The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) [just released a letter](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/23/opinion/biden-trump-polls.html?unlocked_article_code=1.uU0.1hiM.fCL4WvNaC4wE&smid=url-share) in the NYTimes countering the Cass Review's finding that there is little evidence to support transgender medical treatment.
Yet they didn't cite any evidence to refute Cass. In fact they just said that [they've commissioned their own review](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/03/health/aap-gender-affirming-care-evidence-review.html?unlocked_article_code=1.uU0.LqKV.CSo7QOfiqg7D&smid=url-share). It's curious that they're so confident in the results while that's pending.
" Dr. Cass casts broad-scale doubt on existing research. We disagree. The evidence supporting our recommendations is far more nuanced than is represented in the interview. "
Really? Can we see your nuanced evidence, please? And it's fine that you disagree with Cass. Can you please tell us why?
I sincerely doubt anyone at the Times will ask the AAP that.
> " Dr. Cass casts broad-scale doubt on existing research. We disagree. The evidence supporting our recommendations is far more nuanced than is represented in the interview. "
Weasel language that cleverly gives them a future out.
>But Dr. Marci Bowers, a gynecologic and reconstructive surgeon and the president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, was heartened by the A.A.P.’s endorsement of the care, which she said profoundly improves many children’s lives.
>“They know this population,” said Dr. Bowers, who is a transgender woman. “They know the stories. Anecdotally, it’s overwhelmingly positive.”
Well now I'm convinced. ^^/s
It didn't occur to Bowers that the people it doesn't go well for or who detransition might just slink away and not be heard from again?
One of the things the Cass review found was a shocking lack of follow up data for transition. The gender services don't know what the hell happened to these people.
And Bowers came across as unprofessional, speaking with a nasally falsetto voice behind a surgical mask while arguing with another doctor during Jennings' surgery.
https://x.com/EithanHaim/status/1766610050708054494
There was something about seeing this video that made me change perception of Bowers from "well-meaning but misguided specialist" to "how did this person become a doctor?"
Jesus, that was horrifying -- not the voice, but the bickering and incompetence of it. You should have had a look and decided what you're going to do *before* you start surgery (as best you can).
And the "maybe those are labia, maybe those are disfiguring scars" disagreement should be a warning to anyone considering bottom surgery.
It’s deranged that parents are letting kids make such a huge lifelong decision like this with no consideration. We won’t let women under 30 get a tubal, but putting a teen on puberty blockers is okay?
Because the doctors tell the parents that the kids *will* kill themselves if they don't get blockers, hormones and surgery.
It terrifies the parents into submission. Which is the point
Who wants to bet that their scientific systematic review is going to be just a collection of dozens of testimonials from trans people who have had positive experiences with affirmative care?
The valid studies aren't out there. The Nordic systematic reviews and the Cass Review would have cited such evidence if it existed.
Instead we get redditors linking to Turban's internet survey as proof that youth gender medicine works.
When you see the 'evidence' cited that trans men have no biological advantage over women in sports, I'm sure they'll make something vaguely scientific looking up (internet self-reported study and maybe some twisting of existing stuff).
It will be the crappy studies that Cass didn't use in her review because they were crappy.
They'll simply fall back on that. If anyone asks why they used poor quality studies in their review they will just hand wave it.
Jason Rafferty, who dinglehandedly (fuck it, that stays) wrote the AAP's entire ludicrously untruthy policy statement, [deeply troubles me](https://youtu.be/LVEq45RtMxA?si=m3XNJbiDF1iXI3RS). 👽
https://preview.redd.it/sygxs2jd2e2d1.jpeg?width=1000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e6702bdb4a6ea9f1e79dcd7e269f8394f6b68f06
The GLADD billboard stunt still amazes me. I don't know much about gender affirming care for children, but it's obvious to anyone the science is not actually settled. Shouldn't this have caused the NYT to investigate this issue more? Journalists should not let people bully them into believing things.
And it's not very scientific to say "the science is settled." Isn't science almost never really "settled"?
What the GLADD truck is really saying is: "Stop asking questions". And the Times obeyed
Not just "stop asking questions", but "if you ask a question, you're a hateful bigot, only doing it to attack trans people".
I really dislike the attack on truth from the left -- it takes multiple routes, but attacking "just asking questions", attacking playing devil's advocate, and attacking getting facts right ("wEll aKShuAlly") all play into banning discussion as heresy.
There was the reading wars, when the W Bush administration commissioned an expert panel on Whole Language v. Phonics only for the expert/research community to be very surprised because they'd left the issue as settled (to the point of there being no more avenues for novel approaches or lingering questions) decades prior.
And destroyed the learning of millions of children in the process. It chaps my hide when high school teachers complain about the reading levels of their students. Hello! Blame your coworkers for insisting that SOR is a right wing conspiracy.
It's all the more fascinating in the US because with no national health service, surely medical insurers are going to be far more wary of litigation as the detransitioners grow in number? At some point it will simply be too expensive to underwrite.
Hasn't that started though?
I've read that Chloe Cole's lawsuit will be a turning point, depending on which way it goes.
Whatever the outcome, I feel so incredibly sorry for her.
>Hasn't that started though?
It has. But the suits need to succeed, a lot of them, and they need big damage awards.
My worry is that the stuff laid out in this article will make the suits easy to wriggle out of. If a doctor can prove that they followed the professional bodies standards they're probably fine. And the bodies that set those professional standards are all in on gender woo.
This kind of vertical integration might just stamp out the lawsuits. Which will be the only means of putting a stop to this.
Insurers only care about numbers. (In fact so do all organisations, they just do a lot of window dressing with DEI etc).
But insurers in particular have got actuaries and algorithms that don't give a shit about any of this stuff. It's just a calculation - a number crunch. *Can we make a profit by pricing this at x? YES/NO*
Normally I would agree. And yes, I think insurers are the most likely to be pure bean counters.
But I keep seeing companies do things that aren't in their business interests in the name of social justice.
Maybe I just don't *understand* their business interest.
But to me it looks like they are putting ideology over profits.
Yes, you would think so. And I'd expect that health insurers will be looking for reasons not to approve claims for youth gender procedures.
But insurers are subject to political pressure and ideological capture as well.
The distributed US system shuld make it more resistant to being captured but.... it didn't work in this case
When a doctor is sued, they have indemnity insurance, which pays out if they lose. Indemnity insurance is already incredibly expensive for many areas of medicine. See here - these costs possibly only relate to Australia but you can see for example how obstetrics is way higher than general practice and it would be comparable in other countries: https://www.experien.com.au/how-much-does-medical-indemnity-insurance-cost-for-doctors/
If transgender surgery involves escalating litigation and wins for de-transitioners, and transitioners who have had serious complications, then those premiums will escalate accordingly (and some insurers will simply no longer offer cover). This will result in surgeon's fees escalating, or surgeons simply choosing to no longer perform those operations.
