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So, I watched Escaping Twin Flames this week. It's basically a documentary about a cult, with a fun twist at the end. The short version is it's a cult/mlm that promises true love to everyone paying in. The leader of the cult claimed he could channel who the soul mate, or "twin flame" to use cult speak, of the members was. Twin flames were often just random ass people in the cult members life. No matter what members were encouraged to stalk, harass and profess their love to their "twin flame". That approach wasn't going so great however. There was a manifest lack of success in the group, with vanishingly few members successfully entering a relationship with their "twin flame". Sensing things weren't going so great, the leader changed the rules so that everyone's twin flame was actually already in the cult. Only problem was, 80% of the members of the cult were women, and there weren't enough men to go around. But the cult leader had a fantastic idea. If you just convince half the women that they are actually "divine masculine", and get them to transition, everyone can pair off as "divine masculine" and "divine feminine". It's genius!
Why can't two ladies just be in a relationship? I donno, shut up. Cult leader says so.
So anyways, the final episode is about the cult forcing members to get "gender affirming care". Cross sex hormones, top surgery, you know the deal. And this is enforced through all the classic cult conditioning you've seen if you've ever watched a documentary about cults. The cult recruits from lonely, vulnerable, often young and impressionable people. You are encouraged to cut off everyone outside of the cult. All dissenters are exiled from the cult, creating a status quo where you must do whatever the cult leader says or lose your entire social support network. A lot of people even derived their income from the cult, making the control even more complete. Lots of struggle sessions breaking down the identities of cult members. Like I said, if you've seen a cult documentary before, none of this will be new to you.
What made this special to me is the many, frequent caveats the documentary included that you are not, under any circumstances, to apply any of the horrific trans brainwashing depicted in this documentary to anything else. This is unidirectional knowledge. You are only allowed to consider it in the context of this specific cult being bad. Now here is random trans expert we've hired to reinforce the point that these trans people have been abused into being trans, and not any other trans people you may have had in your life. Ignore your lying eyes. Especially insulting is that all the moms they interview about how their children were stolen away by the cult still use the new preferred pronouns and names of their abused and brainwashed children. Had me yelling at the screen "Have the fucking strength of your convictions you coward!"
Frankly, the nominal stories a lot of parents tell about their children deciding they are transgender doesn't differ that much from the cult experience. Their child is totally normal, not a hint of gender dysphoria, until a person the kid looks up to or wants to impress, often someone the parents can specifically identify, starts pushing it on their kid. Kid does it to fit in with their friend group, maybe a completely different friend group than they had before, maybe a friend group that only exists online. Then kid is encouraged to completely cut off anyone not 100% on board with their new identity. Most horrifying of all is how often the state involves itself in this, with schools serving as a vector to suggest to children, and glamorize, queer identities, facilitate their secret transitions, and CPS stepping in to take custody from parents who don't "affirm".
But going even deeper, where the fuck is the medical establishment? When the Heaven's Gate cult had members castrated themselves, I sincerely doubt they just waltzed into a Planned Parenthood and had it done no questions asked. How are the diagnostic criteria so wide open that a cult leader can have his members electively mutilate themselves at walk in clinics, no problem?
Most ironic of all, is there is a part of the documentary where they describe an incident where the cult leader had his top leadership watch a documentary about another cult. Then he instructed them to write essays about how he was definitely not a cult leader. This was the moment one of the interviewee's in the documentary realized she was in a cult and left. All the other cult members performed that feat of cognitive mutilation however. Meanwhile, on a meta level, the documentary is pulling the same fucking thing on us, the audience, with it's gaslighting about the explosion of trans youth. We just weren't assigned the further task of completing homework about how nothing we saw in the documentary about a trans cult applies to the other trans cult we see sitting right in front of us.
According to stats I’ve found, something like 1390 adolescents went on puberty blockers in the US in 2021, out of a population of about 42 million total teenagers. 282 teenagers got a mastectomy. In comparison, 2,590 kids died from a gunshot in that same year.
With those numbers, you’re exceedingly unlikely to know anyone with kids going through those procedures. To me, this just seems like a moral panic amplified through the news in order to distract the masses from real issues - the housing crisis, corruption, school shootings, inflation, wealth inequality, social services being stripped away, the erosion of the middle class. Why do you care about this? Why do trans issues keep getting posted, over and over, when it’s a largely irrelevant issue to the vast majority of people?
