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MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
It’s not ideological for the kids involved. But it is a way for ostracized kids to find some measure of acceptance and even celebration as they decide to transition. Which would feel better to a boy who doesn’t fit in at all with the other boys? Grow up to be a lonely male incel hikkimori, doomed for life, or be trans female and find some measure of acceptance by wider society, a new, somewhat trendy identity. People choose all kinds of identities that don’t fit them perfectly for the purpose of fitting in. Goths, various fandoms, music scenes, sports, you name it. Humans are social animals that naturally want to be high in the social hierarchy. It’s not really that weird to think that if there’s social capital in being trans there would be kids willing to at least socially transition. The alternative is being an outcast.
sockpuppet2
1d ago
There are ways to argue these policies, and Unikowsky made them at oral arguments, if not especially honestly. I can criticize them separately, if you'd like (please: "when you talk about discrimination, we can mean two different things" is a great opportunity).
I enjoy your effort-posts about law, so criticize Unikowsky to your heart's content!
With regards to Unikowsky's position on clever interpretations, how do you think a litigator's arguments on behalf of clients should be weighed against the views they independently express? Doesn't "zealous representation" require you to present any "valid" argument furthering your client's interests, regardless of your personal preferences? My idea of an argument that damages a lawyer's credibility would be something like former CA AG Harris arguing that CA was justified in not releasing prisoners, as SCOTUS directed, due to the state having a supposedly overriding 13A interest in extracting their value as laborers.
HereAndGone
1d ago
But Rowling is not a good champion for that narrow, sensible point when she is clearly against social transition, and all forms of adult transition, as well.
Is she? Maybe she is now, after the campaigns against her by such as Gretchen Felker-Martin but it started out with what to me was the mild and reasonable position of "hey, maybe people with penises should not be in the same spaces as people who have been hurt by people with penises" and then it all exploded.
So if you're going to be called a fascist genocidal TERF and you have more money than God, why not lean into it and go "okay, I really don't agree with this stuff"?
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
1d ago
I do think the FDA has a thankless task. First, the very real risk of litigation means that if they fast-track anything and it ends up that oops, when it comes to millions of real world patients, the very rare side effects do crop up in noticeable numbers, then somebody is going to take a lawsuit to sue the pants off everyone. Hence, the risk-averse nature of "let's make really really sure this doesn't curl your hair" when it comes to the approval process.
Yeah I agree, and I think this is a much broader problem than just with the FDA. In general government organizations are extremely risk averse due to how damaging litigation can be.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
1d ago
Moral panics when they're about extremely rare events like satanic cannibals are one thing. We're talking about the ascendant ideology which is extremely entrenched and uses the organs of government to do things like force parents to give up their children if they don't subscribe radical political/philosophical views. Moral panics are designed to counter things like this, and I'm glad America in particular has a habit of doing so.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
I think like most things it’s a form of what I call Yarvin’s Disease which is the tendency of any bureaucratic system to avoid being to blame for anything. He talks about this quite a lot, but it’s generally the case that while the FDA can only be blamed if something goes wrong it can never get credit when things go right. As such, there’s zero incentive to take a risk going fast, even if the potential cure is world changing. If it’s going to turn people’s hair funny colors the FDA gets blamed for not doing enough tests. On the other hand, slowing things down doesn’t cause blame. If the cure for cancer is held up for twenty years because the FDA wanted the triple check that it doesn’t cause tummy aches, nobody’s going to call for investigations. So, going slow preserves the FDA which is the point.
recovering_rationaleist
1d ago
Ironically, reversibility was among the conditions that were being studied among the eight "transgender mouse" studies which the Trump administration cancelled funding for.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1d ago
Woah, that’s stunning. So we need puberty for brain development to reach its full potential?
quiet_NaN
1d ago
"Hello, you have now gotten all your family back home exiled, imprisoned, or executed. Love and kisses, the CCP".
I was thinking more about people who had already decided to do something which pisses off the CCP, like joining Falun Gong or campaigning for human rights.
Gosh, with this one neat trick, there will be no chance at all of the Chinese government setting it up so that certain trusted agents sure look like they have renounced their citizenship credibly and are now deeply embedded!
From my understanding, the problem with Chinese students spying is not that they get their hands on highly classified projects. The problem is that they get their hands on a lot of much less sensitive projects which then give China a competitive edge.