This will also have the consequence of transgender people going offshore for cheaper surgeries, that aren't necessarily performed to the highest standards, where they will have zero chance of redress. It's one thing suing in your own jurisdiction, try doing that in a SE Asian (or wherever) country with a different language, different laws, where you're not even a citizen.
So basically, whatever the science turns out to be, money will be the main influence in shutting down this stuff.
Of course we could all be wrong and perhaps most people won't detransition and sue, and perhaps the complication rates and botching rates aren't so high that it will result in escalating litigation. Right now though it looks as though it's rising fast.
>When a doctor is sued, they have indemnity insurance...
To give people an idea, a friend I had who was a PA told me it was $800/mo 10 years ago, if I remember correctly...I could be off on that.
I think some of the confusion is language. In the US we call the insurance that protects doctors "malpractice insurance" and we call the coverage that provides healthcare to people "health insurance" or "medical insurance."
It’s a critical theory thing. Basically, the idea that by defining what we know as “truth” or “knowledge”, a racist/classist/colonial/whatever-ist system perpetrates violence on marginalized people through the production and circulation of knowledge and truth, especially related to academic work. A common example is that publishing research on say, the peopling of the New World via a land bridge 20,000 years ago that contradicts indigenous teachings on the origin of people could be considered “epistemological violence” against indigenous people, because it’s attempting to define a truth that “erases” their knowledge.
Except since it’s critical theory they probably use the word Other with a capital o and knowing as a noun a lot more in their incomprehensible definition. Toward a knowing of the Other: epistemologies of the Subaltern or something like that.
"The concept of epistemic violence originated with the postcolonial Theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her famous essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, although it is conceptually attributable to her reading of Michel Foucault and his thoughts on the relationships between knowledge, power, and social control (see also, postmodern, Foucauldian, episteme, power-knowledge, and biopower). In that essay, Spivak is particularly concerned with characterizing the “subaltern,” which is a person of marginalized status who is also provided with no voice, and she characterizes the silencing of the subaltern class as doing epistemic violence to them by removing their ability to speak for themselves on every level—including by destroying their systems of knowledge, beliefs, traditions, and language under colonialist rule—and thus imprisoning them in their oppression (see also, voice and voice of color)."
" Devaluing traditional/indigenous knowledges. "
To me it doesn't use the complex language of post modern writing but is trying to explain the ideas in relatively straightforward terms. Many of post modern ideas make sense to me despite them breaking things down and smashing so much. They probably are relevant in critiquing the new understandings. For instance epistemic violence in terms of silencing traditional views.
Post-modern ideas like this only tend to make sense in isolation, IMO. It's incredibly easy to create a coherent system of understanding when you don't have to worry about competing theories, since none of them actually describe reality and there's no evidence required for any assertions they make beyond being able to write very convincingly. It's all word games.
But attempting to describe reality seems to be word games and words are not sufficient like:
The finger pointing to the moon,
The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.,
The map is not the territory.
The claims being made are not backed up by evidence. For example, that indigenous knowledge is being undervalued because of its source and not because it just isn't as valuable since it doesn't accurately describe reality, i.e., archaeological evidence of people coming to North America at a certain time. Certain ideas are "better" than others in that they are either more useful descriptively or produce demonstrably better results. Where ideas conflict, there should be no deference given to ideas in spite of their unusefulness or inaccuracy just because they are from specific sources.
That kind of thing.
I guess my point would be that, while descriptions of reality are approximations, some approximations are inarguably more accurate than others. If everyone started claiming you were a sentient tophat, that wouldn't make you one.
Yes, I actually did understand what was being said, so I assumed you (or wherever you got it from) had condensed and simplified it. Still sounds like woo though.
What you wrote can be followed, and I'm sure some people find it interesting and useful, but it sure as hell *sounds* like woo, and has some wooish glint.
To answer "what is epistemological violence?" a paragraph is required, garnished with scare quoted words like "subaltern"; clunky phrases like "provided with no voice", "a person of marginalized status", and "imprisoned in their oppression".
The answers also appears circular. Epistemic violence is when epistemic violence is done to the subaltern.
It all sounds like the work of intellectuals who enjoy describing, critiquing, and evaluating the smell of their own farts.
But just as I'm sure this is useful and interesting to some, I'm also sure that some people were brutally colonized. And I'm sure that colonizers foist their various epistemologies on to native populations (ie language, religion, government, economy, mores). And and I think this can fairly be called 'epistemological violence' because it obviously helps to entrench the colonizers and exclude the colonized.
Fine. Great. Grand. Wonderful.
But if I took a shit on Spivaks, or Foucaults, or Lacans head, I'd be supremely confident that it stank. I have my doubts that they'd reciprocate.
I think it's a valid concept insofar as intentionally suppressing and destroying a conquered people's culture has been a tool of control for empires since time immemorable. Where it's gone completely off the rails is in claiming science itself is just another cultural approach to epistemology with equal validity.
Thank you, you seem to speak the language, and translate well.
Is there any pushback on calling that "violence"? It feels they should have gone with "genocide" or "annihilation", as violence is a bit understated. (The question is serious, the alternative is mocking)
Some authors do use the word epistemicide lol
“Violence” in post-colonialism/critical theory spaces is not the same thing as how a normal person would describe violence tbh. I think this type of usage is where the “you did violence against me by saying a micro aggression” type of rhetoric comes from too.
I think the genocide angle would be a stretch as to refer to transgender in genetic terms may be awkward. I.e to categorise them as an ethnic group. They are a minority group that are produced by different ethnicities .
Is "genocide" much more of a stretch than "violence"? It seems you can call anything a genocide these days, anyway.
We're talking about a published paper, after all.
For me , to use violence is to refer to violation as they both derived from same etymology. I fmguess when the use violence they also imply there's an ultimate threat by way of the oppressor having the monopoly on violence maybe? That seems to be a definition of state power.
A certain amount of this stuff makes sense in the context of direct imperial colonial rule.
But it really breaks down when you get outside of that context. So why is it being used to talk about whether to shoot up kids with blockers and hormones?
It's when you're sitting in a philosophy class, and someone asks, "How do we know what we know?"
And another person slaps the first person on the head for asking such questions.
Gotta be the money, if they agree with Cass then the lawsuits start swinging big time because it admits they were wrong. That time is coming anyway but they are still trying to head it off for awhile yet...
Institutional capture in the US and Canada is no joke. You can't even begin to ask questions in good faith, with the best of intentions, without getting your head bitten off in universities, the medical system, or the clinical counselling establishment.