You know what issue really affects children in the US? 1 in 4 kids are obese or overweight. Where is the medical establishment there? What about the 8.4% of kids on psych meds, some of whom are on them involuntarily?
Also maybe it’s because I don’t live in America, but in my modern Western country, transitioning isn’t a matter of waltzing into a clinic and getting your breasts chopped. Just getting evaluated by the gender service takes upward of 5 years, and you need to be vetted by a series of psychologists. Getting any kind of surgery requires an official gender identity disorder diagnosis and a letter from 2 separate professionals (and good luck getting those). Sure, you can go private - have you got ten thousand pounds in cash? You have to be incredibly dedicated, child or adult, to go through this system.
And as far as I know, America doesn’t have much public healthcare, so these kids getting surgeries while they’re underage have got to be the beneficiaries of rich parents who can afford to foot the bill. You can get all sorts of crazy ridiculous procedures, even as a minor, if you have more money then sense. Is it not absolutely disproportionate to have so much air time occupied to whatever most likely very low % of those few hundred kids from privileged backgrounds that might regret it later?
Yeah, and yet I do. You know, this actually reminds me of the discussion downthread, about some author misrepresenting/misunderstanding stats to try to show that a greater proportion of whites are illiterate than blacks in CA.
When you posted the site with those stats before, I wanted to push back then, but got distracted. But your own source pointed out it was likely undercounting, because it was only capturing a very narrow statistical category of trans youth. Namely, youth with a formal diagnosis and formal prescription for gender dysphoria.
Meanwhile, using older stats, there are at ~150,000 transgender youth from age 13-17 in the united states. So something here isn't adding up by several orders of magnitude.
This is weak. You can’t just associate a statistic you cannot debunk to one that has been. If trans researcher lie, I think it’s much more likely that they lie on the positive effects of transition rather than on raw numbers like these.
I don’t think it’s a narrow category. The adolescents, and the parents who go along with it, think it's What The Science Says. They're not out there getting gonzo surgeries on their own initiative. If you want to play up scary numbers, it seems that the number of kids diagnosed with gender dysphoria rose from 25k to 42k from 2020 to 2021, and the mean age for the diagnostic is decreasing. It could be that there’s tens of thousands of kids in the pipeline for such surgeries, they just didn't have the time to get to the previous ones in large numbers before they matured.
There has to be a way to push back against suspicious statistics. The information is not public so common people can't verify them, so a "you can't deboonk this" approach leaves others with the ability to make numbers up, and get away with it for years.
They were lying about hormones and surgeries being done children at all. So even with these stats it has to be conceded they lie about the numbers.
But just pointing to a completely different false statistic + your intimate conviction is not the way. What is the rule being applied here? All statistics are false if I feel like it?
Your ‘deboonking’ quip is invalid, it’s supposed to make fun of people’s tendency to falsely claim they have debunked their opponent’s statistics. But on the literacy numbers, it would be hard to find a halfway reasonable ‘antiracist progressive’ who would still support the original claim after the debunking. Ergo, it’s a true debunking, not a ‘deboonking’.
Who is ‘they’? To make the “282 teenage mastectomies” claim false here, one researcher has to lie, and then all the other researchers have to support it by not publishing any contradictory evidence (since you haven’t found it). And that group includes a lot of people who think it’s a very good thing that those surgeries are being performed, so the dubious claim can be attacked both from a pro-trans and anti-trans perspective. The ‘they’ obscures the difference between a few liars within a broadly sympathetic group and an extremely well-coordinated conspiracy, requiring all to act as one.
I'm not invested in any particular form of pushback, just in there being some response available, when people do the equivalent of newspapers publishing bullshit on the frontpage, and a correction notice in tiny print, on page 19.
More like: just because it's a officially published statistic, doesn't mean it's true. If you expect people to change their mind based on the statistic you're citing, but it turns out to be false, you should be willing to suffer reputational damage if it turns out to be false, going forward people should have a right to be skeptical of any statistics posted in favor of the idea you're arguing for.
