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 New IOC Transgender Participation Rules Are Unfair To Biological Women

 The International Olympic Committee released its new framework for transgender and intersex athletes Tuesday. Hard as it is to believe, it is even worse than the old 2015 rules, which required testosterone level verification — despite the utter lack of science behind this. (The problem is the ineradicable changes wrought by male puberty: even after a year of hormone therapy, M2F transsexual athletes retained the vast majority of their strength advantage.)

The document itself is a pastiche of delusion, starting with its first section. Titled "Inclusion", all else follows from that idea, namely, that anyone who claims to be female should also get to compete with them in athletic events. The rest is filled with rationalizations for how this is to happen and why. Quoting Fair Play for Women's response (emboldening all mine):

UK sports governing bodies now have two different sets of guidance to consider, and on this point they agree. The new Sports Councils Equality Group guidance also concluded that testosterone suppression was pointless. But unlike the IOC, they kept sight of the implications: there is no fair way to include people who’ve been through male puberty in female competitive sport. Women will always be disadvantaged. That’s why a separate category for the female sex exists in most sports in the first place.

The IOC claims it has taken notice of the UK Sports Councils Equality Group’s output. It’s hard to see how. The IOC’s new guidance has abandoned the science and says there should be “no presumption of advantage”.

“No athlete should be excluded from competition on the exclusive ground of an unverified, alleged or perceived unfair competitive advantage due to their sex variations, physical appearance and/or transgender status.”

What does this mean? It means that being transgender is no longer to be counted as having any relevance at all for sporting eligibility. No one is arguing that we don’t need separate female and male (or open) classes. Without them, females would barely get a look-in. Yet the IOC is saying being born male is not a factor.

“Transgender status” is what permits a male to compete as a female when there’s a massive advantage, ranging from 10% at the low end, in running and rowing, to 35% in weightlifting. This advantage is unaffected by gender identity. It would be laughable, were it not so disappointing, that the IOC has thrown out the fig-leaf of testosterone suppression and ended up with self-identification.

 The gasoline that will keep this car moving is the fact that there is necessarily a limited supply of M2F transsexuals wanting to participate in women's sports. That does not make this any more fair to biological women.

Actual Intersex People: Forgotten Pawns In The Trans Wars

I recently had cause to read something from Intersex Human Rights Australia which struck me, at least at first glance, as entirely sensible and a subtle rebuke to the trans activists who wish to define away biological sex into some kind of nonexistent spectrum (emboldening mine):

After fielding a few phone calls it is clear that many people can’t grasp our position in opposing the creation of a third sex while supporting X sex descriptors on birth certificates and passports.

To be clear, intersex is not an arbitrary third sex category, but rather a spectrum of possibilities, and nor is it an arbitrary third gender.

Even though some intersex people define their identity as intersex, this is a political statement, and not necessarily anything about their gender or preference for sex classification. Identity is not what defines intersex: intersex is contingent on innate physical bodily characteristics. Intersex is not a gender identity because it is a matter of sex. ...

We say we should have that right in the same way we have the right to remain silent on our gender identity, our sexual orientation, our race, our religion and our political affiliation. None of those things are marked on birth certificates or passports, though they are in some ways more indicative of who a person is than sex anatomy. 

This strikes me as entirely reasonable. The trans activists have tried to conflate biological intersex individuals (such as people with Kleinefelter syndrome) with people having gender dysphoria, but the former get almost no air time.

Transgender Desister Sues The UK's Tavistock Clinic

Yes, it's the Daily Mail, but interesting times in the UK as a (biological) woman taken in by the infamous Tavistock Clinic for sex reassignment claims she was given experimental puberty-blockers at age 16, when she did not have legal ability to consent. She is now suing the clinic. It will be interesting to see how this proceeds.

On a related note, I'm adding Transgender Trend to the sidebar. They first came to my attention because of this post about the exponential increase in children sent to the Tavistock clinic, and the astonishing graph therein:

I really hope they win this battle; it seems to me that medicalization of young people needs to be delayed until they can make these sorts of decisions on their own.

More Link Dumping

• Annie Wilkes, Part 1: Ford vs. Ferrari: now the subject of one of those Annie Wilkes reviews. "Best left dead", sheesh.
• The best thing The Federalist has published all year: "Climate Worship Is Nothing More Than Rebranded Paganism". Excerpt:

  The reality is, of course, completely different. Much less than destroying the planet, climate change isn’t even a settled science. Conservatives don’t disagree that climate is changing. That is a straw man. Conservatives, however, are opposed to hysteria, have skepticism about the rate of the climate change, and would like to see an actual cost-benefit analysis of the radical changes being demanded.
  
  More important than that, conservatives understand that climate change is cynically used by a certain section of people to justify their political goals of steering the West away from its way of life, a way they perceive to be evil and harmful, hetero-patriarchal, and capitalist. How? Appealing to the faith-based part of human brains, the need for subservience, and propping up children as human shields.

• California de facto bans fracking by making all new wells subject to a "scientific" (read: captive of the greens) panel. 
• Annie Wilkes, Part 2: Annie Blames The Audience:  No, really, Elizabeth Blanks has preemptively blamed men if her Charlie's Angels reboot fails.
  

