Author: Ophelia Benson

  • A puzzle

    What’s the issue? The issue, or question, is whether or not there is a moral obligation to affirm, or at least not deny, people’s claims about themselves.

    Put like that, it seems obvious that there can’t be such an obligation without a lot of stipulations and exceptions and so on. People can lie, people can cheat, people can forge – the list is long.

    Ok but maybe trans people are exceptions. They’re not trying to empty your bank account or move into your house or turn your brother into a ballerina. At least, not all of them are. Probably not a large number of them are. Why not just give them what they want? Why not just go ahead and validate them?

    The thing is, they really really want you to. They want it a lot. It’s important to them. How can you be so callous and brutal as to say no?

    But the problem with that is, they’re not the only people who have wants. They want us to lie for them, but we want to be not bullied into lying for them.

    The assumption is widespread that they want what they want with far more desperation than we want what we want. I think that assumption is false, and I also think they have no right to think it’s true. Why should we dedicate ourselves to lying for them because of their depth of feeling while they treat our feelings as so much dross?

  • Guest post: That’s the emergency backup system taking over

    Originally a comment by Artymorty on The belief is mandatory.

    Fred Wallace is of course the man who sends unsolicited dick picks to women. He also sends unsolicited pics of himself in flagrante at men’s fetish dens. I still can’t wrap my head around people who insist this man is a woman even when they know that he knows he’s a fetishistic man, and that they know that he knows that they know he’s a fetishistic man — so much so that he blatantly publishes pornographic pictures of himself engaging in his fetish.

    Everybody knows he’s a man, and everybody knows that everybody else knows he’s a man. And yet.

    It’s that two-regions-of-the-brain thing: first-order belief (“I believe x is true/false”) lives in the frontal cortex. But the limbic system overrides it, because it prioritizes tribal attachment, which involves second- and third-order beliefs (“Other people in my tribe believe x is true/false”, or “Other people in my tribe believe that other people in my tribe believe x is true/false”). They’re not stating their personal beliefs, because they can’t even access that part of the brain. They’re stating the prevailing dogma of their tribe, as required to maintain their social standing within it.

    And they’re not even conscious of the fact that they’re doing it. The switchover in their brain from rational driver to irrational driver is imperceptible to them.

    But it’s not imperceptible to us, to the people around them. If you pay attention, you can actually tell that they’re doing it. You can tell that their safety mechanism has been activated if they’re confronted with anything that involves questioning beliefs about trans. You can tell that they’ve switched over to a heightened emotional state. You can tell that they’re subconsciously panicking, that their threat level has spiked, that they’re no longer calm and collected, when the word “trans” comes up. Sentences become fragmented and clipped. The voice raises. The body tenses up. It’s as if they’re in the jungle and they’ve just detected a lion. They flee as soon as they can. Or they do the modern equivalent: they abruptly hang up the phone on you.

    That’s not first-order logic processing; that’s the emergency backup system taking over. It’s the limbic system hijacking the brain and cutting off the capacity for individual belief because it could endanger the person’s tribal standing. That there is the magic behind the curtain that keeps religions and cults going for millenia. It’s probably the single most perplexing feature of the human mind.

    And the fact that that mechanism is activated by the word “trans” is proof positive that trans is a cult. It literally operates on the same brain mechanism as cults do.

  • The belief is mandatory

    The police are telling us we are not allowed to say that men are not women.

    Based at Lewisham Police Station.

    @MPSLewisham Officer Humphreys asked what had given rise to the doxing and I told him that I hold the position that men cannot become women.

    He immediately, without taking a breath said “well, that’s transphobic“.

    Officer Humphries then proceeded to harangue me about my ‘transphobia’ and ‘homophobia’.

    I told him that I was not confident in the way he responded and that I would be reporting him to his superiors.

    He said “well you won’t get anywhere“.

    I then tried to explain to him that being ‘transphobic’ is not a crime and that gender critical beliefs are protected under the Forstater Ruling.

    I also told him about the Supreme Court ruling that sex, in law, means biology and not identity.

    At this point in the conversation, PC Humphreys put the phone down on me.

    PC Humphreys seemed to have no understanding of his responsibility to act as an impartial public servant.

    He also seemed unconcerned that I felt threatened and that I and my family could be put at risk by the doxing.

    His only interest was in berating me for my beliefs.

