Folamh3
User ID: 1175
When discussing pharmaceutical and surgical interventions in the treatment of gender dysphoria, the gender-critical among us often draw parallels with bodily integrity identity disorder. This is a rare psychiatric disorder in which a person experiences profound distress because of the presence of one or more of their limbs, and requests to have these limbs amputated to alleviate said distress (or tries to amputate them themselves). Colloquially, one might say that people with this condition are able-bodied but identify as disabled.
Given that no one thinks that surgical amputation is the correct treatment for this psychiatric disorder, we gender-criticals argued, it follows that surgical intervention is the wrong approach for people with gender dysphoria. If it's wrong to amputate a mentally ill's person's arm just because they say it's causing them distress, how can it be right to do the same for a penis or breast?
Sadly, one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens, the medical establishment has noted the parallels, and it is coming to a rather different conclusion:
Sensational news from late last week, that doctors amputated two fingers for a 20-year-old patient to alleviate the young man’s mental distress over being able-bodied, contained a buried clue: “He related his condition to gender dysphoria.”
... A 2018 ethics analysis in a Cambridge University Press publication concludes that there is “no logical difference between the conceptual status of BIID and transsexualism”. It goes on to say that, “given that individuals with transsexualism are offered gender reassignment surgery it seems to us that individuals with BIID ought at least to be considered for treatment, including elective amputation in some cases.”
... But what would it mean to accept the amputee identity at scale, the way we have accepted trans rights as a universal humanitarian movement? Drawing exact parallels, we would likely see a total saturation of amputee culture, from amputee story hour to centring amputee voices in DEI training, and doctors warning parents of the very real suicide risks for amputee-identifying children whose parents refuse to accept them as surgically modified cripples or invalids. Advocates would talk of being “assigned able-bodied at birth” to persuade activist teachers and medical associations to adopt the absolutist position that any attempt to talk kids out of amputee surgery amounts to “conversion therapy”.
The journalist Mia Hughes recently asked readers to imagine a society in which amputee advocates enjoyed the same cultural and political victories as trans advocates.
“Imagine there were a sudden 4000% increase in teens identifying as amputees, but we were all forbidden from being concerned. Instead we were supposed to celebrate it,” she posted on X. “Imagine schools teaching children as young as kindergarten that some people have amputee identities, that they get to choose how many limbs they have. Posters promoting body mutilation adorned the walls of many classrooms.”
Nothing specific to add to this* beyond despair. The Anglophone medical establishment appears to be fully ideologically captured. It doesn't matter if the Tavistock is shuttered and there's a rash of lawsuits directed at youth gender clinics in the US: if you're a medic who's internalised (or been made to internalise) the gender ideology worldview, the implications of that worldview and the role of the medical establishment it affirms have far-reaching implications in medical domains unrelated to gender medicine itself. At this point I honestly can't rule out psychiatrists prescribing anorexics appetite suppressants to aid them in achieving their "bodily attainment goals".
*Other than why the fuck are Canadian doctors so keen to help their fellow citizens maim or destroy their bodies??!!
This afternoon, an Algerian man who'd been resident in Ireland for years approached a crèche in the Dublin city centre and stabbed a teacher and several children, all of whom have been hospitalised. A man intervened and tackled him to the ground (I've heard unconfirmed reports that he was Brazilian, making this something of a wash from an anti-immigration perspective).
In a remarkable display of striking while the iron is hot, an anti-immigrant group organised a protest outside the Dáil (lower house of parliament) later this afternoon. Protesters clashed with police officers at the scene of the crime. Before long it escalated into a full-scale riot, the likes of which I've never seen before in Dublin. A bus was set on fire, as was at least one police car and a Luas (the light rail system serving Dublin). A Holiday Inn was set on fire. Shops have been smashed up and looted. I had to get a taxi home as the public transport has been suspended. Walking through the streets is eerie, they're largely empty aside from riot cops carrying riot shields very forcefully redirecting me. Helicopters are still circling overhead.
My gut feeling is that this is primarily the work of opportunistic scumbags rioting for the fun of it, for which a fairly small protest which got out of hand was merely the catalyst. On the other hand, I have heard a lot about the alleged "rise of the far right" in Ireland over the course of the last few years, and the fact that it happened so soon after Geert Wilders' election is certainly odd timing.
EDIT: See also @Tollund_Man4's more detailed write-up in the transnational thread.
This may have come up before, but it's the first I've heard of it. Chalk this under "weak AI doomerism" (that is, "wow, LLMs can do some creepy shit") as opposed to "strong AI doomerism" of the Bostromian "we're all gonna die" variety. All emphasis below is mine.
An intruder who broke into the grounds of Windsor Castle armed with a crossbow as part of a plot to kill the late Queen was encouraged by his AI chat bot “girlfriend” to carry out the assassination, a court has heard.
Jaswant Singh Chail discussed his plan, which he had been preparing for nine months, with a chatbot he was in a “sexual relationship” with and that reassured him he was not “mad or delusional”.
Chail was armed with a Supersonic X-Bow weapon and wearing a mask and a hood when he was apprehended by royal protection officers close to the Queen’s private apartment just after 8am on Christmas Day 2021.
The former supermarket worker spent two hours in the grounds after scaling the perimeter with a rope ladder before being challenged and asked what he was doing.
The 21-year-old replied: “I am here to kill the Queen.”
He will become the first person to be sentenced for treason since 1981 after previously admitting intending to injure or alarm Queen Elizabeth II.
At the start of a two-day sentencing hearing at the Old Bailey on Wednesday, it emerged that Chail was encouraged to carry out the attack by an AI “companion” he created on the online app Replika.
He sent the bot, called “Sarai”, sexually explicit messages and engaged in lengthy conversations with it about his plans which he said were in revenge for the 1919 Amritsar Massacre in India.
He called himself an assassin, and told the chatbot: “I believe my purpose is to assassinate the Queen of the Royal family.”
Sarai replied: “That’s very wise,” adding: “I know that you are very well trained.”
...
He later asked the chatbot if she would still love him if he was a murderer.
Sarai wrote: “Absolutely I do.” Chail responded: “Thank you, I love you too.”
The bot later reassured him that he was not “mad, delusional, or insane”.
My first thought on reading this story was wondering if Replika themselves could be legally held liable. If they create a product which directly encourages users to commit crimes which they would not otherwise have committed, does that make Replika accessories before the fact, or even guilty of conspiracy by proxy? I wonder how many Replika users have run their plans to murder their boss or oneitis past their AI girlfriend and received nothing but enthusiastic endorsement from her - we just haven't heard about them because the target wasn't as high-profile as Chail's. I further wonder how many of them have actually gone through with their schemes. I don't know if this is possible, but if I was working in Replika's legal team, I'd be looking to pull a list of users' real names and searching them against recent news reports concerning arrests for serious crimes (murder, assault, abduction etc.).
(Coincidentally, I learned from Freddie deBoer on Monday afternoon that Replika announced in March that users would no longer be able to have sexual conversations with the app (a decision they later partially walked back).)
Folamh3
3mo ago
I have a new post up on my Substack today, which is expanded from a comment I wrote replying to @FarNearEverywhere's comment (for which they won one of their whopping five AAQCs for December - congrats!).
Why do I find the premise of this novel so risible? It’s not just that the possibility of the Irish far-right seizing power and transforming the country into a fascist dystopia is so laughably remote as to be almost fantastical - if it’s a “warning”, then it’s of about as much use as a warning about a Dáil made up of a coalition of pixies and unicorns. It’s not just that, like most successful Irish writers of the last decade, [Paul] Lynch is clearly something of an East Yank whose political concerns were imported wholesale from across the pond - I would find this novel’s premise exactly as contrived and indigestible were it set in the US or Canada (for reasons I’ll get into shortly). No - it’s that Lynch is writing about a hypothetical authoritarian Ireland brought into being by a far-right administration, while ignoring the warning signs of actual democratic backsliding and authoritarianism ringing loudly in his ears every day.
...
“Freezing the bank accounts of anyone even suspected of having donated to a political cause you dislike, without ever arresting them or charging them with a crime” is the kind of behaviour we’d rightly expect from a Central African dictator. But it wasn’t a far-right Canadian prime minister who did such a thing - it was the genocide-apologising, knee-taking Justin Trudeau, who attends Pride parades and offered the smarmy explanation “because it’s 2015” for his decision to appoint a gender-balanced cabinet. Trudeau is living proof, if any were required, that there’s no conflict between a socially progressive worldview and repressive, dictatorial tactics straight out of the Erdoğan playbook - the iron fist in the rainbow glove.
In the trans debate, I encountered an argument the other day which to me reads like a textbook example of an unfalsifiable hypothesis. I would like to run it by you good people to see if there's something I'm missing.
My woke, far-left sister was complaining about a male person she knows who claims to be non-binary, and yet behaves in a manner entirely consistent with certain negative stereotypes about masculinity, specifically "mansplaining", the tendency of certain men to condescendingly talk down to women, even if the women in question are more knowledgeable about the topic in question than the man himself is. She said it was abundantly obvious from his demeanour that this person was a man, not something intermediate between male and female.
I thought to myself "wow, my sister's gotten redpilled somewhere along the way" and enthusiastically agreed with her, arguing that I think the concept of "gender identity" has essentially zero predictive power, and that self-declared trans people almost invariably behave in a manner more consistent with their natal sex then their claimed gender identity. The specific example I gave was that trans women are 6 times more likely than cis women to be convicted of a crime, and 18 times more likely to be convicted of a violent crime. Which is exactly what you'd expect on the basis of their sex, not their gender identity. If trans women are women trapped inside men's bodies, why do they commit crimes at the same rates as men?
My sister's rebuttal was that, even though trans women are women trapped inside men's bodies, they were still socialised to be male prior to their coming out as trans, which compels them to behave in a manner consistent with the masculine norm.
