Trans Proselytizing In Elementary Schools Is No Moral Panic

 Florida's HB 1557 created something of a firestorm, in case you haven't heard. The opposition Democrats and their friends in the press called it the "Don't Say Gay" bill, the furor being over this paragraph:

Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.

It is arguable that this could extend to a number of incidental discussions (hence, the hypothetical of a gay teacher being forbidden to discuss weekend plans with his husband). It's already facing a court challenge, which focuses on its vague drafting. But if it falls, this will not go away, because the motivations for it have not:

• Transsexual agitators seek to use the public schools for literal recruiting in ways that gay and lesbian advocates did not. Andrew Sullivan recently reviewed the materials on sexual identity lately published for very young children, and concludes this is now very mainstream:
  

  Am I nut-picking? Are these examples on the fringe? One indication that they are not is that “Born Ready” was written by a board chair of the Human Rights Campaign, Jodie Patterson. It doesn’t get more mainstream Gay Inc. than that.

  It is not, of course, totally normalized in the public schools just yet, but it's pretty clear where this is destined:

  For the sake of argument, let’s posit that this kind of teaching, and these kinds of books, are not yet entrenched in K-8 in public schools. But they are definitely popping up in stories around the country — in Stamford, CT; in West Hartford, CT; in Oak Park, CA; in Chicago; in Seattle; in Charlotte-Mecklenberg, NC; in St. Paul, MN; in Jefferson County, KY. Parents are beginning to hear their kids talk about “women with penises,” as more teenage girls suddenly announce they’re transitioning, and the White House doubles down on affirming puberty blockers for children, even as European countries begin to realize they overstepped. (In the U.K., Sweden, Finland, and France, medical authorities are sounding the alarm. But the Biden administration regards these drugs as essential.)

  As always, the end goal is sexual transition, using puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and reassignment surgery. What is the analog of this among gay men or lesbians, in the Stonewall era or the present one?
  
• Pediatric sex transition has the backing of the medical establishment and the Democratic Party. Health & Human Services offers a guide to pediatric sexual transition, one which apparently is the White House playbook now. This guide cites position papers from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). Jenn Psaki has recently stated that sex reassignment surgery, puberty blockers, and hormone therapy amount to "best practice"; states preventing it "will be held accountable". Accountable, though, for what?
  
• The academic and institutional recommendations principally push for self-ID as the standard, and prescribe medical interventions at surprisingly young ages in some cases. The Endocrine Society's guidelines (2017, PDF) at least admits the possibility that some people who claim to be gender dysphoric may "have conditions other than gender dysphoria/gender incongruence and … may not benefit from the physical changes associated with this treatment", i.e. that appropriate screening is necessary. On the contrary, the AAP document (2018) flatly calls anything other than self-ID as "conversion therapy", noting this approach has been "banned by executive regulation in New York and by legislative statutes in 9 other states as well as the District of Columbia." And the WPATH guidelines (2012, with a new edition to be released shortly) are even more explicit, saying "withholding puberty suppression and subsequent feminizing or masculinizing hormone therapy is not a neutral option for adolescents," and that these interventions should occur "as soon as pubertal changes have begun … it is recommended that adolescents experience the onset of puberty to at least Tanner Stage 2. Some children may arrive at this stage at very young ages (e.g., 9 years of age) [emphasis mine]."
  
  
• Evidence for improved post-transition mental health is extremely sketchy. Advocates badly misrepresent such evidence as we do have. The supporting belief undergirding pediatric transition is that it results in improved mental health outcomes, and particularly lowered suicidal ideation. But Jesse Singal's recent essay on Tordoff, et al. showed the opposite, that puberty blockers and hormone therapy does not help the mental health of kids with gender dysphoria (formatting is original equipment):

  … [K]ids who took puberty blockers or hormones experienced no statistically significant mental health improvement during the study. The claim that they did improve, which was presented to the public in the study itself, in publicity materials, and on social media (repeatedly) by one of the authors, is false.

  It’s hard even to figure this out from reading the study, which omits some very basic statistics one would expect to find, but the non-result is pretty clear from eTable 3 in the supplementary materials, which shows what percentage of study participants met the researchers’ thresholds for depression, anxiety, and self-harm or suicidal thoughts during each of the four waves of the study:

  

  At each time point, “PB/GAH” refers to the kids who reported being on puberty blockers or gender-affirming hormones, while “none” refers to the kids who reported no such treatment.

  "The kids in the study arrived with what appear to be alarmingly high rates of mental health problems, many of them went on blockers or hormones, and they exited the study with what appear to be alarmingly high rates of mental health problems." All of which is to say, transition did nothing to improve kids' mental health.
  
