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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32796 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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Jesse Singal gets gaslit

Also, a more neutral take: https://elizamondegreen.substack.com/p/about-that-twitter-shitstorm-affirmationnot

Brief recap:

  1. NYT shifts its coverage of medical concerns for trans issues from 100% supporting transition in all cases to a more questioning stance, particularly with minors

  2. An open letter is sent to NYT laying out "serious concerns with editorial bias" in response to this shift

  3. Jonathan Chait posts a critical response to the open letter at New York Magazine (no relation to NYT)

  4. Chait gets dragged on twitter for being anti-trans, with a highlighted passage

  5. Jesse Singal posts in support of Chait, showing the highlighted passage is directly in accordance with WPATH guidelines and explains what it means

  6. E. Kale Edmiston, a trans man, posts in response that he, Edmiston, wrote the WPATH guidelines posted by Singal, and that Singal is misinterpreting them

  7. Liberal media pundits and reporters pile on, when Singal defends the straightforward interpretation, demanding that Signal accept Edmiston's (frankly bizarre) interpretation of the quoted passage

  8. Singal has done his homework and contacts several other WPATH authors, who all confirm Singal's interpretation of the passage and reject Edmiston's

  9. Eventually this reaches Scott Leibowitz, overall head of the WPATH guidelines document, who says that Edmiston definitely did not write the highlighted passage, and later severely admonishes this lying and false attribution from within academia

  10. Singal performs several victory laps on Twitter, demanding from the media pundits and reporters the apologies and corrections they had demanded from him

Good guys: Jesse Singal, Jonathan Chait, Scott Leibowitz

Bad guys: E. Kale Edmiston, Madeline Leung Coleman (NYMag editor), Michael Hobbes, Jeet Heer, Marisa Kasabas (MSNBC Columnist), David Perry, Eric Vilas-Boas (Vulture staffer), Miles Klee, Siva Vaidhyanathan

The most interesting, dire, and relevant info is from Eliza Mondegreen, linked near the top. Apparently there is a wink/nod system with the WPATH Standards of Care document, where the words are written a certain way because they must be, but they are interpreted much differently.

She concludes:

Theory and practice—the Standards of Care and what actually happens in the exam room—have nothing to do with one another. Everything in the Standards of Care that sounds cautious and responsible comes with an understanding that’s supposed to go unspoken: We don’t really mean it. We just need to say this. If a patient shows up with serious comorbidities, of course we have to say that they must undergo a “comprehensive” “assessment” and that the clinician must remain open to the possibility that the patient might not really have gender dysphoria and maybe shouldn’t really transition. But you know how important the work we all do is.

In other words, the Standards of Care are a lie that everyone involved in gender medicine pretends to believe. When reporters like Singal and Chait try to hold gender clinicians to WPATH standards (something I think is worth doing, by the way!), savvy clinicians will respond: Yes, of course we “assess” patients very carefully, what do you think this is, the Wild West?

Among other, more obvious mistakes, Edmiston’s most grievous error was not pretending to believe the lie.

EDITS: Signal, Single, Liebowitz. added Cast of Characters, Eliza Mondegreen quote

I'm honestly shocked Leibowitz had the bravery and integrity to do that. He must have been under tremendous pressure to join the pile-on and hand his authority to the gaslighters. Good on him, but I hope he won't be purged for it.

But I went to WPATH. There were whole sessions devoted to transitioning people with every imaginable comorbidity—like patients presenting with ‘multiple personalities’ who disagree about what irreversible interventions ‘they’ want to pursue

Holy shit, I didn't realize it was quite that bad. Only a decade ago the "multiple personality" thing was recognized as larping social contagion, and now it's back to being treated seriously?

I guess this shouldn't be surprising after the castration fetish forum member writing the wpath guidelines, but the gell-mann amnesia is hard to shake off.

I'm honestly shocked Leibowitz had the bravery and integrity to do that. He must have been under tremendous pressure to join the pile-on and hand his authority to the gaslighters. Good on him, but I hope he won't be purged for it.