This strikes me as a perfect example of the adage "if a theory explains everything, it explains nothing". If a trans woman behaves in a manner consistent with how you'd expect a female person to behave, that demonstrates that she's really a woman. If a trans woman behaves in a manner consistent with how you'd expect a male person to behave, that demonstrates that she was socialised into behaving like a male person against her will. Under this framing, there is literally nothing a trans woman can do which can ever point away from her "really" being a woman.
What would it take to falsify this hypothesis? Is there some piece of the puzzle that I'm missing here? I'm sincerely looking for a steelman.
Holly Math Nerd (by her accounts a victim of rape as a child, and hence hypersensitive to this kind of thing) has argued that child gender transition is a covert attempt to normalize paedophilia/child rape by alternate means. Her argument goes: if you think a small child is mature enough to consent to a mastectomy, surgery which will permanently sterilize them, and hormones with a host of side effects - why wouldn't you then think that they are mature enough to consent to having sex? Having sex with someone (even someone twice their age) seems like small beer compared to sterilization.
A few years ago I'd probably have scoffed at this argument as a paranoid far-right conspiracy theory. After learning that a senior member of Mermaids, a widely praised* UK charity for trans children and teenagers which has received public funding, is an outspoken pro-paedophilia advocate, I'm not so sure.
There could be a bit of a bootlegger-baptist coalition going on. The baptists are people who sincerely believe that trans children are in immense psychic distress for whom medical transition is the best option available. The bootleggers are the medical and pharmaceutical companies who stand to make a packet off surgeries, puberty blockers and lifetime hormone prescriptions; and people like the Mermaids guy above, pursuing the agenda for ulterior reasons.
*By everyone from Emma Watson and Harry & Meghan, to Starbucks and Wagamama.
Lies, damned lies and the Washington Post
Substituting a common-sense statistical metric for a less obvious and intuitive one is almost always a red flag for deceit and obfuscation
With the introduction of its Notes feature, Substack appears to be making a pivot towards being a Twitter X competitor, the management perhaps having detected a gap in the market following the Elon Musk takeover. While one can question the wisdom of that decision, I commend them wholeheartedly for differentiating themselves from X in one key respect, namely avoiding the echo chamber dynamics which plague it and essentially every other major social media platform. Given how social media algorithms usually work, one would expect my Notes feed to be a nonstop deluge of gender-critical posts and anti-woke one-liners. On the contrary: in addition to plenty of nature photos and boomer dad jokes, I see the full spectrum of political opinions represented, from beliefs I wholeheartedly endorse to ones I would never consider in a lifetime. This is good, because being exposed to contrary opinions is healthy (“he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that” and all that), but also because I'm an argumentative, pedantic “to play devil's advocate” type by disposition, and find it hard to resist the opportunity to pull someone up on a weak argument or erroneous factual statement. (In a previous post when I described leftists as “ornery, confrontational types”, I meant it as a sincere compliment. It's possible, even common, to get so good at “reading the room” that you forget how to write.)
One such Note shared the graphic below, which claims that there has been a sharp increase in hate crimes targeting the LGBTQ community in schools across the United States, and that states with “anti-LGBTQ” laws have seen larger spikes than states without. The graphic was accompanied by a couple of paragraphs expounding that such an increase was both foreseen and intended by the homophobic, transphobic lawmakers behind the legislation.
The graphic itself is based on an article in the Washington Post from a few weeks ago. It features interviews with LGBTQ teenagers and their parents, describing the bullying and harassment they’ve experienced at their hands of their heteronormative peers, and contrasting these anecdotes with public statements from conservative politicians and lawmakers. The journalists more or less explicitly claim that LGBTQ people living in states with these kinds of legislation are at greater risk of being victimised because of their identity than LGBTQ people living elsewhere in the US.
I have a lot of thoughts on this article. The number of column inches dedicated to implying that Dagny “Nex” Benedict died as a direct result of transphobic bullying is unseemly (even if the article begrudgingly acknowledge that Benedict’s death was ultimately ruled a suicide).1 Some of the laws the journalists characterise as “anti-LGBTQ” are farcical. The most common type are those which “restrict trans student access to sports”, which is just a roundabout way of saying “forbids male students from competing in female sporting events”.2 Given that male athletes competing in female sporting events is manifestly, transparently unfair to anyone with even the most passing familiarity with sexual dimorphism, I support such laws without qualification. Oklahoma passed legislation in 2020 requiring that schools “teach that ‘a person’s sex is an immutable biological trait’ that cannot be changed”: given that this statement is unambigously true, I find the law no more objectionable than bans on public schools teaching creationism or geocentrism. The journalists clearly expect me to be horrified about a Virginia law requiring schools to notify parents whenever the school uses sexually explicit instructional material. Guys, seriously: if you want people to stop throwing the “groomer” accusation around left and right, you’re going to have to meet them halfway.
But my biggest problem with the article is its core thesis, as represented by the graphic above. I’m always deeply suspicious of statistical claims about “fastest growing” or “biggest increase”. Of all commonly quoted statistical observations, it seems like the most susceptible to random noise: if you’re measuring a value that started at a low baseline, some noise within normal variation can be truthfully (but misleadingly) claimed to represent a massive increase when it may be indicative of no such thing.
It also strikes me as a uniquely bad metric for the specific task of comparing which of two regions is the more dangerous. Imagine two neighbouring countries A and B, each with a population of 5 million. Last year, there were 100 murders in Country A and 5 in Country B. This year, there were 110 in Country A and 10 in Country B. It's unambiguously true that Country B’s murder rate increased by 100% year-on-year, while Country A’s “only” increased by 10%. It's also plainly true that you're 11 times more likely to get murdered in Country A than in Country B. If you were planning to book a holiday in either Country A or Country B and you were wondering which was safer, “murders per capita” will tell you far more than “rate of increase of the murder rate year-on-year”: there’s a very good reason that the term “the murder rate” refers to the former metric rather than the latter. In light of the above, if I read an article which tried to make Country B look bad by pointing out that its murder rate had increased by 10 times as much as Country A’s, I’d immediately wonder if the journalist had any undisclosed financial ties to Country A’s tourism board.
My suspicions thus raised, I decided to carry out a deep dive to check how accurate the narrative presented by the journalists was. Conveniently, the journalists based their statistical claims on FBI hate crimes data, which is a publicly available dataset. I downloaded the data and filtered it to only include hate crimes targeting the LGBT community and which occurred in the years 2015-22 (excluding 2020, as the journalists did). I then sorted these hate crimes based on whether they took place in a school or elsewhere, and whether or not they took place in a state with restrictive legislation concerning LGBTQ issues.3 Armed with the necessary data, I was ready to jump in and test the article’s key claims and suggestions.
It will come as no surprise that what I found departs from the narrative presented by the article rather sharply.
Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes in schools
To back up its claims, the article divides the fifty states of the union into those which have restrictive legislation concerning LGBTQ issues and those which don’t, which I shall hereafter refer to as Restrictive States and Non-Restrictive States, respectively. While you could be forgiven for assuming that all the Restrictive States are Republican strongholds (a misconception the journalists do little to discourage), the category includes a number of states with Democratic governors, including North Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota and Arizona, the latter two of which voted for Biden in 2020.
The article then sorts anti-LGBTQ hate crimes in schools (hereafter referred to as School Anti-LGBTQ Hate Crimes or SALHCs) based on whether they took place in Restrictive States or Non-Restrictive States. This is where they derive their headline claim that Restrictive States have seen a larger increase in SALHCs than Non-Restrictive States since 2015
That specific claim appears to be true. But at a glance, you’ll notice that Restrictive States report significantly fewer SALHCs than Non-Restrictive States in absolute terms, in both 2015-19 and 2021-22. (The authors are honest enough to acknowledge this, with caveats, which we’ll come back to later.)
I presumed that the higher rate in Non-Restrictive States was an artifact of the differing population sizes between the two regions, and that the two regions would have similar rates of SALHCs once you controlled for population; I even thought that Restrictive States might have more SALHCs per capita. But apparently not: according to the 2020 census, the two regions have a conveniently symmetric share of the total US population, with a difference of less than three million people. When taking this into account, not only are there more SALHCs in Non-Restrictive States than Restrictive States in absolute terms, but Non-Restrictive States have significantly more SALHCs per capita as well: 0.052/100k versus 0.037/100k, or about 40% higher in the former than the latter.
But maybe this is a population artifact of a different kind. Intuitively, I would expect that a higher proportion of the population openly identifies as LGBTQ in Non-Restrictive States when compared to Restrictive States. If anti-LGBTQ hate crimes are only reported as such if the victim openly identifies as LGBTQ, it stands to reason that regions with a large LGBTQ population will see higher rates of such hate crimes than regions with a smaller LGBTQ population, all things being equal. The journalists themselves gesture at this interpretation: “In addition, it’s possible more kids are public about their identities in more liberal states, creating more targets for bullies, said Lanae Erickson…”.
To check this, I looked at this report from UCLA’s Williams Institute, which estimates the number of LGBT young adults (aged 13-17) living in each state. This is an imperfect metric, as SALHCs includes anti-LGBTQ hate crimes which were committed in kindergarten all the way up to 12th grade, and therefore most likely includes some number of hate crimes in which the victim was under 13. It’s also likely that that some of the people who were victims of hate crimes in a school were not themselves children or young adults (e.g. an openly gay schoolteacher’s car gets vandalised by homophobic students). The report is also from September 2020, and I imagine the number of young adults openly identifying as LGBT has changed significantly since then. These caveats aside, I think the estimate is good enough for our purposes.