    I have made an in-person complaint at Lewisham Police Station and I will be making an appointment to discuss this incident with my MP @JanetDaby

    The police are enforcing trans ideology and bullying women who are bullied by trans ideologues. How is that their job? How is that any part of their job?

  • They’ve unearthed

    Well here’s a malevolent bit of “journalism” to put in the record books.

    Brilliant. Just brilliant. Pitch a fit about a chief medical officer and get him recused from the nightmare superfluous “puberty blockers trial” so that more kids can have their lives blighted by the fad for magic gender. Pat yourself on the back Cathy Newman.

  • No not that kind of trust and openness

    Yikes. The Lancet on Bad Kennedy’s war on HHS:

    10 days after his speech about trust and openness, HHS rescinded a 54-year-old policy of soliciting public comments for new rules and regulations, silencing the voices of many of the stakeholders he pledged to serve. Kennedy has summarily dismissed advisers and experts, communicated policy changes on pay-walled media, fired a whistleblower, and overseen the revisions of guidelines and recommendations, contradicting decades of established science, often to the benefit of industries he formerly condemned. Under Kennedy’s leadership, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) shuttered programmes studying the health effects of air pollution, HHS withheld a report linking alcohol consumption to cancer, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) withdrew warnings of potential harm from consuming products (such as raw milk and chlorine dioxide) falsely marketed as treatments for autism. His changes at CDC have driven 26 states to reject official guidance on vaccine policy, and in December the CDC awarded an unsolicited $1·6 million grant to conduct a vaccine study in Guinea-Bissau that raised so many ethical concerns—the design would have risked exposing thousands of unvaccinated children to hepatitis B—that it has been compared to the infamous Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee.

    Holy shit. I did not know that. How fascinating that the study is (was) in Guinea-Bissau and not, say, Massachusetts.

    HHS under Kennedy has made a habit of throwing good money after bad science. Amid the Trump administration’s cuts to research funding and personnel there has been a harmful shift in priorities. Cutting-edge discoveries and clinical investigations—on subjects ranging from mRNA vaccines to diabetes and dementia—are denied crucial resources while junk science and fringe beliefs are elevated without justifiable explanation.

    I wonder how much of that stems from the fact that Kennedy is in no way a medical or scientific professional. As far as the science of medicine goes he’s just some shlub off the street. We shlubs are not equipped to lay down the law on medical matters, because it’s not a subject for amateurs. I wonder if Kennedy is kicking out the knowledge-based stuff in favor of amateur hour because he is himself an amateur. If the sheep hides among all the other sheep the wolf will likely never find that one sheep.

  • IDs that reflect who they are (no not that kind)

    But…

    But what he means is IDs that don’t reflect who they are – or at least that don’t declare who they are. The whole point of IDs is to verify that the ID-haver is who she/he says she/he is. Because that’s the whole point, the information has to be accurate. The ID has to have the right date of birth, the right height and weight, the right citizenship – and the right sex. A driver’s license or passport is not an occasion for a theatrical performance of magic gender; it’s an occasion for verifying a few blunt facts and then moving on. The idea that one tiny Special set of people get to present fake id because it “reflects who they are” is mawkish and ridiculous. Funny, that, because trans ideology itself seems to make people mawkish and ridiculous. Droning about the glory of fake ID that reflects the owner’s version of Whooo Theyyyy Arrrrre is childish and embarrassing.

  • Pointed

    Meidas Touch:

    BREAKING: As Hillary Clinton heads into a closed-door deposition related to the Epstein investigation, she released a pointed opening statement, making clear she knew nothing about Epstein and slamming the Republicans for not allowing her to testify in public.

    Below is her full, unedited statement:

    I’ll excerpt.

    Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member, Members of the Committee… as a former Senator, I have respect for legislative oversight and I expect its exercise, as do the American people, to be principled and fearless in pursuit of truth and accountability.

    As we all know, however, too often Congressional investigations are partisan political theater, which is an abdication of duty and an insult to the American people.

    The Committee justified its subpoena to me based on its assumption that I have information regarding the investigations into the criminal activities of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Let me be as clear as I can. I do not.

    Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member, Members of the Committee… as a former Senator, I have respect for legislative oversight and I expect its exercise, as do the American people, to be principled and fearless in pursuit of truth and accountability.

    As we all know, however, too often Congressional investigations are partisan political theater, which is an abdication of duty and an insult to the American people.

    The Committee justified its subpoena to me based on its assumption that I have information regarding the investigations into the criminal activities of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Let me be as clear as I can. I do not.