  She stated, “Look, people have to buy tickets to this movie, too. This movie has to make money.” She added, “If this movie doesn’t make money it reinforces a stereotype in Hollywood that men don’t go see women do action movies.”

  This is an odd place to go given recent successes with Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, and Mad Max: Fury Road. The 2000 reboot took in $125M at the domestic box office, so maybe it's just you, Liz?
• Annie Wilkes, Part 3, Corncob Edition:

  Wow. Nearly 3000 replies because one woman voices her opinion that we shouldn’t be at a point anymore where we just accept media that normalizes patriarchy. Cool cool cool. Everyone’s having a normal one I see. pic.twitter.com/N8vMHJZ09e

  — Anita Sarkeesian (@anitasarkeesian) November 21, 2019

• I am glad to see our courts beavering away at the important question of whether women can consent to a threesome. And to think, this poor man almost had his freedom snatched away from him.
• Elizabeth Warren fires the opening shot in banning cars:

  Traffic violence kills thousands and injures even more Americans every year. On World Day of Remembrance for Traffic Crash Victims, I'm sending my love to the families and friends of those who have lost loved ones. It's time to #EndTrafficViolence.

  — Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) November 17, 2019

• Sully gets it right again on the intersectional left's long-term political goals:

  Every now and again, it’s worth thinking about what the intersectional left’s ultimate endgame really is — and here it strikes me as both useful and fair to extrapolate from Kendi’s project. They seem not to genuinely believe in liberalism, liberal democracy, or persuasion. They have no clear foundational devotion to individual rights or freedom of speech. Rather, the ultimate aim seems to be running the entire country by fiat to purge it of racism (and every other intersectional “-ism” and “phobia”, while they’re at it). And they demand “disciplinary tools” by unelected bodies to enforce “a radical reorientation of our consciousness.” There is a word for this kind of politics and this kind of theory when it is fully and completely realized, and it is totalitarian.

  Also, homosexuals are now under attack by — wait for it — the woke left, for the crime of not hewing to the trans lobby's worldview:

  Of course, anyone can and should like whatever they like and do whatever they want to do. But if a gay man doesn’t want to have sex with someone who has a vagina and a lesbian doesn’t want to have sex with someone who has a dick, they are not being transphobic. They’re being — how shall I put this? — gay. When Rich suggests that “it’s not just possible but observable and prevalent to have ‘preferences’ that dog-whistle bigotry,” and he includes in the category of “preferences” not liking the other sex’s genitals, he’s casting a moral pall over gayness itself. Suddenly we’re not just being told homosexuality is “problematic” by the religious right, we’re being told it by the woke left.

• I Am Shocked, Shocked That Mothers Want To Be With Their Children, but this apparently is huge news to the New York Times. A study of California, which in 2004 instituted mandatory paid maternity leave, found women worked fewer hours and earned less a decade later, results that are consistent with the results in Sweden, where the labor pool is the most sex-segregated in the OECD.

Andrew Sullivan's Rightly Worried About Immigration, Trans Advocacy

Two very good essays by Andrew Sullivan at New York magazine's "Intelligencer" column, the first about immigration:

Courts have also expanded asylum to include domestic violence, determining that women in abusive relationships are a “particular social group” and thereby qualify. In other words, every woman on the planet who has experienced domestic abuse can now come to America and claim asylum. Also everyone on the planet who doesn’t live in a stable, orderly, low-crime society. Literally billions of human beings now have the right to asylum in America. As climate change worsens, more will rush to claim it. All they have to do is show up.

Last month alone, 144,000 people were detained at the border making an asylum claim. This year, about a million Central Americans will have relocated to the U.S. on those grounds. To add to this, a big majority of the candidates in the Democratic debates also want to remove the grounds for detention at all, by repealing the 1929 law that made illegal entry a criminal offense and turning it into a civil one. And almost all of them said that if illegal immigrants do not commit a crime once they’re in the U.S., they should be allowed to become citizens.

How, I ask, is that not practically open borders?

Then, trans advocacy sinking the ship of lesbian/gay civil rights successes. The polling numbers are earthshaking:

The number of Americans 18 to 34 who are comfortable interacting with LGBTQ people slipped from 53 percent in 2017 to 45 percent in 2018 — the only age group to show a decline,” according to the annual [GLAAD] Accelerating Acceptance report.

Sullivan rests this sad state of affairs squarely on the shoulders of the trans advocates, who he imagines (I think correctly) will not readily relinquish their newfound power:

...[T]here is almost no chance that the gay-rights Establishment will relinquish the “LGBTQ” label. They, like most extensions of the Democratic Party, have completely embraced postmodern critical gender and queer theory. My fear is that this will fail to win support and that, as the trans movement keeps pressing and pressing, the backlash will grow and gays and lesbians will become collateral damage. The T activists, having embraced an extremist theory of gender, could undermine not just their own case but also equality for the Ls, Gs, and Bs. They could swiftly reverse the gains we have won. They sure have made a good start in turning the next generation against us.