  
• The claim that efforts to discuss sexual identity with very young children is a moral panic is categorically different from the most famous recent widely known instance, the satanism panic of the 1980s. This is all over social media, of course, but evidence of the mainstreaming of the "moral panic" slur may be found in this Advocate piece of September, 2019 that smears Andrew Sullivan's criticism of pediatric transition as some sort of "unintentionally ... transphobic" writer, smirking that "transgender people are coming for your kids":

  I have been trying to find someone, anyone, I could seduce into the seamy underbelly of the transgender lifestyle. I thought perhaps I could take them to the Southern Comfort Conference or sneak them into a meeting of the National Center for Transgender Equality. So I have hung around soda counters, pool halls, and even pachinko parlors (look it up). I have wandered Times Square at 2 a.m., looking for groups who appear vulnerable and/or defenseless, and hissing, “Hey … wanna buy some estrogen? Testosterone? Good stuff! Guaranteed hospital grade!”
  

  This descends into the usual minimization of all critics as being 1950s McCarthyists, tarring everyone raising alarms at the poor quality of the research being used to support medicalization and surgery. Again, this is coming from The Advocate, which as Sully said before, is about as mainstream Gay, Inc. as it gets. But the most visible historical precedent of moral panic involving young children and sex is not very favorable to the pediatric trans argument.
  
  The McMartin Preschool case, the zenith of the satanism panic, hinged entirely on the discredited recovered memory therapy of Lawrence Pazder. Judy Johnson, the mother of a child at McMartin, claimed the staff there engaged in ritual sexual abuse of children and animals, and a lot more; she was eventually hospitalized for acute paranoid schizophrenia and died from the side effects of alcoholism before the preliminary hearing she sparked had concluded.
  
  That is to say, the whole thing was a farce, a made-up string of lies based on the charges of a mentally ill woman, abetted by pseudoscience and bogus experts. There were no sexual abusers lurking there, no witches, no chambers, and no tunnels. But proselytizing for sexual transition has both a real goal (puberty blockers, hormone therapy, sexual reassignment surgery) and people willing to carry this out. These are real outcomes, supported by institutional players, not hobgoblins manufactured by quacks. Trans advocates cannot escape this, because it is what they actually demand.

 I do not profess to know what the right course of action for young people with gender dysphoria is. But the medical profession and a lot of institutions have taken the trans party line that pediatric transition is the way to go, evidence or no. As Sullivan wrote recently,

What we need … is clarity and transparency about what exactly is “age-appropriate.” This is completely routine for all subjects, because toddlers and teens obviously need different approaches. And we should tailor teaching according to age. I’ve been an openly gay man my whole adult life, but I don’t think that kids in primary grades need to know anything more about homosexuality, let alone gay sex, than what they may pick up in the media or find out from their parents. For that matter, I don’t see why the tiny phenomenon of trans identity — much less than one percent of the population — needs to be centered in sex ed for eight-year-olds. But I do think public schools should teach the facts about sex, including homosexual orientation and transgender identity, as neutrally as they can.

People need to take a breath and step back. And more importantly, we need serious pushback on the institutions that have been knocked senseless in the name of a misguided sense of fairness.

The Suppression Of Black Lives Matter Abuse At Meta/Facebook

 I've previously written about the obvious scam that is Black Lives Matter; as a basic matter, there is no national organization per se, and as a consequence, money donated to that cause merely awaits the right scammer to pick up the tab, particularly as much of it passes through the sticky and opaque fingers of ActBlue, a fundraising siphon where accountability goes to die.

Sean Campbell's extensive update to the story at New York magazine discovered that Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Melina Abdullah had purchased a home with

… more than 6,500 square feet, more than half a dozen bedrooms and bathrooms, several fireplaces, a soundstage, a pool and bungalow, and parking for more than 20 cars, according to real-estate listings. The California property was purchased for nearly $6 million in cash in October 2020 with money that had been donated to BLMGNF [Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation].

Of course, this meant that the BLMGNF immediately started playing defense, changing ownership of their clubhouse (known as "the campus") "to an LLC established in Delaware by the law firm Perkins Coie … [ensuring] that the ultimate identity of the property’s new owner was not disclosed to the public." It also meant 

…monitor[ing] social media for negative mentions of BLMGNF, with members using their influence with the platforms to have such remarks removed. It’s currently not possible to share the Post’s article on Cullors’s home purchases on Facebook because the site’s parent company, Meta, has labeled the content “abusive.” At other points, Bowers and his associates direct a private investigator to look into BLMGNF detractors and journalists, including me.

(Emboldening mine.) The ban appears to be over, thankfully, but it's pretty clear they fully expect the cooperation of social media companies to prevent unseemly details from leaking out. To their credit, as far as I can tell, Twitter never did play along with this game.