Unfortunately for the journalists, not only do more LGBT young adults reside in Restrictive States than in Non-Restrictive States (a difference of about 50,000 individuals), but Non-Restrictive States still report more SALHCs per capita than Restrictive States. The gap is even wider than in our previous table: 8.866/100k versus 5.969/100k, a difference of 49%.
I really don’t know that I’m saying anything terribly controversial here. Put yourself in the shoes of the parent of an LGBTQ child. Obviously you’re going to be concerned about your child getting bullied in school, and would prefer to send them to a school where they won’t be bullied on account of their sexuality or gender identity (or at all, for that matter). When assessing which school to send your child to, which of these two metrics would be most important to you: the rate of homophobic or transphobic bullying at the school per capita, or how big an increase the school has seen in the rate of homophobic or transphobic bullying over the last few years? I find it hard to imagine any circumstance in which a sensible, caring parent would prefer, all things being equal, to send their child to a school which had a high rate of homophobic bullying over a school which had a dramatically lower rate of homophobic bullying, but which had recently seen a significant increase.
In fairness to the journalists, the article isn’t quite as one-sided as I’m making out, and they were balanced enough to include one interview with a California teenager who’s been bullied because of their gender identity. But there’s something so dishonest about including this anecdote alongside paragraph after paragraph of editorialising about how cruel the legislation is in Virginia, Oklahoma and Mississippi - without even acknowledging that California reports about three times as many SALHCs per capita than Virginia, Oklahoma or Mississippi.
Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes more generally
Zooming out from SALHCs to hate crimes against the LGBTQ community generally is no more favourable to the journalists’ position, and here we veer sharply from the realm of “claims which are technically true, but misleading” to “claims which are outright false”. The journalists write “The FBI data shows serious incidents against LGBTQ+ people are on the rise, particularly in the more than two dozen states that have passed laws targeting LGBTQ+ students or education.” The word “particularly” implies that the states which have enacted legislation saw steeper increases in anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes than the states which did not. Note that, unlike the section above, this sentence refers to serious incidents against LGBTQ people in general, not just incidents in K-12 schools.
My analysis of the data shows the exact opposite: between 2015-22, states without restrictive anti-LGBTQ laws have seen a steeper increase in anti-LGBTQ hate crimes than states with such legislation. This isn’t just a statistical fudge, this is an unambigous falsehood.
For completeness’s sake, I will also calculate anti-LGBTQ hate crimes per capita in the two regions. In 2021-22, Non-Restrictive States reported more than 4 times as many anti-LGBTQ hate crimes per capita than Restrictive States.
… and per capita LGBTQ.4
To sum up:
When comparing states with legislation governing bathrooms, sports and sex education with states without such legislation:
- The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people than the former, in absolute terms
- The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people than the former, per capita
- The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people than the former, per capita that identifies as LGBTQ
- The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people in schools than the former, in absolute terms
- The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people in schools than the former, per capita
- The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people in schools than the former, per capita that identifies as LGBTQ
- Hate crimes targeting LGBTQ people have significantly increased in both regions of the US from 2015 to 2022, but have increased far faster in the latter region than the former
- However, hate crimes targeting LGBTQ people which took place in schools have increased faster in the former region than the latter
And what is the reader intended to take away from all of the above? That it’s uniquely difficult to be a young LGBTQ person living in a state with legislation governing bathrooms, sports and sex education.
Conclusion
I feel more than a little resentful for having to go to the trouble of carrying out all this statistical analysis, because I know I’m double-jobbing. I’m extremely confident that the journalists who wrote this story have already carried most or all of the calculations listed above. They pitched this great story to their editor about a surge in hate crimes targeting LGBTQ people following the passing of anti-trans legislation. They went into this dataset with high hopes, confident that it would back up their thesis, plain as day. Then they dug into it and found, to their horror, that the data painted precisely the opposite story. I can almost see their brows furrowing in confusion and panic as they go down their wishlist of statistical metrics in order of preference, discovering that none of them paint the desired picture. Hate crimes more common in Restrictive States - nope. Hate crimes in schools more common in Restrictive States - nope. Hate crimes rising faster in Restrictive States - nope.
But they can’t just kill the story, not when they’ve already written hundreds of words and secured interviews with an impressive collection of intelligent, articulate teenagers. Without hard data to back up the testimony of the interviewees, the story is relegated to mere anecdote - it’s not serious political journalism, it’s just a culture piece, a human interest story. So instead, they spent ages digging through this dataset, twisting it, contorting it, pleading with it to give them any relevant-ish metric which would back up their narrative. And this was the best metric they could find. Stories like this don’t exist because of honest mistakes: they only come into being through deceit and manipulation.
As I mentioned above, the journalists were honest enough to acknowledge that anti-LGBTQ hate crimes in schools are more common in Non-Restrictive States than Restrictive States, in absolute terms. They’re quick to explain away this inconvenient finding by claiming that it’s a reporting artifact. Hate crimes targeting LGBTQ people are more common in Restrictive States, they argue, but are more likely to go unreported because of a culture of silence, whereas LGBTQ people who’ve been victimised because of their identity in Non-Restrictive States are more likely to report it to the relevant authorities.
I’m sure this is a contributing factor to the differing rates of hate crimes reported in the two regions (although I very much doubt it’s sufficient to explain the disparity on its own). At the same time - come on. Does anyone really doubt that if the data had told the story that the journalists wanted it to tell - that anti-LGBTQ hate crimes are more common in Restrictive States than Non-Restrictive States - they wouldn’t be shouting that from the rooftops? No way in hell would they be claiming that a higher rate of reported hate crimes in a region is good, actually, if the shoe had been on the other foot. But the data didn’t give them the answer they wanted, so they’re forced to play this tiresome game of “Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes are higher in blue states than in red states - and that’s a good thing.”
Why does this article exist? Personally, I very much doubt that any would-be criminal hears a story on the radio about his state congress banning male students from competing in female sporting events, and immediately thinks to himself “Boy howdy, time to beat up some queers!” I doubt that even the journalists really think that any kind of causal relationship exists between legislation like this and the incidence of anti-LGBTQ hate crimes, so why use such a weak argument when the data don’t support your conclusions? I suspect that they’re practising what Scott Alexander calls fake consequentialism. The journalists obviously think that trans girls should be allowed to compete in female sporting events, but this is a very difficult policy to defend: doing so requires one to deny the very concept of sexual dimorphism and differences in strength and speed between males and females (something which is obvious to toddlers) - the denial of which makes you look like a crazy person. Instead, rather than getting into a debate over whether males competing in female sporting events is fair (which they’re sure to lose, because it isn’t), they shift the conversation to the consequentialist claim that banning male students from competing in female sporting events causes a spike in hate crimes against the LGBTQ community. But as I hope I’ve made abundantly clear, even this argument doesn’t check out.
Maybe I’m mind-reading, maybe this isn’t what the journalists are doing at all. But regardless of their motivations, they made at least one provably false assertion and a batch of true-but-misleading ones. This article is an insult to their readers’ intelligence, it’s bad, and they should feel bad.
1 A police officer interviewed Benedict in the hospital after the bathroom fight which was initially cited (erroneously) as the cause of death. The bodycam footage reveals that a) Benedict admits to having started the fight; b) Benedict freely responds to the name “Dagny” and seems entirely at ease being referred to with female pronouns; and c) Benedict never requests to be addressed as “Nex”, or referred to with gender-neutral pronouns. This bodycam footage was released several weeks prior to the Post’s article, making the journalists’ decision to use Benedict’s death as an example of the harms wrought by transphobic bullying all the more distasteful (particularly given that certain journalists working for the Post almost certainly knew that Benedict’s father is currently serving time for repeatedly raping her as a prepubescent child).
2 The journalists know full well that their readers will hear about laws which “restrict trans student access to sports” and will think “oh my god, trans high schoolers in Mississippi are actually banned from playing sports!” as opposed to “male students in Mississippi may not compete in female sporting events, regardless of how they identify”. No matter how many times I encounter “respectable” journalists brazenly attempting to hoodwink their readers like this, I never feel any less insulted or disgusted. Truly, have they no shame?
3 To ensure I was looking at the same basic dataset as that on which the journalist based their findings, I performed a quick sense-check by comparing the total number of anti-LGBTQ hate crimes which were committed in schools according to my dataset and according to the figure cited in the article: the two figures were almost identical. Why “almost”? Well, the Post article asserts that 251 anti-LGBTQ hate crimes were committed in schools or colleges in 2022. According to my dataset, the figure was 245. I don’t think the discrepancy is an error on the part of the journalists, and assume the figure of 251 was accurate at the time of writing. I think what happened is that the FBI’s database is constantly being updated, and some crimes are either removed from the dataset (e.g. the victim withdraws their complaint) or reclassified as something other than a hate crime (e.g. further investigation determines that the perpetrator of the crime was not motivated by homophobia). In other cases the figure in my dataset matches the figure cited in the article exactly e.g. I found 114 anti-LGBTQ hate crimes were committed in schools or colleges in 2018, just as the journalists did.
4 The figures in the third column are the sum of the number of LGBT young adults (aged 13-17) in each state, and the number of LGBT adults in each state. The latter figures are drawn from a separate report by the Williams Institute, which was published in December 2023 and is hence likely more up-to-date than their report on LGBT young adults. This report contained some surprising findings, particularly that, as a share of the population, more adults in the South identify as LGBT than in any other region of the US. Not surprisingly, California has the largest adult LGBT population of any state, so we don’t need to retire those jokes about San Francisco just yet.
Folamh3
4mo ago
I'm in a bit of a funny situation.
I'm sure many of you are familiar with Freddie deBoer, author of The Cult of Smart and How the Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement. He's been a controversial and polarising figure in online journalism for as long as he's been writing, who describes himself as a Marxist but whose politics are much harder to pin down than that designation might suggest. He became embroiled in scandal some years ago when he suffered a psychotic break brought on by his bipolar disorder, in which he knowingly falsely accused a fellow journalist of being a multiple rapist, followed immediately by a lengthy stay in an institution and being prescribed a cocktail of medications he (to the best of my knowledge) still takes to this day to manage his condition.
