At this point, I think it would be almost impossible to create a totally neutral document. Take the win and move on. Move on to breaking the wall to get MSM to do fair and informative coverage on this important issue; an article, series, something that breaks the spell of the extreme misinformation that is continuing to be the narrative.
Obsessing about form begins to feel like an echo chamber - and all that really matters at this point is getting the truth out and breaking the spell that has kept this cult, this ideology powerful enough to continue to damage real children, women's sports, spaces, medical malpractice, etc.
If only Sancho could sit still for more than a minute or two at a time he'd make a great additional host. I'd really like to know his opinion on Gender Affirming Care for minors...
Ok - I'm reading the review. That this is coming from a MAGA government requires some mental gymnastics:
"Non-conformity to sex-role stereotypes is as old as history, and present to
some degree in every known culture. This feature of the human experience is not
pathological and needs no treatment. "
Contrast that to "I am Jazz" and "Born Ready", books for kids, in which boys who like pink are "really" girls, and girls who get As in math are "really" boys.
I love all of your perspectives and eagerly tune in each week for my fix of Informed Descent. This time, though I wanted a lot more Cori. Thanks also to Ben for mentioning Megyn Kelly’s interview with the New York Times reporter. We are really enjoying that. See you all next week! 💞
Can we get there by convincing more people? Yes. More people can be convinced, but not without the help of the media. Left-biased Journalism is the key here, and these journalists need to accept the fact that “gender affirming care” is actually the mutilation of gay people’s bodies. But I fear that they’ve already flagged “transing away the gay” as right-coded or a right wing conspiracy.
I don't know if there's any hope for left-biased journalism ... they have gotten so much wrong, including everything covid ... and they're either hopelessly corrupt and determined to not be found out, or completely brainwashed, like the deepest cult followers, as Cori and Ben were saying.
Perhaps the hope could be in getting people to see how corrupt the media is?
Then again, when they're in that liberal bubble, they don't trust anything outside the media. And, yes, sadly they associate - have been trained like animals to associate - any criticisms of violations of informed consent, whether with gender "medicine" or the many injections they're told are perfectly "safe and effective", (Covid and Gardasil are by far the most dangerous), they equate that with right wing propaganda. And of course, everything connected in any way to the right wing = 100% bad, and everything on the left = 100% good. Sigh ... I used to think that way too ... Until I saw how the left mocked and censored the doctors actually successfully treating Covid ... and then learned that it was not just adults making well thought out decisions who were medically transitioning.
Maybe I'm being too negative that the media is hopelessly captured ... (?) I'd love to be wrong ...
Eliza was an absolute beacon here. Yes, the report said what needed to be said: that further experimentation on children that includes these "treatments" is unethical.
Those of you of either sex who are dreading your fifties, sixties etc. have been sold an utter bill of goods. Sometimes it's a bit giggle-worthy to see how many of you fall for it, but often it's just sad.
Here's the truth: being a sexagenarian rocks. Your discernment has sharpened and every last one of your everyday delights intensifies in ways you never could have imagined when you were still young and haplessly searching for some kind of instruction manual. You don't believe it? Check out all the happiness studies. I'm shooting for 120, myself.
Shout out for Carol Tavris here--I loved *The Mismeasure of Woman*. Lovely to watch you folk read these peeps.
Agree on Carol Tavris! I have both “The Mismeasure of Woman” and “Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me).” Both are excellent reads!
Back when my little sister was trans-identified, she said to me at one point, “I just can’t picture myself as an old woman.” She was maybe 22 then? And I remember thinking, “Is that unusual? Who are the young people who can easily imagine their elderly selves?”
I think Lisa was speaking from experience, rather than having "fallen for" something when she said aging is no fun. I'm glad it's been awesome for you, but I am in my early fifties and I definitely agree with Lisa. I now have chronic pain I didn't have before, it's harder to keep the weight off, I have less energy, worse sleep, and I still struggle with some of the same mental health issues I've had all my life despite having a better understanding of them. HRT helps (and is indispensable for me), but I know that physically, it's all downhill from here, and that's depressing. But maybe wisdom will come in my 60s if I keep working on it, and maybe I can dial up my gym routine to the point where I can at least get my body from ten years ago back... I haven't totally given up hope!
