe side effects from these therapies.
Lastly, you argue by creating false dichotomies. There is, for example, never reason to choose to either always use antibiotics or never use antibiotics. Understanding both the potential benefits and significant dangers of using pharmaceutical antibiotics can guide the appropriate use of them. The fake tweets create an unnecessary strawman argument which you would not have needed to include were your claims more factually-based and your arguments on more solid ground.
It is impossible to be born in the wrong body and to recommend extreme body modifications for emotional distress doesn’t seem like a successful strategy.
I guess that’s what the UK, Sweden and Finland discovered too.
As with many things, we are even more extreme in the US. Can’t wait for us to catch up.
Fall of Rome seems to be the stage we are at….sadly. I refuse to sacrifice my children.