Where WPATH’s SOC 8 normalizes the idea of altering oneself to conform to the world’s gendered expectations, the Gender Framework proudly stands for gender non-conformity free from medical dependence.
How dare you ask a question that would embarrass any proponent of "surgical affirmation"? You must be hateful, bigoted and transphobic OR sane and sensible. Methinks the latter!
Your question makes no sense. Nobody actually believes sexual organs define gender, because that would imply removing or losing ones sexual organs (which is a common enough occurrence due to accident or disease) would result in the de-gendering of that person.
The post modernist 'free for all' which underpins feminist ideology/ trans activism (trans activism being the latest wave of feminism) pushes many critics towards biological essentialism, only to overshoot and end up pushing hard materialism instead.
And adopting a hard materialistic / mechanistic stance plays right into the hands of the transhumanists, who are the ones behind the entire feminist/ trans agenda to begin with. The transhumanists disregard consciousness altogether (and seek to erase it), pushing a kind of mechanistic 'lego brick' model of biology instead, treating humans like modular robots and our brains like computers (just listen to Harari).
If you combine the hard materialistic/ mechanistic world view of most 'gender critics' with post modern identity politics of the feminists and trans activists you end up with all the ingredients for a transhumanist future where gender will be 'constructed' by the addition/ subtraction of bits of tissue and chemicals.... and consciousness will not be part of the equation at all.
As Steiner wrote a century ago (paraphrasing) ...... in the future a medicine will be developed to eradicate consciousness/ the soul from humanity, turning humans into automatons.....
We are on the brink out that future now, and I don't think these dumbed down materialistic arguments (from either side) about 'body parts' are helping to lift us out of this moronic transhumanist mindset.
Reading this, I am feeling JOY that the juggernaut that has been WPATH will finally find itself no longer seen as the "authority" on this subject! !!!Hurrah!!! Thanks to everyone who has worked so hard to get to this day and will be working hard to carry this forward!!!
As I understand it, WPATH and its standards of care present an obstacle to successfully litigating claims against professionals for harmful interventions that are meant to affirm patients' trans identities.
That's because the physician or mental health professional will raise the legal defense that he or she merely followed the definitive standards of care in their field, by which they would mean WPATH's SOC 8 and its predecessors.
I imagine that trans activists and their allies go to great lengths to make sure WPATH's standards of care remain unassailable. Why, even my state legislative representative's staffer referred to these flawed standards of care as the "gold standard."
Often the outcome of a lawsuit depends on which side's expert wins the courtroom battle of experts. Does Genspect intend that at some point the Gender Framework will have sufficient credibility in the right places that it can be used in court to show that the gender-affirming professional who relied on WPATH's standards failed to exercise reasonable care? What needs to be done to reach that point?
In a separate vein, it grinds my gears whenever I see the output of scholars such as Judith Butler dignified by being referred to as "theory," to wit, "queer theory" and "gender theory." Whatever the intent behind that practice was, it has the effect of conferring an unwarranted status of scientific legitimacy to ideologies that have never been validated according to the scientific method. I hope that Section 1 of the Gender Framework will disabuse the world of the notion that queer theory accurately describes or predicts any aspects of human attitudes or behavior.
"As I understand it, WPATH and its standards of care present an obstacle to successfully litigating claims against professionals for harmful interventions that are meant to affirm patients' trans identities."
This is accurate, but woke state governments go much farther. They have passed and are passing laws that specifically "protect providers of gender affirming care" from malpractice suits. My state has included this protection in their laws requiring that gender affirmative care be the legal standard of care for anybody claiming to have one of the identities currently approved for surgery. These identities include "non-binary," so that people who want both sets of equipment can order and get them at our local university hospital. All insurance companies are required by state law to pay for these services, and if a prospective consumer needs additional funding, the taxpayers are required to pay for them via Medicaid.
That progressive states are granting gender-affirming health care professionals legislative protection from malpractice liability is depressing and outrageous. I'm not well enough versed in this field of law to know whether legal claims for failure to obtain the patient's informed consent would be covered by the grant of immunity.