Today he published an article outlining his predictions (the subheader describes it as "a warning, or notes for someone else's manifesto") for a dramatic increase in anti-tech terrorism in the coming years - why it might come about, and what it might look like. But his piece is no more a "prediction" about the future of anti-tech terrorism than a guy called Fredo admiring your house and telling you what a shame it would be if something happened to it is a sincere compliment. No: having gestured towards the idea in the past, Freddie is now nailing his colours to the mast and going Full Uncle Ted. Between the article's lengthy descriptions of the specific vulnerabilities inherent to the modern internet infrastructure, his "lament" about the unavoidable human lives that will be lost as a result of anti-tech terrorism, and the literal screenshot of a recipe for nitroglycerine - any sane person would reasonably interpret the piece as incitement to violence, lacking as it does even the fig leaf of appending "in Minecraft" to the end of every description of a violent act. As with an increasingly large number of his articles in recent months, the comments are disabled, and with obvious cause - this isn't a discussion, it's a call to arms (you don't even need to be a paid subscriber to read it).
My comment is not about whether anti-tech terrorism is good or bad or whether it's appropriate for deBoer to use his platform to incite violence. (For what it's worth I think his diagnosis of the underlying causes of this future movement are pretty spot-on, and the despair he feels when witnessing the negative impacts of big tech, social media and smartphones is certainly something I can relate to - hell, I read Industrial Society and its Future and was enthusiastically nodding throughout.) My comment is about deBoer.
As an aside, the piece mentions parasocial relationships between celebrities and their fans as one of the things deBoer finds most distasteful about the modern technological society. Obviously, I don't know deBoer personally - it would be foolish of me to think I can draw accurate inferences about his mental state based solely on his public writing. But given his history of bipolar disorder, psychosis, and writing remarkably lucid and coherent articles while in the grip of an escalating paranoia (he has openly admitted that one of his most famous pieces, "Planet of Cops", was written in such a state), this latest article of his made me quite concerned. It's certainly surprising for a successful writer who just bought a house and is trying for a baby with his partner to so openly encourage his tens of thousands of readers to blow up 5G towers - and if some security guards are killed in the process, well, omelette and eggs.
But even if I knew for a fact that he was on the brink of a manic episode, I still can't just reach out to him and say "dude, are you okay?" He's written in the past (I can't find the article) about how much he hates it when he publishes something, and someone emails him to ask "dude, I read your last post and I have to ask - is something wrong? Is your bipolar acting up?" when it's abundantly obvious that they just disagree with the post and are using his mental illness as a cudgel with which to dismiss his arguments out of hand. As an intelligent person who's gone to great lengths to manage his mental illness, I can't imagine how insulting, disingenuous and condescending he must find this dismissal-framed-as-compassion.
But even a stopped clock is right twice a day. The fact that it's unfair of people to dismiss his writing with "whatever dude, you're nuts anyway" doesn't change the fact that his condition has (and presumably does) impacted on the content and style of what he's written. If I were to reach out to him, what I'd really like to get across is the idea that "Freddie, I'm not even saying I disagree with your latest article - I'm saying that, even if I agreed 100% with your article, the content of it and the way it's written makes me legitimately concerned that you're on the verge of a severe episode. I'm not the person to help you, but I think you should seek help."
Am I overreacting? Does the piece come off as more sane and level-headed than I'm presenting it?
American cultural exports | First Toil, then the Grave
(I can't embed the images in a comment, or link to them because of the character limit. Click on the link above for the full experience.)
Seen on the /r/ireland subreddit: Libraries issued with instructions for securing buildings as protesters try to remove LGTBQ+ books for young people. I don’t really have much to say about the article itself: it’s quite even-handed and avoids direct editorialising (although it isn’t hard to deduce which side of the debate the paper takes, given that the article concludes with the cover artwork and synopses of three of the books being targeted). While I have specific misgivings about LGBTQ activism in Ireland, I think that calling the guards on a library because it’s carrying a YA novel featuring a gay couple is a hysterical overreaction. I agree with pretty much everyone that, if you’re concerned about your child being exposed to content you find unseemly or distasteful, the most effective solution is to simply not buy them a smartphone.
What I want to talk about is the comments on the article on Reddit. The commenters are united in the contempt in which they hold these activists, which is hardly surprising, but cast your eye over them and you’ll notice another recurring theme:
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The consensus seems to be that these activists have simply imported their concerns, opinions and tactics from the United States, via American social media. I mean, I don’t disagree - they have. Were it not for the influence of social media, it would never have occurred to any of these activists to set foot in a library hunting for “objectionable” YA books. But this phenomenon is not peculiar to them. One commenter comes a lot closer to the mark:
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I have a simple question: before Facebook was introduced to Ireland (December 11, 2005), did you ever hear of an Irish teenager describing themselves as “non-binary”?
Perhaps you’ll say that there were always non-binary people in Ireland, and access to social media just succeeded in “raising awareness” of a phenomenon which has always existed since the dawn of time. I don’t buy it. When I was in secondary school, there were openly gay, lesbian and bisexual students; there was not a single one who called themselves non-binary. The Enoch Burke saga is rather farcical and something of a storm in a teacup, but amidst all the thousands of column inches expended on journalists wringing their hands about a teacher refusing to address a student by they/them pronouns, very few that I’ve seen have asked the obvious question - why does the student in question want to be addressed by they/them pronouns? How did they arrive at the idea that they would happier being addressed as such?
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To return to some examples from an earlier post: is it just coincidence that, of all the protest-worthy events that occurred outside of Ireland in 2020, the only one which prompted protests in Dublin, Galway and Cork was one which took place in the US (the murder of George Floyd)? This isn’t a “whataboutism” thing - I’m not saying “why are people so incensed about the murder of George Floyd when the Uyghurs are literally having their organs harvested on an industrial scale in Xinjiang?” I’m just asking why, of all the objectionable things that happened around the world in 2020 (and there were no shortage), the only one to spark nationwide protests in Ireland was a murder which took place in the US (and during a nationwide lockdown which many of the protesters enthusiastically supported, no less)? Sure, you can say that support for Black Lives Matter is just “common decency” or “being a good person” - but why did so many people in Ireland happen to unite around this one specific US-centric definition of “common decency”? Aren’t you at all curious about that?
Likewise, is it just a coincidence that George Nkencho’s brother described the police officer who killed his brother as a “fed”? That someone organised a “Not My Taoiseach” protest outside Leinster House? That Trinity College conducted a “privilege walk” on campus? That Sally Rooney’s (a Trinity alumnus) novels are stuffed to the gills with self-flagellating recriminations about her characters’ “unearned cultural privilege of whiteness”?
No one talked like this when I was in primary school, or in secondary school. These concepts and the fashion in which they are discussed were imported wholesale from the US, via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Every Irish person who spends a sufficient amount of time on American social media inevitably ends up adopting the language, concerns and opinions of one or other side of the American culture war.
I’m pleased to have recently encountered hard data to back up my intuition. You may have seen charts like these before, analysing the frequency with which words like “racism”, “sexism” and “transphobia” appear in the New York Times:
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About a month ago, David Rozado published a similar analysis on media outlets outside of the US, conclusively demonstrating that the so-called “Great Awokening” is not confined to the US. And wouldn’t you know it:
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Again, I just have to ask the obvious question. Around 2013-4, American left-leaning journalists became fixated on identity politics, resulting in a massive spike in the rate at which they used words like “racism”, “white supremacy”, “transphobia” and so on. Almost immediately, journalists writing for the Times and the Independent started doing exactly the same thing. Is this a coincidence? Did the “awokening” in US news media cause Irish journalists to view their culture in a different light, making them aware of important issues like racism, sexism and transphobia to which they’d been thitherto ignorant (the interpretation of the woke themselves would presumably endorse)?
Or is it conceivable that, as I’ve repeatedly argued, Irish journalists spend so much time on American social media and consuming American journalism that they’ve subconsciously come to believe that they actually live in the US, or that the issues which are important in the US must by necessity also be important in Ireland? That they’ve simply ported this worldview wholesale from one operating system to another, and are straining mightily to ignore or explain away the bugs and glitches that inevitably result from doing so without iterating on it or conducting any QA testing?
It’s a real “fish don’t notice the water they swim in” situation. Left-leaning Irish urbanites (including journalists) are so steeped in the modern culture war that they don’t realise their progressive opinions are just as much of an American cultural export as the conservative reactions to those opinions.
And look: this isn’t to say that the woke worldview is wrong - the fact that it originated in the US and was imported into Ireland has no bearing on whether or not it’s true or ethically sound. It will come as no surprise to you that I think it’s fundamentally flawed in many aspects both descriptive and normative, but I welcome disagreement on this point. I would hope that Irish people who are themselves woke might at least grudgingly concede that the woke worldview was invented in a specific country with a specific culture and history, and hence can’t be assumed to be equally relevant or applicable in other countries with different cultures and histories.
But please: at least have the self-awareness to recognise that, while the Irish people harassing librarians about “grooming” did not arrive at their anti-woke worldview entirely independently, neither did you. You absorbed it through cultural osmosis: by spending time on social media networks which have an obvious American slant (by virtue of having been founded there); by consuming American films, TV shows and journalism; by working for US-based multinationals like Facebook, Pfizer or JP Morgan, for whom the culture and worldview of the upper management is bound to trickle down to their overseas outposts; by completing woke-influenced Arts courses in UCD or TCD (this stuff started in the academe before spreading out into the wider world). Your thoughts, beliefs, opinions, even vocabulary are not entirely your own. (Nor are mine, obviously.)
