Some people just aren't ready for the adult table. It's hard to analyze empirical evidence and create reasoned arguments, but it's much easier to dismiss your opponents as evil.
"I don't agree with that police reform idea" gets interpreted as "I don't care about police abuse."
"I don't think that economic policy will work" gets interpreted as "I don't care if poor people starve."
"I don't think that COVID policy passes a cost-benefit analysis" gets interpreted as "I don't care if millions of people die from COVID."
"I don't think that climate policy is optimal" gets interpreted as "I don't think climate change is real."
etc etc. And apparently my mixed views on the Ukraine-Russia conflict make me both a CIA and Putin shill, yet I haven't gotten a check from either? What's up with that?
I don't use Twitter or Reddit for much beyond hockey, board games, and memes at this point, since so few people seem capable of even rudimentary argumentation. What's extra sad is that many of these people have college degrees, which shows the increasing uselessness of those instructions.
I've learned to appreciate libertarianism. I'm not a fan of it's political goals; I'd prefer the median sci-fi dystopia over a libertarian society. However, they've clearly thought it through, and generally have arguments and counter-argument and counter-counter-arguments for their positions. Most political movements can't say the same.
I've learned to appreciate normie liberals who don't receive the memos that woke social- and mainstream-media types do, either directly or from their social milieu. That is, 2014-style liberals who just didn't participate in the brainworms of recent years.
On the other hand, there's nothing more boring than obsession over personal identifies with no material meaning.
I've met plenty of women are "bi" but would never touch another women in a 10 foot pole. I just assumed it was the female version of guys who talk about kicking people's asses but will never actually fight anyone
I totally get what you're saying even though I'm not a fan of libertarianism -- not by a long shot -- but they are more likely to be independent thinkers and provide explanations for why they think as they do, which I respect even if I disagree. Justin Amash and I disagree on a lot of things politically, but he strikes me as someone with integrity with good intentions.
We have given up on evidence based truths, based on outcomes, a long time ago. We now operate in what philosophers call "closed systems"; that is, no possible evidence can negate the truth of the initial premises. All contrary evidence is interpreted under the assumption that the initial premise is true.
In such a system, bad outcomes for child transition will only mean that the transition was not done early enough. We need to start earlier! We haven't invested enough funds in making sure this works! The bad outcomes are only caused by those evil anti-trans people! And on and on...
This is how we have dealt with every obvious failure over the last century. The philosophies and premises are not wrong. The overwhelming evidence that they don't work is really just evidence that these brilliant ideas were not properly implemented. So spend more, start earlier, pass more and more laws and so on. And when they still don't work, of course it can only be due to the moral failings of those who don't agree with the experts who know their ideas are right.
Right— good point about closed systems— once you accept the premise that disagreement is incorrect and based on hate, you can’t hear anything else. It really prevents discussion.
I have become nostalgic for the Oprah show and Phil Donahue (not to be confused with Dr. Phil!) I didn’t admit to watching them, but I did watch when I was home with young kids. The discussions could be facile but that made them accessible to all, and no topic seemed to be off limits. Above all, they were respectful of differing views. Today, we make knee-jerk pronouncements that come from a chain of trust in the spokespeople of our tribes. Often it works well enough, but this issue is a glaring exception. If we can’t have Oprah to inform us, I’d settle for a Congressional hearing or two!
What I appreciated about those shows (which I also occasionally watched) was that they assumed that people, or more specifically women, could consider various points of view and develop their own opinions.
Great piece. It’s so disingenuous to claim opponents of pediatric transition want trans kids to suffer. But it’s such a common line. I don’t know how we will ever sort this out when it has become so politicized.
I wish we could start by acknowledging that, all else equal, it’s not ideal for kids to need hormones and surgery. Just like it’s better to not need chemo or antidepressants or any medical treatment. If a child tells her parents “I want male hormones and surgery” it’s appropriate to not consent unless the parents are 100% sure that the alternative will be worse for the child.
Instead the message is that “Almost no one regrets this” and “If they do it’s not a big deal” and any concerns are just bigotry. They’re asking parents to greenlight a treatment that comes with health risks, loss of fertility, possible sexual dysfunction, a lifetime of medical needs, and there’s just no acknowledgement that reservations are valid.
The push to affirm and transition kids ASAP scares the shit out of parents. Sure, there are conservative types who oppose transition for religious reasons / desire to enforce gender conformity. But a lot of other people are simply terrified of getting it wrong.
I don’t support the Alabama bill. I don’t want legislatures deciding this at all, in either direction. But it’s a reaction to the activist position that says legitimate concerns=hatred.
Thank you for your comments, Carina -- they're always so thoughtful and valuable to the convo! The point about "just like it's better to not need chemo or antidepressants or any medical treatment" is such a good one. Yes, all things being equal, it's better to leave our bodies alone if we can avoid it. Even something as miraculously beneficial as antibiotics can be overused and harmful.
I'm not sure how I feel about the Alabama bill. Yes, this seems a bizarre thing to be left up to legislators and the individual states -- similar to abortion. Medical issues are not best left up to legislators. On the other hand, if they perceive harm being done to the kids in Alabama, and no one else is stepping in to stop it (the medical societies are certainly not regulating themselves; on the contrary, like any other medical cash cow, it's been fully embraced), I can see why they want to take action.
It's kind of like -- if they see harm happening and they can do something about it, why wouldn't they?
What do you think would be the best response? I would think "let the medical societies decide" except that I know how medical societies operate. They mean well, I'm sure, but the profit makes it really hard to see how pernicious this is. If we wait for the expensive lawsuits (which are surely coming) to put the brakes on, a lot of other kids will be harmed in the meantime. I just don't know the best response -- so I'm not opposed to legislation until I hear about a better response.
Aww, thanks your posts always give me a lot to think about. Especially on this issue where I feel conflicted.
> What do you think would be the best response?
It’s a tough question. I’m not prepared to say no child should ever transition, because I don’t feel qualified to say what is best for 100% of kids. The only thing I know for sure is that current practices are irresponsible, as evidenced by those with regret and bad outcomes.
Also, practically, I don’t think bans work. Families will travel, move, or find other ways, especially when most states allow treatment.
I think we need lawsuits to make doctors more cautious, combined with raising awareness to change public opinion (especially among the educated left). This would get us to a place with more careful assessment and fewer regrets.
To be honest, it’s hard for me to imagine <18 transition ending entirely. For better or worse, I don’t see how the toothpaste gets back in the tube. Unless the number of adults asserting the current activist framework (TWAW, etc) dwindles to almost zero which is… hard to imagine. But we may reach a place where intervention before puberty becomes rare.
I hope it does. I can’t imagine transition being in the best interests of any child. And I can’t imagine the illusion that it is beneficial can hold up long term. In the meantime, while we wait for reality for displace the fantasy, I see actual children physically and emotionally harmed. It’s…distressing to say the least.
I do support the Alabama bill, because the medical community has just gone completely off the rails on this; they are not functioning in an evidence-based way. When this happens, deferral to their judgment on medical issues (which is normally called for and appropriate) is no longer the best path for society, and political intervention is required.
I do think the bizarre American profit motive in medicine means that we are slower to correct course compared to countries like Sweden, Finland or the UK.
There is. Many people associated with the NHS’s gender clinic complained officially and several resigned. Some felt it was “conversion therapy” for kids whose parents would find a “straight” “trans” child preferable to a gay child.
In fact this week an official distinction was being made (by Boris Johnson maybe?) between real conversion therapy (trying to make gay kids straight) and exploratory therapy for kids with gender distress which some activists had also been calling “conversion therapy” too. The UK is backing off such a broad definition and they are coming to understand that exploratory therapy is important and preferable to blanket “affirmation.”
The Keira Bell case had quite an effect in influencing the UK to understand that puberty blockers and surgeries are not appropriate for young people in distress. That is still going through appeals etc, but the general mood is shifting away from mindless affirmation and transing of kids.
There’s also been a few research papers showing that affirmation and transing really don’t have the promised beneficial effect.
If it's any consolation, Canada is even further behind than the US. The Trudeau government has effectively made affirmative care mandatory nationwide, by
1) Establishing a binary between affirmative care and conversion therapy (there is no middle ground)
2) Banning conversion therapy (thus, by process of elimination, affirmative care is the only legal form of care)
Any doctor in Canada who doesn't immediately commit to affirmative care when they see a gender-questioning patient is at risk of losing their medical license.
Double comment, but they're two different points. Also my comments are amazing so we definitely deserve two of them.
It's so strange how fast new issues become "settled" by each side. I didn't know trans kids existed until like... a year ago. It sounds pretty complicated, and probably involves biology well beyond my understanding (i.e, any biology after 8th grade). How do so many people have strong partisan views on this already?
Yes. 100% people have decided things are settled -- and most often they have absolutely no sense of the evidence pro or con.
What's surprising with "trans kids" is the complete lack of evidence for any biological involvement whatsover, and yet the "treatments" are highly medicalized. Anyone who knows even a little bit about it can see how bizarre it is.
Also yes - I agree your comments are amazing so thank you for gracing us with two of them!
"I didn't know trans kids existed until like... a year ago."