In any case, since many gender doctors today are more faithful to gender identity ideology than to their obligations to do no harm, giving those individuals immunity from malpractice claims is a patent injustice. It leaves people who suffered damages at the hands of gender doctors without recourse. I hope there are creative litigators out there who can come up with innovative legal theories to circumvent such barriers.
If not, it means that efforts to roll back the excesses of trans activism must focus on states where progressives don't control the executive and legislative branches and where malpractice suits are still viable. That's not without its drawbacks. One of them is having to collaborate with MAGA Republicans and/or far-right lawyers such as the stable at Stephen Miller's America First Legal Foundation. The other is that the mainstream media would present any gains inaccurately as an "assault on LGBTQ rights" the way they always do while gender identity ideologists would scream trans genocide.
Now, I tend to respect the mainstream media and have no sympathy for those who babble about "fake news," but when it comes to trans issues few journalists are willing to do objective reporting, perhaps because of pressure from above.
I certainly agree with everything you are saying! Some of the detransitioners who have been featured on this site are suing in progressive states, so we will perhaps see how the gender ideologues defend their destructive interventions. It is also possible that state laws that are intended to cancel citizens' right to sue will be judged as illegal by courts. A third source of hope is that evidence of dissent and debate regarding standards of care for sexual identity issues discredits the gender ideologues claim that all clinicians agree with them.
This is wonderful news! It's joyful news! Puberty is not a disease but it is the pathway to adulthood. Trying to fix mental/emotional issues with mutilation and dangerous drugs does not address the way young people feel when going through puberty. I've been praying for growing awareness and commonsense; what a blessing!
It's great to see a meaningful alternative to WPATH being offered to practitioners and policymakers. Well done. I just want to add that, everyone who has contributed to this effort has done so at some personal cost, and it is truly appreciated.
Citation is not debate, it is the transfer of responsibility for forming coherent argument. We see plenty of writers right here on this page who can form arguments and articulate positions without quoting someone else.
These words, describing the prevailing guidelines for surgery on minors, “...technical manual for an incurious mechanic, tinkering with a machine.” Ultimately, I am left asking where are the medical ethicists? And medical ethics beg the existence of a value system! What is the difference between a machine and a human being? Does anyone care anymore?
“Woke” is mostly bullying, psychological terrorism, employed in support of (frequently fake*) victim narratives. Actual ethics are replaced by rhetoric that supports corrupt grifters and people with severe psychological psychological dysfunctions (“Cluster B” narcissism, ptsd, sociopathy, borderline personality disorder, etc.). All of their rhetoric revolves around subjective, fact and evidence avoidant narratives that are used to manipulate emotions. They generally reject objective, rational, systematic and actual fact based arguments, but especially ones that contradict “woke” pathologies and propaganda, and confirmation biases.
* GRIFTERS, EXPLAINED
by a liberal-heterodox black lawyer, social science professor and data wonk: hate crime hoaxes
A trans widow stickers truth in "woke" Brooklyn, NY! Let the world know--we don't agree, it isn't safe, children are harmed. (children of, children who)
I’m fascinated and pleased at reading a structured intelligent approach to this phenomenon. If I can offer criticism:
Gender applied to an organism is and will remains a content-free term. It remains a linguistic concept which, when applied to humans untethers from anything except subjective interpretations which are culturally untranslatable, and radically misinterpretable since it propagates into biology where it cannot have any meaning. It is a linguistic relationship not a mental state of an organism, humans included. I realize this is impossible to fight with an organization with “gender” embedded in its name, but the meaning of the word needs to always be clarified.
Second I think there’s a fruitful avenue of amplifying understanding that a type of transsexualism is due to a delusion that one’s genitals do not belong, a variant of BIID. I also think that it would be fruitful to contemplate that the maturation of the human neural system around synaptic pruning in adolescence is what most often surfaces this type of transsexualism.
I would amplify homophobia, not just internalized homophobia as a source of transsexualism. Iran is an object example of homophobia creating transsexuals.