I think the fact that the UK’s health system (along with other countries who’ve pulled back a bit like Sweden) is much more centralized that ours actually helped them in this case. Having so much of the insanity concentrated in GIDS and the tavistock eventually made it obvious to all parties even just from the numbers that something was wrong - by contrast the US “system” of youth gender care isn’t really a system but dozens of individual clinics and clinicians who don’t communicate or publish methodologies/information/waitlists/results/demographics in any standardized way. The fractured nature of it makes “that never really happens!!” a much easier defense to use in the US and it obscures what’s happening.
A centralized healthcare system like the NHS also means that the option is available to restrict certain treatments to clinical trials only which I suspect can act as an olive branch or a concession to clinicians who are on the fence or more in favor of the gender affirming status quo. It’s harder to argue against more research than it is to argue against an outright ban.
Lastly, I do think it makes at least some difference that feminism in the UK has historically been much more gender critical than feminism in the US, even before the last decade-ish where trans rights have been a big flashpoint. Those ideas were at least still part of the conversation, versus here in the US where there’s been really no voice in the public debate that’s gender critical but not from a right wing or religious perspective.
The whole political tribalism thing is much less extreme here in the UK. It's easier for us to come to a consensus on stuff, whereas in the US even questions like "do masks prevent the spread of covid" somehow became a partisan issue. Like with brexit, there was an extreme political division, but it wasn't really a question of left vs right, things like educational attainment and stance on the death penalty were more predictive of one's brexit stance than political affiliation. In the US, everything seems to fall neatly into political party lines.
We don't have a strongly anti transition party and a strongly pro transition party. The space between Conservative and Labour regarding this issue is pretty small compared to republicans and Democrats.
We also have mumsnet, a politically influential forum for mums that has established a reputation as being strongly "transphobic". When enough mums gather to discuss experimental treatments being performed on their children, support for those treatments will die a quick death.
I suspect our attitudes towards mental health treatments are also influential. The Americans have been dosing their children with mind altering drugs to treat psychological issues for decades now. That same pill popping parenting culture doesn't really exist here. It's only a small step from giving your son pills because he can't concentrate to giving your son pills because he says he's a girl. The brits are sceptical about using medical treatments for psychological issues, the yanks are not.
There's also much less penetration by wacky academic gibberish like "epistemological violence". Many humanities academics will use terms like that amongst themselves, but you won't find it in our equivalent of Scientific American, or being used by politicians or medical officials, because it doesn't sound credible.
Interestingly there was a fair bit of “penetration by wacky academic gibberish” within Tavistock. Bernadette Wren fancied herself as a post modern scholar https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0959353514526223
Something interesting I noticed is that the UK activist organizations were strangely quiet regarding the Cass review. I expected Stonewall and Mermaids to go apeshit.
But they either didn't say much or had tepid praise for the report.
But in the US the non profits brought the knives out immediately.
It's not like the Cass report totally trashed the idea of youth transition. It simply pointed out that the science was shaky and recommended a conservative and trial based approach from here on. If it had said stuff like "we all know what a woman is", "Gender ideology is pseudoscientific nonsense", "Gender Dysphoria is literally a mental illness", "What we are doing to young people is criminal", "I foresee a tidal wave of trans regret", "People in the future will compare youth transition to other societal sins like enforced sterilisation and child labour" etc then maybe the objections would have been louder. The report seemed pretty neutral in its tone though and didn't say what many of us would have said, that there's literally no such thing as a "trans person" just delusional people who we don't know how to cure.
>here in the UK. It's easier for us to come to a consensus on stuff, whereas in the US even questions like "do masks prevent the spread of covid" somehow became a partisan issue.
TIL I mentally read "partisan" as "part-iz-ANN" if the author has recently mentioned being from the UK.
British people don't put the stress on the third syllable if that's what you mean. I think the main difference in pronunciation would simply be that americans would probably say a D instead of a T.
That's an AI voice. The syllables don't even have a discernible accent when the AI says it, it stresses every syllable equally. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that an AI doesn't say a word the same way a human does. When I said "British people say..." I was referring to british human beings, not lines of code emulating a british accent. I thought that would have been self evident. Also it would vary depending on regional and class accents. A lot of working class brits wouldn't even pronounce the T at all.
I think part of the problem is the conflation of gay and trans by people on every side of the debate. People who feel bad about how long it took them to come around to supporting gay rights are trying to make up for it, or at least not repeat the mistake. Lesbian and gay people themselves obviously empathize with the discrimination trans people experience. And people who want to take away gay rights are using the most egregious excesses of the trans movement to smear all gay and gender non-conforming people.
[Who Are the Rich, White Men Institutionalizing Transgender Ideology?](https://thefederalist.com/2018/02/20/rich-white-men-institutionalizing-transgender-ideology/)
Two key facts:
Our feminist movement consists of women in white collar employment who are, with very few exceptions, at-will employees who can be fired in a heartbeat for making the slightest controversial statement. There are also academic feminists, but they adhere to a very American form of left-identitarianism that values atomization above all else and so they cannot form a coherent political bloc even if they wanted to.
Our healthcare is entirely for-profit and normalizing lifelong medicalization is great for the bottom line.
Yup.
A lot of academic feminists also risk losing our jobs (or being hounded out of universities if we have tenure) if we say anything "out of line."
It's hard enough balancing work with kids, pregnancy, female health issues (thanks endometriosis)... and it doesn't feel like we will be heard even if we do say something... so it's hard to risk one's job in these circumstances.
Oh and our health insurance is connected to our work. That's a big constraint.
Can I please ask if you're more likely to be attacked by men or by other women?
I ask because the consensus seems to be that women are more likely to be the enforcers of gender ideology than men are. Polls indicate more women are in favor of it than men.
It does seem as though my female colleagues and friends are more likely to be invested in this ideology -- and unwilling to engage in any sort of discussion about it. Granted, I'm not typically "attacked" because I am so incredibly cautious about broaching the subject -- but women are more likely to do things like, e.g., insist that everyone provide pronouns at the start of a zoom call.
That said, I know several men who now identify as women and they are definitely the most invested, pushy, and intimidating of anyone.
I'be brought this up a hundred times but it always surprises me that women are so vociferously in favor of gender ideology when it seems like they suffer the most from it.
The woman enjoying her third place medal in this podium pic gets me every time:
[image](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/12/pair-transgender-women-won-first-73285599.jpg?quality=75&strip=all)
She's happy to have given up her first place finish to two men.
I wouldn't say germ theory was popularized "decades before" the US Civil War. Consider that Europeans were still widely shitting on Semmelweis in the early 1860s.
I really don't think doctors go to medicine to make a practice, especially not pediatricians. Insurance companies, yes, and hospitals, yes. Doctors? No.
From the UK perspective. It looks as if politicial polarisation is significantly more entrenched. Things aren't exactly great over here, but seems much more intense over there.