    It’s a guy thing. If anything has ever been a guy thing, this is that thing. It’s ridiculous to drag a wife of one of those guys in to be bullied by…what else, a bunch of guys.

    ou have held zero public hearings, refused to allow the media to attend them, including today, despite espousing the need for transparency on dozens of occasions.

    You have made little effort to call the people who show up most prominently in the Epstein files. And when you did, not a single Republican Member showed up for Les Wexner’s deposition.

    This institutional failure is designed to protect one political party and one public official, rather than to seek truth and justice for the victims and survivors, as well as the public who also want to get to the bottom of this matter. My heart breaks for the survivors. And I am furious on their behalf.

    I have spent my life advocating for women and girls. I have worked hard to stop the terrible abuses so many women and girls face here and around the world, including human trafficking, forced labor, and sexual slavery. For too long, these have been largely invisible crimes or not treated as crimes at all. But the survivors are real and they are entitled to better.

    In Southeast Asia, I met girls as young as twelve years old who were forced into prostitution and raped repeatedly. Some were dying of AIDS. In Eastern Europe, I met mothers who told me how they lost daughters to trafficking and did not know where to turn. In settings around the world, I met survivors trying to rebuild their lives and help rescue others — with little support from people in power, who too often turned a blind eye and a cold shoulder.

    If you are new to this issue, let me tell you: Jeffrey Epstein was a heinous individual, but he’s far from alone. This is not a one-off tabloid sensation or a political scandal.

    It’s a global scourge with an unimaginable human toll.

    …

    As Secretary of State, I appointed a former federal prosecutor, Lou deBaca, to ramp up our global antitrafficking efforts. I oversaw nearly 170 anti-trafficking programs in 70 nations and directly pressed foreign leaders to crack down on trafficking networks in their countries. Every year we published a global report to shine a light on abuses.

    The findings of those reports triggered sanctions on countries failing to make progress, so they became a powerful diplomatic tool to drive concrete action.

    I insisted that the United States be included in the report for the first time ever in 2011. Because we must hold ourselves not just to the same standard as the rest of the world but to an even higher one. Sex trafficking and modern slavery should have no place in America. None.

    Infuriatingly, the Trump Administration gutted the Trafficking in Persons Office at the State Department, cutting more than 70 percent of the career civil and foreign service experts who worked so hard to prevent trafficking crimes. The annual trafficking report, required by law, was delayed for months. The message from the Trump Administration to the American people and the world could not be clearer: combatting human trafficking is no longer an American priority under the Trump White House.

    Unless there is some political revenge involved, like…this hearing right here.

  • We require that all members believe

    How indeed?

    Manchester Green Party:

    In other words, we of Manchester Green Party require that all members affirm a conspicuous and absurd lie. We regard refusal to do so as irrational hatred. We affirm that such refuseniks are not welcome as members of Manchester Green Party.

    It’s Trumpian. Why does Manchester Green Party want to be Trumpian?

  • Crook fires more cops

    When the crook is empowered to fire the cops.

    At least 10 FBI employees who worked on former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into President Trump’s retention of classified records after he left the White House in 2021 were fired on Wednesday, multiple sources told CBS News.

    The firings came after Reuters reported that the FBI had subpoenaed records of phone calls made by FBI Director Kash Patel and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles when they were still both private citizens as part of Smith’s probe into Trump.

    The Reuters article quoted Patel, who alleged that the FBI had secretly subpoenaed his phone records “using flimsy pretexts and burying the entire process in prohibited case files designed to evade all oversight.” The Reuters article added that it had not independently verified any of Patel’s claims.

    Patel did not provide any evidence of wrongdoing by the staff who were terminated.

    So? He can do whatever he wants. Shut up.

    Special Counsel Jack Smith oversaw two federal probes into now-President Trump. One case alleged he unlawfully tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, while the other focused on his retention of classified documents and efforts to obstruct the Justice Department when it asked him to return the files.

    The “One case alleged” is funny since we watched him do it. It wasn’t a behind closed doors type thing, it was Trump shouting on nationally broadcast tv.

    The FBI Agents Association, which represents current and former agents, condemned the firings in a statement, saying they violate FBI employees’ due process rights.

    “These actions weaken the Bureau by stripping away critical expertise and destabilizing the workforce, undermining trust in leadership and jeopardizing the Bureau’s ability to meet its recruitment goals—ultimately putting the nation at greater risk,” the group said.