It is likely that the CCP is already sponsoring the odd fake dissident, but more for reasons of infiltrating the international dissident community than in the expectation that the US will put them on a highly sensitive project.
But the average Chinese student is not some deep cover super spy, but just some average person who is required to do a bit of snooping on the side. "We will simply order our students to join a credible anti-CCP movement so that they will be able to do industrial espionage, and then when they return we will keep wondering which of them were actually flipped by being exposed to hostile ideologies on our orders" does not sound like a winning strategy.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1d ago
Great counterpoints! The abuses of the medical system in the past were pretty horrific now that I think of it. The stuff we have today isn't great but could definitely be worse.
HereAndGone
1d ago
Without going into any studies or the difficulty of distinguishing persistence vs desistance rates, it’s unarguable that early transitioners just fit in better in society and have less chance of being perceived as “freaks” in public based on their appearance.
That is the genuine problem for which I do have sympathy. However, the extreme cases around transgender issues and the activist rhetoric about "not owing anyone femininity" (which seems to translate to "keeping your feminine penis and testicles and your beard") make it difficult to maintain that sympathy, as well as the push for "so this means that nine year olds should be started on the transition path because of course every child who has concerns and problems around facing into puberty is trans and not at all perhaps suffering from different anxieties and problems that need to be addressed by therapy but don't mean telling them 'it's because you're really a girl or a boy, not a boy or a girl'".
Jesse Singal gets absolutely slaughtered on Bluesky for being a Nazi fascist supporter of trans genocide for being a conventional liberal who is positive on socially liberal issues but has concerns around the whole transitioning of kids and expressed such qualms. It's a genuine question of "when should you start medical - which means puberty blockers and hormones - transitioning versus social transitioning", because going too early does involve other problems later on, but if you are not 100% behind "this never happens and if it does, it's a good thing" then you are a trans genocider.
HereAndGone
1d ago
That's the argument that annoys me in the same way as when "but intersex people!" is used. A case where puberty is gone wrong and needs medical intervention to be halted is not the same thing as normal puberty, in the same way as a syndrome where there is an intersex condition is not the same thing as normal development of primary and secondary sexual characteristics.
HereAndGone
1d ago
In humans the best we have seems to be this study in which a 3-year course of puberty blockers in girls with precocious puberty is associated with a 7-point reduction in IQ from what they scored before beginning the puberty blockers.
I think that would be hard to disentangle from "are there associated problems with precocious puberty that affect the brain?" since presumably the IQ tests happened before the precocious puberty set in which is when the puberty blockers would be needed. I think that if the wiring for when puberty should begin is so mistimed, it wouldn't be surprising if other problems came to the fore as well.
If the cause can be traced to the hypothalamus or pituitary, the cause is considered central. Other names for this type are complete or true precocious puberty.
Causes of central precocious puberty can include:
- hypothalamic hamartoma produces pulsatile gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH)
- Langerhans cell histiocytosis
- McCune–Albright syndrome
Central precocious puberty can also be caused by brain tumors, infection (most commonly tuberculous meningitis, especially in developing countries), trauma, hydrocephalus, and Angelman syndrome. Precocious puberty is associated with advancement in bone age, which leads to early fusion of epiphyses, thus resulting in reduced final height and short stature.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1d ago
As such I tend to be skeptical of trans diagnosis simply from my experience of being diagnosed adhd — it took ten minutes and I didn’t even go in seeking a diagnosis.
Really? I thought it was very hard to get an ADHD diagnosis, especially as an adult.
I certainly don't think that it's a given that they need puberty blockers.
The ultimate pro-puberty-blocker argument is that if treatment is not provided children will commit suicide. Last time I looked at this (mid-pandemic), there were no randomly controlled trials on suicide rates in trans children under different treatment regimens. If you looked at the effect sizes of the few existing small Scandinavian studies about the effectiveness of different transitioning methods on suicide rates, it looked like social transition had about the same effect size as medical transition.
I'm generally in favor of doing more RCTs on children whose parents consent (and on pregnant women). There are so many medical questions that we don't have answers to because medical ethics has raised the standards for informed consent higher than is reasonable.
then when I point out the responses to it
This response to the Cass review was particularly hilarious: a paper written by two lawyers attempting to dispute the "evidentiary standards" of the Cass review, which manages to misinterpret the Cass review as well as misquote two of the scientific meta-analyses used by the Cass review. If that's the highest quality of argument they can put forward (in NEJM of all places!), then I'm going to guess that the actual "evidentiary standards" in support of their position are quite weak.