I mean, they didn't exist until recently. Kids meeting the DSM criteria of gender dypshoria have existed for longer, and kids with inclinations and behavior at odds with sex-norms have existed forever. Our host has a really good article[1] the premise of which is that trans identity is a culture-bound response to sex-norm divergence. The analogy I think of is how gay and lesbian identities are culture-bound responses to the human (and, pretty much, mammalian) universal of homosexual inclinations and behavior.
Gender dysphoria is one of those DSM diagnoses that's "X out of Y symptoms". And it's even more poorly specified than most such diagnoses: it's a two-out-of-six diagnosis, which means you can have three people who share no symptoms and they're all diagnosed with gender dysphoria.
Especially in the past decade, we're seeing a much wider range of people presenting with gender dysphoria than we did in 1980 when "transsexualism" was added to the DSM, and from which the diagnosis of gender dysphoria proceeds linearly. Male-attracted Jazz Jennings who has been feminine since as long as her parents can remember pretty clearly has something different going on from thrice-heterosexually-married decathlete Caitlyn Jenner. Who in turn has something different going on from twelve-year-old natal females with Asperger's who ravenously consume male-male romantic/erotic fanfiction (Harry and Draco (Harry Potter), Edward and Jacob (Twilight)). . ..
I really appreciate your comments -- especially the great point about how fuzzy the diagnosis is. This is exactly why you can have people as dissimilar as Jazz Jennings and Caitlyn Jenner both being "trans." Great points. Thank you so much for contributing to the conversation, Jasconius.
It involves biology well beyond *anyone*'s understanding, and it will stay that way so long as it is impossible to make progress in understanding gender dysphoria[1]. Mainstream academia and media has room solely for the companion "mismatched brain" and "mismatched soul" hypotheses, the first of which is unsupported by evidence[2], and the second of which is unsupportable by evidence.
2. https://twitter.com/NeuroStaggy/status/1497234158090866694 for a good long discussion of how trans brains are distinguishable in MRI studies from cis brains only to the extent that trans brains are disproportionally homosexual (gynephilic FtMs and androphilic MtFs).
"...the first of which is unsupported by evidence[2], and the second of which is unsupportable by evidence."
It would be impossible to overemphasize this point. Belief in "being trans" is definitely a faith-based (and not an evidence-based) belief system. If you partake in that belief, no proof is necessary, and no one can talk you out of it. It's very similar to a belief in a specific deity, with similar circular reasoning.
One way of organizing competing models of being trans is along axes of objective/subjective and internal/external.
If being trans is about having a gender identity in the "infallible inner conviction"/"sexed soul" sense that is incongruent with one's sexed body, then it is objective but internal. This is the religious belief that you mention.
If being trans is, as I think you and I prefer to understand it, a way someone responds to their gender dysphoria or sex-norm nonconformity, then it is subjective and external -- you do "being trans" the way you do "being {a man, a woman}", performing your gender, à la Judith Butler.
Objective and external would be something like being able to distinguish a trans brain from a cis brain of the same sexual orientation with fMRI, which research has looked for and been unable to find.
I'd be fine with "being trans" having this meaning if we then didn't yoke a need for medical transition to it. Attaching to this meaning a need to correct one's body, to my mind, is actually *more* pathologizing than the idea that being trans is an individual's (chosen) way to address their gender dysphoria and/or sex-norm nonconformity. The former says, "there's something wrong with my body, and I need to medicate myself and go under the knife to fix it"; the second says "we all make accommodations to be able to live in society, and mine involve medication and surgery."
Yes exactly. Just as I (personally) might think purely cosmetic surgeries are unethical and marvel at the fact that surgeons do them and patients want them, I also can recognize other adults’ right to bodily autonomy. If a woman can pay for a breast lift or a man can pay for facial feminization surgery and they can find someone willing to do those surgeries, I guess that’s their business.
I object to the notion that there’s some kind of medical need for these surgeries (the so-called “life saving health care” that Chase and others of that ilk are always banging on about) which completely changes the basis for discussion.
Those discussions ask us to accept premises for which there are no bases— and yet the general public (and especially minors!) have no reason to know this. The general public is of the opinion that there’s some kind of wrong-body mismatch, and isn’t that sad and tragic, and we need to provide health care for these unfortunate people.
That would make sense if it were true. Our job is to build awareness that there is no evidence to believe this is true, that these are cosmetic procedures that adults can choose for their emotional distress, but that kids need to stay completely out of it.
Amen to this. I've long struggled with good and evil, right vs. wrong. Having a teen claim a trans identity ripped my foundations out from beneath me there for a bit, but I've found my way back to people have "different world views" and I never thought anyone was intentionally hurting children. I do think profit-motive and greed are involved, but I believe most people are trying to support children according to their current understanding of what that means. We desperately need to get better at communicating. What a different world it would be if we knew how to identify and articulate our needs rather than project our junk onto the "other"? I try to keep what you brilliantly worded in my mind when I hear myself getting "righteous":
"Our chronic emotional dysregulation as Americans is incredibly convenient to the plundering class"
I respect you so much, StoicMom, and can only imagine what you've been through. (People who are interested in hearing more about this issue through a concerned parent's perspective should also check out your newsletter! You've learned to handle your situation with such grace, and you have been blazing the trail for other parents who are stunned to find themselves in this situation.
Until about 10 years ago, any person who wanted to transition since childhood was typically very, very gender nonconforming. It was not a secret to their family or to anyone who knew the child at school, at camp, at clubs. It's only recently that we have this whole cohort of parents who've been blindsided with a trans declaration from a child who otherwise seemed very ..."unremarkable" in their development.
It's got to be completely disorienting to the whole family. Anyway, thank you so much for your valuable contributions!
Wow! Thank you so much for this powerful shout out. I have tremendous respect for you and am incredibly grateful for your contributions. I link your work in mine to help encourage understanding among my readers.
This situation with my daughter caused me to really grapple with this idea of right and wrong; I had already nearly eliminated these words from my vocabulary before I learned she had convinced herself she was a boy and that meant she'd need to treat her otherwise healthy body. It seemed what was happening to our children was SO wrong and I understand why people call it evil. AND that doesn't help us have conversations. She's "taught" me so much through this journey--mostly that I need to walk my talk.
I don't think I'm on the "side of right and goodness". I do like to think in terms of adaptability or social/anti-social on a spectrum. I believe we're wired for sociality since that's how we've survived as a species. Our current culture breeds distrust and divisiveness. My daughter has given me the opportunity to get super clear on my values, but to also recognize that's my value set. Learning to communicate with her in a way that didn't shut her down and push her away relied on my coming to this place of genuine acceptance for other world views. People adopt philosophies that "work" for them to fill a need. That can look unhealthy from my perspective, but to just tell someone what I see without first attempting to understand how they've come to believe what they do is ineffective and communicates that I'm convinced my way is "better" than their way. Curiosity and humility go a long way toward keeping someone engaged in conversation and open to your concern. When it comes to our children, we also need to remember we're "in their heads" as group expert, Patrick Ryan says.
The energy we bring to our conversations matters. Righteous energy causes the other to dig in and defend. As I'm typing this, I find myself very curious about this also. Why did we evolve this way, I wonder? I really do love me a good argument, but I've learned no one ever wins. I can argue for fun but if I want to be productive and actually be heard, I know I can't enter a conversation with the intent to persuade through argument.
As always you've written a thought-provoking, informative piece that more people need to see. I'm pretty sure I'll be linking this one too! Thank you so much for your work.
Thank you, StoicMom! So many great points and great questions.
You’re right-- humans seem wired for sociality (and it seems to promote our survival) yet our current society breeds division and distrust.
It’s seems that when we interact this way, from a place of division and distrust, we’re ensuring our own destruction (whether that’s at the level of a society, a group of friends, or a family). How does that happen? Why is this the current tone of so many important discussions? How did we get ourselves in this dead end?
J. Lincoln’s earlier comment about this mentality belonging to warfare -- to a life and death conflict between groups -- makes a lot of sense. When faced with an existential threat, of course a group bands together, forgets any squabbles within its own membership, and faces the threat fully united.
You can imagine why this warfare mentality, when the alternative is to be destroyed, would be a useful feature of humans too, and promote survival. This extreme turn to Us versus Them could be adaptive when someone is coming to steal your crops, burn your village, and enslave anyone who can be subdued.
A belief in Right and Wrong, Good and Evil, might be vital when dealing with an immediate existential threat. It’s similar to know many of us can never imagine killing someone but if someone were attacking our child, we’d find ourselves capable of it. When this is happening within a society or family though--when the “Bad Guys” are our own members, and the fight is ideological rather than immediate life or death, it seems so dysfunctional.
Then, too, if a child seems bent on self-destruction-- if to a parent a child’s trans declaration means the parents no longer have the son or daughter they knew, but a stranger -- that might well seem like a life-or-death struggle to the parents. It would be hard to achieve a mindset that is _not_ combative, eh?
That’s why I like the “Stoic” part of your user name. It’s so apt. What an amazing amount of self-mastery, self-control, and willingness to accept things that are outside our control has to be achieved when dealing with trans ideology in one’s own child.