    Blah blah blah. Doesn’t matter. They said bad about Trump so they are toast.

    Smith’s dual investigations into Mr. Trump led to the first federal criminal indictments against a former president in U.S. history. The classified document charges were dismissed by a federal judge in Florida in mid-2024 on the grounds that Smith was unlawfully appointed, and Smith dropped the 2020 election charges after Mr. Trump won the 2024 race.

    And that judge was………………………Aileen Cannon, the wildly underqualified hack appointed by…………………..Trump. What a surprise.

    Since then, the Trump administration has taken aim at federal employees who worked on the two cases. The Justice Department fired a group of prosecutors who worked on Smith’s team, and the FBI has fired agents involved in the Arctic Frost election investigation.

    Nothing corrupt here, no sirree.

  • The men’s team

    Sigh.

    A “distasteful joke” by US President Donald Trump has overshadowed the achievement of female athletes at the Winter Olympics, says USA women’s ice hockey captain Hilary Knight.

    USA won both men’s and women’s ice hockey gold for the first time at the Milan-Cortina Games this month.

    The men’s team received a congratulatory call from Trump, who invited them to his State of the Union address and said he would have to ask their female counterparts as well or he “probably would be impeached”.

    Sigh.

    That’s not really a “joke” – not as normal people normally understand a joke. It might pass as a “quip” for people who like that sort of thing. A stupid gratuitous insulting “quip”.

    It’s so Trump that he simply assumes inviting the women would be a drag, and that he says so out loud. Women are things for sticking your penis into, and other than that they should just let the real people, men, have fun together.

    He didn’t have to say that. He didn’t have to let the men know, wink wink nudge nudge, that he too hates women and doesn’t want them around except at fucking-time. We all know that already.

  • It’s Brighton, Jake

    Women must not be allowed to meet without male supervision.

    A row has broken out over an event’s single-sex attendance policy.

    Rosie Hayes told the BBC multiple venues in Brighton had cancelled or stopped hosting trauma-healing classes organised by her group Sisters Heal for the victims of sexual assault, rape and domestic abuse, which were limited to “biological women only”.

    Indeed. Women must be forced to talk about their sexual trauma in the presence of men. They have no right to keep such exciting chat to themselves.

    Terf Watch Brighton, which describes itself as a grassroots collective of journalists reporting on “anti-trans efforts”, said it was not aware of any groups or networks coordinating opposition to Sisters Heal. It added that it had not contacted the venues or shared information about those events on its platforms, although it had reported on social media about separate activities of Sisters Heal.

    “The groups run and advocated for by Sisters Heal and similar organisations are discriminatory to trans women, and deliberately divisive,” Terf Watch Brighton told the BBC.

    Dropping the sarcasm, permit me to point out that women are allowed to meet without men present. It’s not “discriminatory” for underdogs to meet with no overdogs present.

    Mr Terf Watch went on to say:

    “Their purpose is always, at least in part, to push trans women out of society – it is unreasonable not to expect complaints and political opposition.”

    No, it’s not. It’s to stop men who call themselves women pushing themselves on women and into all of women’s spaces and institutions. Trans women are men, and way too many of them love to bully women.

  • How pro-life

    Any opportunity to harm women is welcome.

    Republicans in Tennessee have proposed a bill that would allow women who have had an abortion to be sentenced to death.

    House Bill 570 allows for the death penalty to be imposed on women who have abortions, as well as charging women “involved in the homicide of her own unborn child” with homicide.

    This is because love, you know. Tennessee Republicans love fertilized eggs so much they’re willing to kill adult humans for not allowing the fertilized eggs to take over their bodies.

    The legislation would allow prosecutors to charge women who obtain abortions with fetal homicide. This crime is punishable by life imprisonment, life without parole, and in some cases, the death penalty.

    Tennessee has some of the strictest abortion laws in the U.S. since its “trigger ban” took place in 2022. The Human Life Protection Act prevents all abortions from fertilization and there are no exceptions for rape or incest.

    This is just one more way men get to perform their hatred and contempt for women in public, along with the way Jeffrey Epstein and Andrew Mounty-Windy and Donald Trump did and do. The big ones have to stay pregnant no matter how much they don’t want to, and the small ones are there to be raped. A decent system.

    The Tennessean reports that HB0570 specifically removes further legal protections from women living in the state and classifies harm done to an unborn child the same as harm done to a living person, or someone who is “born alive.”