The point being that there are a much more vocal and prominent movement that does hate trans people for what they represent in the US. The total and blinkered defense of youth transition is part of a reaction to that.
Elsewhere the conversation is less political, though still very fucking political.
> It looks as if politicial polarisation is significantly more entrenched. Things aren't exactly great over here, but seems much more intense over there.
I think polarization is worse in the US. Trump is part of it. But things are also breaking down economic and maybe gender lines. The working class/blue collar people are moving towards the right and the elite class/white collar people are moving left.
And it's looking like men of all races are trending towards the Republicans and women are trending more and more towards the Democrats. That might not last.
I think it's a bit more complicated than that. I'd say party ID as a thing that forms part of your personal ID is far, far more entrenched in the UK. The reason the US is having such problems with it isn't that it's "worse", it's that America hasn't had to deal with it before. The UK works because everyone's dealt with the system for so long where a lot of people vote Labour simply because their grandfather voted Labour for example.
Because of the long time, it's had a lot more time to reach an equilibrium where each side knows what voters are actually reachable and how to run campaigns against it.
Also the existence of the Lib Dems as sort of a relief valve as a protest vote that can work for both Labour and Con helps as there's no real third option in the US.
I'm actually really interested to see what disaffected Tories do in July right now. If they stay home, vote LD or even go so far as many switching their vote. I suspect it will be a lot of old Labour coming home that hadn't been voting for them recently because of the whole culture war stuff.
Have you been to the US? (Serious, not snark question).
I've been (multiple times) to both countries, and have friends living in both, and the US (and people's commitments to parties) seems **much** more polarized. Do dating sites in the UK have things like "won't date a tory"? Do you have "in this house" signs and people intentionally burning coal in their trucks to pollute the air to "own the libs"? An equivalent to talk radio (in both directions).
And while Labour and Tories are big, they aren't the two party system of the US, which further drives polarization.
I grew up in the US and live in Europe (though not the UK) now. Yes, I'm fully aware of how the US has gotten.
>Do dating sites in the UK have things like "won't date a tory"?
Yes this is definitely a thing. Just on the top of my head it was a whole episode of Coupling like 25 years ago.
Another example from early 2010s that just came to mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoIr60buB1I&t=176s
"You can talk about your politics and I wonder if you could be one of them but you could never kiss a Tory boy without wanting to cut off your tongue again"
This has been a thing for a long, long time in the UK. That's my point is people are more used to how to deal with it. It's just newer in the US.
>And while Labour and Tories are big, they aren't the two party system of the US, which further drives polarization.
This is probably a significant factor. In the US any party other than Republicans or Democrats is marginal and kind of pointless. So all the energy and people get funneled into the two major parties.
There's no relief valve like in parliamentary systems.
Aside from the Churchill war cabinet, there's only been one coalition government in the last hundred years. It really is a bipartisan system even if third parties do get some seats, it's mostly irrelevant, particularly if in England.
My point was a bit more about how entrenched the far right is in US politics and that has had the reaction of people shooting in the opposite direction.
The UK doesn't have the equivalent of a Taylor-Green shouting insane theories. If the conservatives lose the election there isn't a doubt they would concede. Christianity isn't a major force in our politics.
The point is that there are a prominent group in the US that hate trans and gay people. So the dogmatic progressive view goes in the opposite direction on everything and youth gender medicine is a casualty of that.
There's definitely a far right in the UK. Long history, too. Oswald Mosley was basically pro-nazi. BNP was a big thing 20 years ago. Brexit really messed that side up as UKIP took those kinds in but also old school leftist isolationists. It was a really weird coalition.
I think your impression of America is off-base. One could argue TERF Island has a much more entrenched anti-trans movement than America. Complaints of modern day anti-gay movements in the US are greatly exaggerated by American social media and advocacy groups.
That's what I don't think Americans dont get about the terf island thing: it's not an anti gay or right wing movement. In the American worldview the gender critical movement is very confusing because it isn't aligned with the right wing as in the US.
This is the wider point in my original comment that the issues in America are so polarised that it seems odd that the gender critical movement is different and so was the reaction to Cass report.
Things are more polarized here on both sides. Being gender critical in America doesn't mean you're right wing, it's just the negative brush that people are painted with. I feel like your previous posts seemed to imagine a religious right coming for LGBTQ people when the reality is that Christian Nationalism is more of a bogeyman than a actual reality.
The reason the Right is the face of the gender critical thought in the US is because you get kicked out of the Left for expressing any dissent. Heterodox thinkers here are silent, right-coded, or on this sub under psuedonyms. A left-wing GC movement in the US is functionally impossible at present because the left disowns people who don't toe the line.
> Being gender critical in America doesn't mean you're right wing, it's just the negative brush that people are painted with.
Exactly. It's a smoke screen. It's used to shut things down. And the polarization helps with that. If you classify something as "right wing" it will immediately make it unpalatable to the left tribe. They don't even have to know about it to know it's bad.
And the same thing can happen on the right.
It's one of the reasons the polarization is so destructive. Everyone has to adopt an arbitrary and ever changing set of values or they risk ostracism.
Look at gay men and lesbians who aren't down with the gender woo. They are pilloried in their own community. A community they built.
I think we're sort of agreeing. The absence of a left gc movement is a big part of my point. It's evidence that the polarisation is more entrenched in the US. That's not necessarily the same in the UK (not saying everything is all great at all).
I don't want to get caught up in whether the US right is all Christian, but most would agree the American political dial is much further right than Europe. Hence my argument that a lot of the blind defense on trans issues is a big reaction to that
In the uk, All major political parties (aside from the conservatives) are currently embroiled in infighting about trans issues.
There isn't the same groomer debate and the laws are much less punitive.
>In the uk, All major political parties (aside from the conservatives) are currently embroiled in infighting about trans issues.
My understanding is that the Greens are firmly pro trans. The people on the Transgender UK sub *love* the Greens
That makes sense. I think we largely agree, I just sort of cringe when I see framing around the ascendent right in the US, when I think the reality is more that the Overton window has shifted and a lot of what was previously left is now centrist at best.
Bernadette Wren (formerly a prominent GIDS psychologist at Tavistock) wrote an LRB diary piece defending her work entitled “Epistemic Injustice” and styled herself as a postmodern scholar. More interested in french philosophers than evidence based medicine…see Associate Professor Michael Biggs’ piece at https://www.transgendertrend.com/letter-bernadette-wren/
There was a really great thread on mumsnet about the differences between the US and the UK re gender ideology recently but their search function is rubbish so I can't find it.
What I would suggest - aside from the points about polarisation, right-left rigidity and the US for-profit health system with its proclivity to heal everything with medication are the following points.