“Righteous energy causes the other to dig in and defend” -- so true. And why do we go there? I think sometimes our ideological squabbles can feel like genuine life-or-death situations. What parents would not want to do anything in their power to persuaded their child that there’s nothing wrong with his or her body? It seems like such a _natural_ place to go! Righteousness! Because the parent knows their child, and know they’re right.
And yet as you say it just doesn’t work. As Sasha Ayad has said so often, the primary goal is to manage to stay connected to your child.
It doesn’t help, though, that baked right into trans ideology is that anything short of enthusiastic agreement is transphobia and grounds for cutting off your family. That is what kids hear, over and over.
Depending on how old (independent of the family) or indoctrinated a child is at the time they come to believe they are “trans,” even openness and curiosity from the family can backfire.
And yet I don’t see any other way to be? What a problem.
It’s certainly not the case that a parents instinct, ie, telling a child she’s wrong, as if you were warning a toddler away from a hot stove, will work. These kids are at a developmental stage where they want to establish their independence. They want very much to feel as if they know what’s best for themselves.
Sometimes, being open and curious will work to keep a relationship alive, and sometimes _even_ being open and curious can’t do the trick. I grieve for those parents, who despite all their best efforts can’t keep a relationship going with their child.
I keep thinking our best strategy -- especially for those who aren’t immediately facing this in our own families -- is to cultivate these conversations, build awareness, try to embolden people to think about what they believe, and try to get people to understand that even if they are not personally facing this issue, it’s an important issue to care about.
Once we have more and more people looking at the evidence (or lack thereof) for “trans as a medical condition” with a rational, dispassionate, some might say Stoic (!) eye, we can build a consensus that makes kids more or less immune to an empty harmful ideology.
What a comprehensive and thought-provoking response, and I wish I had more time to respond to the evolutionary angle you describe that makes sense to me–I believe we’re seeing lots of our natural wiring as humans being perverted to serve “the plundering class.”
I do quickly want to say a few things about a parent’s natural response to something so clearly dangerous to the health and wellbeing of their child.
I find it quite interesting (and disturbing) that this movement involves ideologically, and sometimes literally, separating the child from her caregivers, essentially fraying and sometimes destroying the natural attachment that allows a parent to guide and support that child into healthy maturity. (I do have lots of “righteous” opinions on this that I’ll keep to myself here but do plan to illuminate eventually in my Substack in the hopes of helping families maintain that crucial attachment.) This is what parents in my situation are dealing with–and the amount of consciousness, intuition, and skill it takes to navigate this in a way that doesn’t fracture the family is not to be understated.
I do encourage parents to start thinking in terms of adaptive/maladaptive (rather than right/wrong; good/bad.) I’ve found this a much more solid, usable framework and lexicon for managing one’s own energy and maintaining some influence on our captured kids. Attending to what’s working and what’s not–which requires some thought about what “working” looks like. They may be able to see how the identity is currently serving their child which in turn might lead to “healthier” ways to get those needs met.
Thank you for caring so much about this topic, and encouraging others to think more deeply about and see more clearly what's happening. This will affect us all eventually.
“the amount of consciousness, intuition, and skill it takes to navigate this in a way that doesn’t fracture the family is not to be understated” — I believe this 100% and you have my full support. You’re right that it will affect us all eventually (until we have a better evidence-based understanding of what’s happening).
“Righteous energy causes the other to dig in and defend. As I'm typing this, I find myself very curious about this also. Why did we evolve this way, I wonder?”
Because for most of human history, “politics” meant “which tribe gets more of the mammoth carcass.” Adherence to group norms and loyalty (what we might calque in a modern sense as a “moral code” or “political opinions”) were literally a matter of immediate life or death.
See also Jon Haidt’s book “The Righteous Mind,” which makes this point more eloquently and at length.
Yes, Haidt's Righteous Mind is on my reading list!
It's also my understanding that the most cohesive tribe, the one with the highest level of cooperation usually got the meat and plenty of evolutionary biologists are concluding that life is far more symbiotic than we've previously thought, and cooperation plays at least an equal if not much larger role in evolution than competition. It helps me stay optimistic to believe humans could optimize our attachment mechanisms and work together to save our species--and restore the Earth to some of its earlier magnificence. (I've recently read Jeremy Lent's books, The Patterning Instinct and The Web of Meaning that make a compelling argument for examining our values and ways of thinking to achieve a more symbiotic relationship with the world around us. He references Haidt's "The Righteous Mind")
Let me offer sincere props here for something that is by its own example a rendering of exactly what is wrong with our whole public discourse on, well, practically everything. And by that, I mean that what's written here is everything our public discourse isn't and everything that it should be.
It isn't a loud, screeching, inflammatory appeal to emotion through misinformation, distortion of facts or outright lies, or a moral indictment of "that other guy that doesn't agree with me". It IS a thoughtful, well-reasoned statement of facts and a well-presented argument for a particular point of view, more than proper in tone and tenor.
Beyond that I don't have much to say, since as noted in a previous comment I'm not all that well informed about "trans issues", since they don't affect me or my family in anything resembling a personal way. I've got no skin in the game, so to speak, beyond my belief that all people are deserving of basic human dignity, concern and respect until they prove that they aren't. And when it comes to kids, anyone who desires to use them as political props for any reason is, in my book, trying really hard to do just that.
For what it's worth, very good work. I will say that I think you're right in that these children's best interests are served by evidence-based truth, not emotionally based fears or biases.
Absolutely -- wherever any of us land politically, the evidence is what should guide us in how best to address these children's needs. Deciding a children's health issue via a political litmus test is absolutely the wrong way to go.
To the extent that gender dysphoria and trans identification are exploding among youth today, we all have some skin in the game as these are the people who will be driving future social, economic, and technological progress, and caring for us in our old age.
I'm glad I took the time to view your reply on the actual comments page, since the "Feel free to ask me some questions" and the ending sentence were apparently added in by edit after your original post and didn't appear on the version in my inbox. Having read your question, I then found the last sentence of your post to be indicative of your intent in asking it.
Your preface of "Somewhat tangentially" is, I believe, the thinnest of connecting threads to the subject of my comment. And as to the topic of this particular posting from the author, I find the connection even thinner to the point of almost nonexistence. The words used to create the tone and tenor of your final sentence indicate your question is, in this instance, likely an opportunistic rhetorical device evidencing a desire for an argument rather than a genuine desire for a good faith exchange of ideas. Your handle and profile reinforce this view, and I've never been inclined to engage in such discourse.
Hence, considering our views of vaccines are diametrically opposed, your question is unanswerable by me, since I'm sure no answer from me would suffice as legitimate or worthy of consideration for someone whose view about vaccines is so rigidly and, in my opinion incorrectly, fixed. And though you invite questions, I have none for you that would be pertinent for the reasons I've given. However, I'm not inclined to judge unkindly or otherwise in this instance. Your views and desires are your own, you're entitled to them, and I'll not attempt to gainsay them here, since there appears to be no common ground of belief from which to start. Rather, I'm more inclined to wish you good health and good luck.
I deleted your comments because they didn’t seem serious. They seem troll-like, intended to provoke a response, and not linked to evidence, and therefore they don’t seem part of a serious conversation.
Our environment is permeated with endocrine disrupters and that’s hardly news. It’s a problem.
Apparently substack’s ban feature doesn’t work when writers keep comments open.
I’d just advise everyone not to feed trolls and if that doesn’t work, I’ll close comments to paid subscribers only (and if any “old regulars” want a free subscription let me know).
The only thing I will "defend" is my post which brought this response. I replied to your question straightforwardly and as cordially and free of malice or rancor as possible, knowing that our two belief systems on this subject are for several reasons irreconcilable, and wished you well in the process. You respond by calling me an enemy, which validates the point I was making rather well. So, thank you for that.
Reply to this in any way you want, using any language you desire, if you have no more pressing matters to attend to. Just know that you have heard the last from me on this subject.
I am late to this party, but I wanted to hop on to say that I am so grateful for you, for your humane and generous tone, and for your wisdom in such a fraught issue. I agree that it is very rare to have true villains; most of us are just muddling along, trying to do our best. Every time a reasonable and eloquent person like you speaks up, you make it easier for the rest of us. Thank you.
Thank you for your kindness and support, Mari! Your newsletter really brightens my day, and I welcome your contributions to the convo over here any time! I agree: understanding that we are all trying to do our best will get us farther than some of the other ways we try to engage with each other!!
Great article, as always! I've been thinking along similar lines. While I have no question that the irreversible damage being wrought on children in the name of gender ideology is a hideous moral error propagated by the left, it's not the only injustice in the world. Anyone who is passionate about causes such as free speech, human rights, and individual liberty, should also respect the rights of people to live as they choose, worship (or not) as they choose, and believe whatever they want. The problem is that those values are not consistent with the political goals of many people who have or pursue power over the lives of others. That fact confronts those of us who are broadly "gender critical" (or GC) with a serious problem in today's political climate.
As you rightly say, "But just as there are no people on the Right cackling with glee at harming 'trans kids' by denying them 'life-saving' health care, there are no people on the Left calling for 'medical experiments' or 'Mengele style butchery.' Similarly, not everyone on the side of gender ideology, however otherwise misguided they may be, are pedophiles or abuse children."