I'm not sure there's such a thing as a balanced or neutral assessment of youth "gender medicine." Just as I'm not sure that "more research" will reveal much that is not already obvious to anyone.
This isn't a disagreement about protocols, this is a disagreement over the existence of "gender." I don't think there's a middle ground there: you either believe in its existence or you don't.
Maybe most people already understand what's wrong with it. That's why they don't want boys in girls sports.
Maybe the task is not so much convincing most people there's something wrong with it but in reshaping the institutions that are promulgating it. And that will look ugly. There's no way around it: purging just might be necessary. Let's not pretend there's some kind of compromise here (allow the destruction of the fertility of 100 children instead of 1,000?).
If the money goes away (federal funding, insurance), the institutions will change. The hardcore practitioners will go underground or go independent but that will reduce the damage.
I would say, overall, I’m with Lisa here on the need for a neutral document. While it is true that the activists will not be persuaded (I think Cori’s analysis on that point is spot on), there are still a whole swath of people left of center who remain unaware and uninformed. It’s those people a lot of us are trying to reach, and in my experience, at least some are reachable. They definitely initially reject any document that emanates from this White House, but in one on one conversations it is sometimes possible to get past that. I also agree completely, as Evie has also commented here, that getting intelligent press coverage is key. The NBC report that included the superb quotes from Jamie was better, but we need a lot more from the MSM, as we all know.
Lisa: 1. Gender Ideology is a non evidence based belief and it should be treated as such. That might mean getting it acknowledged as a religious belief (perhaps) and then protected. Just as we don’t allow female genital mutilation among Muslims, we can ban other genital surgeries. But people can continue to believe in gender woo woo and pay for things like FFS and boob jobs. And hopefully also get therapy.
2. The proponents of gender ideology won’t be convinced by evidence or you talking nicely to them about being even handed. They will call you “trash” for not being in their cult. The people who need to be convinced are everyone else and those people will respond to being told what’s true by authority figures.
3. People who say it helped them are doing something all humans can do - they’ve convinced themselves of something false. I don’t think there is any way that drastic unneeded cosmetic alterations, sterilization, and cross sex hormone use could actually do anything to help anyone. Since they believe it does, then, for some, it does. And some are lying! This is why buying into the delusion is so essential - because it’s only the belief that has helped them, not the interventions.
4. To change my mind someone would need to find a type of medically measurable intersex condition to explain trans. Maybe it would be in body tissues or in the brain. But something like a difference in enzyme production or in pathway receptivity. Something that’s not psychological. Even differences in brain structures could be explained by behaviors or beliefs. I’m thinking I’d need to see a biochemical root cause for trans to be convinced hormones are a treatment.
Some 'medically measurable intersex conditions' such as Klinefelter's Syndrome (a male with XXY chromosomes) are treated with sex hormones, as being a male with underdeveloped testicles might mean you don't produce enough testosterone for a healthy body, and they might even lead to a surgery like keyhole male breast reduction if you find noticeable breast development distressing. But I'm not aware that any of the 40+ sex or reproductive developmental differences (or 'intersex conditions) we have uncovered need to be treated with opposite sex hormones, although some of them are very complicated in terms of the endocrine system, and need highly specialist doctor input.
Eliza around 46:00 talking about parents tying not wanting to sterilise kids as a type of enforced pronatalism: I was watching an interview with Louise Perry recently where she talked about the decline in birth rates across the western world and it struck me that practically speaking the modern left is very anti natal. Like, it's gone from believing that Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare to believing it should be safe, legal, common, and celebrated. Fear of climate change has also caused many to refuse to have children as a way of sparing them future suffering. So it really shouldn't be a surprise at this point that left wing people in general aren't going to care about whether GAC sterilises kids because they oppose any suggestion that kids might be an important part of a fulfilling life for many, if not most people. I wonder how much of the lefts anti natalism is a knee jerk response to the rights pro natalism.