(And indeed, the Cass review is up front about there being no RCTs available for use.)
HereAndGone
1d ago
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1d ago
I sense a divorced man in our presence.
HereAndGone
1d ago
I do think the FDA has a thankless task. First, the very real risk of litigation means that if they fast-track anything and it ends up that oops, when it comes to millions of real world patients, the very rare side effects do crop up in noticeable numbers, then somebody is going to take a lawsuit to sue the pants off everyone. Hence, the risk-averse nature of "let's make really really sure this doesn't curl your hair" when it comes to the approval process.
Second, when it does fast-track something, for every person who goes "yay! warpspeed hastened through the covid vaccines!", you will have another person writing how the vaccines murdered and are murdering thousands of healthy young people by causing them to drop dead of cardiac events, and they'll reference studies like this one, so damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Not to mention the whole Aduhelm controversy, where the drug has been discontinued after it got fast-tracked due to a combination of the drug company getting Alzheimer patient support and activist organisations to put pressure on and behind the scenes politicking, where it caused upheaval within the FDA and besmirched its reputation.
That's the trap we all fall into. We have some vague notion that a hundred or five hundred years ago, things weren't the same as they are now (though modern adaptations of classic works do seem to be trying their hardest to persuade us all that Regency Englishmen and women behaved just like late 20th century/early 21st century people. Ditto for genre/historical novels where the heroes, but more usually the heroines, have all the values of 21st century liberals around everything from race to sex, and the villains of course have the values of their time).
But when it comes to thirty/forty/fifty years ago, we think that's close enough that things were Just Like Now, and we forget how much social change happens in quite a little time.
EDIT: Don't be too hard on yourself, I'm old enough that I've lived through the change from "garlic is a rare, foreign, and untrusted ingredient that is not suitable for our plain but wholesome national cookery" to "now we have three new sushi joints started up in the town" 😁
HereAndGone
1d ago
Once you start quoting Chesterton, it's hard to stop 😁 I love his description of newspaper interviews; first, what the headlines put him down as saying:
Another innocent complication is that the interviewer does sometimes translate things into his native language. It would not seem odd that a French interviewer should translate them into French; and it is certain that the American interviewer sometimes translates them into American. Those who imagine the two languages to be the same are more innocent than any interviewer. To take one out of the twenty examples, some of which I have mentioned elsewhere, suppose an interviewer had said that I had the reputation of being a nut. I should be flattered but faintly surprised at such a tribute to my dress and dashing exterior. I should afterwards be sobered and enlightened by discovering that in America a nut does not mean a dandy but a defective or imbecile person. And as I have here to translate their American phrase into English, it may be very defensible that they should translate my English phrases into American. Anyhow they often do translate them into American. In answer to the usual question about Prohibition I had made the usual answer, obvious to the point of dullness to those who are in daily contact with it, that it is a law that the rich make knowing they can always break it. From the printed interview it appeared that I had said, 'Prohibition! All matter of dollar sign.' This is almost avowed translation, like a French translation. Nobody can suppose that it would come natural to an Englishman to talk about a dollar, still less about a dollar sign — whatever that may be. It is exactly as if he had made me talk about the Skelt and Stevenson Toy Theatre as 'a cent plain, and two cents coloured' or condemned a parsimonious policy as dime-wise and dollar-foolish. Another interviewer once asked me who was the greatest American writer. I have forgotten exactly what I said, but after mentioning several names, I said that the greatest natural genius and artistic force was probably Walt Whitman. The printed interview is more precise; and students of my literary and conversational style will be interested to know that I said, 'See here, Walt Whitman was your one real red-blooded man.' Here again I hardly think the translation can have been quite unconscious; most of my intimates are indeed aware that I do not talk like that, but I fancy that the same fact would have dawned on the journalist to whom I had been talking.