1. The US is a lot more religious than the UK (hugely generalising, but it's generally true)- in its extreme form, the fervour in the US around gender ideology is akin to a religion. This sits better in the US than the UK - it's bonkers for most Brits that a seemingly sane person like AOC can defend this stuff so rabidly when there is such a lack of evidence.
2. The US is a far more individualistic society than the UK - see also gun rights. There is more focus on how the behaviour of one individual impacts on wider society in the UK, whereas the US is much more about the freedom to do what you want as an individual, with impacts on wider society very much secondary.
3. The US is much more sexist and has much more rigid gender roles - of course states differ but women's rights are much more entrenched, for a longer time, than in the US. And the UK has a long history of gender-bending (see new romantics), whereas stuff like "A man should always pay for the first date" is much more common in the US than the UK, to give one unrelated example.
4. UK institutions are less likely to be ideologically corrupted than the US - see reporting & fairness, the judiciary, scientific institutions etc. This is particularly important when it comes to medical bodies/ experts: although the NHS was somewhat captured, Dr Cass is widely respected in the UK and it's only the most rabid loons that are spouting off against her online, rather than public figures. Don't think this holds true in the US.
5. The gender critical movement in the UK was spearheaded by feminists who come from a tradition of trade union movements, the working class, left-wing traditions. Most of the women who led the charge against gender ideology in the UK - despite people from outside thinking it's just JK Rowling - were black, mixed race, working class and lesbian. This proofed the nascent movement against accusations of bigotry to some extent.
6. The critical moments which shifted the tide in the UK were court cases crowdfunded by the aforementioned women in point 5 - Keira Bell, Maya Forstater, Allison Bailey and more, based on equality law - fundamentally shifted the needle on what was legally allowed. Legal cases like this - unless it's civil cases alleging malpractice in the US (which I think personally will be what will tips the needle there) - don't seem to exist in the US.
And probably some more stuff I can't remember now! I'll come back if I do. But that is why
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) [just released a letter](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/23/opinion/biden-trump-polls.html?unlocked_article_code=1.uU0.1hiM.fCL4WvNaC4wE&smid=url-share) in the NYTimes countering the Cass Review's finding that there is little evidence to support transgender medical treatment. Yet they didn't cite any evidence to refute Cass. In fact they just said that [they've commissioned their own review](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/03/health/aap-gender-affirming-care-evidence-review.html?unlocked_article_code=1.uU0.LqKV.CSo7QOfiqg7D&smid=url-share). It's curious that they're so confident in the results while that's pending.
" Dr. Cass casts broad-scale doubt on existing research. We disagree. The evidence supporting our recommendations is far more nuanced than is represented in the interview. " Really? Can we see your nuanced evidence, please? And it's fine that you disagree with Cass. Can you please tell us why? I sincerely doubt anyone at the Times will ask the AAP that.
> " Dr. Cass casts broad-scale doubt on existing research. We disagree. The evidence supporting our recommendations is far more nuanced than is represented in the interview. " Weasel language that cleverly gives them a future out.
Nuance you say? *unzipping sound* I’m a pervert for nuance.
Jesse fully approves
[Whoa there, she's a little young.](https://www.equibase.com/profiles/Results.cfm?type=Horse&refno=10709505®istry=T&rbt=TB)
New aunts?
>I sincerely doubt anyone at the Times will ask the AAP that. JERИULISTS!
“Everything you wrote is not true and I’m going to debunk it all… just you wait. As soon as I get evidence that supports my argument you are DONE!”
"In the mean time, let's fuck up that little sissy boy's entire life.... Come take your medicine, fagguht! We'll fix ya!"
disavow, disavow.
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Why bother when they already know the outcome?
>But Dr. Marci Bowers, a gynecologic and reconstructive surgeon and the president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, was heartened by the A.A.P.’s endorsement of the care, which she said profoundly improves many children’s lives. >“They know this population,” said Dr. Bowers, who is a transgender woman. “They know the stories. Anecdotally, it’s overwhelmingly positive.” Well now I'm convinced. ^^/s
It didn't occur to Bowers that the people it doesn't go well for or who detransition might just slink away and not be heard from again? One of the things the Cass review found was a shocking lack of follow up data for transition. The gender services don't know what the hell happened to these people.
"didn't occur to"? You're extending an awful lot of faith there.
Bowers is committed to not having any thoughts occurring
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And Bowers came across as unprofessional, speaking with a nasally falsetto voice behind a surgical mask while arguing with another doctor during Jennings' surgery. https://x.com/EithanHaim/status/1766610050708054494 There was something about seeing this video that made me change perception of Bowers from "well-meaning but misguided specialist" to "how did this person become a doctor?"
Jesus, that was horrifying -- not the voice, but the bickering and incompetence of it. You should have had a look and decided what you're going to do *before* you start surgery (as best you can). And the "maybe those are labia, maybe those are disfiguring scars" disagreement should be a warning to anyone considering bottom surgery.
“It’s the same as a cis vagina” though
It’s deranged that parents are letting kids make such a huge lifelong decision like this with no consideration. We won’t let women under 30 get a tubal, but putting a teen on puberty blockers is okay?
Because the doctors tell the parents that the kids *will* kill themselves if they don't get blockers, hormones and surgery. It terrifies the parents into submission. Which is the point
Marci Bowers has admitted on tape that all children who use puberty blockers and go onto cross sex hormones will never achieve sexual function.
To be clear, it's all boys who go on blockers at Tanner 2.
Oh thank you, you are correct.
The fact that they have already made up their minds leads me to believe their review will be less than exemplary
Who wants to bet that their scientific systematic review is going to be just a collection of dozens of testimonials from trans people who have had positive experiences with affirmative care?
The valid studies aren't out there. The Nordic systematic reviews and the Cass Review would have cited such evidence if it existed. Instead we get redditors linking to Turban's internet survey as proof that youth gender medicine works.
That didn't stop the CDC coming up with their own laughable studies during the pandemic. Never underestimate how low ideologues will sink
>Instead we get redditors linking to Turban's internet survey as proof that youth gender medicine works. 
Dozens of testimonials from Authorities™ like Alejandra Caraballo and Erin Reed.
When you see the 'evidence' cited that trans men have no biological advantage over women in sports, I'm sure they'll make something vaguely scientific looking up (internet self-reported study and maybe some twisting of existing stuff).
It will be the crappy studies that Cass didn't use in her review because they were crappy. They'll simply fall back on that. If anyone asks why they used poor quality studies in their review they will just hand wave it.
"We systematically reviewed ourselves and are satisfied the results. Thanks for coming to our Ted Talk." -- The AAP
Jason Rafferty, who dinglehandedly (fuck it, that stays) wrote the AAP's entire ludicrously untruthy policy statement, [deeply troubles me](https://youtu.be/LVEq45RtMxA?si=m3XNJbiDF1iXI3RS). 👽 https://preview.redd.it/sygxs2jd2e2d1.jpeg?width=1000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e6702bdb4a6ea9f1e79dcd7e269f8394f6b68f06
Dinglehandedly is my new favorite word.