Also, on the subject of Phyllis Schlafly: The College Republicans brought her to speak on my campus when I was a freshman. I was in the school’s feminist group, and most of the other women in it wanted to organize a protest of her visit. I was confused because 1. I hadn’t heard of Phyllis Schlafly before and 2. Why? She just sounded like some lady who was going to say stuff. What would we be protesting exactly? That she was being allowed to speak? I remember spending the afternoon in a school computer lab, catching up on who she was and some of her writing. I didn’t find it particularly compelling, but I also didn’t understand why it was protest-worthy - I decided to skip the talk. In retrospect, this was an early warning sign of the troubles that were to come during my years in feminist spaces…
My biggest critique of her writing at the time was that she seemed to copy/paste heavily from her own writing, and that things she wrote for one piece often seemed to show up elsewhere, to the point where it was very noticeable just within the amount of reading I managed to do just in that one day. Now that I’m older, though, I completely understand this, because I lifted much of *this* comment from one I made on an episode of Meghan Daum’s The Unspeakable a while back. 😜
Ben mentions that Megyn Kelly argued it would be better for journalists to be upfront about their bias and report from their perspective, and Lisa argues for the importance of both being open about biases and also trying to look clearly even at evidence that doesn't fit the journalist's worldview. As a classroom teacher, I would just add that we desperately need journalists to do what we want more teachers to do: to present what is true as openly as we can to students without indoctrinating them. Megyn Kelly has called for this in classrooms, as well. I wish she would see the connection to journalism. I'm honestly not sure it's practicable to push for more teachers to teach students to examine things from multiple views and consider things for themselves if we don't have support in the public sphere, particularly from journalists, modeling the same. I loved Lisa's vision for NPR and PBS (however unlikely it is to happen) of bringing together multiple (not just left right!) views on our most contentious issues, as this is what I've been bending over backwards to do with students in my high school classes. It's almost like we need a Heterodox Academy for journalism. If we had more examples in the press, I think it would really help teachers.
I agree with Cori about NPR--and there should never have been federal funding of news in the first place. Public broadcasters get a lot of revenue from corporate sponsors and donors--they haven't been "publicly" funded for a long time. They were created as educational outlets aimed at children and the elderly--demographics not served by commercial television (which aimed at 18-49 year olds). But their mission has evolved--and so should their funding.
And objectivity, however defined, left journalism a while ago--it's not coming back. Instead of trying to bring it back, I agree with Megyn Kelly: just be up front about where you're coming from and let the audience understand that.
(BTW: Kelly is fantastic on the gender/trans stuff--there's some clip of her being dismissed for caring so much about a fringe issue and she pounces and kills it, explaining how this ideology has penetrated *everything.* I'll look for the clip.)
There is no way we are going to have a "neutral document" because for the people we need to reach, neutrality is not allowed. It's not considered ethical or moral on this issue. You might as well be talking about creating a neutral document on segregation. This has become an issue where neutrality is a red flag for poor quality and bias. How a media outlet reports on this has become one of those test issues that people use to determine if a news source is reliable and safe to trust. This became most likely irreversibly entrenched with the re-election of Trump. Unless some miracle happens where all the trusted left leaning news sources like WaPo, NYT, and NPR along with people like John Oliver, Jon Stewart, Harris, and AOC all come out together with a new message on this issue, we are not going to move the needle on this from the top down. The best hope is a ground up shift that comes from Gen Z and Gen Alpha where they politically shift on this issue (re: Cori's comments on the NBC survey) and unconsciously shift on having gender dysphoria as a widely accepted idiom of distress in the symptom pool for adolescent and young adult onset of gender dysphoria. It will also require parents of the very young traditional cohort of gender nonconforming children to decide for themselves at the ground level that gender nonconformity does not equal trans and, most importantly, *never take the child to a doctor or therapist in the first place* because we're not going to change the AAP and the APA and teacher orgs/boards of education. They have to hold the course they're on now or else admit guilt and open the floodgates for lawsuits.
At this point, I think it would be almost impossible to create a totally neutral document. Take the win and move on. Move on to breaking the wall to get MSM to do fair and informative coverage on this important issue; an article, series, something that breaks the spell of the extreme misinformation that is continuing to be the narrative.
Obsessing about form begins to feel like an echo chamber - and all that really matters at this point is getting the truth out and breaking the spell that has kept this cult, this ideology powerful enough to continue to damage real children, women's sports, spaces, medical malpractice, etc.
If only Sancho could sit still for more than a minute or two at a time he'd make a great additional host. I'd really like to know his opinion on Gender Affirming Care for minors...