Second, the difference between the experience of being interviewed (where the reporter is courteous) and the way interviews are written up:
Then again there is a curious convention by which American interviewing makes itself out much worse than it is. The reports are far more rowdy and insolent than the conversations. This is probably a part of the fact that a certain vivacity, which to some seems vitality and to some vulgarity, is not only an ambition but an ideal. It must always be grasped that this vulgarity is an ideal even more than it is a reality. It is an ideal when it is not a reality. A very quiet and intelligent young man, in a soft black hat and tortoise-shell spectacles, will ask for an interview with unimpeachable politeness, wait for his living subject with unimpeachable patience, talk to him quite sensibly for twenty minutes, and go noiselessly away. Then in the newspaper next morning you will read how he beat the bedroom door in, and pursued his victim on to the roof or dragged him from under the bed, and tore from him replies to all sorts of bald and ruthless questions printed in large black letters. I was often interviewed in the evening, and had no notion of how atrociously I had been insulted till I saw it in the paper next morning. I had no notion I had been on the rack of an inquisitor until I saw it in plain print; and then of course I believed it, with a faith and docility unknown in any previous epoch of history. An interesting essay might be written upon points upon which nations affect more vices than they possess; and it might deal more fully with the American pressman, who is a harmless clubman in private, and becomes a sort of highway-robber in print.
gattsuru
1d ago
The above comment is over a year old, as a warning.
"aversion to clever solutions isn't as awkward as when coming from the emoluments clause fandom, but it's still pretty nakedly new given the man's role in Espinoza"
In the article AshLael wrote above, Unikowsky said:
My most fundamental objection to the NRSC’s position is that I’m allergic to excessively clever interpretations of the Constitution. I don’t agree with the NRSC’s theory for the same reason I don’t agree with efforts to distinguish “office of the United States” from “office under the United States”: these arguments treat the Constitution like the Da Vinci Code.
I don’t know how the Supreme Court should resolve Trump v. Anderson. But whatever the Court does, I hope its opinion hews as closely as possible to the ordinary meaning of the constitutional text.[emphasis added]
This is enough of an argument that it gets a header.
However, Unikowsky was the attorney of record for Montana in Espinoza v. Montana Revenue. At the risk of ironing over some finer details, the case involved Montana blocking (a program that indirectly funded) otherwise generally-applicable scholarships to religious schools, a few families suing the state to be allowed to access the program and winning at the district level, and then the state court getting rid of the whole program. There are ways to argue these policies, and Unikowsky made them at oral arguments, if not especially honestly. I can criticize them separately, if you'd like (please: "when you talk about discrimination, we can mean two different things" is a great opportunity).
For the purposes of this comment, the simple problem is the text of the First Amendment holds "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof [...]". Unikowsky takes the various epicycles of the legal jurisprudence as a given: "respecting an establishment" means pretty much any religious funding or suggestion thereof, "prohibited free exercise" has its Smith-level deference to 'unless the state wants to get in the way', and you get into this very clever situation where he can argue the state either can block opportunities to religious groups or can close down a program specifically to avoid helping religious groups. But its plain text does not actually say that.
AvocadoPanic
1d ago
screen for CCP connections
I'm doubtful we're executing on this effectively.
I know two trans women.
One transitioned in her late twenties, and gets stared at wherever she goes. Anyone can instantly tell that she’s trans from her voice and appearance, she’ll need to spend a lot of money on surgery to look remotely female, and she’s at the risk of being hate-crimed just from walking in the wrong area. She doesn’t behave very femininely, perhaps from nearly 30 years of growing up as male.
The other went on puberty blockers as a teenager, she has a normal female voice, and wherever she goes, the average person just sees a normal woman. She didn’t have to spend a single dime on facial feminisation surgery, and also seems to have fairly standard straight female sexuality (no complaints about anorgasmia) as opposed to the weird fetishistic oversexualised behaviour some later transitioners have.
Without going into any studies or the difficulty of distinguishing persistence vs desistance rates, it’s unarguable that early transitioners just fit in better in society and have less chance of being perceived as “freaks” in public based on their appearance. I don’t know if that quality of life upgrade is taken into account in any studies, but that’s enough for me to support them in a broad strokes fashion, even if I don’t necessarily agree with all the details of the modern clinical practices.
AvocadoPanic
1d ago
I don't think anyone is talking about excluding Chinese-Americans.
The topic was Chinese from China.
I don't expect us to have the determination to last over four centuries, we'll skip directly to the betrayal.
I think what makes it appear suspect is simply who feels the impulse to drink calorie free sodas. It's just correlation, not causation.
As a wise man once said:
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