    Well, it isn’t. An aborted fetus isn’t sitting around somewhere mourning the rich and fulfilling life it could have had. An aborted fetus doesn’t know what it’s missing (or escaping). Interrupting its gestation is not the same as murdering a thinking dreaming hoping person not still lounging around in utero.

    Fellow Republican congressman Monty Fritts, who co-sponsored the bill and is running for Tennessee governor, has constantly backed the idea that women who receive abortions should face the death penalty.

    “Murder is murder. I know that’s hard for people to hear, and I don’t mean to be hard with it, I promise,” Fritts told the Tennessee Holler, adding that abortion should be a “capital crime.”

    “We have failed to identify that tiny little, jelly-bean-sized baby as a human being. If we kill a human being, we have to say it is murder,” he told the outlet.

    Men eager to kill women. Where have we seen that before?

  • The epic length

    Size is not everything.

    Sometimes more is less.

    Donald Trump himself forecast the epic length of the State of the Union address that he planned to deliver to Congress on Tuesday evening. “It’s gonna be a long speech because we have so much to talk about,” he had said beforehand.

    No, it was gonna be long because he loves the sound of his own voice.

    Trump is all about superlatives. Everything he does has to be the biggest, the strongest, the mostest. Who cares that he managed to say almost nothing with all those words?

    Quantity over quality; that’s Trump in a nutshell. There’s lots of it and it’s all shit.

    The problem for Trump at such a moment is that he’s not a persuader; he’s a pitchman, the kind of salesman who transmits in exclamation points all the fantastic, terrific, unbelievable features of the new car that he wants you to buy.

    That’s one way of putting it. Another is that he’s just too stupid now to do anything else. I say now because I don’t know if he was better at it in the past, but I can certainly see in the present that he’s not what you’d call eloquent.

    CNN’s latest survey had Trump at a sixty-three-per-cent disapproval rating, and just a thirty-six-per-cent approval one; other surveys show similarly brutal numbers. Trump, in other words, has sunk close to post-January 6th territory with the public—not exactly the moment for a speech that leaned hard into the President’s Panglossian conviction that a country with him as its leader must be doing pretty damn great.

    Well Trump doesn’t think about it in those terms. Trump thinks about it as another awesome opportunity to strut his stuff, the way he did when he blathered at the captive military bigwigs back in September for a very very long time.

    Trump’s default setting is triumphalism. He is never more animated than when he’s touting his own accomplishments, even if they are not actually his accomplishments. His eyes positively glowed as he launched into a long riff with an imagined interlocutor about how “our country is winning so much” under his leadership “that we really don’t know what to do about it.” A few seconds later, the doors to the visitor’s gallery above the House floor opened and the American men’s Olympic hockey team, wearing matching U.S.A. sweaters and gold medals, marched in. Chants of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” rang through the hall.

    And that was his doing! He made them win gold medals! He trained them! He gave birth to them!

    First as tragedy, then as farce.

  • Dig

    Banning transgender women from lesbian group could ‘undermine their dignity’, court hears

    How fascinating. Now let’s think about the dignity of the women in the lesbian group.

    Think think thinky think

    Done that?

    Here’s what I come up with: what about the dignity of the women in the lesbian group? Eh? What about them? Eh? Why is the “dignity” of men who want to force themselves on lesbian groups more important than the dignity of the women who don’t want them to?

    Why is the purported dignity of men who pretend to be women so vastly more important than the dignity of actual women? Why do men get to hog the camera while women are pushed out into the shadows somewhere?

    Transgender women could have their dignity “undermined” and be made to feel “inferior” if a lesbian group is allowed to ban them from events, a court has heard.

    How does that work? You could say the same about, say, musicians. The dignity of someone with zero musical training could be undermined if professional musicians banned people who are not any kind of musicians from events. So what? Things are what they are. We’ve always done it that way, for compelling reasons.

    Self-declaration is just that. We can all announce that we’re surgeons, engineers, opera singers, pilots, architects, but if we don’t have the relevant education and experience, then it’s a mistake to accept our claim. We can all announce that we’re rabbits, stones, daffodils, but since we all have background knowledge that none of those entities can announce such a thing, such announcements fall flat.

    Unless it’s men announcing that they’re women.

    The Lesbian Action Group (LAG) has been in the Federal Court this week, appealing a decision by the Human Rights Commission (HRC) that ruled the group could not legally exclude transgender women from its public events.