Ok - I'm reading the review. That this is coming from a MAGA government requires some mental gymnastics:
"Non-conformity to sex-role stereotypes is as old as history, and present to
some degree in every known culture. This feature of the human experience is not
pathological and needs no treatment. "
Contrast that to "I am Jazz" and "Born Ready", books for kids, in which boys who like pink are "really" girls, and girls who get As in math are "really" boys.
I love all of your perspectives and eagerly tune in each week for my fix of Informed Descent. This time, though I wanted a lot more Cori. Thanks also to Ben for mentioning Megyn Kelly’s interview with the New York Times reporter. We are really enjoying that. See you all next week! 💞
I wanted a lot more Cori, too!
Can we get there by convincing more people? Yes. More people can be convinced, but not without the help of the media. Left-biased Journalism is the key here, and these journalists need to accept the fact that “gender affirming care” is actually the mutilation of gay people’s bodies. But I fear that they’ve already flagged “transing away the gay” as right-coded or a right wing conspiracy.
I don't know if there's any hope for left-biased journalism ... they have gotten so much wrong, including everything covid ... and they're either hopelessly corrupt and determined to not be found out, or completely brainwashed, like the deepest cult followers, as Cori and Ben were saying.
Perhaps the hope could be in getting people to see how corrupt the media is?
(https://anotherbetrayedliberal.substack.com/p/information-permaculture-and-cooties)
Then again, when they're in that liberal bubble, they don't trust anything outside the media. And, yes, sadly they associate - have been trained like animals to associate - any criticisms of violations of informed consent, whether with gender "medicine" or the many injections they're told are perfectly "safe and effective", (Covid and Gardasil are by far the most dangerous), they equate that with right wing propaganda. And of course, everything connected in any way to the right wing = 100% bad, and everything on the left = 100% good. Sigh ... I used to think that way too ... Until I saw how the left mocked and censored the doctors actually successfully treating Covid ... and then learned that it was not just adults making well thought out decisions who were medically transitioning.
Maybe I'm being too negative that the media is hopelessly captured ... (?) I'd love to be wrong ...
https://coronawise.substack.com/p/npr-propaganda-for-progressives1/comments#comment-13848848 - Great article by very liberal peace activist psychologist, from 2023. Unlike the reporting of NPR, and all of them, these statements stand true today ...
Eliza was an absolute beacon here. Yes, the report said what needed to be said: that further experimentation on children that includes these "treatments" is unethical.
Those of you of either sex who are dreading your fifties, sixties etc. have been sold an utter bill of goods. Sometimes it's a bit giggle-worthy to see how many of you fall for it, but often it's just sad.
Here's the truth: being a sexagenarian rocks. Your discernment has sharpened and every last one of your everyday delights intensifies in ways you never could have imagined when you were still young and haplessly searching for some kind of instruction manual. You don't believe it? Check out all the happiness studies. I'm shooting for 120, myself.
Shout out for Carol Tavris here--I loved *The Mismeasure of Woman*. Lovely to watch you folk read these peeps.
Agree on Carol Tavris! I have both “The Mismeasure of Woman” and “Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me).” Both are excellent reads!
Back when my little sister was trans-identified, she said to me at one point, “I just can’t picture myself as an old woman.” She was maybe 22 then? And I remember thinking, “Is that unusual? Who are the young people who can easily imagine their elderly selves?”
I think Lisa was speaking from experience, rather than having "fallen for" something when she said aging is no fun. I'm glad it's been awesome for you, but I am in my early fifties and I definitely agree with Lisa. I now have chronic pain I didn't have before, it's harder to keep the weight off, I have less energy, worse sleep, and I still struggle with some of the same mental health issues I've had all my life despite having a better understanding of them. HRT helps (and is indispensable for me), but I know that physically, it's all downhill from here, and that's depressing. But maybe wisdom will come in my 60s if I keep working on it, and maybe I can dial up my gym routine to the point where I can at least get my body from ten years ago back... I haven't totally given up hope!
Lisa was speaking from a LOT of experience. 🤭
The systematic review quoted by the WP that you wrote to them about--it was one of those included as part of the HHS umbrella review.