My model of Leibowitz, pending specific updates, is the same as for NYT editors I've explained here. Actual top managers do not want any «Cathedral» to grow underneath their feet. He doesn't necessarily care about the object level conflict. He may even be more sympathetic to the radical side. But he runs this thing. He's the boss, the alpha of the pack. You use the correct word – hand his authority. It was a direct challenge to him: hey boss, we wanna eat this dude, give us the greenlight OK? Just keep silent about this pesky lil detail we made up that compromises the reputation of your organization, we'll take care of everything. Just sit this one out... Had he agreed, he'd have recognized them as decision makers. And then it would have been as bad as any cancellation, for all his power and status would have become nominal, a shell at the mob's beck and call.

Before long they'd have started to casually refer to more unhinged opinions he did not endorse – what's the harm, the old man's a bit out of the loop (heh) but his heart's in the right place, he's gonna see our point when he gets to it, why bother him. His own assistants would have begun signing documents without his authorisation (realistically they already do, but only when believing he does intend them to do so) – assuming he'd find it too stressful to retract, and would instead escape to routine work, to conferences, to personal affairs... And then a younger alpha, an informal leader, having built a coalition of energetic strivers, would have gratefully received the reins.

Power balance in institutions is surprisingly dependent on such archaic chimp instincts. Do not give your boss the impression you want to make him your bitch unless you're ready to strike.

There's this recurring phenomenon in psychology of fad illnesses that have gigantic spikes in diagnoses for diseases that are real but normally extremely rare. And typically specifically spikes of teenage girls.

Trans has clearly been going through the motions but it's bigger culturally than MPD or anorexia ever were and at this point I think it might be self sustaining.

Appeal to historical patterns is a lot more compelling when it’s not immediately followed by “and this time will be different.”

I was there when trans was this obscure thing nobody gave a shit about, I can tell how different things are now from first hand experience.

I don't fucking know what's gonna happen. The other fads I know of didn't have a political movement attached.

But if there's no level of social contagion involved here I'd like to know how you explain the 1000% growths. Because so far it's the only compelling explanation I've found and the only answer people claiming otherwise have given me is insults and dismissals of official statistics as lies.

It’s not that there can’t be a social contagion involved. I have no doubt that the movement has picked up trend chasers, disaffected youth, hypochondriacs, whatever. How many? I don’t know, I haven’t looked at detransition stats lately, but that’d be a good lower bound. I definitely wouldn’t pick number of Reddit subscribers, especially due to the attached political movement.

I’m objecting to the anorexia comparison for a different reason. You’ve observed that both trans and anorexia have the trappings of a fad. But trans doesn’t seem to be hitting the expected lifecycle. This suggests two options.

If trans is a fad, then like anorexia, it should be expected to wane. If trans isn’t going to fade away, then it perhaps it isn’t like anorexia in other ways.

Instead, you’ve picked from both options. It’s like anorexia (contagious, not “real”, should be stigmatized) except when it isn’t (politicized, expected to self-sustain).

Only a decade ago the "multiple personality" thing was recognized as larping social contagion, and now it's back to being treated seriously?

Scott Alexander has written about this, I feel pretty certain. Tulpas (intentional creation of additional personality) and victims (unintentional multiple personalities) seem to be real phenomena, if rarer than claimed.

I'm pretty sure that 200 years from now we will regard contemporary psychology and pyschiatry the same way we regard galenic medicine today.

Scott Alexander has written about this, I feel pretty certain.

Yes he has

Wow, Freddie was going off in the comments.

We've had some recent discussion here, too. I think Singal's motioning around the modern "plural/multiplicity" thing, which is still weird, but it's a different sort of problem than the more classical DID/MPD "is this a giant trauma reaction, or are shrinks training people into it" (and, perhaps more importantly, doesn't have the 'large memory gap' symptom that a lot of DID fakers abused).

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