But the charge of pedophilia has become a Republican talking point and, consciously or not, many in the GC community are falling into a right-wing political trap. This is perhaps one of the most emotionally incendiary charges that politicians can level at their opponents. In terms of political expedience, it barely matters whether it's true, or even whether a shred of evidence can be found to support the charge. Anyone who watched the Senate hearings for Judge Jackson cannot have missed the theme that the GOP was attempting to color her as sympathetic to pedophilia. I've never spoken to her, but I am as near certain as I can be on the basis of trusting my people instincts, that she would be at least as opposed to pedophilia as any of her critics. This was nothing more than a coordinated attempt at politically motivated character assassination.
In the wake of the hearings, GC Twitter was on fire with condemnations of Jackson for failing to "provide the definition of a woman," as Sen. Marsha Blackburn demanded. A careful review of that exchange reveals that Blackburn carefully denied Jackson the opportunity to expand on her initial response, to the effect that definitions carry legal weight and should be precise and that, because she is not a biologist, did not have the exact, legally relevant, wording of such a definition memorized. Perhaps she would have gone on to say something like, "I may not know the definition, but I certainly know what a woman is." We'll never know. But it doesn't matter, because Blackburn, very cleverly, got her sound bite. That single interaction dominated the news about the hearings. The right made political hay.
I am convinced that the rightwing political power elite in the US is *not* broadly committed to women's rights. Why not? Because the most conservative force in political ideology, whether on the right or the left, is patriarchy. The power structures in almost all known societies throughout recorded history have been dominated by men and centered men's needs and interests. Chief among those is the control of the reproductive capabilities of women. That is, to paraphrase Marx, the means of production of the most valuable of all sources of wealth: new human beings. That is ultimately why both church and state have, for so long, been allied against women's reproductive autonomy. Of course, men also want to control women's freedom for other purposes, notably sexual servitude. The rightwing power structure, and in the U.S. that means the Republican political establishment, will never willingly accede to women having full ownership of their own bodies.
The Republicans are commandeering the GC movement (spurred on by the left, who are therefore culpable for the takeover), but they aren't doing so in the interests of women. Those of us who want to safeguard the classical liberal values like free speech and the legal rights ensuring you can live as you want, should be very wary of being coopted by the right.
Thank you Lee, for this really meaty contribution to the conversation! So many important points. I agree this is often where even the most careful and well-intentioned of us can stumble: "Anyone who is passionate about causes such as free speech, human rights, and individual liberty, should also respect the rights of people to live as they choose, worship (or not) as they choose, and believe whatever they want. The problem is that those values are not consistent with the political goals of many people who have or pursue power over the lives of others."
To some extent, we are all in favor of preventing people from doing what they want right? I'm not in favor of the sort of female genital mutilation that some cultures practice, even though it is a real part of their culture -- if I'm honest, I want to pursue power over those parents, if they live in the United States. I want that to be totally illegal here, because it's a form of medical harm.
So when is it OK or not OK to control other people's freedoms? I think the line is "harm to others" -- but often people can't agree on what that means. I believe the evidence supports the notion that transition harms children's bodies in ways they can't consent to, but not everyone agrees with me. Basically...this is really hard stuff, and we'll never get everyone to agree, but we need to do better than we've been doing.
You say such interesting stuff about the overlap and links between Republicans (some of whom are purely playing politics, no doubt; some of whom have real beliefs based on their faith -- the integrity of one's God-given body etc.) and GC folks, when the gender critical viewpoint grew out of a certain flavor of feminism. It's an odd alliance, and both sides at times (in my view) make it harder for each other. That's why I'm so big on trying to keep the discussion focused on the medical evidence -- what's really best for these kids? We all agree we care about children thriving.
I tend to be GC to the extent that I believe that gender expectations can and should be completely subverted by anyone who wants to subvert them. But one's personality has nothing to do with one's body. A girl who likes rough and tumble play is just a girl who likes rough and tumble play, and that's that. There's nothing about her body that needs to be altered -- how silly is that notion?
Where I tend to depart from old-school GC views is that I don't see kids as a tabula rasa, where girls generally prefer dolls and quiet play only because they're socialized to do so. Not all GC people have this belief, but some do.
I found out for myself that kids were not a tabula rasa when I provided my own kids with a variety of toys and possibilities to pursue the activities they wanted. I had a boy and a girl. The boy played baseball; the girl wanted to dance (both activities were offered to both kids). The boy turned the big silk scarves in the dress-up box into superhero capes or pirate bandanas; the girl turned them into dresses and fairy wings. The girl liked the feather boa; the boy liked the fireman hat. The boy wanted to mud-wrestle with his friends; the girl wanted to play house and stay clean.
I saw the same trends repeated in most other friends' kids -- and yet, a few kids really are just "gender-nonconforming" -- not because they have been taught anything, but because that's just how they are, how they prefer to be, and that's ok!
But anyway -- I think the GC viewpoint has a lot of wisdom to offer. It's not a surprise that it clashes with the Republican viewpoint fairly often. That being said, I think for the most part, what I'm hearing from the Republican legislators who are trying to prevent medical transition of children is reasonable and evidence-based.
And to jump topics for a minute -- yes the pedophilia thing is a mine field. There are plenty of people who are gender nonconforming and who are not pedophiles. Obviously -- it doesn't even need to be said! And yet there is a small subset of people who are clearly treating some lonely and confused kids -- as some vulnerable kids have _always_ been treated by adult predators -- as easy pickins.
"Oh your parent doesn't understand you? I'm your parent now!" (alienating the child from his/her parents, sometimes literally encouraging minors to run away and live with them)
"Oh you are x, y, z sexuality? Your family is so close-minded, and I, the predatory adult, am very interested in hearing all about it, and even telling you some things about my sexuality which are completely inappropriate. By the way, here's some porn." (sexualizing the child)
"You are a female-bodied person who's not attracted to a 'woman' with a penis? That makes you transphobic, and you need to overcome that." (trampling over the kid's boundaries, telling them their wants and needs don't matter)
"There are things you are afraid to disclose to your parents? Well, I'll keep them a secret from your parents! It will be just between us." (secret keeping)
These are all things that "helpful" adults do to these vulnerable kids. I've found a lot of detransitioned kids sharing such stories, and it's often a certain subset of porn-sick "transwomen" who are doing the predation.
Please note, everyone -- I'm not saying all "transwomen" are porn-sick and predatory. I'm not saying _all_ the "helpful" adults are doing these bad things (at least not intentionally), and I'm not saying _every_ vulnerable gender-questioning kid will encounter these predatory people.
But it's common enough that it's something that needs to be discussed, and yet it's the third rail of the trans discussion. Can you imagine anything that will close the ears of the garden-variety liberal faster? But I'm determined to make a post on this in the near future.
Well, I've gone on long enough and didn't touch on all your points, but I appreciate your contributions a lot - thanks, Lee!
Of course the worst expression of when we take sides and declare (our fellow human beings) to be evil takes place during warfare between nations. Great time to take note of this reprehensible, but under the circumstances necessary phenomenon. I'm old enough to remember the Wehrmacht belt buckles with their inscribed motto, "Gott Mit Uns".
"We pray for God to kill our enemies. Our enemies pray for God to kill us. Somebody's gonna be disappointed. Somebody's wasting their fucking time. Could it be... everyone?" - George Carlin
Yes, the good-versus-evil narrative used to typically crop up during wars. Now it crops up during each social issue before us, and pits us against each other. It's incredibly destructive.
The stuff I've been hearing from Ukraine is very reminiscent of the World War I and World War II propaganda against the Germans, who were portrayed as monstrous, vicious, and less than human.
Sometimes I think our 21st-century propensity to see Evil at the root of every social issue is making us especially gullible where the Ukrainian / Russian propaganda is concerned. Some of the stories are so far-fetched and read like the crudest urban legends. And yet they're repeated with the straight face.
"Chase Strangio is the person whom I most associate with destroying the reputation of the ACLU (although to be fair, Chase is very vocal but bears only a portion of the blame)."
So, if Chase Strangio is not one of Those People Over There and he's not Bad Guy, what is he?
Chase is a person in a very visible and influential position, who is entrusted with promoting civil liberties, who unfortunately is destroying civil liberties and harming kids despite (presumably?) good-faith good intentions.
Like anyone, Chase is a fallible person who in this case (and in my judgment) is making very bad mistakes, and as a result, the ACLU is greatly weakened and many children are medically harmed.
Some people just aren't ready for the adult table. It's hard to analyze empirical evidence and create reasoned arguments, but it's much easier to dismiss your opponents as evil.
"I don't agree with that police reform idea" gets interpreted as "I don't care about police abuse."
"I don't think that economic policy will work" gets interpreted as "I don't care if poor people starve."
"I don't think that COVID policy passes a cost-benefit analysis" gets interpreted as "I don't care if millions of people die from COVID."
"I don't think that climate policy is optimal" gets interpreted as "I don't think climate change is real."
etc etc. And apparently my mixed views on the Ukraine-Russia conflict make me both a CIA and Putin shill, yet I haven't gotten a check from either? What's up with that?
