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Notes -
Yet Another Part Of the WPATH Saga
Unsealed Court Documents Show That Admiral Rachel Levine Pressured WPATH To Remove Age Guidelines From The Latest Standards Of Care
You may have heard about the controversy around the latest Standards Of Care removing the age minimums for various transgender care procedures. What I didn't make clear in that post was this wasn't about the difference between SOC7 and SOC8, the removal took place between different versions of the SOC8 itself. Shortly after the original guidelines were published, a correction notice was issued, and WPATH republished the SOC with the minimum ages removed (among other changes). Curiously the current version of the notice says the original version was published by mistake, and contains no details about the text that was changed.
The now unsealed documents show that this was the result of pressure from none other than Admiral Rachel Levine:
Another quote from the article says that "we have made changes as to how the minimal ages are presented in the documents", but this wasn't just a simple change in presentation, all age limits, other than for phalloplasty, are gone, and replaced with procedural steps the patient should go through. They claim this makes the standards more restrictive, but in my opinion that's contradicted by the statements from admiral Levine.
Jesse Singal also points out standards were supposed to be determined by the "Delphi process":
This process was violated according to SOC contributors themselves:
So between the "correction notice" shenanigans, and outright admission that rules were broken to push through that particular change, it seems like a pretty slam-dunk case for the Biden administration putting political pressure to loosen criteria for transgender care for minors.
This all just feels like moving deck chairs on the titanic. If being trans is real and we can indeed reliably detect it then all of this is pointless. If it's not then deciding what age to do the surgeries is the least of our issues. I don't see how there can be some middle road where we are confident it's real and detectable and yet should move cautiously.
There's a few problems here. For one, I don't think people at he forefront of the trans movement are even using the same framework as you are, where it's a diagnosable disorder that should be treated - see my previous WPATH post. Secondly, they're not really making any claims about detectability, because that would allow us to resolve the matter in a simple blinded test, and I don't think it would come out well for the pro-trans side.
Now, I believe (and think I have enough examples to back it up) this "medicalized narrative" has absolutely been used to persuade the broader public. Even as they were avoiding making specific claims about detectability, they were speaking with enough confidence that the detectability felt implied, and this is why this conversation is not pointless. Most people know children are developing, go through phases, and are generally more malleable, so recommending irreversible treatments will at the very least give people pause. This is why this is such a big part of the conversation, it highlits the tensions and contradictions in the discourse.
Another thing is that I don't think the story is so much about the state of Trans Science, as it is about the political pressure on science. The pro-trans side claims the anti-trans are playing dirty by passing bills limiting transgender care for children, they claim this should be left to the doctors. As it turns out, they're putting substantial political pressure themselves to force "the science" to say what they want it to say, except they do it covertly.
This is core to the progressive playbook.
Simplified American democracy can be thought of as "You think A, I think B - let's vote on it." Our dispute resolution mechanism is voting plus individual level protections (the constitution) and then courts for reviewing the decision even after its made. Throw on top a lot of procedural shenanigans as a mechanism to slow or disrupt a process, but not to truly alter the game. It gets down to voting, often multiple times over time.
The progressive playbook is "Let's not vote on this." Instead, it's "Let's shoehorn this into something we've already voted on and, simultaneously, push a narrative than any disagreement with subject X is actually a disagreement with already universally agreed upon subject Y (ie that thing on which we've already voted)" Primarily this takes the form of injecting everything into the 1964 Civil Rights acts (or one of its many updates over the decades). Why? Because no one is going to come out and say "I'm against civil rights." All the progressives have to do is say "everything is civil rights" which they do routinely.
And this, as you state, is exactly why WPATH has tried to science-ify and launder what is actually a very niche ideological debate. If "science" says all of this trans stuff is "healthcare" then they can make the argument "this is about healthcare, not about out trans stuff" while simultaneously making outrageous claims like "people against us want to hurt children."
This is also how "abortion" is no longer primarily about "killing babies vs not killing babies" but about drafting off of 1960s-1970s era women's rights ("her body, her choice") and (again) healthcare infused "reproductive health."
And this is what truly disturbs those on the right about progressives. It isn't the issue / ideology stuff - you can have crazy ideas all you want, and you can have them away from me. If enough people really do agree with you, we can all vote on it. But when you keep hacking and re-hacking the system to effectively circumvent all of the laws and norms that have been developed to deal with disagreement since the founding of the republic, it really doesn't look like you don't care about things like the constitution anymore - you just want to have it YOUR way, all others be literally damned and exiled. And it's stupid because all of those laws and norms are there for really good reasons like preventing tyranny and resisting highly emotional social movements. It's funny to me when I hear progressives say things like "Donald Trump will end democracy" because it demonstrates they don't really understand how the three branches of government work and interact. But, then again, if the institutions go the way the progressives want then, yes, a sufficiently motivated demagogue would have the instruments at hand to end democracy in America as we know it.
It has always been framed this way. Pro-choice advocates have been framing it mostly in terms of women's lib since they stopped framing it mostly in terms of eugenics. The emphasis on 'healthcare' has always been in the background, I think it's just increased progressive neuroticism that brought it to the fore.
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