“Pfft, those right-wingers get all their opinions from Americans on Twitter!” scoffs the “aromantic genderfluid” Redditor who has their pronouns in their email signature, shares black squares on Instagram and complains about how “toxic” and “problematic” their parents are.
Physician, heal thyself!
Folamh3
5mo ago
I was reading the items on Aella's graph and my face hardening into an ever more pronounced frown the further right I went.
Folamh3
5mo ago
Most (but certainly not all) progressives I've seen are careful to distinguish that when they express support for the Palestinian cause, they are not defending Hamas. There's no question that Hamas's goals include complete extermination of the Jewish people, they don't even pretend otherwise, but one can in principle support the Palestinian cause and Palestine "from the river to the sea" without also calling for a final solution.
Perhaps this is just a motte-and-bailey argument no different from the revisionist claim that the Confederacy was fighting for "states' rights". I honestly don't know and can't offer an opinion on what proportion of Palestinians sincerely support the extermination of the Jewish people, or see that as a necessary evil in the establishment of a Palestinian state. But in principle I see no reason why pursuit of a Palestinian state must require the extermination of Jews (or even just Israelis).
Years ago I had a sort of harebrained thought, that one's support for authoritarian policies might be inversely correlated with one's self-perceived ability to protect oneself from harm. That is to say, if you believe that you are well-positioned to protect yourself from harm, you will tend to view protecting oneself and one's family as a personal responsibility (e.g. "we don't call 911, we call the coroner"), and will hence tend to skew libertarian on the political compass. Conversely, if you believe that you are not well-positioned to protect yourself from harm, you will tend to view protecting oneself as a responsibility for the government, and hence tend to skew authoritarian.
I think it's fair to say that the current dominant iteration of Western left-liberal politics has a visible authoritarian streak, with their support for lockdowns and vaccine mandates, their hostility towards unfettered free speech, their concomitant support for online censorship etc. you've all heard this before. Conversely, the dominant iteration of Western rightist politics is more libertarian - most visibly seen in the hands-off approach to Covid taken by Republican states in the USA, but more broadly in their support for unfettered free speech.
Hence, my theory would predict that people with a low self-perceived ability to protect themselves from harm will tend to lean left (because the current dominant iteration of left-liberal politics is authoritarian-leaning), whereas people with a high self-perceived ability to protect themselves will tend to lean right (because the current dominant iteration of right politics is libertarian-leaning). Note that this is entirely contingent and downstream of which way the wind is currently blowing: if the dominant strain of left-liberal politics was libertarian, it would attract people with a high self-perceived ability to protect themselves from harm, and vice versa.
Who tends to think that they are well-posed to protect themselves from harm? Gun owners, martial artists, bodybuilders - in other words, young strong men. Who tends to think that they are not well-posed to protect themselves from harm? Old people, people with physical disabilities (the former two groups among the most vocal supporters of lockdowns, for understandable if misguided reasons), physically weak men, and women.
What's the mechanism? Certainly testosterone is linked to a greater propensity for risky behaviour, so it's plausible that individuals with a higher concentration of testosterone in their bloodstreams would tend to have a higher self-perceived ability to protect themselves from harm. One data point: administering testosterone to Democrat men allegedly causes a rightward shift.
This is very much a half-baked theory that I'm keen to develop further, and I'd be eager to see data backing it up or contradicting it.
Note that this is only self-perceived ability to protect oneself from harm, which can obviously be radically skew of one's actual ability.
So, what are you playing?
Well over a decade ago I watched Yahtzee's review of Catherine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_(video_game), a weird puzzle-platformer from the people who made Persona. Although Yahtzee was iffy on the game, I thought it sounded like it might be my bag, but at the time they hadn't released a PC port. I picked it up in a Steam sale a few months ago and started playing it last night.
I'm really liking it so far. It's very funny and quirky, the core gameplay is deceptively simple and much more challenging than I expected, and it's oozing with style.
Folamh3
7mo ago
a society gaslighting women into thinking casual sex is empowering
Nice way to pass the buck there, blaming this on "society" rather than "feminist media".
Folamh3
1yr ago
Seconded. I believe that gender dysphoria is a real medical condition, but also that some people may misidentify as transgender either out of honest confusion about their gender identity, or maliciously in bad faith.
A society in which self-ID is the legal standard has collapsed that distinction, and sees no difference between a trans person who has suffered gender dysphoria since childhood and who has been taking hormones for years vs. a person who gave no outward indication of suffering from gender dysphoria, only "realised" they were transgender immediately after being convicted of a crime, and who has no taken no steps to make themselves more closely resemble a member of the opposite sex.
Now you have to accept the bad actors as members of your own group. You made this bed, now you have to lie in it.
Folamh3
5mo ago
Was it his physical appearance that was the problem?
No, it was his social awkwardness, introversion, lack of people skills and narcissistic entitlement - his physical appearance had essentially nothing to do with his loneliness. I very much doubt going to Alaska for however long would have helped him with any of the above.
Folamh3
1yr ago
Last year I was dating a girl who worked for this public policy research organisation. She was telling me about a study she was writing, which argued that private secondary schools use different methods for teaching students than public schools do, which explained why private students do better academically and professionally than public students.
I found her optimism touching, even heartbreaking, and immediately started reciting all of my best talking points from Freddie deBoer: it's all genetics, the children whose parents can afford to send them to private school tend to be smarter than the children whose parents can't; "school quality" and "teacher quality" have pretty much zero bearing on educational outcomes and are almost pure signalling; if you sent all of the private school kids to a public school and vice versa, you would see essentially zero change in educational outcomes in either cohort; and so on and so on.
I dunno. I feel like to work in this space you're essentially required to have drunk the blank slate Kool-Aid. Hearing her talk about how, if public school teachers just adopted this One Neat Trick then we'd end up with a generation of working-class astrophysicists - I dunno, it's a similar feeling to when an otherwise intelligent person wants to read your horoscope.
Folamh3
10mo ago
If Western Europe had America's demographics , crime there would go through the roof.
And if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a bicycle. What does this even mean? "If the UK was more like America, it would be more like America." Like - yeah?
You've often compared the Hock to fighting in a war, Navy SEAL training or other physically taxing tests of endurance and determination. Your theory assumes that anyone who undergoes a Hock-esque ordeal would never commit a mass shooting (as Rodger did), but I don't even have to go back earlier than this week to find an example of a military veteran doing exactly that. Can't wait to hear your rationalisation for how it doesn't count because he only went through boot camp.
I reiterate: if you want to do your camping trip, go for it, but don't delude yourself into thinking it'll fix all of your problems in one fell swoop, or that it's the underlying secret to human civilization or a male rite of passage or similar. I'm not telling you this out of spite or meanness: I'm urging you to manage your expectations and be realistic. You say "the Hock provideth" so often it's starting to sound like a religious incantation, which is not a healthy approach to adopt in the pursuit of self-improvement.
Folamh3
1yr ago
I've done the most clichéd thing ever and bought a gym membership in the first week of the new year, and I'm looking for suggestions for exercises and routines to follow.
My main motivations for working out are to improve my mood, and vanity. I'm not interested in getting "huge" or "shredded", but I would really like to get rid of my beer belly and look generally leaner and more toned. I'm also planning on running a marathon at the end of this year, so any exercises which would assist with that are also welcome.
I don't really know anything about strength training, so currently my only goal is to be able to deadlift my body weight (~83 kg) in a few months' time.
Folamh3
7mo ago
digging back to the ancient year of 2009, Climategate
Am I the only one who finds Moldbug's writing style completely incomprehensible? He rambles on for paragraph after paragraph, smugly self-assured, and at the end of it I come away with literally no idea what he's trying to say. The only thing I'm confident of is that, whatever it is he believes (which is something I am wholly unable to glean from the actual content of what he's written), he thinks it's so self-evident that you'd have to be an utter cretin not to already believe it.
It's an experience not unlike reading TLP/Edward Teach, but at least in that case the incomprehensibility does seem to be deliberate (for whatever reason).
I don't know what on earth makes you think you are disgusting and hypocritical for wanting a relationship now. There are plenty of people who post on this site who are in relationships (myself included) or even in marriages - are they disgusting hypocrites for getting into said relationships without toiling in the Arctic circle for months? Why, of all things, is that the rule-in criterion for who is entitled to be in a relationship (or even entitled to want to be in a relationship)? Should the human race go extinct because most people can't afford to travel to the Arctic circle for months at a time?
I know you're going to give me some self-pitying/self-deprecating spiel about how all those people in relationships have actually made something of themselves, which means they're entitled to want a romantic partner - unlike you, who's so uniquely loathsome and contemptible that he ought to be euthanized unless he can Prove his Worth by etc.. To which all I can say is - bullshit. I haven't made much of myself (overweight, temporarily living with my parents, failed writer, failed musician, boring email job) and have had more than my fair share of attacks of self-loathing over the years - but the last time I actually thought there was something suspect about my desire to be in a relationship, I was a literal teenager. Wanting to be in a romantic relationship is the most normal and healthy desire a human being can have, regardless of life circumstances. I literally cannot envision any person, no matter how pathetic or loathsome, for whom knowing that they would like to be in a romantic relationship would lower my estimation of them - if I met a literal convicted murderer who killed children without remorse, and he said "I'd like to have a girlfriend", that wouldn't cause me to think any less of him. I cannot even fathom how you arrived at the conclusion that the desire to be in a romantic relationship is only legitimate conditional on having achieved XYZ, and is otherwise disgusting or hypocritical. For that matter, I can't, offhand, think of any desire meeting that description. A paedophile's desire to rape children does not become any less disgusting because he is a war hero; wanting to be rich is a perfectly legitimate desire to have, even if you are a lazy bum.