Lastly I would amplify the “levels” of trans impact, due to efforts to mask the existence of the transexual delusion. Each level (self, disguised, medical, systemic, cross-system, social, and language) to understand how impacts have been growing geometrically with acceptance of the delusion.
I don’t know of this link still works but from notes I’ve been collection for more than two decades, I shared a PDF with some friends, https://file.io/gHr4F3gIjuUF which I called a transifesto,
Oh and I’ve been telling people for some time that multiple forms of trans are not uncommon fantasies - manipulating children with or without consent of their parents chemically and surgically to force them into a sex other than that they were born. The written pornography is online and easily searchable. If you’re not familiar with written pornography it may not seem actually possible, but it’s relatively common in trans written pornography.
I could not agree more with your characterization of the g-word. Unless one is deliberately trying to bamboozle readers and prolong unproductive discussions, one should not be using the g-word. (You're right. This means renaming G-spect.) More on this anon.
YES!!!! Those of us in the thick of this issue for years have been handcuffed in being able to push back or ask questions, because WPATH would be thrown in our faces as the unimpeachable and incapable-of-being-challenged "authority" (not a worthy title). This has to have been a Herculean effort to pull together, and many of us are deeply grateful for the work all of you are doing on behalf of our children and families.
I'm keen to understand if you'll be asking for any input on sections. I notice that the co-occurrence of giftedness is not listed next to conditions like depression, eating disorders, autism, etc. I know anecdotally that many trans-identified teens are gifted. Would love to see a discussion of this included in the framework.
If genitalia doesn't assign gender, how does removing genitalia affirm gender?
How dare you ask a question that would embarrass any proponent of "surgical affirmation"? You must be hateful, bigoted and transphobic OR sane and sensible. Methinks the latter!
I sure would love to hear a trans activist or gender dysphoric person answer this question.
Your question makes no sense. Nobody actually believes sexual organs define gender, because that would imply removing or losing ones sexual organs (which is a common enough occurrence due to accident or disease) would result in the de-gendering of that person.
The post modernist 'free for all' which underpins feminist ideology/ trans activism (trans activism being the latest wave of feminism) pushes many critics towards biological essentialism, only to overshoot and end up pushing hard materialism instead.
And adopting a hard materialistic / mechanistic stance plays right into the hands of the transhumanists, who are the ones behind the entire feminist/ trans agenda to begin with. The transhumanists disregard consciousness altogether (and seek to erase it), pushing a kind of mechanistic 'lego brick' model of biology instead, treating humans like modular robots and our brains like computers (just listen to Harari).
If you combine the hard materialistic/ mechanistic world view of most 'gender critics' with post modern identity politics of the feminists and trans activists you end up with all the ingredients for a transhumanist future where gender will be 'constructed' by the addition/ subtraction of bits of tissue and chemicals.... and consciousness will not be part of the equation at all.
As Steiner wrote a century ago (paraphrasing) ...... in the future a medicine will be developed to eradicate consciousness/ the soul from humanity, turning humans into automatons.....
We are on the brink out that future now, and I don't think these dumbed down materialistic arguments (from either side) about 'body parts' are helping to lift us out of this moronic transhumanist mindset.
Reading this, I am feeling JOY that the juggernaut that has been WPATH will finally find itself no longer seen as the "authority" on this subject! !!!Hurrah!!! Thanks to everyone who has worked so hard to get to this day and will be working hard to carry this forward!!!
As I understand it, WPATH and its standards of care present an obstacle to successfully litigating claims against professionals for harmful interventions that are meant to affirm patients' trans identities.
That's because the physician or mental health professional will raise the legal defense that he or she merely followed the definitive standards of care in their field, by which they would mean WPATH's SOC 8 and its predecessors.
I imagine that trans activists and their allies go to great lengths to make sure WPATH's standards of care remain unassailable. Why, even my state legislative representative's staffer referred to these flawed standards of care as the "gold standard."
