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Notes -
The Saga of Jaime Reed continues
For those who haven't followed it:
Part one was Jaime Reed blowing the whistle on the St. Louis Children's Hospital by submitting an affidavit, and Bari Weiss' Free Press publishing an article about it.
Part two was the aftermath, Missouri Independent's and the St.Louis Post Dispatch doing an investigation that contradicted Reed's statements, summed up by @PmMeClassicMemes, focusing in no small part on the ridiculousness of the claim that one of the patients identified as an attack helicopter.
Part three was Jesse Singal doing an investigation of his own, pointing out the statements contradicting Reed were made by members of a group called TransParents, some of who actually co-founded the clinic in question. He also got documentation from her about the attack helicopter kid. I summarized it here.
Now the New York Times has also investigated the issue. As someone following trans issues for a while I found it to be a bit of a slog, but it could be interesting to someone out of the loop. The short of it is they've corroborated many of Jaime Reed's claims, though they claim to have contradicted one of them:
For what it's worth Reed responded to it on Twitter:
The question of NYT's bias is an interesting one. A lot of people from the "anti-trans" side of the issue are praising the article as very nuanced. I'm also firmly on that side, and personally I feel like they're pulling a lot of their punches, if an "anti-trans" version Cade Metz wrote that article they'd have many opportunities to go wild on this particular subject, to the point that the article on Scott would appear like a fluff piece. On the other hand I do recognize they're constrained by their audience, and even writing the article in it's present form is probably about as much as they can get away with at the moment.
Indeed, GLAAD got maad, and unleashed The Truck. This is actually the second time they did this, the first was after NYT published a profile on detransitioners. I think this might a strategic mistake on their part. The first time they protested the NYT, their action carried some energy, even if it didn't result in anything. The problem is that doing the same thing again after their original protest had no effect, makes this one feel rather impotent. With responses turned off it's hard to gauge people's reactions, but it feels like they aren't having it anymore, at least on this particular issue.
At the beginning of the year I made a prediction that something's up with the trans issue. The debate rages on, and we're probably still years away from a resolution, but I'm growing increasingly confident that this year is a turning point.
There is precedent for the LGBTQI2 movement to overreach. Decriminalization of child molestion and destigmatization of pedophilia were once positions which were tolerated by its majority, but today they go as far as deny any historical association. But when the rift between the majority of gay and assocated advocates and pedophiles emerged, the former lacked the institutional support they now have. When the senate threated to withdraw funding of UN unless NAMBLA is ejected, the Sixcolour was a partisan symbol, not a second national flag as is today.
How big do you figure was the movement at the time? If the "LGBTQI2 movement" went from being 1% of society of whom 50% were pederasts to being 50% of society of whom 1% are pederasts - as one may expect to be the case if the movement could be modelled as providing a home for all that are sufficiently far from the conservative ideal of sexual orientation, with the distance threshold steadily going down - then this simultaneously call into question the "wokes are crypto-pederasts waiting for their time to strike" narrative many right-wingers seem to want to get out of this historical observation, and whether we can generalise to assume that the movement will step back from another putative overreach, given that there is now much less room for further growth and hence dilution.
It's not that "wokes are crypto-pederasts", it's that the genuine paedophiles will use any movements around loosening the 'conservative ideal of sexual orientation' as stalking horses and useful idiots, see the push on now for MAPs instead of paedophiles since that term is stigmatising, etc. There probably are genuine people with this perversion who want to change, but given that we've had it hammered into us that conversion therapy doesn't work, is a fraud, is torture, and should be illegal, then are we supposed to believe "it doesn't work at all except in this one instance of a new sexual orientation" and the real child-rapists who don't want to change and have no intention of doing so will use these organisations as a cloak and protective colouration - 'how dare you slander me by accusing me of being a paedophile, I'm taking you to court! I just have this particular orientation that is not my fault, ask the psychologists and social scientists!'
Look at trans rights movement - for whatever genuine people are out there, isn't it strange how all of a sudden male-identifying violent rapists suddenly found their true inner womanhood when it was a question of going to jail and which prison they'd be put in? And such people used the force of law which was intended to protect oppressed minority to get their way about being put in women's prisons.