I don't use Twitter or Reddit for much beyond hockey, board games, and memes at this point, since so few people seem capable of even rudimentary argumentation. What's extra sad is that many of these people have college degrees, which shows the increasing uselessness of those instructions.
I've learned to appreciate libertarianism. I'm not a fan of it's political goals; I'd prefer the median sci-fi dystopia over a libertarian society. However, they've clearly thought it through, and generally have arguments and counter-argument and counter-counter-arguments for their positions. Most political movements can't say the same.
I've learned to appreciate normie liberals who don't receive the memos that woke social- and mainstream-media types do, either directly or from their social milieu. That is, 2014-style liberals who just didn't participate in the brainworms of recent years.
2014-style liberals = "the olden days"
I thought you'd enjoy this from a 2014-style liberal: https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/who-do-we-think-we-are/articles/straightness-studies
Not exactly about this issue, but about the growing (and pointless) categorization of things related to sex and sexuality.
So very interesting! The idea that straight women are just choosing boringness. HA! It was an interesting review.
Also: "“heteropessimism"!
On the other hand, there's nothing more boring than obsession over personal identifies with no material meaning.
I've met plenty of women are "bi" but would never touch another women in a 10 foot pole. I just assumed it was the female version of guys who talk about kicking people's asses but will never actually fight anyone
Ha!!!!!
I totally get what you're saying even though I'm not a fan of libertarianism -- not by a long shot -- but they are more likely to be independent thinkers and provide explanations for why they think as they do, which I respect even if I disagree. Justin Amash and I disagree on a lot of things politically, but he strikes me as someone with integrity with good intentions.
So true. As you've shown, the "evil intent" accusation is used no matter what the topic. Contrary evidence is labeled "misinformation".
And as the real-world evidence of failure mounts, it's time to go looking for diversions and scapegoats. That seems to be where we are now.
We have given up on evidence based truths, based on outcomes, a long time ago. We now operate in what philosophers call "closed systems"; that is, no possible evidence can negate the truth of the initial premises. All contrary evidence is interpreted under the assumption that the initial premise is true.
In such a system, bad outcomes for child transition will only mean that the transition was not done early enough. We need to start earlier! We haven't invested enough funds in making sure this works! The bad outcomes are only caused by those evil anti-trans people! And on and on...
This is how we have dealt with every obvious failure over the last century. The philosophies and premises are not wrong. The overwhelming evidence that they don't work is really just evidence that these brilliant ideas were not properly implemented. So spend more, start earlier, pass more and more laws and so on. And when they still don't work, of course it can only be due to the moral failings of those who don't agree with the experts who know their ideas are right.
Right— good point about closed systems— once you accept the premise that disagreement is incorrect and based on hate, you can’t hear anything else. It really prevents discussion.
I have become nostalgic for the Oprah show and Phil Donahue (not to be confused with Dr. Phil!) I didn’t admit to watching them, but I did watch when I was home with young kids. The discussions could be facile but that made them accessible to all, and no topic seemed to be off limits. Above all, they were respectful of differing views. Today, we make knee-jerk pronouncements that come from a chain of trust in the spokespeople of our tribes. Often it works well enough, but this issue is a glaring exception. If we can’t have Oprah to inform us, I’d settle for a Congressional hearing or two!
What I appreciated about those shows (which I also occasionally watched) was that they assumed that people, or more specifically women, could consider various points of view and develop their own opinions.
Great piece. It’s so disingenuous to claim opponents of pediatric transition want trans kids to suffer. But it’s such a common line. I don’t know how we will ever sort this out when it has become so politicized.
I wish we could start by acknowledging that, all else equal, it’s not ideal for kids to need hormones and surgery. Just like it’s better to not need chemo or antidepressants or any medical treatment. If a child tells her parents “I want male hormones and surgery” it’s appropriate to not consent unless the parents are 100% sure that the alternative will be worse for the child.
Instead the message is that “Almost no one regrets this” and “If they do it’s not a big deal” and any concerns are just bigotry. They’re asking parents to greenlight a treatment that comes with health risks, loss of fertility, possible sexual dysfunction, a lifetime of medical needs, and there’s just no acknowledgement that reservations are valid.
The push to affirm and transition kids ASAP scares the shit out of parents. Sure, there are conservative types who oppose transition for religious reasons / desire to enforce gender conformity. But a lot of other people are simply terrified of getting it wrong.
I don’t support the Alabama bill. I don’t want legislatures deciding this at all, in either direction. But it’s a reaction to the activist position that says legitimate concerns=hatred.
Thank you for your comments, Carina -- they're always so thoughtful and valuable to the convo! The point about "just like it's better to not need chemo or antidepressants or any medical treatment" is such a good one. Yes, all things being equal, it's better to leave our bodies alone if we can avoid it. Even something as miraculously beneficial as antibiotics can be overused and harmful.
I'm not sure how I feel about the Alabama bill. Yes, this seems a bizarre thing to be left up to legislators and the individual states -- similar to abortion. Medical issues are not best left up to legislators. On the other hand, if they perceive harm being done to the kids in Alabama, and no one else is stepping in to stop it (the medical societies are certainly not regulating themselves; on the contrary, like any other medical cash cow, it's been fully embraced), I can see why they want to take action.
It's kind of like -- if they see harm happening and they can do something about it, why wouldn't they?
What do you think would be the best response? I would think "let the medical societies decide" except that I know how medical societies operate. They mean well, I'm sure, but the profit makes it really hard to see how pernicious this is. If we wait for the expensive lawsuits (which are surely coming) to put the brakes on, a lot of other kids will be harmed in the meantime. I just don't know the best response -- so I'm not opposed to legislation until I hear about a better response.
Aww, thanks your posts always give me a lot to think about. Especially on this issue where I feel conflicted.
> What do you think would be the best response?
It’s a tough question. I’m not prepared to say no child should ever transition, because I don’t feel qualified to say what is best for 100% of kids. The only thing I know for sure is that current practices are irresponsible, as evidenced by those with regret and bad outcomes.
Also, practically, I don’t think bans work. Families will travel, move, or find other ways, especially when most states allow treatment.
I think we need lawsuits to make doctors more cautious, combined with raising awareness to change public opinion (especially among the educated left). This would get us to a place with more careful assessment and fewer regrets.
To be honest, it’s hard for me to imagine <18 transition ending entirely. For better or worse, I don’t see how the toothpaste gets back in the tube. Unless the number of adults asserting the current activist framework (TWAW, etc) dwindles to almost zero which is… hard to imagine. But we may reach a place where intervention before puberty becomes rare.
I hope it does. I can’t imagine transition being in the best interests of any child. And I can’t imagine the illusion that it is beneficial can hold up long term. In the meantime, while we wait for reality for displace the fantasy, I see actual children physically and emotionally harmed. It’s…distressing to say the least.
I do support the Alabama bill, because the medical community has just gone completely off the rails on this; they are not functioning in an evidence-based way. When this happens, deferral to their judgment on medical issues (which is normally called for and appropriate) is no longer the best path for society, and political intervention is required.
I do think the bizarre American profit motive in medicine means that we are slower to correct course compared to countries like Sweden, Finland or the UK.
I think the relative zealotry of the woke has a stronger correlation. Is there really a course correction in the UK?
There is. Many people associated with the NHS’s gender clinic complained officially and several resigned. Some felt it was “conversion therapy” for kids whose parents would find a “straight” “trans” child preferable to a gay child.
In fact this week an official distinction was being made (by Boris Johnson maybe?) between real conversion therapy (trying to make gay kids straight) and exploratory therapy for kids with gender distress which some activists had also been calling “conversion therapy” too. The UK is backing off such a broad definition and they are coming to understand that exploratory therapy is important and preferable to blanket “affirmation.”
The Keira Bell case had quite an effect in influencing the UK to understand that puberty blockers and surgeries are not appropriate for young people in distress. That is still going through appeals etc, but the general mood is shifting away from mindless affirmation and transing of kids.
There’s also been a few research papers showing that affirmation and transing really don’t have the promised beneficial effect.
Lots of things are converging in the UK
Well that's good to hear.
If it's any consolation, Canada is even further behind than the US. The Trudeau government has effectively made affirmative care mandatory nationwide, by
1) Establishing a binary between affirmative care and conversion therapy (there is no middle ground)
2) Banning conversion therapy (thus, by process of elimination, affirmative care is the only legal form of care)
Any doctor in Canada who doesn't immediately commit to affirmative care when they see a gender-questioning patient is at risk of losing their medical license.
That’s really terrible.
Double comment, but they're two different points. Also my comments are amazing so we definitely deserve two of them.
It's so strange how fast new issues become "settled" by each side. I didn't know trans kids existed until like... a year ago. It sounds pretty complicated, and probably involves biology well beyond my understanding (i.e, any biology after 8th grade). How do so many people have strong partisan views on this already?
Yes. 100% people have decided things are settled -- and most often they have absolutely no sense of the evidence pro or con.
What's surprising with "trans kids" is the complete lack of evidence for any biological involvement whatsover, and yet the "treatments" are highly medicalized. Anyone who knows even a little bit about it can see how bizarre it is.