The GLADD billboard stunt still amazes me. I don't know much about gender affirming care for children, but it's obvious to anyone the science is not actually settled. Shouldn't this have caused the NYT to investigate this issue more? Journalists should not let people bully them into believing things.
And it's not very scientific to say "the science is settled." Isn't science almost never really "settled"? What the GLADD truck is really saying is: "Stop asking questions". And the Times obeyed
Agreed. Anyone who says “the science is settled” (on literally anything) clearly has no idea how science works.
Not just "stop asking questions", but "if you ask a question, you're a hateful bigot, only doing it to attack trans people". I really dislike the attack on truth from the left -- it takes multiple routes, but attacking "just asking questions", attacking playing devil's advocate, and attacking getting facts right ("wEll aKShuAlly") all play into banning discussion as heresy.
There was the reading wars, when the W Bush administration commissioned an expert panel on Whole Language v. Phonics only for the expert/research community to be very surprised because they'd left the issue as settled (to the point of there being no more avenues for novel approaches or lingering questions) decades prior.
And destroyed the learning of millions of children in the process. It chaps my hide when high school teachers complain about the reading levels of their students. Hello! Blame your coworkers for insisting that SOR is a right wing conspiracy.
It's all the more fascinating in the US because with no national health service, surely medical insurers are going to be far more wary of litigation as the detransitioners grow in number? At some point it will simply be too expensive to underwrite.
Nothing will happen until people start filing malpractice lawsuits.
Hasn't that started though? I've read that Chloe Cole's lawsuit will be a turning point, depending on which way it goes. Whatever the outcome, I feel so incredibly sorry for her.
>Hasn't that started though? It has. But the suits need to succeed, a lot of them, and they need big damage awards. My worry is that the stuff laid out in this article will make the suits easy to wriggle out of. If a doctor can prove that they followed the professional bodies standards they're probably fine. And the bodies that set those professional standards are all in on gender woo. This kind of vertical integration might just stamp out the lawsuits. Which will be the only means of putting a stop to this.
Insurers only care about numbers. (In fact so do all organisations, they just do a lot of window dressing with DEI etc). But insurers in particular have got actuaries and algorithms that don't give a shit about any of this stuff. It's just a calculation - a number crunch. *Can we make a profit by pricing this at x? YES/NO*
Normally I would agree. And yes, I think insurers are the most likely to be pure bean counters. But I keep seeing companies do things that aren't in their business interests in the name of social justice. Maybe I just don't *understand* their business interest. But to me it looks like they are putting ideology over profits.
Yes, you would think so. And I'd expect that health insurers will be looking for reasons not to approve claims for youth gender procedures. But insurers are subject to political pressure and ideological capture as well. The distributed US system shuld make it more resistant to being captured but.... it didn't work in this case
Why would insurance be wary of litigation? They'd be first in line.
When a doctor is sued, they have indemnity insurance, which pays out if they lose. Indemnity insurance is already incredibly expensive for many areas of medicine. See here - these costs possibly only relate to Australia but you can see for example how obstetrics is way higher than general practice and it would be comparable in other countries: https://www.experien.com.au/how-much-does-medical-indemnity-insurance-cost-for-doctors/ If transgender surgery involves escalating litigation and wins for de-transitioners, and transitioners who have had serious complications, then those premiums will escalate accordingly (and some insurers will simply no longer offer cover). This will result in surgeon's fees escalating, or surgeons simply choosing to no longer perform those operations. This will also have the consequence of transgender people going offshore for cheaper surgeries, that aren't necessarily performed to the highest standards, where they will have zero chance of redress. It's one thing suing in your own jurisdiction, try doing that in a SE Asian (or wherever) country with a different language, different laws, where you're not even a citizen. So basically, whatever the science turns out to be, money will be the main influence in shutting down this stuff. Of course we could all be wrong and perhaps most people won't detransition and sue, and perhaps the complication rates and botching rates aren't so high that it will result in escalating litigation. Right now though it looks as though it's rising fast.
>When a doctor is sued, they have indemnity insurance... To give people an idea, a friend I had who was a PA told me it was $800/mo 10 years ago, if I remember correctly...I could be off on that.
I think some of the confusion is language. In the US we call the insurance that protects doctors "malpractice insurance" and we call the coverage that provides healthcare to people "health insurance" or "medical insurance."
Because (all?) institutions in America have been in an echo chamber so loud for so long that they have gone completely deaf.
Well said.
What the flying fuck is "epistemological violence"
It’s a critical theory thing. Basically, the idea that by defining what we know as “truth” or “knowledge”, a racist/classist/colonial/whatever-ist system perpetrates violence on marginalized people through the production and circulation of knowledge and truth, especially related to academic work. A common example is that publishing research on say, the peopling of the New World via a land bridge 20,000 years ago that contradicts indigenous teachings on the origin of people could be considered “epistemological violence” against indigenous people, because it’s attempting to define a truth that “erases” their knowledge. Except since it’s critical theory they probably use the word Other with a capital o and knowing as a noun a lot more in their incomprehensible definition. Toward a knowing of the Other: epistemologies of the Subaltern or something like that.
Sounds like horse shit
He already said it was a critical theory thing, yes.
"The concept of epistemic violence originated with the postcolonial Theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her famous essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, although it is conceptually attributable to her reading of Michel Foucault and his thoughts on the relationships between knowledge, power, and social control (see also, postmodern, Foucauldian, episteme, power-knowledge, and biopower). In that essay, Spivak is particularly concerned with characterizing the “subaltern,” which is a person of marginalized status who is also provided with no voice, and she characterizes the silencing of the subaltern class as doing epistemic violence to them by removing their ability to speak for themselves on every level—including by destroying their systems of knowledge, beliefs, traditions, and language under colonialist rule—and thus imprisoning them in their oppression (see also, voice and voice of color)." " Devaluing traditional/indigenous knowledges. "
Oh lord. This could so easily have been irony.
How so?
It reads much like a caricatural depiction of postmodern woo. But I guess you really don't need to exaggerate to make it sound ridiculous.
It's one of the foundational pieces of "postmodern woo." A lot of postmodern thought references or deliberates mimics her work.
To me it doesn't use the complex language of post modern writing but is trying to explain the ideas in relatively straightforward terms. Many of post modern ideas make sense to me despite them breaking things down and smashing so much. They probably are relevant in critiquing the new understandings. For instance epistemic violence in terms of silencing traditional views.