I think this understanding fails to model low-decouplers properly. A high-decoupler might indeed see the $currentyear belief system and think that there's a glaring unprincipled special case ("conversion therapy doesn't work... except for pedos") at work that is only waiting to be regularised. Meanwhile, I think, for the low-decoupler, the principle has never changed: things are either simultaneously evil, in violation of principles, wasteful, ineffective and fraudulent - or simultaneously good, in line with all principles, efficient, effective and honest. You could consider this an instance of the just-world fallacy, or simply affect-loading as the main and only way to make pronouncements about the real world. "$orientation conversion therapy doesn't work" was never intended to be the scientific statement, orthogonal to questions of morality, that you imagine it to be: it simply means that $orientation belongs in the good-effective-honest cluster and interfering with $orientation belongs in the bad-ineffective-fraudulent cluster. Any social debates being had, and any shift of public opinion, is not about eggheaded technical arguments regarding techniques but only about where the line between good and bad is drawn, and there I don't see any significant qualitative shift having happened in previous years. The last big Chesterton Fence that broke down in the western theater of the good-bad assignment battlefield was the loss of Christian authority, and I don't think we're getting back to that anytime soon; if you are serious about stopping pederasts, you probably should be more concerned with fortifying a new line. (I think that the liberal principle of bodily non-compulsion - which seems to have stood strong enough that the push for "you must sleep with trans women" fell completely flat - and some reinforcement of the idea that unrelated adults are by default sexually exploitative towards children and so children can't consent would be sufficient.)
I reckon this to be a sideshow entirely driven by the circumstance that approximately nobody actually has the slightest stake in what happens in women's prisons, and so the whole issue is a convenient side-stage to fight proxy wars for the conflict that actually matters (similar to how so many people with an opinion on Trump appear to have a strong opinion on Orbán, without necessarily even being able to point out Hungary on a map). I don't think the pederasty case has the same potential: many more people actually have a stake (by virtue of having children), and at the same time it doesn't have the shape of any live CW battle that it could serve as a substitute for (since all "can A have sex with B?" battles are currently cleanly resolved in favour of yes or no). (During the brief heyday of NAMBLA, the latter condition was not yet met, which is why the pedo question managed to get some air.)
Oh, I never thought it was anything to do with science but was purely for the "homophobia! bad!" sloganeering. But the thing is, when they're going to be dragging MAP into the spotlight as the new 'homosexuality is not a perversion or mental illness, but it is a disorder, but they can't help it and so should not be persecuted or prosecuted', part of that will be the useful idiot psychologists et al. going on about therapy to help them deal with these impulses.
And we'll all be expected to forget that this boils down to conversion therapy, which we were all told never works anyway. Because that will be the politically convenient take on it.
I'm sufficiently autistic/OCD on details like this to want them to pick a story and stick to it, and I know that makes me a fool. There is no objective truth, there isn't even any subjective truth, there's just whatever line is the most convenient to get them what they want, and Science has replaced Religion as the moral arbiter and setter of rules for society. "The science is settled" is the secular progressive version of Roma locuta, causa finita est. And "the science" changes according to the whim of the day.
But MAP not being persecuted or prosecuted is not sufficient to actually enable pederasty. We're quite comfortable with letting people have sexual orientations they can't legally act upon otherwise (the morbidly obese and disfigured, incels, and even the vast majority of MtF-seeking-female), and I'm not convinced that dangling some sliver of hope before those groups ("well, theoretically, if you became really rich and beautiful, you might find someone who will consent, one day... it's not impossible...") makes so much of a practical difference. Why not just defend the line that children can't consent? The virtue-ethicist transference which seeks to bring the hammer down on MAPs and assorted anime lolicons and amounts to "the problem is not that children are subjected to sex by adults, but rather that adults get off on children" is quite counterproductive here because it does in fact turn a problem that's beyond a defensible line (necessity of consent + non-recognition of consent given by children/societal lessers) into one whose only defensible line (society can wield violence to align your beliefs/mental state to norms that are set by the right wing) has already long collapsed.
(I note that uncharitable voices on the left have also long benefited from the natural suspicion that right-wing virtue ethicists also buy into the converse of the virtue-ethicising of pederasty condemnation: i.e. that if the adult is not getting off on the sexual interaction with the child, it is no longer such a big deal, and hence may take a backseat to other preferences. There's a general sense among the left that right-wingers are reticent about state meddling to disrupt abuse which may be motivated by power more than pedophilia, be it intrafamilial or in the "suspiciously sexualised punishment at Jesus camp" class, which inoculates left-wing parents against right-wing think-of-the-children arguments.)
I'm not sure what this example is saying. Is this to say that you would you be okay with your perfectly vanilla heterosexual male relative changing your wife's, or a hypothetical 18 year old daughter's, underwear? Or, if not, do you think this is evidence that they should be jailed or removed from society in some other way, rather than just not letting them do that (resp. not letting your diaper fetishist relative change your infant's diaper)?
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