Also yes - I agree your comments are amazing so thank you for gracing us with two of them!
"I didn't know trans kids existed until like... a year ago."
I mean, they didn't exist until recently. Kids meeting the DSM criteria of gender dypshoria have existed for longer, and kids with inclinations and behavior at odds with sex-norms have existed forever. Our host has a really good article[1] the premise of which is that trans identity is a culture-bound response to sex-norm divergence. The analogy I think of is how gay and lesbian identities are culture-bound responses to the human (and, pretty much, mammalian) universal of homosexual inclinations and behavior.
Gender dysphoria is one of those DSM diagnoses that's "X out of Y symptoms". And it's even more poorly specified than most such diagnoses: it's a two-out-of-six diagnosis, which means you can have three people who share no symptoms and they're all diagnosed with gender dysphoria.
Especially in the past decade, we're seeing a much wider range of people presenting with gender dysphoria than we did in 1980 when "transsexualism" was added to the DSM, and from which the diagnosis of gender dysphoria proceeds linearly. Male-attracted Jazz Jennings who has been feminine since as long as her parents can remember pretty clearly has something different going on from thrice-heterosexually-married decathlete Caitlyn Jenner. Who in turn has something different going on from twelve-year-old natal females with Asperger's who ravenously consume male-male romantic/erotic fanfiction (Harry and Draco (Harry Potter), Edward and Jacob (Twilight)). . ..
1. https://bprice.substack.com/p/trans-is-something-we-made-up?s=r
I really appreciate your comments -- especially the great point about how fuzzy the diagnosis is. This is exactly why you can have people as dissimilar as Jazz Jennings and Caitlyn Jenner both being "trans." Great points. Thank you so much for contributing to the conversation, Jasconius.
It involves biology well beyond *anyone*'s understanding, and it will stay that way so long as it is impossible to make progress in understanding gender dysphoria[1]. Mainstream academia and media has room solely for the companion "mismatched brain" and "mismatched soul" hypotheses, the first of which is unsupported by evidence[2], and the second of which is unsupportable by evidence.
1. https://unherd.com/2020/06/eneuro/
2. https://twitter.com/NeuroStaggy/status/1497234158090866694 for a good long discussion of how trans brains are distinguishable in MRI studies from cis brains only to the extent that trans brains are disproportionally homosexual (gynephilic FtMs and androphilic MtFs).
"...the first of which is unsupported by evidence[2], and the second of which is unsupportable by evidence."
It would be impossible to overemphasize this point. Belief in "being trans" is definitely a faith-based (and not an evidence-based) belief system. If you partake in that belief, no proof is necessary, and no one can talk you out of it. It's very similar to a belief in a specific deity, with similar circular reasoning.
One way of organizing competing models of being trans is along axes of objective/subjective and internal/external.
If being trans is about having a gender identity in the "infallible inner conviction"/"sexed soul" sense that is incongruent with one's sexed body, then it is objective but internal. This is the religious belief that you mention.
If being trans is, as I think you and I prefer to understand it, a way someone responds to their gender dysphoria or sex-norm nonconformity, then it is subjective and external -- you do "being trans" the way you do "being {a man, a woman}", performing your gender, à la Judith Butler.
Objective and external would be something like being able to distinguish a trans brain from a cis brain of the same sexual orientation with fMRI, which research has looked for and been unable to find.
I'd be fine with "being trans" having this meaning if we then didn't yoke a need for medical transition to it. Attaching to this meaning a need to correct one's body, to my mind, is actually *more* pathologizing than the idea that being trans is an individual's (chosen) way to address their gender dysphoria and/or sex-norm nonconformity. The former says, "there's something wrong with my body, and I need to medicate myself and go under the knife to fix it"; the second says "we all make accommodations to be able to live in society, and mine involve medication and surgery."
Yes exactly. Just as I (personally) might think purely cosmetic surgeries are unethical and marvel at the fact that surgeons do them and patients want them, I also can recognize other adults’ right to bodily autonomy. If a woman can pay for a breast lift or a man can pay for facial feminization surgery and they can find someone willing to do those surgeries, I guess that’s their business.
I object to the notion that there’s some kind of medical need for these surgeries (the so-called “life saving health care” that Chase and others of that ilk are always banging on about) which completely changes the basis for discussion.
Those discussions ask us to accept premises for which there are no bases— and yet the general public (and especially minors!) have no reason to know this. The general public is of the opinion that there’s some kind of wrong-body mismatch, and isn’t that sad and tragic, and we need to provide health care for these unfortunate people.
That would make sense if it were true. Our job is to build awareness that there is no evidence to believe this is true, that these are cosmetic procedures that adults can choose for their emotional distress, but that kids need to stay completely out of it.
Amen to this. I've long struggled with good and evil, right vs. wrong. Having a teen claim a trans identity ripped my foundations out from beneath me there for a bit, but I've found my way back to people have "different world views" and I never thought anyone was intentionally hurting children. I do think profit-motive and greed are involved, but I believe most people are trying to support children according to their current understanding of what that means. We desperately need to get better at communicating. What a different world it would be if we knew how to identify and articulate our needs rather than project our junk onto the "other"? I try to keep what you brilliantly worded in my mind when I hear myself getting "righteous":
"Our chronic emotional dysregulation as Americans is incredibly convenient to the plundering class"
I respect you so much, StoicMom, and can only imagine what you've been through. (People who are interested in hearing more about this issue through a concerned parent's perspective should also check out your newsletter! You've learned to handle your situation with such grace, and you have been blazing the trail for other parents who are stunned to find themselves in this situation.
Until about 10 years ago, any person who wanted to transition since childhood was typically very, very gender nonconforming. It was not a secret to their family or to anyone who knew the child at school, at camp, at clubs. It's only recently that we have this whole cohort of parents who've been blindsided with a trans declaration from a child who otherwise seemed very ..."unremarkable" in their development.
It's got to be completely disorienting to the whole family. Anyway, thank you so much for your valuable contributions!
Wow! Thank you so much for this powerful shout out. I have tremendous respect for you and am incredibly grateful for your contributions. I link your work in mine to help encourage understanding among my readers.
This situation with my daughter caused me to really grapple with this idea of right and wrong; I had already nearly eliminated these words from my vocabulary before I learned she had convinced herself she was a boy and that meant she'd need to treat her otherwise healthy body. It seemed what was happening to our children was SO wrong and I understand why people call it evil. AND that doesn't help us have conversations. She's "taught" me so much through this journey--mostly that I need to walk my talk.
I don't think I'm on the "side of right and goodness". I do like to think in terms of adaptability or social/anti-social on a spectrum. I believe we're wired for sociality since that's how we've survived as a species. Our current culture breeds distrust and divisiveness. My daughter has given me the opportunity to get super clear on my values, but to also recognize that's my value set. Learning to communicate with her in a way that didn't shut her down and push her away relied on my coming to this place of genuine acceptance for other world views. People adopt philosophies that "work" for them to fill a need. That can look unhealthy from my perspective, but to just tell someone what I see without first attempting to understand how they've come to believe what they do is ineffective and communicates that I'm convinced my way is "better" than their way. Curiosity and humility go a long way toward keeping someone engaged in conversation and open to your concern. When it comes to our children, we also need to remember we're "in their heads" as group expert, Patrick Ryan says.
The energy we bring to our conversations matters. Righteous energy causes the other to dig in and defend. As I'm typing this, I find myself very curious about this also. Why did we evolve this way, I wonder? I really do love me a good argument, but I've learned no one ever wins. I can argue for fun but if I want to be productive and actually be heard, I know I can't enter a conversation with the intent to persuade through argument.
As always you've written a thought-provoking, informative piece that more people need to see. I'm pretty sure I'll be linking this one too! Thank you so much for your work.
Thank you, StoicMom! So many great points and great questions.
You’re right-- humans seem wired for sociality (and it seems to promote our survival) yet our current society breeds division and distrust.
It’s seems that when we interact this way, from a place of division and distrust, we’re ensuring our own destruction (whether that’s at the level of a society, a group of friends, or a family). How does that happen? Why is this the current tone of so many important discussions? How did we get ourselves in this dead end?
J. Lincoln’s earlier comment about this mentality belonging to warfare -- to a life and death conflict between groups -- makes a lot of sense. When faced with an existential threat, of course a group bands together, forgets any squabbles within its own membership, and faces the threat fully united.
You can imagine why this warfare mentality, when the alternative is to be destroyed, would be a useful feature of humans too, and promote survival. This extreme turn to Us versus Them could be adaptive when someone is coming to steal your crops, burn your village, and enslave anyone who can be subdued.
A belief in Right and Wrong, Good and Evil, might be vital when dealing with an immediate existential threat. It’s similar to know many of us can never imagine killing someone but if someone were attacking our child, we’d find ourselves capable of it. When this is happening within a society or family though--when the “Bad Guys” are our own members, and the fight is ideological rather than immediate life or death, it seems so dysfunctional.
