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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.
I've started to use religious terms around transgender ideology, since I think they're the most accurate ones to describe what I see as a metaphysical belief system, or a "folk religion." If there can be a more widespread understanding of this ideology as similar to a folk religion, I think the decisions around treatments and surgeries (acts of faith) become easier for pundits/politicians/voters to articulate and decide where the guardrails should be.
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