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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.
This is a good point. But I think you're making an assumption which might not be true, which is that people's beliefs on sexuality are not malleable.
At different times in history, pederasty was perfectly acceptable. We've just seen in the last few decades how behaviors which were deeply taboo have become mainstream. Why not pederasty too? It would stand to reason that the people who were most malleable in the past would be most likely to embrace the next transgression.
With concern about child sexuality being painted as right-wing, how long until we see the "and its actually a good thing" articles start to appear?
I take the point that I made that assumption, but I still don't think that it's correct to extrapolate present trends to expect a normalisation of pederasty. The direction of change is clearly not as simple as "away from right-wing morality" - we are not seeing murder becoming acceptable or mainstream, and I don't think zoophilia is getting there either (even though it would be such low-hanging fruit if you just wanted to offend conservatives), though the carrying principle may be switched from sexual taboos to animal welfare. Therefore, a priori, the details of the concrete activity matter - a model like "right-wingers hate it, therefore left-wingers will eventually push for it" does not have sufficient predictive power. In the case of pederasty, there are enough features that set it apart from the activities that have been made acceptable by the left-wing drive that I don't think you can just put it on the same trendline:
the existing taboo rests on the idea that "consent" by the child is unavailable or invalid on principle, as opposed to the pattern, memed as "A: I consent; B: I consent; GOD: I don't", that previous normalisations overcame - in other words, there was no principal objection that, say, out of two gay men, one of them could not competently consent to gay sex because he was not mature, unencumbered and responsible enough to be trusted with grasping the consequences;
it goes against a countervailing tendency to shelter children/tighten parental control over them more, out of security considerations;
the main beneficiaries of a legalisation of pederasty would no doubt be straight men (who already exhibit the greatest variability/jitter and a well-documented preference for youth), and the left-wing ethos strongly defaults to limiting this group's sexual self-actualisation, rather than enabling it.
What are the forms of legalised/normalised pederasty that could plausibly slip by these three? It seems to me that a NAMBLA-style "legal when gay only" version would be exceedingly hard to sustain with the present memetic complex (and anyhow would collide head-on with the third point above with the first publicised case of a Discord lothario who has the rule engineering mindset to ask his 12 year old to become a boy on paper). I could imagine a weak version along the lines of it being systematically tolerated in the case of trans perpetrator + blessing of the legal guardians, but that seems like a case where the delta-damage that can be done by the systematic tolerance over the baseline of having that sort of guardians and environment is not particularly big. (Also, children's lives being ruined by bad guardians is a problem that society seems to have resigned itself to leaving largely unsolved apart from the occasional bandaid solution.)
I agree that the idea of consent (magically obtained at age 18) did form, until recently, a very strong Schelling point that prevented the NAMBLA types from gaining influence.
This Schelling point is now under strong attack from multiple groups.
The trans enthusiasts who are pushing children (even very young children) into adopting trans identities and even surgical or hormonal modification.
Feminists who are pushing that age 18 no longer forms an age of consent for women, and that a man dating a much younger (but still legal) woman is a groomer
I have a hard time believing that any Schelling point is strong enough to withstand the current fast-changing sexual environment. In any case, it my personal view, pederasty (defined as post-pubescent but under 18 sexual relations) causes far less harm to the minor than does exposure to trans ideology.
I'd far rather have my 16 year son or daughter have a sexual relationship with their teacher than to have a sex change. So I guess I don't even know why we worry about pederasty so much when the larger problem is people causing irreparable harm to their bodies through exposure to trans ideology. We don't need to argue that trans is bad because some of the proponents are groomers. It is bad on its own merits.
Then oppose it on those merits, rather than trying to conflate it with pedophilia.
I think the age-of-consent Schelling point is still strong. /u/4bpp gives several good reasons for why it’d remain intact. The current push for trans acceptance makes a hard brake when it approaches the subject of children.
I certainly don’t think that shaming men for allegedly imbalanced relationships is going to weaken such a norm.
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