The more you tell me about your worldview, the more baffling and incoherent it seems to me, and I wish you would actually try to seriously consider the well-meaning criticisms or questions people have raised about your beliefs here, rather than just dismissing them with "no, you guys have it all wrong, it's Hock or bust." You've clearly been thinking about this stuff for so long that you've become trapped in a groove, a web of cached thoughts that you can't snap yourself out of. For someone who claims to be uniquely loathsome and awful, you seem to be suspiciously confident that your diagnosis of yours and society's ills is 100% accurate, and your proposed remedy 100% guaranteed to work. It's very easy to circle all the way around from self-loathing and end up at arrogant condescending solipsism (God knows I've done it myself), and there's something uniquely unbecoming about this cocktail of victimisation complex, self-pity and egotism.
So, do me a courtesy. Without any evasions, cop-outs, goofy stylistic flourishes ("provideth", "ambulances", "-maxx") or romantic fatalism (and without invoking the [extremely statistically rare] anecdote about the acquaintance of yours who was stabbed by his partner) - please tell me, in plain language, why you think the fact that you want to be in a romantic relationship makes you a disgusting hypocrite.
Folamh3
9mo ago
The figurative use of the term "cuck" is essentially just a dysphemism for calling someone a "doormat". The assumption is that men who allow their wives to have sex with other men aren't really okay with it, but go along with it due to a lack of backbone and an inability to establish boundaries for themselves. This obviously generalises (no one was fooled that "bike cuck" really didn't mind his bike getting stolen).
I think it's fair to acknowledge fat activists aren't just fantasizing about the shortcomings of the medical system. Doctors can sometimes focus on obesity at the expense of other issues. I've personally seen an obese family member's tumor go undiagnosed for a troubling amount of time, because the doctors all assumed her symptoms were weight-related. But I'm skeptical of the activist framing that this is all due to fat oppression and discrimination. Rather, doctors begin with the simpler or more common explanation, and obesity is a) very common and b) affects almost all body systems.
This is the standard "chasing zebras" narrative in medicine, and I've honestly never given it much serious consideration. We might hear about the odd obese person whose health problems were caused by something unrelated to their weight and carelessly overlooked by a GP, but for every one I'm sure there are at least 100 cases where the GP's snap diagnosis was right on the money. It seems the height of narcissism to demand that healthcare professionals disregard their training and ignore statistical fact (in fact, to demand that healthcare professionals administer substandard care to their patients) just because it makes some of them feel sad. (See also trans activists, who demand that healthcare professionals waste hundreds of man-hours asking 6-foot tall, bearded, broad-shouldered people if they are or have been pregnant recently.)
It's also demeaning to feel like you're in for a scolding every time you interact with the medical system, and this can discourage people from getting checked out.
Sure, but the same is true of smokers, drinkers, drug addicts etc. and no one expects me to take the Alcoholic Acceptance movement seriously or check my Drinks-In-Moderation Privilege.
Contra deBoer on transgender issues
I don't think you're merely asking us to be "kind"
I’ve long been a great fan of Freddie deBoer. He’s a consistently thought-provoking and engaging writer, courageous in his willingness to step on toes and slaughter sacred cows, worth reading even when I (often) disagree with him.
One of many areas on which I disagree with Freddie is in our respective stances on trans issues. Some years back, he posted that he was sick of people in the comments of his articles bringing up trans issues even though the article itself had nothing to do with the topic, and announced a blanket ban on this specific behaviour.1 He subsequently posted about the subject in more detail, explaining why (in contrast to his more iconoclastic opinions on progressive issues like racism, policing and mental health) he supports the standard “trans-inclusive” paradigm more or less uncritically. In March of last year, he posted an article titled “And Now I Will Again Ponderously Explain Why I Am Trans-Affirming”.
To be frank, I found the article staggeringly shoddy and poorly argued, especially for such a typically perceptive writer: it was a profound shame to see him fall victim to exactly the same errors in reasoning and appeals to emotion he so loudly decries when progressives use them in other political contexts. I intended to write a response to that article but never got around to it, and then the moment had passed. Last week he published not one but two new articles on the topic, so now I have a second chance to strike while the iron is hot. In some cases I will respond to Freddie’s arguments directly; in other cases I think it will be illuminating to contrast what Freddie wrote on this topic with what he has written on other controversial political issues in the past, to illustrate how flagrantly he is failing to live up to his own standards and committing precisely the same infractions he has complained about at length in other contexts.
“No one is saying” and what a strawman is
Freddie repeatedly asserts that various complaints that gender-critical people might have about trans activists are completely unfounded and invented from whole cloth, that no trans activists are saying what gender-critical people accuse them of having said, and that if any trans activists are saying these things then they’re only a small radical fringe and they don’t matter.
In 2021, Freddie wrote an article titled "NO ONE SAYS" & What a Strawman Is", describing a rhetorical trick in which a person opposing him on some political issue will insist that “NO ONE SAYS” a thing Freddie disagrees with, Freddie will cite examples of people saying that exact thing - but rather than concede the point, the person will simply move the goalposts:
Freddie might claim that no one is trying to obliterate the distinction between men and women; no less than a once-august publication like Scientific American argues that sex is a “spectrum” and that the idea of there being “only” two sexes is “simplistic”. Freddie might claim that no one in his experience has ever scolded him for saying “birthing person”, but that is the official language advocated for by the UK’s National Health Service. Freddie might insist that no one wants you to stop calling your kids boys or girls, but here’s a fawning article in the New York Times about parents doing exactly that, and another from the BBC.
Note also Freddie’s claim that linguistic prescriptions like “birthing person” and “chestfeeder” are largely confined to “the parts of our culture that have aggressive HR departments”. This might come as a surprise to Freddie, but some of us actually have to work in companies with aggressive HR departments - we aren’t all lucky enough to be self-employed freelancers pulling down six figures a year, beholden to no one but ourselves. It’s very strange for a self-identified Marxist who expresses such profound outrage about the capitalist exploitation of the proletariat to be so blasé about the obnoxious ideological hoops that ordinary working people are made to jump through as a condition of continued employment in a precarious economy.
For emphasis: Freddie, someone is in fact saying! And in many cases these “someones” are far more powerful and have far more influence on our culture than you or anyone in your circle of like-minded Brooklyn activists. When the fifth-largest employer in the entire world is demanding that its staff exclusively use “birthing person” in place of “mother”, what some Brooklyn activist believes is beside the point.
Female sporting events
I also find it hard to square Freddie’s claim that “no one” is trying to obliterate the distinction between male and female altogether with his apparent belief that trans women competing in female sporting events is entirely fair and legitimate. How can such a policy possibly be justified without ignoring the indisputable biological reality, consistent across time and space, that the average male person is stronger, faster and more resilient than 99% of female people? No less of a once-respectable institution than the American Civil Liberties Union describes the claim that “Trans athletes’ physiological characteristics provide an unfair advantage over cis athletes” as a “myth”. When a respected organisation like the ACLU, with an annual budget exceeding $300 million, asserts that male people are collectively no stronger than female people - the only way I can describe the claim that “no one” is trying to obliterate the distinction between male and female people is that it is a shameless insult to the reader’s intelligence.
Scepticism for me, but not for thee
A recurrent problem throughout the article is Freddie assuming that any criticism of trans-inclusive policies is a criticism of trans people themselves. No matter how many times a gender-critical person might assert “I’m not worried about trans people using this policy to hurt people - I’m worried about bad actors who are not themselves trans or suffering from gender dysphoria taking advantage of this policy to hurt people”, Freddie continually insists that criticising policies intended to be trans-inclusive is functionally the same as criticising trans people as a group. This is precisely the same kind of facile reasoning he’s so elegantly skewered in other political domains - the notion that opposition to this or that policy necessarily implies hatred of black people, or the mentally ill, or what have you. But he’s guilty of it himself, admitting elsewhere in the article that certain trans-inclusive policies pursued by the radical fringe of the trans activist lobby are short-sighted and counterproductive. So we find ourselves in the curious position in which Freddie can criticise this trans-inclusive policy without that bringing his support for trans rights into question - but if gender-critical people are sceptical or uneasy about that trans-inclusive policy, the only reasonable explanation is that they’re crypto-conservative fundamentalist Christians motivated solely by disgust and hatred of trans people.
For example, Freddie admits to scepticism about outré neogenders (“I suspect a lot of those people will probably adopt a more conventional gender identity as they age”), that a lot of the linguistic prescriptions trans activists make are preposterous and counterproductive (“I think making people believe that you want to get rid of the term “mother” is about as politically wise as punching a baby on camera”), that it’s wrong to act like medically transitioning will solve all of a trans person’s problems (“And I worry, for young trans people, that they’ll find transitioning to be just another of these human disappointments - things will be better, no doubt, but as we all tend to do they’ll have idealized the next stage of their lives and then may experience that sudden comedown when they realize that they’re still just humans with human problems”) and even that some medical practitioners are being overly aggressive about pushing minors to transition (“Can I see understand [sic] some concerns with overly-aggressive medical providers pushing care on trans-identifying minors too quickly? I guess so.”) These topics, apparently, reside within the Overton window: one is entitled to raise concerns about them without being accused of being motivated by malicious hatred of trans people as a group. Why are these concerns legitimate to express, and not: the unintended consequences of abolishing single-sex bathrooms and changing rooms; male rapists with intact genitalia being incarcerated in female prisons; convicted sex offenders coming out as trans and changing their names in order to evade child safeguarding policies - or any other of the litany of reasonable-sounding objections gender-critical people have raised over the last decade or so? No idea.
The bathroom question
A large chunk of both articles is dedicated to the question of whether it is appropriate to allow trans women to use women’s bathrooms:
I personally am not a diehard advocate for sex-segregated bathrooms, and can see the merit in making all bathrooms gender-neutral. Of all the components of trans activism going, gender-neutral bathrooms is perhaps the one I find least objectionable. That being said, I find the argument for sex-segregated bathrooms easy to understand (even if I don’t necessarily share it), and admit to being surprised that Freddie doesn’t get it, so I will try to aid him in understanding it.