    The LAG does not believe people can change sex and wants to hold political and social events exclusively for “lesbian born females”. This means no males or transgender women could attend.

    To do this, it must get an exemption to the Sex Discrimination Act, which ordinarily protects against discrimination on the basis of gender identity.

    Which is insane. Protecting _____ on the basis of a fictional idenniny is a contradiction in terms. You can’t protect women from sex discrimination if you refuse to let women organize and argue and protest as women, without any men. If you force women to let men join in then there is no protection against discrimination.

    The HRC opposes the appeal and today told the court banning trans women from such events would go against the purpose of the Sex Discrimination Act and come at “too great a cost”.

    “Trans lesbians see themselves and seek to manifest themselves to the world as women and lesbians. The exclusion here seeks to perpetuate the view that actually they are neither of those things,” senior counsel for the commission, Celia Winnett, said.

    Because they are neither of those things. Men are not women. Men are not lesbians. That’s not a “view”; it’s a tautology. Men are men. Men being men, they cannot be women. Not being women, they cannot be lesbians. It does not matter what they “seek to manifest themselves to the world” as. They can seek to manifest themselves as various things as a hobby or a game or a kink, if they like, but they can’t force it on other people, much less alter our understanding of women and men because of it. Play your games, but don’t try to force everyone else to play along.

    Ms Winnett gave examples of exemptions, such as those issued to Australian lead mining companies in the 1990s which allowed them to only employ men because lead exposure could put women’s fertility or unborn babies at risk.

    She said this was different to the current application, which had the purpose of excluding trans women just because they were transgender.

    Wrong. Because they are men. Get cute all you want, but that’s the reason.

  • Expanding hole in the dam

    More on the possible small or medium size hole in the dam:

    These statements were released days after a woman named Fox Varian became the first person to win a malpractice case after undergoing gender transition care and later regretting it. Ms. Varian and her lawyer argued that her psychologist and plastic surgeon in suburban New York, despite her serious mental health problems and apparent ambivalence over her transgender identity, failed to safeguard her by going forward with a double mastectomy when she was 16.

    That last clause should be “went ahead with a double mastectomy when she was 16, thus failing to safeguard her despite her serious mental health problems and apparent ambivalence over her transgender identity.”

    In short it’s “when in doubt, do the drastic life-altering surgery.”

    The most striking finding of the Cass review, a 2024 British inquiry that found “remarkably weak” evidence to back up the practice of youth gender medicine, was the shoddy quality of the professional guidelines for this treatment.

    Researchers at the University of York, who provided underlying work for the Cass review, found that rather than being linked to careful, independent evaluations of the evidence, these guidelines relied heavily on other organizations’ guidelines. 

    Ahhh yes, isn’t that illuminating. Of course they did. It’s like the people of Pharyngula, relying heavily on each other’s rage and venom instead of pausing for a minute to wonder how they got here. Somebody under this huge pile of words must be right, right? They can’t all be wrong, not when they shout so loudly.

    A 2018 policy statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics provides a useful example of how these documents can go wrong. At one point, it argues that children who say they are trans “know their gender as clearly and as consistently as their developmentally equivalent peers,” an extreme exaggeration of what we know about this population.

    Not to mention what we know about that word. “Gender” is as sacred and taboo as any other core religious word, so of course it tricks medical academies into talking childish drivel about children “knowing their gender.” You might as well say children know their nervous systems or how to get from Tulsa to Winnipeg without looking at a map.

    The document also criticizes the “outdated approach in which a child’s gender-diverse assertions are held as ‘possibly true’ until an arbitrary age” — the A.A.P. was instructing clinicians to take 4- and 5-year-olds’ claims about their gender identities as certainly true.

    Bam. This kind of thing is what I’ve been scribbling about for far too many years – people who should know better, people who used to know better, people who probably do know better but can’t face the fallout. All so that they won’t get yelled at. News flash: getting yelled at is a lot better than throwing your own brains into the septic tank.

    Policy statements like this one can reflect the complex and opaque internal politics of an organization, rather than dispassionate scientific analysis. The journalist Aaron Sibarium’s reporting strongly suggests that a small group of A.A.P. members, many of whom were themselves youth gender medicine providers, played a disproportionate role in developing these guidelines.

    No conflict of interest there!

    The shakiness of the guidelines didn’t matter, though — they were cited numerous times in news accounts and court documents as evidence that the most important pediatric association in the country supported youth medical transition.

