Bazelon and the NYT's led us to the river, let us see the water, but didn't quite let us drink. I took great comfort in reading the rational comments from the readers.
Thank you, Colin, for publishing this, and thank you, Lisa, for writing it. I have to admit, the one before last paragraph got me completely choked up. “It brought up enough issues for them to ask more and better questions, to wonder, to worry. It allowed for curiosity, something verboten in this political climate. Their reactions tempered my disappointment.”
This is exactly how I feel about the article. It didn’t go where I wanted it to go, but it put a crack in the veneer and I, too, had a couple of unexpected people reach out to me, almost in a whisper to say “can you tell me more?” For that, I am grateful. We must just keep delicately chipping away.
At least Bazelon pointed out that the scientific issues are not simple, well-defined, and fully decided. That's a step in the right direction. I'm hoping that sometime soon practitioners will remember the principle of "First, do no harm," and realize that children are incapable of adequately making the self-diagnoses for which they've been given responsibility, under the "affirmation" model of treatment.
“a gay man with deep shame over his sexuality.” A powerful and important factor. Perhaps these issues should be explored psychologically before being explored chemically.
It’s a signal moment, however cautious Bazelon was. What it may also do is reveal to ordinary people who haven’t so far been steeped in this issue how vicious the hardcore activism is. It is beginning to feel very different from 12 months ago.
This strikes me as a flawed discussion too. A "false positive?" The tenderly bending-over to try to accommodate some level of genuine transness seems to me ridiculous. There are people whose mental distress can be alleviated by time, by careful ethical therapy; and people whose mental disorder is so profound that they can find relief only in extreme measures.
Perhaps ancient societies invented initiation rituals, some involving infliction of considerable pain and tasks of dangerous endurance, as part of the transition from puberty to adulthood, because they recognized that such a tumultuous stage of development needed to be managed somehow, and though they had no knowledge of sex hormones and endorphines etc. etc. etc., they discovered methods that worked.
Now we have tattooing and piercings and other mutilations divorced from formal ritual meaning, but the urgent need to find relief through pain and body-altering remains as part of a strange affliction of our particular mammalian species.
I think we need to drop all idiotic labels. "Identifying as cis?" "Genuinely transgender?" This is not solving a serious problem of society; it's playing games with semantics.
I, too, thank you for publishing this piece, Colin. Thanks to Lisa for writing it. I'm finding this whole issue very disconcerting. It is now so wrapped up in politics, egos, activism, money (e.g., physicians and clinics), and academic jargon that it's going to continue, ad infinitum. We've seen this happen in many other biological/psychological controversies (some of which I've written about). We can trade interpretations of data and statistics, we can bicker over the nuances of psychological categories, and we can argue over the meanings of words forever. In the meantime, something very wrong is happening, I think. When slick websites unabashedly advertise procedures such as gender nullification, and that's deemed to be an acceptable solution to a psychological issue, it feels as if we've regressed to an era in which trepanning and lobotomies were thought to be reasonable medical procedures. This is dire.
It is difficult to confront the fanatics of gender ideology because most people find thinking about such matters as "bottom surgery" deeply distressing. It's brutal to do, a kind of 21st-century torture, and especially hard to contemplate as something done to a young and suffering person. This is one reason that its advocates have prevailed thus far in so many ways.
The advocacy of a "gendered soul" is an odd thing to find on the post-modernist left, I think, because so many people in this group don't really believe in a soul at all. They have, after all, been t college.
There’s some really junky articles on my Apple News feed today, courtesy of CNN and USA Today. That’s the problem too. When TRAs see articles that they don’t like in one news outlet, they go in hard on the others.
Bazelon chickened out. It's not like she didn't have the information available to her. She was just too afraid to tell any more of the truth than she did. One of the trans-related scandals few seem to be addressing is the "conversion ban" that affects the ability of therapists to even treat the complicated and suffering children who present with the affliction of gender.
It is difficult to confront the fanatics of gender ideology because most people find thinking about such matters as "bottom surgery" deeply distressing. It's brutal to do, a kind of 21st-century torture, and especially hard to contemplate as something done to a young and suffering person. This is one reason that its advocates have prevailed thus far in so many ways.
The advocacy of a "gendered soul" is an odd thing to find on the post-modernist left, I think, because so many people in this group don't really believe in a soul at all. They have, after all, been t college.
Bazelon and the NYT's led us to the river, let us see the water, but didn't quite let us drink. I took great comfort in reading the rational comments from the readers.