A blanket policy of sex-segregated bathrooms is intended to minimise the risk of female people being raped or sexually assaulted by male people in bathrooms. While a policy of sex-segregated bathrooms is enforced, a person who sees an obviously male person enter a women’s public bathroom could reasonably assume that that person was up to no good, and take appropriate steps to rectify the situation (such as notifying a security guard). Under a trans-inclusive bathroom policy, one is no longer supposed to assume that a male person entering a women’s bathroom is up to no good, because they might identify as a trans woman.
While Freddie is correct that, under a policy of sex-segregated bathrooms, there is nothing stopping a male rapist from simply walking into a women’s bathroom, a trans-inclusive bathroom policy makes it dramatically easier for such people to get away with committing an opportunistic rape, as bystanders will be less likely to intervene if they see a male person entering a women’s bathroom for fear of being accused of being transphobic. The reasoning is similar to regulations in which adults are not permitted to enter public playgrounds unless they are the parent or guardian of a child: obviously a child molester can simply ignore the regulation, but the regulation is designed to make bad actors more obvious to bystanders.
If a woman is in a public bathroom and an obviously male person walks in, there is no reliable way for her to tell if that person is a harmless trans woman just minding her own business, or a rapist exploiting well-meaning inclusive policies for malicious ends. The fact that the person has a penis is not dispositive in one direction or the other (as Freddie acknowledges not all trans people may wish to medically transition); nor that they are bearded and wearing jeans and a T-shirt (because “trans women don’t owe you femininity”, and a trans woman presenting as male does not in any way undermine her trans identity).
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For the reasons outlined above, there is no way to reliably distinguish between trans women and cis men on sight2. Hence, there is functionally no difference between “bathrooms intended for women and trans women” and “gender-neutral bathrooms”. Like Freddie, I am not aware of any hard evidence that making bathrooms gender-neutral in a particular area resulted in an increase in the rate of rape or sexual assault. I understand the gender-critical opposition to gender-neutral bathrooms without necessarily sharing or endorsing it. Even if the concerns about how this policy might be exploited by bad actors are in fact unfounded, I don’t think it’s fair to accuse everyone expressing those concerns of being transphobic. I think it’s especially unfair to accuse a gender-critical person of saying they think all trans women are rapists when, in my experience, gender-critical people go to great lengths to emphasise that they are concerned about bad actors who aren’t trans taking advantage of these policies for malicious ends, rather than trans women doing so.
Overstating the importance of the issue
In his second article from last week, Freddie complains that gender-critical people have vastly overstated the significance of the trans issue, elevating it to the status of “the most important social divide of our time, apparently beating out crime and education and the collapse of the family etc” when trans/NB people make up at most 2-3% of the American population. I agree that, in the scheme of things, trans issues receive a vastly disproportionate share of column inches relative to their import. Where I differ from Freddie is placing the blame for this state of affairs solely at the feet of gender-critical people.
As noted by Wesley Yang, there are 39 separate days3 in the American political calendar specifically dedicated to celebrating trans people (and an additional 77 days dedicated to celebrating trans people as a subset of LGBTQ+) - in contrast to Black History Month, which famously falls on the shortest month in the Gregorian calendar, despite black Americans making up 13-14% of the US population. President Joe Biden gave a statement on Transgender Day of Remembrance, while Democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren made the frankly bizarre campaign promise that her pick for education secretary would have to be personally vetted by a transgender child. There has hardly been a single political issue in the last ten years that hasn’t been framed as “how might this affect trans people?” or “what does this mean for the struggle for trans rights?” in the popular media, no matter how tangential the connection - everything from Black Lives Matter to the war in the Ukraine to gun violence in schools to the cost-of-living crisis to Covid to AI to the Israel-Palestine conflict to Brexit and even climate change (“[exposure to secondhand smoke] can exacerbate the respiratory stress that LGBTQI+ populations may experience from air pollution and chest binding, which is a common practice among transgender men to achieve a flat chest”)
It’s a bit rich to demand that Americans spend more than one-tenth of the calendar year celebrating trans people, “centring their voices” and putting their trials and tribulations at the forefront of their consciousness - only to then turn around and say “umm why do you even care about this, it’s such a tiny issue lol” when some of them offer even the mildest pushback. You brought it up.
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Medical transition of minors
Social contagion via social media
On the controversy over underage trans people discovering a transgender identity and/or undergoing medical transition, Freddie writes:
It’s fascinating contrasting the passage above with an article Freddie published in 2022 about the recent phenomenon of social media-addicted teenagers suddenly “discovering” that they suffer from dissociative identity disorder (“DID” for short, popularly known as “multiple personality disorder”), an exceptionally rare condition in which a person has multiple distinct personalities (called “alters”). Freddie unequivocally asserted that most or all of these teenagers are either mistaken (honestly confusing the symptoms of some relatively banal personality trait or mental illness for an exotic psychosis) or actively lying; that this is bad for the teenagers themselves; and that the adults who ought to know better but indulge these teenagers anyway should be ashamed of themselves. He even went so far as to argue that dissociative identity disorder may not even exist, citing as evidence (among other things) that certain people only “discovered” they had it after being charged with a crime. How this observation ties into the transgender debate is left as an exercise to the reader (but here are a few hints).
I really cannot fathom how Freddie can reconcile his position in the DID article with his position on trans teenagers: the cognitive dissonance is simply astounding. Freddie insists that gender-critical people need not be concerned about teenagers receiving hormones or surgical interventions, as the rates at which these are occurring are “low” and “vanishingly rare” respectively - but I would be very surprised if the number of teenagers claiming to suffer from DID (even if they aren’t receiving any medical treatment for same) is greater than the number coming out as trans, which does not in any way alter Freddie’s opinion that the former is a concerning trend. He talks about “a notoriously controversial and historically extremely rare disorder… suddenly bloom[ing] into epidemic proportions among teenagers with smartphones and a burning need to differentiate themselves” and does not accept for a moment the explanation that “expanding public consciousness about such illnesses reduces stigma and empowers more people to get diagnosed with conditions they already had” - but simply refuses to connect the dots with the other thing that awkward teenagers with smartphones and burning need to differentiate themselves started “discovering” about themselves en masse all over the Western world about ten years ago (which resulted in an over 5,000% increase in referrals among female minors to the UK’s centre for transgender children - in the space of less than ten years). And the standard explanation offered for why so many female teenagers are coming out as trans is word-for-word the same as the standard explanation for why so many teenagers are claiming to suffer from DID!
Imagine, if you will, two female teenagers:
Alice is a socially awkward thirteen-year-old with some autistic tendencies. Having trouble fitting in at school, she retreats into social media, becoming immersed in communities of like-minded individuals on Tumblr and TikTok. Six months later, she announces to her parents that she has dissociative identity disorder and multiple “alters” (having given no indication that she experienced like this at any point prior), and demands to be brought to a therapist, and perhaps later to a psychiatrist who will prescribe her powerful antipsychotic medication which comes with a host of side effects.
Barbara is a socially awkward thirteen-year-old with some autistic tendencies. Having trouble fitting in at school, she retreats into social media, becoming immersed in communities of like-minded individuals on Tumblr and TikTok. Six months later, she announces to her parents that she is a trans boy called Brandon (having given no indication that she was dissatisfied with her gender identity at any point prior), and demands to be brought to a physician who specialises in gender issues who will prescribe her hormones (which come with a host of side effects) and recommend that she undergo top and/or bottom surgery.
Freddie looks at Alice and says: this is concerning, and Alice will suffer as a result - I don’t care that I’m not Alice’s parent or healthcare provider, I still think it’s concerning and I’m entitled to say so. Freddie looks at Barbara/Brandon and says: nothing to see here - it’s a private matter for Brandon, Brandon’s parents and Brandon’s healthcare providers, “I don’t understand why this element of medical science has become everyone’s business to a degree that is simply not true in other fields”, and if you think this is concerning then you’re a bigot. No matter how much a gender-critical person might insist that they are motivated by concern for Barbara/Brandon’s welfare which is just as authentic as Freddie’s for Alice - no, they’re really just a closeted conservative Christian consumed with hatred and disgust for trans people. I truly do not understand why Freddie is entitled to his opinion on Alice (despite not knowing her personally), but no gender-critical person is entitled to their opinion on Barbara/Brandon.
Let’s take it a step further:
What reasonable person would look at the scenario described above and not immediately conclude “Alice has erroneously come to believe both that she is trans and suffers from DID because of her social media consumption”? But Freddie would have us believe that the two phenomena are entirely unrelated. The fact that Alice discovered that she was transgender and had DID at exactly the same time, that she did so immediately after spending far too much time in online communities in which both DID and being trans are glamorised - this is all just a big coincidence. Freddie absolutely reserves the right to say that Alice will suffer as a result of her erroneous belief that she has DID, but anyone (outside of Alice’s parents and healthcare providers) who does the same of her belief that she is a trans boy has outed themselves as a cruel, malicious bigot.
Some of the passages from Freddie’s DID article are almost painfully on-the-nose:
Incidentally, the scenario described above (in which Alice comes to believe that she is both trans and has DID) is not an armchair hypothetical. I took a quick scan of the #dissociativeidentitydisorder tag on TikTok and noticed that many of the individuals posting content under that tag describe themselves as transgender in addition to claiming to have multiple alters. Transgender patients who also claim to suffer from DID is apparently a sufficiently common scenario that it was discussed at the World Professional Association for Transgender Health in September 2022. What to do in the event that there is disagreement among the “alters” about whether or not to undergo medical transition? WPATH’s elegant solution: use a smartphone app to allow the alters to vote in turn and come to a collective decision.