    So round and round and round we go, getting stupider with every circle.

  • A tiny hole in the dam?

    Jesse Singal in the NY Times:

    Medical Associations Trusted Belief Over Science on Youth Gender Care

    What even is “gender care”? I know what they mean by it, of course, but it’s so silly.

    American advocates for youth gender medicine have insisted for years that overwhelming evidence favors providing gender dysphoric youth with puberty blockers, hormones and, in the case of biological females, surgery to remove their breasts.

    It didn’t matter that the number of kids showing up at gender clinics had soared and were more likely to have complex mental health conditions than those who had come to clinics in years earlier, complicating diagnosis.

    And there’s another thing: these younger kids grew up in a culture that was increasingly steeped in the rhetoric of trans ideology. Ideas can be contagious, and trans ideology is nothing but a set of ideas, most of them absurd. Those ideas were not stored in a vault somewhere, they were and are up in our faces all day every day. It’s hardly surprising that the number of kids showing up at gender clinics had soared: the ideology has been hard at work making the number soar all this time.

     “The science is settled.” The Human Rights Campaign says on its website that “the safety and efficacy of gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary youth and adults is clear.”

    What kind of “efficacy” are we talking about? It can’t be making people who call themselves trans more calm, reasonable, thoughtful, slow to anger.

    The reason these advocates were able to make such strong statements is that for years, the most important professional medical and mental health organizations in the country had been singing a similar tune: “The science” was supposedly codified in documents published by these organizations. As GLAAD puts it on its website, “Every major medical association supports health care for transgender people and youth as safe and lifesaving.”

    Well obviously people who claim to be trans should have health care. Or do they mean health care specifically to “treat” gender dysphoria? Of course they do, but is that really even health care? Especially when it includes amputation of breasts and genitals, cross-sex hormones, and other adventurous appearance-tweaks? Singal says some of this is getting through.

    But something confounding has happened in the last few weeks: Cracks have appeared in the supposed wall of consensus.

    After expressing concerns about the evidence base in 2024, on Feb. 3, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons became the first major American medical group to publicly question youth gender medicine since its widespread adoption. The organization published a nine-page “position statement” advising its members against any gender-related surgeries before age 19 and noting that “there are currently no validated methods” for determining whether youth gender dysphoria will resolve without medical treatment. 

    And, again, can elective amputation of healthy body parts for the sake of gender-belief really be called medical treatment? Are we sure?

    The next day, the American Medical Association — which has long approved of such procedures — announced that “in the absence of clear evidence, the A.M.A. agrees with A.S.P.S. that surgical interventions in minors should be generally deferred to adulthood.”

    Do we suspect that being able to say “agrees with A.S.P.S.” made it a lot easier and safer to say that? “Don’t hit us, we’re just agreeing with the plastic surgeons!”

  • Guest post: A post-analytical world

    Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on After everything collapsed.

    We are living in a post-analytical world on many issues and this leads to social ills that can’t be sustained for long. I fear that rising nationalism in the US and the UK is a symptom of a lack of trust in our institutions and the presumption that “someone must be held to account.” The rise of transgenderism is a result of the backlash against feminism, but once removed, as males who do not want to fit in with the toxic masculinity that prizes “alphas” over people are being led to believe that women have it easier because they don’t have to participate in that garbage (but of course they really don’t know what prices women pay for selfsame garbage.) And they glom onto the permission granted to fetishists to call themselves women, allowing them to pretend they are “expressing their true selves.”) This leads to an erosion of trust in our scientific communities due to an academic embrace of transgender belief. So, we can’t trust anyone to tell the truth, and lash out against the easiest targets. I don’t think transgenderism is the cause of nationalism, but I think it is contributing to it.

    I don’t know where this is all going to end, but I do see people I consider friends being seduced by nationalism and focusing on immigrant communities in England as the source of a rise of violence against good British girls and that by expelling entire communities to clear the country of grooming gangs England will once again be safe from harm. In the US, resistance to ICE is considered to be supporting the rapes and murders committed by “illegals” and so people don’t trust liberals and are okay with the detention centers where detainees are not afforded the dignity that we extend even to the livestock in our industrial farms.

    I’m afraid we are headed for worse times before we come to our senses and restore a semblance of civilization, and that may be what it takes even for people to recognize what a wrong turn we have taken on gender, among other problems.

  • Deceptive headline strikes again

    Birdwatching group disbands after new members made shooting birds for target practice a priority.