I'm not sure there's such a thing as a balanced or neutral assessment of youth "gender medicine." Just as I'm not sure that "more research" will reveal much that is not already obvious to anyone.
This isn't a disagreement about protocols, this is a disagreement over the existence of "gender." I don't think there's a middle ground there: you either believe in its existence or you don't.
Maybe most people already understand what's wrong with it. That's why they don't want boys in girls sports.
Maybe the task is not so much convincing most people there's something wrong with it but in reshaping the institutions that are promulgating it. And that will look ugly. There's no way around it: purging just might be necessary. Let's not pretend there's some kind of compromise here (allow the destruction of the fertility of 100 children instead of 1,000?).
If the money goes away (federal funding, insurance), the institutions will change. The hardcore practitioners will go underground or go independent but that will reduce the damage.
I would say, overall, I’m with Lisa here on the need for a neutral document. While it is true that the activists will not be persuaded (I think Cori’s analysis on that point is spot on), there are still a whole swath of people left of center who remain unaware and uninformed. It’s those people a lot of us are trying to reach, and in my experience, at least some are reachable. They definitely initially reject any document that emanates from this White House, but in one on one conversations it is sometimes possible to get past that. I also agree completely, as Evie has also commented here, that getting intelligent press coverage is key. The NBC report that included the superb quotes from Jamie was better, but we need a lot more from the MSM, as we all know.
BTW, it would be so helpful if you could make a transcripts available for these discussions. You cover a lot, and in detail, so it’s very hard to catch on the first time through. Substack allows for generation of a transcript, and apparently it’s straightforward: https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/18363324028564-How-can-I-generate-a-transcript-of-an-audio-post-on-Substack#:~:text=Once%20you%20publish%20the%20audio,that%20part%20of%20the%20episode.
There are transcript buttons when I view it? At top, next to "share"?
So odd. Does not show next to share, or anywhere, but thanks for the tip!
Hi all! This is the best podcast on trans!
Lisa: 1. Gender Ideology is a non evidence based belief and it should be treated as such. That might mean getting it acknowledged as a religious belief (perhaps) and then protected. Just as we don’t allow female genital mutilation among Muslims, we can ban other genital surgeries. But people can continue to believe in gender woo woo and pay for things like FFS and boob jobs. And hopefully also get therapy.
2. The proponents of gender ideology won’t be convinced by evidence or you talking nicely to them about being even handed. They will call you “trash” for not being in their cult. The people who need to be convinced are everyone else and those people will respond to being told what’s true by authority figures.
3. People who say it helped them are doing something all humans can do - they’ve convinced themselves of something false. I don’t think there is any way that drastic unneeded cosmetic alterations, sterilization, and cross sex hormone use could actually do anything to help anyone. Since they believe it does, then, for some, it does. And some are lying! This is why buying into the delusion is so essential - because it’s only the belief that has helped them, not the interventions.
4. To change my mind someone would need to find a type of medically measurable intersex condition to explain trans. Maybe it would be in body tissues or in the brain. But something like a difference in enzyme production or in pathway receptivity. Something that’s not psychological. Even differences in brain structures could be explained by behaviors or beliefs. I’m thinking I’d need to see a biochemical root cause for trans to be convinced hormones are a treatment.
Some 'medically measurable intersex conditions' such as Klinefelter's Syndrome (a male with XXY chromosomes) are treated with sex hormones, as being a male with underdeveloped testicles might mean you don't produce enough testosterone for a healthy body, and they might even lead to a surgery like keyhole male breast reduction if you find noticeable breast development distressing. But I'm not aware that any of the 40+ sex or reproductive developmental differences (or 'intersex conditions) we have uncovered need to be treated with opposite sex hormones, although some of them are very complicated in terms of the endocrine system, and need highly specialist doctor input.
Eliza around 46:00 talking about parents tying not wanting to sterilise kids as a type of enforced pronatalism: I was watching an interview with Louise Perry recently where she talked about the decline in birth rates across the western world and it struck me that practically speaking the modern left is very anti natal. Like, it's gone from believing that Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare to believing it should be safe, legal, common, and celebrated. Fear of climate change has also caused many to refuse to have children as a way of sparing them future suffering. So it really shouldn't be a surprise at this point that left wing people in general aren't going to care about whether GAC sterilises kids because they oppose any suggestion that kids might be an important part of a fulfilling life for many, if not most people. I wonder how much of the lefts anti natalism is a knee jerk response to the rights pro natalism.