Often the outcome of a lawsuit depends on which side's expert wins the courtroom battle of experts. Does Genspect intend that at some point the Gender Framework will have sufficient credibility in the right places that it can be used in court to show that the gender-affirming professional who relied on WPATH's standards failed to exercise reasonable care? What needs to be done to reach that point?
In a separate vein, it grinds my gears whenever I see the output of scholars such as Judith Butler dignified by being referred to as "theory," to wit, "queer theory" and "gender theory." Whatever the intent behind that practice was, it has the effect of conferring an unwarranted status of scientific legitimacy to ideologies that have never been validated according to the scientific method. I hope that Section 1 of the Gender Framework will disabuse the world of the notion that queer theory accurately describes or predicts any aspects of human attitudes or behavior.
"As I understand it, WPATH and its standards of care present an obstacle to successfully litigating claims against professionals for harmful interventions that are meant to affirm patients' trans identities."
This is accurate, but woke state governments go much farther. They have passed and are passing laws that specifically "protect providers of gender affirming care" from malpractice suits. My state has included this protection in their laws requiring that gender affirmative care be the legal standard of care for anybody claiming to have one of the identities currently approved for surgery. These identities include "non-binary," so that people who want both sets of equipment can order and get them at our local university hospital. All insurance companies are required by state law to pay for these services, and if a prospective consumer needs additional funding, the taxpayers are required to pay for them via Medicaid.
That progressive states are granting gender-affirming health care professionals legislative protection from malpractice liability is depressing and outrageous. I'm not well enough versed in this field of law to know whether legal claims for failure to obtain the patient's informed consent would be covered by the grant of immunity.
In any case, since many gender doctors today are more faithful to gender identity ideology than to their obligations to do no harm, giving those individuals immunity from malpractice claims is a patent injustice. It leaves people who suffered damages at the hands of gender doctors without recourse. I hope there are creative litigators out there who can come up with innovative legal theories to circumvent such barriers.
If not, it means that efforts to roll back the excesses of trans activism must focus on states where progressives don't control the executive and legislative branches and where malpractice suits are still viable. That's not without its drawbacks. One of them is having to collaborate with MAGA Republicans and/or far-right lawyers such as the stable at Stephen Miller's America First Legal Foundation. The other is that the mainstream media would present any gains inaccurately as an "assault on LGBTQ rights" the way they always do while gender identity ideologists would scream trans genocide.
Now, I tend to respect the mainstream media and have no sympathy for those who babble about "fake news," but when it comes to trans issues few journalists are willing to do objective reporting, perhaps because of pressure from above.
I certainly agree with everything you are saying! Some of the detransitioners who have been featured on this site are suing in progressive states, so we will perhaps see how the gender ideologues defend their destructive interventions. It is also possible that state laws that are intended to cancel citizens' right to sue will be judged as illegal by courts. A third source of hope is that evidence of dissent and debate regarding standards of care for sexual identity issues discredits the gender ideologues claim that all clinicians agree with them.
I actually felt a little teary reading this. It is so desperately needed.
Thank you for sharing. I will now share widely. Thanks for all you do Colin.
This is wonderful news! It's joyful news! Puberty is not a disease but it is the pathway to adulthood. Trying to fix mental/emotional issues with mutilation and dangerous drugs does not address the way young people feel when going through puberty. I've been praying for growing awareness and commonsense; what a blessing!
It's great to see a meaningful alternative to WPATH being offered to practitioners and policymakers. Well done. I just want to add that, everyone who has contributed to this effort has done so at some personal cost, and it is truly appreciated.
This document has its critics. None of them is able to provide citations for their criticism. As if they never read it before deciding what was in it.
Citation is not debate, it is the transfer of responsibility for forming coherent argument. We see plenty of writers right here on this page who can form arguments and articulate positions without quoting someone else.
Criticizing a document on the basis of imaginary contents is dishonesty. Cite the contents that say what is supposedly said, or else GTFO, liars.
Yes, yes, yes. As a part of emerging from this insanity we need a reasonable alternative to the World Association for Paraphilia Normalization.