    In other news –

    Manchester Women’s Institute to fold after members quit over new transgender ban

    Really? Transgender ban? Or ban on men who claim to be trans?

    Manchester Women’s Institute is to fold after a ‘majority’ of its members quit over new rules which exclude transgender women. 

    Ah. There you go. It’s about men who claim to be women, not a “transgender ban”.

    When you don’t have good reasons, lies come to the rescue.

  • Guest post: More complex and more ambiguous

    Originally a comment by What a Maroon on Use them or else.

    Pronouns are like waiters: done right, they’re efficient but unobtrusive, showing up when needed, helping things flow smoothly, rarely drawing attention to themselves. English has a pretty good pronoun system, but with an obvious gap in the second person–the loss of “thou” in most English dialects has led to awkward, attention-grabbing workarounds like “y’all”, “youse”, “yinz”, “you guys”. Those are the waiters that loudly announce their names when they first approach the table, interrupt the flow of conversation, spill the pizza on your lap, and disappear when you most need them (which is to say, typical American waiters)*.

    The whole pronoun movement is simultaneously attempting to make the English pronoun system more complex and more ambiguous. More complex with all the bespoke pronouns, more ambiguous with the promiscuous use of singular “they”. Proponents of the latter make two dubious arguments in its defense. The first is that we have no trouble dealing with singular “you”, but see the bad waiters. The second is that we’ve been using singular “they” for, like, ever, which is true, but only in limited contexts, where the sex of the referent is unknown or unimportant (“Someone called but they didn’t leave a message”); not in reference to a specific, known person.

    For the record, I use pronouns. I just used one (and there goes another). I use all the pronouns that my dialect of English puts in my toolbox, and occasionally some from other dialects. But my toolbox is pretty much full, and I’m not going to use a hammer when I need a screwdriver, no matter how much you insist I do.

    *And, of course, if you’re a decent person, you tip them anyway while cursing the tipping culture.

  • What dignity?

    The grotesquerie is off the charts. Every word of this is drivel.

    Transgender women could have their dignity “undermined” and be made to feel “inferior” if a lesbian group is allowed to ban them from events, a court has heard.

    That makes no sense. How can men’s “dignity” depend on permission to join lesbian groups? It’s the other way around in fact. It’s grotesquely undignified for men to slap on some lipstick and demand to join lesbian groups.

    The Lesbian Action Group (LAG) has been in the Federal Court this week, appealing a decision by the Human Rights Commission (HRC) that ruled the group could not legally exclude transgender women from its public events.

    Which amounts to ruling lesbians can’t have lesbian groups, which surely is not legal.

    The LAG does not believe people can change sex and wants to hold political and social events exclusively for “lesbian-born females”. This means no males, even those who identify as women, could attend.

    Why “even those who idennify as women”? If anything this means men who idennify as women are the last people who should be allowed to attend. It’s rude, it’s intrusive, it’s demanding, it’s dishonest, it’s manipulative, it’s fucking outrageous. All good reasons for not allowing them to attend.

    The community organisation, which has about 15 members, has been denied this exemption twice before — once by the HRC and again on appeal to the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART). It has now appealed to the Federal Court, arguing lesbians have unique needs and interests and should be able to hold events without “biological males” present.

    What possible reason do men have for wanting to attend anyway? Other than the fun of pestering and persecuting women?

    The HRC opposes the appeal and today told the court banning trans women from such events would go against the purpose of the Sex Discrimination Act and come at “too great a cost”.

    “Trans lesbians see themselves and seek to manifest themselves to the world as women and lesbians. The exclusion here seeks to perpetuate the view that actually they are neither of those things,” senior counsel for the commission, Celia Winnett, said.

    Blah blah blahdee blah. Trans sharks see themselves and seek to manifest themselves to the world as fish and sharks. But they are not sharks; that’s what the “trans” bit means. Humans can be wrong about how they see themselves. Look at Trump for instance – he thinks he’s brilliant, funny, charming, strong, brave – the list is long. He’s wrong about all of it.

    Ms Winnett gave examples of exemptions, such as those issued to Australian lead mining companies in the 1990s which allowed them to only employ men because lead exposure could put women’s fertility or unborn babies at risk.

    She said this was different to the current application, which had the purpose of excluding trans women just because they were transgender.

    Wrong. So wrong. So stupid. Not because they were “transgender” at all: because they were men.