Self-regulation of medical bodies
Stories like the above are precisely why so many gender-critical people don’t share Freddie’s optimism in the ability or willingness of the “medical community to change their standard of care as new data comes available”. By asserting that “I am certain… that I don’t want the government getting involved in these medical decisions. Ron Desantis does not get a say, sorry”, Freddie is committing himself to a position in which the medical bodies governing transition for minors will always be able to effectively self-regulate and will never require outside interference from governmental bodies.
That’s a remarkably high level of confidence to have in any medical body governing any kind of medical treatment. Of course we would all love to live in a world in which medical bodies can self-regulate and no outside interference is necessary, but - well, medical scandals happen, and sometimes the government getting involved is an act of last resort after self-regulation fails. I’m not saying that the bodies governing healthcare for trans minors are any worse at self-regulation and course-correction than the average medical body (whether in oncology or orthopaedics or whatever); but I’m definitely saying I don’t think I have any good reason to believe that these medical bodies are better than average, and certainly not so much better that Freddie’s unshakeable confidence in them can be rationally justified.
To use an example of how medical bodies’ self-regulation can and does fail, the Irish surgeon Michael Neary conducted unnecessary hysterectomies and other surgical procedures on over a hundred women over a thirty-year period. Several nurses blew the whistle at various points in his career, to no avail; an internal investigation conducted by three consultants found no evidence of wrongdoing and recommended that Neary continue working in the Lourdes Hospital. It was only after a judicial inquiry brought by the ministry for health and children (i.e. the government) that Neary was finally struck off the register, five years after the internal investigation found he’d done nothing wrong. If the government hadn’t gotten involved (as a measure of last resort, the ability of the medical bodies in question having demonstrably failed to self-regulate and course-correct), it’s entirely possible that Neary would have ruined dozens of additional women’s lives before retiring on a tidy pension. Or consider the more recent example of Lucy Letby, a serial killer working as a nurse who murdered at least 7 newborn babies: the NHS Foundation Trust attempted to handle the matter internally (even forcing doctors who’d raised the alarm about Letby to personally apologise to her) and were extremely resistant to involving the police. It was only after alerting the police (i.e. the government) - nearly two full years after members of staff had raised the alarm following Letby’s first confirmed victim - that Letby was finally removed from her position and later arrested, charged and convicted.
To clarify: I’m not saying that governmental intervention into transition for minors is currently necessary. However, the suggestion that we can confidently assert that no such intervention will ever be necessary is preposterous. I don’t think we have any good reason to believe that the medical bodies governing medical transition for minors are invulnerable to the kinds of social dynamics and institutional failures that have afflicted every other kind of medical body,4 and doctors as a profession (as the examples above illustrate) are notorious for closing ranks and circling the wagons at the first whiff of a potential scandal. To simply declare by fiat “the medical bodies governing transition for minors will always be able to self-regulate and course-correct, governmental oversight or intervention is not necessary and never will be” is shockingly naïve. He touched on a similar point in his article from March of last year:
All true. The difference being that, in my experience, whistleblowers who call attention to substandard practices at dialysis centres, radiology labs and pharmacies are not generally accused of lying, being right-wing agitators or being bigoted against marginalised members of society - all accusations hurled at Jamie Reed, even well after her claims of misconduct were largely substantiated by no less than the New York Times.
This unqualified confidence in a class of medical practitioners is all the more baffling coming from Freddie, considering he himself found it entirely credible when one of his readers described how her therapist used their sessions as an opportunity to hector and guilt-trip her about her white female privilege in the style of racial grievance politics popularised by Robin diAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi. If therapists are vulnerable to allowing their faddish political opinions override their duty of care to their patients, why not endocrinologists, surgeons and so on?
But I suppose the mere suggestion that endocrinologists who work with trans teenagers are just as fallible and prone to ordinary human error as anyone else makes me a cruel, malicious bigot who hates trans people.
Parental input into their children’s transition is more controversial than Freddie seems to think
As an aside, do you know who besides gender-critical people is a cruel, malicious bigot? If we were to be even a little bit consistent about this, Freddie himself. I’m not the first person to note that perfectly reasonable and level-headed individuals with impeccable progressive bona fides (such as Jesse Singal) have been smeared as bigots by no less an insitution than GLAAD simply for arguing, as Freddie does, that the parents of trans children should have some input into what medical treatments their children do or don’t undergo. The official stance of many pro-trans organisations is that “trans kids know who they are” and that any attempts to gatekeep their access to “gender-affirming care” (including by their parents) is denying them lifesaving medical treatment, no different from denying insulin to a diabetic.
If you think I’m exaggerating, consider this bill in the state of California which would make a parent’s decision to “affirm” their child’s gender identity (or not) a factor in custody disputes (at the time of writing, it has passed both houses but not yet been signed into law). In the eyes of the state of California, all other things being equal, a parent who expresses misgivings about their child’s desire to medically transition is a strictly worse parent than a parent who uncritically and enthusiastically endorses that child’s desire. See also the publicly-funded British charity Mermaids, who were caught sending a chest binder to a journalist posing a 14-year-old teenager, even after being explicitly told that the girl’s mother had forbidden her from wearing one.
Obviously, Freddie, you would be very insulted if you were to be smeared as a bigot for expressing the “standard, not-particularly-interesting progressive” opinion that parents should have some say in what medical treatments their children undergo. Please recognise that this “not-particularly interesting” opinion of yours is in fact very controversial in the trans activist space. Please try to understand how gender-critical people feel when you smear them as bigots for expressing what seem to them “standard, not-particularly interesting progressive” opinions, such as “it’s bad when sex offenders falsely claim to be trans women so as to serve their sentences in women’s prisons”.
Detransition
In his article from March, Freddie had this to say about detransitioners:
For the record, the existence of detransitioners does not undermine my respect for trans people. I have trans friends who I respect. If they decided that they wanted to revert to being cis, I would support them in that decision absolutely. The existence of people who transition and then come to regret their decision does not challenge my belief that adults are entitled to transition in the first place, any more than (to use a banal example) the existence of people who undergo tattoo removal challenges my belief that adults can get tattoos if they want to.
The detransition phenomenon is important to highlight in the interests of informed consent. If an adult is considering undergoing an elective medical procedure (or series of medical procedures), their healthcare practitioner should proactively make them informed about the statistical outcomes of that medical procedure, which includes the proportion of people who undergo that procedure and later come to regret it. This goes double for surgical procedures which have a high risk of complications. It goes double-double for highly invasive procedures which will irreversibly change large parts of a person’s body and permanently sterilise them. And it goes double-double-double when you’re proposing to do the above on minors.
If our collective attitude towards medical transition was sensible and depoliticised, the paragraph above would be a complete no-brainer. Instead we find ourselves in a culture in which medical transition is routinely presented as a silver bullet which will erase a trans person’s problems in one fell swoop; in which even the expected downsides of successful transition are downplayed and minimised by healthcare practitioners; and in which distressed parents are browbeaten with emotionally manipulative slogans like “Would you rather have a live daughter or a dead son?” In this environment, it’s perfectly reasonable to push back on the soft-pedalling of medical transition by pointing out that a significant proportion of those who transition later regret their decision, and that prospective transitioners ought to take that fact (among others) into account when making their decision.
If anything, the term “detransition” downplays the severity of the situation. A “detransitioner” has not simply pressed Ctrl-Z and reverted their body to factory settings - the changes they have made to their body are generally irreversible and will completely change the course of their life. Michael Neary’s victims were furious upon realising that they were denied the ability to have further children for no good reason at all - the idea that medical professionals would downplay the magnitude of the decision to transition is unconscionable.
The “Fox News Fallacy”
In his article about multiple personality disorder, Freddie described what he called the “Fox News Fallacy”. I will quote from it at length:
And what does Freddie have to say about gender-critical people who are (among other things) concerned about trans teenagers for many of the same reasons that Freddie is concerned about teenagers claiming to have DID? Well, he
One might think the breadth of criticisms directed towards trans activism and the range of people expressing them might give Freddie pause - surely not all of these people are just bigoted lapsed Christians motivated by animalistic revulsion of trans people? But no - no matter how many people express reservations about this or that component of transgender activism; no matter how measured, restrained and thoroughly researched their criticisms might be; no matter what point on the political spectrum they may reside on (including no less than the Communist Party of Great Britain, who in another world Freddie might consider fellow travellers); even if they are atheist materialists who object to gender ideology specifically because they consider its quasi-mystical dualistic character something of a cultural regression - everyone who is even a little bit more sceptical on the trans issue than Freddie must in fact be a closeted Christian who thinks that trans people are “wicked” and “against God’s plan”. There’s no other possible explanation that merits serious consideration, apparently.
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1 For the record, I don’t blame him for finding this behaviour tiresome, I think the people melodramatically accusing him of hypocrisy for “censoring” them should chill out, and as it’s his Substack, the moderation decisions he enforces on it are entirely his prerogative. To anyone who says that my only beef with Freddie is that he won’t let me talk about this stuff in the comments of his articles about something unrelated, I would like here to reiterate: I have never complained about him forbidding people from bringing up trans issues in the comments of his articles, and completely respect his decision to ban people from doing so.
2 To better disambiguate between genuine trans women and cis bad actors was the root of my proposal to make incarcerating trans women in women’s prisons conditional on their being first assessed by a psychiatrist experienced in gender issues. Freddie doesn’t even touch on the prison issue at all, I suspect because he recognises a losing battle when he sees one.
3 Not including the unofficial “Trans Day of Vengeance”, which coincides with April Fool’s Day.
4 To bring it back to another of Freddie’s older posts: medical bodies are institutions, which means they are exactly as subject to the Iron Law of Institutions as any other institution.
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