Thank you, Colin, for publishing this, and thank you, Lisa, for writing it. I have to admit, the one before last paragraph got me completely choked up. “It brought up enough issues for them to ask more and better questions, to wonder, to worry. It allowed for curiosity, something verboten in this political climate. Their reactions tempered my disappointment.”
This is exactly how I feel about the article. It didn’t go where I wanted it to go, but it put a crack in the veneer and I, too, had a couple of unexpected people reach out to me, almost in a whisper to say “can you tell me more?” For that, I am grateful. We must just keep delicately chipping away.
Great article, Lisa!
At least Bazelon pointed out that the scientific issues are not simple, well-defined, and fully decided. That's a step in the right direction. I'm hoping that sometime soon practitioners will remember the principle of "First, do no harm," and realize that children are incapable of adequately making the self-diagnoses for which they've been given responsibility, under the "affirmation" model of treatment.
I’m hearing that Washpo and Reuters are taking a closer look and I hope to God that it’s true.
“a gay man with deep shame over his sexuality.” A powerful and important factor. Perhaps these issues should be explored psychologically before being explored chemically.
It’s a signal moment, however cautious Bazelon was. What it may also do is reveal to ordinary people who haven’t so far been steeped in this issue how vicious the hardcore activism is. It is beginning to feel very different from 12 months ago.
This strikes me as a flawed discussion too. A "false positive?" The tenderly bending-over to try to accommodate some level of genuine transness seems to me ridiculous. There are people whose mental distress can be alleviated by time, by careful ethical therapy; and people whose mental disorder is so profound that they can find relief only in extreme measures.
Like these people: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/a-new-way-to-be-mad/304671/
Perhaps ancient societies invented initiation rituals, some involving infliction of considerable pain and tasks of dangerous endurance, as part of the transition from puberty to adulthood, because they recognized that such a tumultuous stage of development needed to be managed somehow, and though they had no knowledge of sex hormones and endorphines etc. etc. etc., they discovered methods that worked.
Now we have tattooing and piercings and other mutilations divorced from formal ritual meaning, but the urgent need to find relief through pain and body-altering remains as part of a strange affliction of our particular mammalian species.
I think we need to drop all idiotic labels. "Identifying as cis?" "Genuinely transgender?" This is not solving a serious problem of society; it's playing games with semantics.
FR Prete
10 min ago
I, too, thank you for publishing this piece, Colin. Thanks to Lisa for writing it. I'm finding this whole issue very disconcerting. It is now so wrapped up in politics, egos, activism, money (e.g., physicians and clinics), and academic jargon that it's going to continue, ad infinitum. We've seen this happen in many other biological/psychological controversies (some of which I've written about). We can trade interpretations of data and statistics, we can bicker over the nuances of psychological categories, and we can argue over the meanings of words forever. In the meantime, something very wrong is happening, I think. When slick websites unabashedly advertise procedures such as gender nullification, and that's deemed to be an acceptable solution to a psychological issue, it feels as if we've regressed to an era in which trepanning and lobotomies were thought to be reasonable medical procedures. This is dire.
It is difficult to confront the fanatics of gender ideology because most people find thinking about such matters as "bottom surgery" deeply distressing. It's brutal to do, a kind of 21st-century torture, and especially hard to contemplate as something done to a young and suffering person. This is one reason that its advocates have prevailed thus far in so many ways.
The advocacy of a "gendered soul" is an odd thing to find on the post-modernist left, I think, because so many people in this group don't really believe in a soul at all. They have, after all, been t college.
There’s some really junky articles on my Apple News feed today, courtesy of CNN and USA Today. That’s the problem too. When TRAs see articles that they don’t like in one news outlet, they go in hard on the others.
I thought Reuters had been sponsoring this ideology internationally for years now....
Bazelon chickened out. It's not like she didn't have the information available to her. She was just too afraid to tell any more of the truth than she did. One of the trans-related scandals few seem to be addressing is the "conversion ban" that affects the ability of therapists to even treat the complicated and suffering children who present with the affliction of gender.
It is difficult to confront the fanatics of gender ideology because most people find thinking about such matters as "bottom surgery" deeply distressing. It's brutal to do, a kind of 21st-century torture, and especially hard to contemplate as something done to a young and suffering person. This is one reason that its advocates have prevailed thus far in so many ways.
The advocacy of a "gendered soul" is an odd thing to find on the post-modernist left, I think, because so many people in this group don't really believe in a soul at all. They have, after all, been t college.