Then, too, if a child seems bent on self-destruction-- if to a parent a child’s trans declaration means the parents no longer have the son or daughter they knew, but a stranger -- that might well seem like a life-or-death struggle to the parents. It would be hard to achieve a mindset that is _not_ combative, eh?
That’s why I like the “Stoic” part of your user name. It’s so apt. What an amazing amount of self-mastery, self-control, and willingness to accept things that are outside our control has to be achieved when dealing with trans ideology in one’s own child.
“Righteous energy causes the other to dig in and defend” -- so true. And why do we go there? I think sometimes our ideological squabbles can feel like genuine life-or-death situations. What parents would not want to do anything in their power to persuaded their child that there’s nothing wrong with his or her body? It seems like such a _natural_ place to go! Righteousness! Because the parent knows their child, and know they’re right.
And yet as you say it just doesn’t work. As Sasha Ayad has said so often, the primary goal is to manage to stay connected to your child.
It doesn’t help, though, that baked right into trans ideology is that anything short of enthusiastic agreement is transphobia and grounds for cutting off your family. That is what kids hear, over and over.
Depending on how old (independent of the family) or indoctrinated a child is at the time they come to believe they are “trans,” even openness and curiosity from the family can backfire.
And yet I don’t see any other way to be? What a problem.
It’s certainly not the case that a parents instinct, ie, telling a child she’s wrong, as if you were warning a toddler away from a hot stove, will work. These kids are at a developmental stage where they want to establish their independence. They want very much to feel as if they know what’s best for themselves.
Sometimes, being open and curious will work to keep a relationship alive, and sometimes _even_ being open and curious can’t do the trick. I grieve for those parents, who despite all their best efforts can’t keep a relationship going with their child.
I keep thinking our best strategy -- especially for those who aren’t immediately facing this in our own families -- is to cultivate these conversations, build awareness, try to embolden people to think about what they believe, and try to get people to understand that even if they are not personally facing this issue, it’s an important issue to care about.
Once we have more and more people looking at the evidence (or lack thereof) for “trans as a medical condition” with a rational, dispassionate, some might say Stoic (!) eye, we can build a consensus that makes kids more or less immune to an empty harmful ideology.
What a comprehensive and thought-provoking response, and I wish I had more time to respond to the evolutionary angle you describe that makes sense to me–I believe we’re seeing lots of our natural wiring as humans being perverted to serve “the plundering class.”
I do quickly want to say a few things about a parent’s natural response to something so clearly dangerous to the health and wellbeing of their child.
I find it quite interesting (and disturbing) that this movement involves ideologically, and sometimes literally, separating the child from her caregivers, essentially fraying and sometimes destroying the natural attachment that allows a parent to guide and support that child into healthy maturity. (I do have lots of “righteous” opinions on this that I’ll keep to myself here but do plan to illuminate eventually in my Substack in the hopes of helping families maintain that crucial attachment.) This is what parents in my situation are dealing with–and the amount of consciousness, intuition, and skill it takes to navigate this in a way that doesn’t fracture the family is not to be understated.
I do encourage parents to start thinking in terms of adaptive/maladaptive (rather than right/wrong; good/bad.) I’ve found this a much more solid, usable framework and lexicon for managing one’s own energy and maintaining some influence on our captured kids. Attending to what’s working and what’s not–which requires some thought about what “working” looks like. They may be able to see how the identity is currently serving their child which in turn might lead to “healthier” ways to get those needs met.
Thank you for caring so much about this topic, and encouraging others to think more deeply about and see more clearly what's happening. This will affect us all eventually.
“the amount of consciousness, intuition, and skill it takes to navigate this in a way that doesn’t fracture the family is not to be understated” — I believe this 100% and you have my full support. You’re right that it will affect us all eventually (until we have a better evidence-based understanding of what’s happening).
“Righteous energy causes the other to dig in and defend. As I'm typing this, I find myself very curious about this also. Why did we evolve this way, I wonder?”
Because for most of human history, “politics” meant “which tribe gets more of the mammoth carcass.” Adherence to group norms and loyalty (what we might calque in a modern sense as a “moral code” or “political opinions”) were literally a matter of immediate life or death.
See also Jon Haidt’s book “The Righteous Mind,” which makes this point more eloquently and at length.
Yes, Haidt's Righteous Mind is on my reading list!
It's also my understanding that the most cohesive tribe, the one with the highest level of cooperation usually got the meat and plenty of evolutionary biologists are concluding that life is far more symbiotic than we've previously thought, and cooperation plays at least an equal if not much larger role in evolution than competition. It helps me stay optimistic to believe humans could optimize our attachment mechanisms and work together to save our species--and restore the Earth to some of its earlier magnificence. (I've recently read Jeremy Lent's books, The Patterning Instinct and The Web of Meaning that make a compelling argument for examining our values and ways of thinking to achieve a more symbiotic relationship with the world around us. He references Haidt's "The Righteous Mind")
Let me offer sincere props here for something that is by its own example a rendering of exactly what is wrong with our whole public discourse on, well, practically everything. And by that, I mean that what's written here is everything our public discourse isn't and everything that it should be.
It isn't a loud, screeching, inflammatory appeal to emotion through misinformation, distortion of facts or outright lies, or a moral indictment of "that other guy that doesn't agree with me". It IS a thoughtful, well-reasoned statement of facts and a well-presented argument for a particular point of view, more than proper in tone and tenor.
Beyond that I don't have much to say, since as noted in a previous comment I'm not all that well informed about "trans issues", since they don't affect me or my family in anything resembling a personal way. I've got no skin in the game, so to speak, beyond my belief that all people are deserving of basic human dignity, concern and respect until they prove that they aren't. And when it comes to kids, anyone who desires to use them as political props for any reason is, in my book, trying really hard to do just that.
For what it's worth, very good work. I will say that I think you're right in that these children's best interests are served by evidence-based truth, not emotionally based fears or biases.
Thanks so much for these generous comments, M.
Absolutely -- wherever any of us land politically, the evidence is what should guide us in how best to address these children's needs. Deciding a children's health issue via a political litmus test is absolutely the wrong way to go.
Absolutely! And you're welcome.
"I've got no skin in the game,"
To the extent that gender dysphoria and trans identification are exploding among youth today, we all have some skin in the game as these are the people who will be driving future social, economic, and technological progress, and caring for us in our old age.
I'm glad I took the time to view your reply on the actual comments page, since the "Feel free to ask me some questions" and the ending sentence were apparently added in by edit after your original post and didn't appear on the version in my inbox. Having read your question, I then found the last sentence of your post to be indicative of your intent in asking it.
Your preface of "Somewhat tangentially" is, I believe, the thinnest of connecting threads to the subject of my comment. And as to the topic of this particular posting from the author, I find the connection even thinner to the point of almost nonexistence. The words used to create the tone and tenor of your final sentence indicate your question is, in this instance, likely an opportunistic rhetorical device evidencing a desire for an argument rather than a genuine desire for a good faith exchange of ideas. Your handle and profile reinforce this view, and I've never been inclined to engage in such discourse.
Hence, considering our views of vaccines are diametrically opposed, your question is unanswerable by me, since I'm sure no answer from me would suffice as legitimate or worthy of consideration for someone whose view about vaccines is so rigidly and, in my opinion incorrectly, fixed. And though you invite questions, I have none for you that would be pertinent for the reasons I've given. However, I'm not inclined to judge unkindly or otherwise in this instance. Your views and desires are your own, you're entitled to them, and I'll not attempt to gainsay them here, since there appears to be no common ground of belief from which to start. Rather, I'm more inclined to wish you good health and good luck.
I deleted your comments because they didn’t seem serious. They seem troll-like, intended to provoke a response, and not linked to evidence, and therefore they don’t seem part of a serious conversation.
Our environment is permeated with endocrine disrupters and that’s hardly news. It’s a problem.
Apparently substack’s ban feature doesn’t work when writers keep comments open.
I’d just advise everyone not to feed trolls and if that doesn’t work, I’ll close comments to paid subscribers only (and if any “old regulars” want a free subscription let me know).
I’d rather not have to close comments, though.
Let’s keep the conversations in good faith.
The only thing I will "defend" is my post which brought this response. I replied to your question straightforwardly and as cordially and free of malice or rancor as possible, knowing that our two belief systems on this subject are for several reasons irreconcilable, and wished you well in the process. You respond by calling me an enemy, which validates the point I was making rather well. So, thank you for that.
Reply to this in any way you want, using any language you desire, if you have no more pressing matters to attend to. Just know that you have heard the last from me on this subject.
I am late to this party, but I wanted to hop on to say that I am so grateful for you, for your humane and generous tone, and for your wisdom in such a fraught issue. I agree that it is very rare to have true villains; most of us are just muddling along, trying to do our best. Every time a reasonable and eloquent person like you speaks up, you make it easier for the rest of us. Thank you.
Thank you for your kindness and support, Mari! Your newsletter really brightens my day, and I welcome your contributions to the convo over here any time! I agree: understanding that we are all trying to do our best will get us farther than some of the other ways we try to engage with each other!!