"They" is people arguing in favor of transgender care. It was an extremely popular at the time, including from researchers albeit not ex-cathedra. It was based on the assumption that the WPATH standards of care were being followed to the letter, and anyone disputing the assumption had the burden of proof shifted onto them.
This is dishonest. I have not not found it, I have not gone looking for it. I don't think anyone should have to go looking for a refutation of any numbers, unless the person making the original claim vouches with their reputation for the statistics used to that back it.
No. All the other researchers have to do, is need a few years to try an replicate the original finding.
People who think it's a good thing those surgeries are being performed are still aware of their political environment, and the backlash that will come if the awareness of high numbers spreads to the public.
Ok, so someone does a study estimating the number of gender-affirming surgery in the US, but they aggregate the youngest age group into 12-18 year olds, so you don't actually know how many have been done on minors, and when a journalist asks them "hey can you sand me the raw disaggregated data", they answer with "all of the analysis we did was based on the age groups that we specified, we haven’t done analyses with other age groups", and refuse to send the data. Nothing comes out of it in the months that follow, is that an "extremely well-coordinated conspiracy"?
Do you need an official “I vouch for those numbers on my children’s children lives” ? Rae and I will suffer some reputational damage for defending those numbers if you find contradicting ones, and that is usually enough of a motivation for others.
I did find them suspiciously low myself, did a quick search, saw no contradicting statistic. This is the point where your priors should move somewhat (since, as in the literacy numbers, there is an alternate universe where they are easily debunked by the quick search), not where you double down on your intuition. And please don’t call me dishonest lightly. Whether you went looking for them or not, you haven’t found them. I am not trying to deceive anyone.
Then why haven’t they lied on the 42k diagnoses ?
The study said “3678 (7.7%) were aged 12 to 18 years“ (gender-affirming surgeries over 4 years). That’s in the same ballpark as “282 mastectomies per year on minors”, no matter how they choose to massage the disaggregated data.
I don't actually think you should suffer reputational damage since you're just trying to get to the real numbers, rather than throwing a wet blanket on the conversation. So from Rae I'll either need an official statement, or a rephrasing of their post in a way that doesn't imply my loicence to care will be taken away if I don't prove the number of surgeries exceed a certain threshold (which, I will notice, is not even specified).
I don't know if I agree. Like I said, for some time I have been frustrated at the "posting bullshit on the front page - posting a retraction on page 19" dynamic, and I'm not in the mood to keep letting it happen. I did move my priors somewhat, back when people were posting WPATH guidelines to tell me surgeries on minors don't happen at all. My reward for that is people telling me to stop caring, because even though surgeries on minors absolutely are happening, it's not a lot. If I am to give this argument any credence, it needs to come with pre-declared costs to the people putting it forward, if the statistics they're using turn out to be wrong. Either that or I feel entitled to reject the argument in it's entirety.
The implication seems to have been (and apparently still is) that since I was unable to provide any contradicting numbers, I should move my priors as you said. That would be a good argument, but I think there's a massive difference between "unable" and "haven't even attempted", and it's not right to conflate the two in this type of argument.
A diagnosis says nothing about the interventions that will take place, you can always say keep repeating the old "reversible interventions only" line that used be popular. We also don't know whether these are undercounted or not.
I haven't posted this study as an example of contradicting numbers, I've posted this study as an example of how they can hide inconvenient data without an "extremely well-coordinated conspiracy" (alternatively, as proof that one exists), so I'm rather miffed this is precisely the point you chose to not answer.
If you want to know why I'm so skeptical of the numbers, one of the reasons is that Kaiser Permanente was doing 40-50 mastectomies on minors per year by 2020 (it being the year of COVID the numbers actually went down somewhat). Now sure, it's a big clinic, it's a progressive state, so probably they'll be doing more of them than the national average, but there's a couple hundred pediatric gender clinics in the US. Maybe they don't all have surgeons, or there are none around to refer to, but it just doesn't pass the sniff test at first glance. Then, even if the mastectomies are in the right ballpark, is opening a new clinic worth it for an average of 5-ish or so blocker prescriptions? I only know of one American whistleblower from a clinic so far, but she reported it being overwhelmed.
Maybe my various inferences about the numbers are wrong, and maybe Rae's numbers do pan out, but given how the goalposts have shifted in the broader debate, I feel entitled to strong skepticism unless overwhelming evidence is provided.
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