These words, describing the prevailing guidelines for surgery on minors, “...technical manual for an incurious mechanic, tinkering with a machine.” Ultimately, I am left asking where are the medical ethicists? And medical ethics beg the existence of a value system! What is the difference between a machine and a human being? Does anyone care anymore?
“Woke” is mostly bullying, psychological terrorism, employed in support of (frequently fake*) victim narratives. Actual ethics are replaced by rhetoric that supports corrupt grifters and people with severe psychological psychological dysfunctions (“Cluster B” narcissism, ptsd, sociopathy, borderline personality disorder, etc.). All of their rhetoric revolves around subjective, fact and evidence avoidant narratives that are used to manipulate emotions. They generally reject objective, rational, systematic and actual fact based arguments, but especially ones that contradict “woke” pathologies and propaganda, and confirmation biases.
* GRIFTERS, EXPLAINED
by a liberal-heterodox black lawyer, social science professor and data wonk: hate crime hoaxes
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40538865-hate-crime-hoax
I love this concise, accurate, hard hitting list of the core characteristics of woke manipulation! Really excellent!
A trans widow stickers truth in "woke" Brooklyn, NY! Let the world know--we don't agree, it isn't safe, children are harmed. (children of, children who)
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/g_-wcxyDduY
I’m fascinated and pleased at reading a structured intelligent approach to this phenomenon. If I can offer criticism:
Gender applied to an organism is and will remains a content-free term. It remains a linguistic concept which, when applied to humans untethers from anything except subjective interpretations which are culturally untranslatable, and radically misinterpretable since it propagates into biology where it cannot have any meaning. It is a linguistic relationship not a mental state of an organism, humans included. I realize this is impossible to fight with an organization with “gender” embedded in its name, but the meaning of the word needs to always be clarified.
Second I think there’s a fruitful avenue of amplifying understanding that a type of transsexualism is due to a delusion that one’s genitals do not belong, a variant of BIID. I also think that it would be fruitful to contemplate that the maturation of the human neural system around synaptic pruning in adolescence is what most often surfaces this type of transsexualism.
I would amplify homophobia, not just internalized homophobia as a source of transsexualism. Iran is an object example of homophobia creating transsexuals.
Lastly I would amplify the “levels” of trans impact, due to efforts to mask the existence of the transexual delusion. Each level (self, disguised, medical, systemic, cross-system, social, and language) to understand how impacts have been growing geometrically with acceptance of the delusion.
I don’t know of this link still works but from notes I’ve been collection for more than two decades, I shared a PDF with some friends, https://file.io/gHr4F3gIjuUF which I called a transifesto,
Great work!
Oh and I’ve been telling people for some time that multiple forms of trans are not uncommon fantasies - manipulating children with or without consent of their parents chemically and surgically to force them into a sex other than that they were born. The written pornography is online and easily searchable. If you’re not familiar with written pornography it may not seem actually possible, but it’s relatively common in trans written pornography.
I could not agree more with your characterization of the g-word. Unless one is deliberately trying to bamboozle readers and prolong unproductive discussions, one should not be using the g-word. (You're right. This means renaming G-spect.) More on this anon.
I just flashed on “G-spot” reading this and briefly stopped being hypnotized by “Dancing With the Stars” long enough to chuckle.
YES!!!! Those of us in the thick of this issue for years have been handcuffed in being able to push back or ask questions, because WPATH would be thrown in our faces as the unimpeachable and incapable-of-being-challenged "authority" (not a worthy title). This has to have been a Herculean effort to pull together, and many of us are deeply grateful for the work all of you are doing on behalf of our children and families.
I'm keen to understand if you'll be asking for any input on sections. I notice that the co-occurrence of giftedness is not listed next to conditions like depression, eating disorders, autism, etc. I know anecdotally that many trans-identified teens are gifted. Would love to see a discussion of this included in the framework.
This is great news. Very well done to all involved!
Brilliant news. Thanks to all at Genspect.