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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- if the (predominantly straight female) Left were really wanting to normalize under-18/over-18 sexual relations, we should have by now seen a marked increase in attractive and enthusiastic late teen and early twentysomething women doing their part to seduce the tweens and teens of America. One would think that, were the Left as sex-positive as they desperately want/need to pretend, that straight young men would be the group they'd start with given their massive oversupply in the sexual marketplace.
With that tone-setting preface out of the way:
But not non-straight men, which is kind of why they're the tip of the, uh, spear in this regard. The
Junior Anti-Sex Leaguepredominantly female left-wing sees them as an excuse to hurt straight men anyway ("it's time to learn about buttsex today boys and girls, all genders are equal but some genders are more equal than others, equality means that both boys and girls are prohibited from socializing like boys because the gay boy complained once, etc." being perfectly representative of this point), which is the main reason the '60s pedo "experiments" mainly concerned themselves with pairing gay men and straight boys (and to an extent, why it's "man-boy" in the first place; man-girl needs no movement as it's merely a natural expression of the power equilibrium between men and women).This is already documented fact, regardless of whether the legal guardians go on to lose the next Virginia election. Unless the we-bes and associated problem children, er, adults are removed from the department (the actual solution is to mandate that no schoolteacher without kids shall be employed by the district- affirmative action forcing the teacher population to match the students' would go a long way to solving the problem provided the current high tolerance for public school molestation-by-weird-sex-propaganda stays constant, and it obviously won't now that the people tolerating it have little else to do after being purged!) nothing will change.
Maybe those children's grandparents shouldn't have freaked out so hard (over, ironically, the same problem: scatterbrained pedo enablers in
schooldaycare, pedos catfishing/lurking in Internet chat rooms, and the occasional snatching blown way out of proportion by financial incentives) in the '80s that constructive interactions and lessened age segregation were still things that existed thus enabled some exposure to social normalcy. The [Outer Party] parents have already lost this war hard and are fighting over the last table scraps of parental power they're currently "allowed" to exercise, and if they can't see that (though, again, it's been the room temperature for the past 40 years) I think they probably deserve to lose.Sucks for the kids, but the only other [straight men] that seem to care about them by definition are just doing it to get them in bed- though if not them, the [totally risk-free alternatives] who are trying to convince them to mutilate themselves with the end result of nobody ever willingly going to bed with them (splitting the fatal cuts of that one suicidal kid across a thousand healthy ones, a solution redistributionists should naturally favor) so really they were fucked either way.
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