Also, on the subject of Phyllis Schlafly: The College Republicans brought her to speak on my campus when I was a freshman. I was in the school’s feminist group, and most of the other women in it wanted to organize a protest of her visit. I was confused because 1. I hadn’t heard of Phyllis Schlafly before and 2. Why? She just sounded like some lady who was going to say stuff. What would we be protesting exactly? That she was being allowed to speak? I remember spending the afternoon in a school computer lab, catching up on who she was and some of her writing. I didn’t find it particularly compelling, but I also didn’t understand why it was protest-worthy - I decided to skip the talk. In retrospect, this was an early warning sign of the troubles that were to come during my years in feminist spaces…
My biggest critique of her writing at the time was that she seemed to copy/paste heavily from her own writing, and that things she wrote for one piece often seemed to show up elsewhere, to the point where it was very noticeable just within the amount of reading I managed to do just in that one day. Now that I’m older, though, I completely understand this, because I lifted much of *this* comment from one I made on an episode of Meghan Daum’s The Unspeakable a while back. 😜
Ben mentions that Megyn Kelly argued it would be better for journalists to be upfront about their bias and report from their perspective, and Lisa argues for the importance of both being open about biases and also trying to look clearly even at evidence that doesn't fit the journalist's worldview. As a classroom teacher, I would just add that we desperately need journalists to do what we want more teachers to do: to present what is true as openly as we can to students without indoctrinating them. Megyn Kelly has called for this in classrooms, as well. I wish she would see the connection to journalism. I'm honestly not sure it's practicable to push for more teachers to teach students to examine things from multiple views and consider things for themselves if we don't have support in the public sphere, particularly from journalists, modeling the same. I loved Lisa's vision for NPR and PBS (however unlikely it is to happen) of bringing together multiple (not just left right!) views on our most contentious issues, as this is what I've been bending over backwards to do with students in my high school classes. It's almost like we need a Heterodox Academy for journalism. If we had more examples in the press, I think it would really help teachers.
I agree with Cori about NPR--and there should never have been federal funding of news in the first place. Public broadcasters get a lot of revenue from corporate sponsors and donors--they haven't been "publicly" funded for a long time. They were created as educational outlets aimed at children and the elderly--demographics not served by commercial television (which aimed at 18-49 year olds). But their mission has evolved--and so should their funding.
And objectivity, however defined, left journalism a while ago--it's not coming back. Instead of trying to bring it back, I agree with Megyn Kelly: just be up front about where you're coming from and let the audience understand that.
(BTW: Kelly is fantastic on the gender/trans stuff--there's some clip of her being dismissed for caring so much about a fringe issue and she pounces and kills it, explaining how this ideology has penetrated *everything.* I'll look for the clip.)
There is no way we are going to have a "neutral document" because for the people we need to reach, neutrality is not allowed. It's not considered ethical or moral on this issue. You might as well be talking about creating a neutral document on segregation. This has become an issue where neutrality is a red flag for poor quality and bias. How a media outlet reports on this has become one of those test issues that people use to determine if a news source is reliable and safe to trust. This became most likely irreversibly entrenched with the re-election of Trump. Unless some miracle happens where all the trusted left leaning news sources like WaPo, NYT, and NPR along with people like John Oliver, Jon Stewart, Harris, and AOC all come out together with a new message on this issue, we are not going to move the needle on this from the top down. The best hope is a ground up shift that comes from Gen Z and Gen Alpha where they politically shift on this issue (re: Cori's comments on the NBC survey) and unconsciously shift on having gender dysphoria as a widely accepted idiom of distress in the symptom pool for adolescent and young adult onset of gender dysphoria. It will also require parents of the very young traditional cohort of gender nonconforming children to decide for themselves at the ground level that gender nonconformity does not equal trans and, most importantly, *never take the child to a doctor or therapist in the first place* because we're not going to change the AAP and the APA and teacher orgs/boards of education. They have to hold the course they're on now or else admit guilt and open the floodgates for lawsuits.
The thing is, Lisa, there may be people who are 'super happy'. For now at least. But there is NO way to know who these people will/may be.