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Notes -
The New York Times just published an article on a trans study not being published for ideological reasons (Archive)
Has anyone else noticed a clear "vibe shift" on trans issues recently? It would have been unimaginable for this article to be published in the New York Times just a few years ago, but now, it just seems like part of an overall trend away from trans ideologues.
I'm am curious where this trend continues. Is it going to go all the way? Will trans issues be seen as the weird 2010s, early 2020s political project that had ardent supporters, but eventually withered away and died like the desegregation bussing movement? Or will it just settle into a more moderate position of never using any medication on children, but allowing adults to do whatever? Or maybe it is just a temporary setback and the ideologues will eventually win out?
Also of note, trans issues are coming to SCOTUS again. The issue presented is
I recommend reading Alabama's amicus curiae brief for an in depth critique of WPATH. SCOTUS is set to hear oral arguments on this case on the 4th of December, so this is lining up to be an interesting oral argument to listen to. SCOTUS usually releases the big controversial cases at the end of their term, so the opinion on this case will probably be released in the summer of '25.
Cautiously hoping this is a sign this is becoming useless as a political wedge and we can go back to studying what GD is and how to help people that have it instead of wallowing in the hell of using it to destroy social norms at the expense of everyone involved.
Studying GD (gender dysphoria) is not innocent. It also creates GD.
Call it Heisenberg's principle of sexuality.
Sometimes it's better to just let people do their thing without labeling it and making it part of the state religion. The less we talk about it the better.
Look, whatever the name you want to put on the phenomenon it's been with us for a very long time. I balk at the idiocy of presentism all the time, but "rare case of pathological desire to be of the other sex" goes back to the beginning of history.
The constructionist position on this is nonsense, you're not going to get rid of this by removing the concept of sex from reality, because not only is that not possible, it's going to cause insane harm to 99% of people.
The medicalist position has giant flaws, not least of which that it's turning into an industry to extract value out of the misery, but at least it's an attempt do deal with the pragmatic phenomenal reality.
You can't tell people who are confused to death about their own identity to "just do their thing" unless you want marginals that kill themselves. They need some help.
And yes, social contagion is a real issue here, and this is indeed a problem what would benefit from less attention. We can have a solution to the problem that doesn't require integration with the state religion, or at least we could before the state turned total.
Well said.
I think there’s room for a stable equilibrium, and it probably involves distinguishing sex from gender. I don’t know if that’s enough to do right by people who experience the world so differently from me. But it would be better than the strategic ambiguity of the current discourse.
I think this was the equilibrium 10-25 years ago when I was growing up/young adult, and it's been proven to be unstable. I think the only stable equilibrium at this point would be far future scifi where literal sex change is possible.
I have a similar impression.
The bleeding edge of teenage identity politics was calling people gay. A statement about gender roles, no doubt, but not sex. Er. You know what I mean.
What do you think happened? Was there some technological development in medicine or information? Do we blame tumblr?
I have no great overarching theory, but a couple of thoughts. One is that, at least since the 90s, and I'm guessing earlier, the idea that "separate is not equal" was taught as dogma to kids due to the history of the US, i.e. Plessy vs Ferguson & Brown vs Board of Education. We took that to heart. That meant that any difference at all in how people were treated - i.e. being "separate" - was, definitionally, unequal. So treating transwomen as literally indistinguishable from women in every single way, i.e. in their sex and not just in their "gender identity," became a moral prerogative.
Another is the success of the gay rights/gay marriage movement on the idea that it was an innate "born this way" thing. I remember back in high school, a friend of mine dated a girl who came out as gay after they broke up; when I talked about how he dated her back when she was straight, my friend "corrected" me by telling me that she was already gay when she dated him, she just didn't know it yet (I bought it at the time, but now I wonder how I could have taken this on faith when it's obvious that such a definitive statement about how sexual orientation works would require absolute mountains of empirical evidence to prove - I was very good at coming up with epicycles for this kind of stuff, I think). The movement to normalize trans people took the same tactic, hence the claim that, say, Bruce Jenner was a woman when "she" won the men's decathlon gold medal or Ellen Page was a man when "he" was nominated for best actress for Juno. This reinforced the idea that someone's "transness" is not tied to anything in physical reality but rather entirely up to the individual's personal judgment, which meant that autogynephiles were encouraged to and celebrated for transitioning, and such people absolutely want access to female-only spaces, and so discriminating against them on the basis that their sex was male despite their gender being otherwise became verboten.
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