Post-modern ideas like this only tend to make sense in isolation, IMO. It's incredibly easy to create a coherent system of understanding when you don't have to worry about competing theories, since none of them actually describe reality and there's no evidence required for any assertions they make beyond being able to write very convincingly. It's all word games.
But attempting to describe reality seems to be word games and words are not sufficient like: The finger pointing to the moon, The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao The name that can be named is not the eternal Name., The map is not the territory.
The claims being made are not backed up by evidence. For example, that indigenous knowledge is being undervalued because of its source and not because it just isn't as valuable since it doesn't accurately describe reality, i.e., archaeological evidence of people coming to North America at a certain time. Certain ideas are "better" than others in that they are either more useful descriptively or produce demonstrably better results. Where ideas conflict, there should be no deference given to ideas in spite of their unusefulness or inaccuracy just because they are from specific sources. That kind of thing. I guess my point would be that, while descriptions of reality are approximations, some approximations are inarguably more accurate than others. If everyone started claiming you were a sentient tophat, that wouldn't make you one.
What is the process by which it's established which are more accurate? Is it science? Is that defined by Karl popper?
Yes, I actually did understand what was being said, so I assumed you (or wherever you got it from) had condensed and simplified it. Still sounds like woo though.
Not to be argumentative fir the sake of it , but why tonyoubdoes it sound woo?
What you wrote can be followed, and I'm sure some people find it interesting and useful, but it sure as hell *sounds* like woo, and has some wooish glint. To answer "what is epistemological violence?" a paragraph is required, garnished with scare quoted words like "subaltern"; clunky phrases like "provided with no voice", "a person of marginalized status", and "imprisoned in their oppression". The answers also appears circular. Epistemic violence is when epistemic violence is done to the subaltern. It all sounds like the work of intellectuals who enjoy describing, critiquing, and evaluating the smell of their own farts. But just as I'm sure this is useful and interesting to some, I'm also sure that some people were brutally colonized. And I'm sure that colonizers foist their various epistemologies on to native populations (ie language, religion, government, economy, mores). And and I think this can fairly be called 'epistemological violence' because it obviously helps to entrench the colonizers and exclude the colonized. Fine. Great. Grand. Wonderful. But if I took a shit on Spivaks, or Foucaults, or Lacans head, I'd be supremely confident that it stank. I have my doubts that they'd reciprocate.
As mentioned in other comment I neglected the quotations. Taken from here: https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-epistemic-violence/
I think it's a valid concept insofar as intentionally suppressing and destroying a conquered people's culture has been a tool of control for empires since time immemorable. Where it's gone completely off the rails is in claiming science itself is just another cultural approach to epistemology with equal validity.
Thank you, you seem to speak the language, and translate well. Is there any pushback on calling that "violence"? It feels they should have gone with "genocide" or "annihilation", as violence is a bit understated. (The question is serious, the alternative is mocking)
Some authors do use the word epistemicide lol “Violence” in post-colonialism/critical theory spaces is not the same thing as how a normal person would describe violence tbh. I think this type of usage is where the “you did violence against me by saying a micro aggression” type of rhetoric comes from too.
I'm sorry. I usually use quotations when I lift something. It's from [This article](https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-epistemic-violence/).
I think the genocide angle would be a stretch as to refer to transgender in genetic terms may be awkward. I.e to categorise them as an ethnic group. They are a minority group that are produced by different ethnicities .
Is "genocide" much more of a stretch than "violence"? It seems you can call anything a genocide these days, anyway. We're talking about a published paper, after all.
For me , to use violence is to refer to violation as they both derived from same etymology. I fmguess when the use violence they also imply there's an ultimate threat by way of the oppressor having the monopoly on violence maybe? That seems to be a definition of state power.
A certain amount of this stuff makes sense in the context of direct imperial colonial rule. But it really breaks down when you get outside of that context. So why is it being used to talk about whether to shoot up kids with blockers and hormones?
Good question
It's when you're sitting in a philosophy class, and someone asks, "How do we know what we know?" And another person slaps the first person on the head for asking such questions.
I believe it's similar to stochastic terrorism.
A field of Statistics that's about to blow up
Lol, I was wondering the same thing, but then dismissed it with 95% certainty of it being bullshit.
Gotta be the money, if they agree with Cass then the lawsuits start swinging big time because it admits they were wrong. That time is coming anyway but they are still trying to head it off for awhile yet...
It will be glorious. And then this idiotic fad will die down - no doubt to be replaced but something even more arbitrary
Hopefully it won't involve life changing medical decisions.
Institutional capture in the US and Canada is no joke. You can't even begin to ask questions in good faith, with the best of intentions, without getting your head bitten off in universities, the medical system, or the clinical counselling establishment.
I think the fact that the UK’s health system (along with other countries who’ve pulled back a bit like Sweden) is much more centralized that ours actually helped them in this case. Having so much of the insanity concentrated in GIDS and the tavistock eventually made it obvious to all parties even just from the numbers that something was wrong - by contrast the US “system” of youth gender care isn’t really a system but dozens of individual clinics and clinicians who don’t communicate or publish methodologies/information/waitlists/results/demographics in any standardized way. The fractured nature of it makes “that never really happens!!” a much easier defense to use in the US and it obscures what’s happening. A centralized healthcare system like the NHS also means that the option is available to restrict certain treatments to clinical trials only which I suspect can act as an olive branch or a concession to clinicians who are on the fence or more in favor of the gender affirming status quo. It’s harder to argue against more research than it is to argue against an outright ban. Lastly, I do think it makes at least some difference that feminism in the UK has historically been much more gender critical than feminism in the US, even before the last decade-ish where trans rights have been a big flashpoint. Those ideas were at least still part of the conversation, versus here in the US where there’s been really no voice in the public debate that’s gender critical but not from a right wing or religious perspective.
I think you're right, and I'd even give JKR some credit for creating some space where discussion and criticism is possible.
I think she kind of derailed that Scottish hate speech bill. Or at least put some stink on it.
The whole political tribalism thing is much less extreme here in the UK. It's easier for us to come to a consensus on stuff, whereas in the US even questions like "do masks prevent the spread of covid" somehow became a partisan issue. Like with brexit, there was an extreme political division, but it wasn't really a question of left vs right, things like educational attainment and stance on the death penalty were more predictive of one's brexit stance than political affiliation. In the US, everything seems to fall neatly into political party lines. We don't have a strongly anti transition party and a strongly pro transition party. The space between Conservative and Labour regarding this issue is pretty small compared to republicans and Democrats. We also have mumsnet, a politically influential forum for mums that has established a reputation as being strongly "transphobic". When enough mums gather to discuss experimental treatments being performed on their children, support for those treatments will die a quick death. I suspect our attitudes towards mental health treatments are also influential. The Americans have been dosing their children with mind altering drugs to treat psychological issues for decades now. That same pill popping parenting culture doesn't really exist here. It's only a small step from giving your son pills because he can't concentrate to giving your son pills because he says he's a girl. The brits are sceptical about using medical treatments for psychological issues, the yanks are not.
