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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32799 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 honestly just decided I’ll be a bigot and have worked out that trans people don’t exists. Realistically I think there’s an incredibly small percent of the population that some hormone thing went wrong and really have gender confusion.

It feels a lot like anorexia. Where Scott just wrote a piece about how it wasn’t common in society until one case got publicized and now you have an epidemic of anorexia and the same process has occurred in multiple societies. Or like one mass shooting leads to multiple Maas shooting.

So it’s part of the culture war I get no interest in reading the nuances of. It’s like trying to debate caring about a cult of Scientology.

Rather than saying they don't exist, it would be more accurate and productive to say that they have a mental illness. Like with people with anorexia. It exists, it can cause suffering, it's complicated and hard to solve rather than just "made up" in a way that a five year old pretending to be a cowboy is. But it exists within the realm of psychology, and therefore effective treatments will also be within the realm of psychology: therapy and medications. And it is socially irresponsible to enable the behavior and reinforce the illness, even though sympathy may be appropriate as it is for most mental illnesses.

But it exists within the realm of psychology, and therefore effective treatments will also be within the realm of psychology: therapy and medications.

I don't think the conclusion follows.

I, like many men, have a similar problem to transgender folks: I'm Dwayne Johnson in the body of a 40+ computer programmer. The solution is squats, deadlifts, bench press, road work and clean eating, not therapy and medication. Body transformation >> body acceptance, at least in this particular case where body transformation has so many other benefits. And it's pretty easy to reverse the transformation and go back to dad bod if desired.

The principle that "what starts in psychology stays in psychology" seems to be false.

Now in the transgender case it's trickier because body transformation doesn't work very well and it seems like the desire for body transformation is often far less permanent than the transformation itself. But that is fundamentally a question of cost/benefit analysis (and I think the modern world is getting it wrong).

Abstract principles like what you describe don't help. If we had a 100% perfect and reversible gender transition, there would be no reason not to let people try on an opposite gender body just for fun.

body transformation doesn't work very well

Do you mean the transformation itself is poor or that transformation is a poor treatment for the illness?

In your fantasy future where

100% perfect and reversible gender transition

Is possible and available, would you expect this to cure the dysphoric cohort?

My suspicion is that other symptoms would emerge. Are anorexics cured / happy once they reach their weight loss goals?

Do you mean the transformation itself is poor or that transformation is a poor treatment for the illness?

I'm not the person you're responding to but I think the answer to both questions is yes. There's no way to enable trans women to get pregnant, neovaginas are a laughably poor substitute for the real thing (functionally and visually), facial feminization surgery only goes so far (especially if the recipient has already completed puberty). On the trans men side of things, no amount of testosterone will enable any trans man from achieving the muscle mass and bone density of the average cis man, and you can't ejaculate with a neopenis.

In answer to the second question, there was a study conducted in Sweden which found that undergoing gender reassignment surgery did not significantly improve the recipient's likelihood of committing suicide. Obviously beware the man of one study (one obvious potential confounder: a trans person even considering undergoing said procedure is probably in far greater distress and hence proneness to suicide than a trans person who isn't considering it), but anyone presenting medical transition as a silver bullet is either ignorant or deceitful.

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