Great article, as always! I've been thinking along similar lines. While I have no question that the irreversible damage being wrought on children in the name of gender ideology is a hideous moral error propagated by the left, it's not the only injustice in the world. Anyone who is passionate about causes such as free speech, human rights, and individual liberty, should also respect the rights of people to live as they choose, worship (or not) as they choose, and believe whatever they want. The problem is that those values are not consistent with the political goals of many people who have or pursue power over the lives of others. That fact confronts those of us who are broadly "gender critical" (or GC) with a serious problem in today's political climate.
As you rightly say, "But just as there are no people on the Right cackling with glee at harming 'trans kids' by denying them 'life-saving' health care, there are no people on the Left calling for 'medical experiments' or 'Mengele style butchery.' Similarly, not everyone on the side of gender ideology, however otherwise misguided they may be, are pedophiles or abuse children."
But the charge of pedophilia has become a Republican talking point and, consciously or not, many in the GC community are falling into a right-wing political trap. This is perhaps one of the most emotionally incendiary charges that politicians can level at their opponents. In terms of political expedience, it barely matters whether it's true, or even whether a shred of evidence can be found to support the charge. Anyone who watched the Senate hearings for Judge Jackson cannot have missed the theme that the GOP was attempting to color her as sympathetic to pedophilia. I've never spoken to her, but I am as near certain as I can be on the basis of trusting my people instincts, that she would be at least as opposed to pedophilia as any of her critics. This was nothing more than a coordinated attempt at politically motivated character assassination.
In the wake of the hearings, GC Twitter was on fire with condemnations of Jackson for failing to "provide the definition of a woman," as Sen. Marsha Blackburn demanded. A careful review of that exchange reveals that Blackburn carefully denied Jackson the opportunity to expand on her initial response, to the effect that definitions carry legal weight and should be precise and that, because she is not a biologist, did not have the exact, legally relevant, wording of such a definition memorized. Perhaps she would have gone on to say something like, "I may not know the definition, but I certainly know what a woman is." We'll never know. But it doesn't matter, because Blackburn, very cleverly, got her sound bite. That single interaction dominated the news about the hearings. The right made political hay.
I am convinced that the rightwing political power elite in the US is *not* broadly committed to women's rights. Why not? Because the most conservative force in political ideology, whether on the right or the left, is patriarchy. The power structures in almost all known societies throughout recorded history have been dominated by men and centered men's needs and interests. Chief among those is the control of the reproductive capabilities of women. That is, to paraphrase Marx, the means of production of the most valuable of all sources of wealth: new human beings. That is ultimately why both church and state have, for so long, been allied against women's reproductive autonomy. Of course, men also want to control women's freedom for other purposes, notably sexual servitude. The rightwing power structure, and in the U.S. that means the Republican political establishment, will never willingly accede to women having full ownership of their own bodies.
The Republicans are commandeering the GC movement (spurred on by the left, who are therefore culpable for the takeover), but they aren't doing so in the interests of women. Those of us who want to safeguard the classical liberal values like free speech and the legal rights ensuring you can live as you want, should be very wary of being coopted by the right.
Thank you Lee, for this really meaty contribution to the conversation! So many important points. I agree this is often where even the most careful and well-intentioned of us can stumble: "Anyone who is passionate about causes such as free speech, human rights, and individual liberty, should also respect the rights of people to live as they choose, worship (or not) as they choose, and believe whatever they want. The problem is that those values are not consistent with the political goals of many people who have or pursue power over the lives of others."
To some extent, we are all in favor of preventing people from doing what they want right? I'm not in favor of the sort of female genital mutilation that some cultures practice, even though it is a real part of their culture -- if I'm honest, I want to pursue power over those parents, if they live in the United States. I want that to be totally illegal here, because it's a form of medical harm.
So when is it OK or not OK to control other people's freedoms? I think the line is "harm to others" -- but often people can't agree on what that means. I believe the evidence supports the notion that transition harms children's bodies in ways they can't consent to, but not everyone agrees with me. Basically...this is really hard stuff, and we'll never get everyone to agree, but we need to do better than we've been doing.
You say such interesting stuff about the overlap and links between Republicans (some of whom are purely playing politics, no doubt; some of whom have real beliefs based on their faith -- the integrity of one's God-given body etc.) and GC folks, when the gender critical viewpoint grew out of a certain flavor of feminism. It's an odd alliance, and both sides at times (in my view) make it harder for each other. That's why I'm so big on trying to keep the discussion focused on the medical evidence -- what's really best for these kids? We all agree we care about children thriving.
I tend to be GC to the extent that I believe that gender expectations can and should be completely subverted by anyone who wants to subvert them. But one's personality has nothing to do with one's body. A girl who likes rough and tumble play is just a girl who likes rough and tumble play, and that's that. There's nothing about her body that needs to be altered -- how silly is that notion?
Where I tend to depart from old-school GC views is that I don't see kids as a tabula rasa, where girls generally prefer dolls and quiet play only because they're socialized to do so. Not all GC people have this belief, but some do.
I found out for myself that kids were not a tabula rasa when I provided my own kids with a variety of toys and possibilities to pursue the activities they wanted. I had a boy and a girl. The boy played baseball; the girl wanted to dance (both activities were offered to both kids). The boy turned the big silk scarves in the dress-up box into superhero capes or pirate bandanas; the girl turned them into dresses and fairy wings. The girl liked the feather boa; the boy liked the fireman hat. The boy wanted to mud-wrestle with his friends; the girl wanted to play house and stay clean.
I saw the same trends repeated in most other friends' kids -- and yet, a few kids really are just "gender-nonconforming" -- not because they have been taught anything, but because that's just how they are, how they prefer to be, and that's ok!
But anyway -- I think the GC viewpoint has a lot of wisdom to offer. It's not a surprise that it clashes with the Republican viewpoint fairly often. That being said, I think for the most part, what I'm hearing from the Republican legislators who are trying to prevent medical transition of children is reasonable and evidence-based.
And to jump topics for a minute -- yes the pedophilia thing is a mine field. There are plenty of people who are gender nonconforming and who are not pedophiles. Obviously -- it doesn't even need to be said! And yet there is a small subset of people who are clearly treating some lonely and confused kids -- as some vulnerable kids have _always_ been treated by adult predators -- as easy pickins.
"Oh your parent doesn't understand you? I'm your parent now!" (alienating the child from his/her parents, sometimes literally encouraging minors to run away and live with them)
"Oh you are x, y, z sexuality? Your family is so close-minded, and I, the predatory adult, am very interested in hearing all about it, and even telling you some things about my sexuality which are completely inappropriate. By the way, here's some porn." (sexualizing the child)
"You are a female-bodied person who's not attracted to a 'woman' with a penis? That makes you transphobic, and you need to overcome that." (trampling over the kid's boundaries, telling them their wants and needs don't matter)
"There are things you are afraid to disclose to your parents? Well, I'll keep them a secret from your parents! It will be just between us." (secret keeping)
These are all things that "helpful" adults do to these vulnerable kids. I've found a lot of detransitioned kids sharing such stories, and it's often a certain subset of porn-sick "transwomen" who are doing the predation.
Please note, everyone -- I'm not saying all "transwomen" are porn-sick and predatory. I'm not saying _all_ the "helpful" adults are doing these bad things (at least not intentionally), and I'm not saying _every_ vulnerable gender-questioning kid will encounter these predatory people.
But it's common enough that it's something that needs to be discussed, and yet it's the third rail of the trans discussion. Can you imagine anything that will close the ears of the garden-variety liberal faster? But I'm determined to make a post on this in the near future.
Well, I've gone on long enough and didn't touch on all your points, but I appreciate your contributions a lot - thanks, Lee!
Of course the worst expression of when we take sides and declare (our fellow human beings) to be evil takes place during warfare between nations. Great time to take note of this reprehensible, but under the circumstances necessary phenomenon. I'm old enough to remember the Wehrmacht belt buckles with their inscribed motto, "Gott Mit Uns".
"We pray for God to kill our enemies. Our enemies pray for God to kill us. Somebody's gonna be disappointed. Somebody's wasting their fucking time. Could it be... everyone?" - George Carlin
Yes, the good-versus-evil narrative used to typically crop up during wars. Now it crops up during each social issue before us, and pits us against each other. It's incredibly destructive.
The stuff I've been hearing from Ukraine is very reminiscent of the World War I and World War II propaganda against the Germans, who were portrayed as monstrous, vicious, and less than human.
Sometimes I think our 21st-century propensity to see Evil at the root of every social issue is making us especially gullible where the Ukrainian / Russian propaganda is concerned. Some of the stories are so far-fetched and read like the crudest urban legends. And yet they're repeated with the straight face.
Very destructive.
"Chase Strangio is the person whom I most associate with destroying the reputation of the ACLU (although to be fair, Chase is very vocal but bears only a portion of the blame)."
So, if Chase Strangio is not one of Those People Over There and he's not Bad Guy, what is he?
Chase is a person in a very visible and influential position, who is entrusted with promoting civil liberties, who unfortunately is destroying civil liberties and harming kids despite (presumably?) good-faith good intentions.
Like anyone, Chase is a fallible person who in this case (and in my judgment) is making very bad mistakes, and as a result, the ACLU is greatly weakened and many children are medically harmed.
Thank you for your thoughtful and nuanced answer.