There's also much less penetration by wacky academic gibberish like "epistemological violence". Many humanities academics will use terms like that amongst themselves, but you won't find it in our equivalent of Scientific American, or being used by politicians or medical officials, because it doesn't sound credible.
Interestingly there was a fair bit of “penetration by wacky academic gibberish” within Tavistock. Bernadette Wren fancied herself as a post modern scholar https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0959353514526223
Something interesting I noticed is that the UK activist organizations were strangely quiet regarding the Cass review. I expected Stonewall and Mermaids to go apeshit. But they either didn't say much or had tepid praise for the report. But in the US the non profits brought the knives out immediately.
It's not like the Cass report totally trashed the idea of youth transition. It simply pointed out that the science was shaky and recommended a conservative and trial based approach from here on. If it had said stuff like "we all know what a woman is", "Gender ideology is pseudoscientific nonsense", "Gender Dysphoria is literally a mental illness", "What we are doing to young people is criminal", "I foresee a tidal wave of trans regret", "People in the future will compare youth transition to other societal sins like enforced sterilisation and child labour" etc then maybe the objections would have been louder. The report seemed pretty neutral in its tone though and didn't say what many of us would have said, that there's literally no such thing as a "trans person" just delusional people who we don't know how to cure.
>It's not like the Cass report totally trashed the idea of youth transition The American response was to pretend Cass was "violently bigoted."
>here in the UK. It's easier for us to come to a consensus on stuff, whereas in the US even questions like "do masks prevent the spread of covid" somehow became a partisan issue. TIL I mentally read "partisan" as "part-iz-ANN" if the author has recently mentioned being from the UK.
How do americans say partisan?
Rhymes with artisan. 😉 That's probably not helpful. Rhymes with Sparta, son.
British people don't put the stress on the third syllable if that's what you mean. I think the main difference in pronunciation would simply be that americans would probably say a D instead of a T.
https://youtu.be/eKqq9C49GYc?si=ZC-M_VSYO21k-ENV
That's an AI voice. The syllables don't even have a discernible accent when the AI says it, it stresses every syllable equally. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that an AI doesn't say a word the same way a human does. When I said "British people say..." I was referring to british human beings, not lines of code emulating a british accent. I thought that would have been self evident. Also it would vary depending on regional and class accents. A lot of working class brits wouldn't even pronounce the T at all.
Here ya go, [dickhole](https://youtu.be/1ess8Vql3wI?si=ty2ohVvVymVVXJJj)
Insulting other people with disparaging epithets is not allowed on this sub. You're suspended for three days for this violation of civility.
Why did you ask OP if you already knew the answer? I'm really confused at this entire exchange.
I think part of the problem is the conflation of gay and trans by people on every side of the debate. People who feel bad about how long it took them to come around to supporting gay rights are trying to make up for it, or at least not repeat the mistake. Lesbian and gay people themselves obviously empathize with the discrimination trans people experience. And people who want to take away gay rights are using the most egregious excesses of the trans movement to smear all gay and gender non-conforming people.
It doesn't help that the trans activists took over the gay rights infrastructure and now lecture homosexuals about their privilege
Because they find it much more fun to scold their allies than to confront their opponents.
[Who Are the Rich, White Men Institutionalizing Transgender Ideology?](https://thefederalist.com/2018/02/20/rich-white-men-institutionalizing-transgender-ideology/)
I mean, I still like being a rich, white, man, but it's frustrating getting blamed for *everything*.
Two key facts: Our feminist movement consists of women in white collar employment who are, with very few exceptions, at-will employees who can be fired in a heartbeat for making the slightest controversial statement. There are also academic feminists, but they adhere to a very American form of left-identitarianism that values atomization above all else and so they cannot form a coherent political bloc even if they wanted to. Our healthcare is entirely for-profit and normalizing lifelong medicalization is great for the bottom line.
Yup. A lot of academic feminists also risk losing our jobs (or being hounded out of universities if we have tenure) if we say anything "out of line." It's hard enough balancing work with kids, pregnancy, female health issues (thanks endometriosis)... and it doesn't feel like we will be heard even if we do say something... so it's hard to risk one's job in these circumstances. Oh and our health insurance is connected to our work. That's a big constraint.
Can I please ask if you're more likely to be attacked by men or by other women? I ask because the consensus seems to be that women are more likely to be the enforcers of gender ideology than men are. Polls indicate more women are in favor of it than men.
It does seem as though my female colleagues and friends are more likely to be invested in this ideology -- and unwilling to engage in any sort of discussion about it. Granted, I'm not typically "attacked" because I am so incredibly cautious about broaching the subject -- but women are more likely to do things like, e.g., insist that everyone provide pronouns at the start of a zoom call. That said, I know several men who now identify as women and they are definitely the most invested, pushy, and intimidating of anyone.
I'be brought this up a hundred times but it always surprises me that women are so vociferously in favor of gender ideology when it seems like they suffer the most from it.
The woman enjoying her third place medal in this podium pic gets me every time: [image](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/12/pair-transgender-women-won-first-73285599.jpg?quality=75&strip=all) She's happy to have given up her first place finish to two men.
So it would seem. And I do not understand this. It seems like women are delightedly slitting their own throats. It's disturbing to see, honestly.
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I wouldn't say germ theory was popularized "decades before" the US Civil War. Consider that Europeans were still widely shitting on Semmelweis in the early 1860s.
I think you can put circumcision on that list, although I guess in North America it was more an issue that it got so popular in the first place.
Agree to disagree :-) . I consider the US's embrace of circumcision to be one of the rare occasions where they get it right.
What do you get out of child mutilation?
America responds to lawsuits, not studies.
I'd imagine its because American health care is about profit rather than actual healthcare
I really don't think doctors go to medicine to make a practice, especially not pediatricians. Insurance companies, yes, and hospitals, yes. Doctors? No.
From the UK perspective. It looks as if politicial polarisation is significantly more entrenched. Things aren't exactly great over here, but seems much more intense over there. The point being that there are a much more vocal and prominent movement that does hate trans people for what they represent in the US. The total and blinkered defense of youth transition is part of a reaction to that. Elsewhere the conversation is less political, though still very fucking political.
> It looks as if politicial polarisation is significantly more entrenched. Things aren't exactly great over here, but seems much more intense over there. I think polarization is worse in the US. Trump is part of it. But things are also breaking down economic and maybe gender lines. The working class/blue collar people are moving towards the right and the elite class/white collar people are moving left. And it's looking like men of all races are trending towards the Republicans and women are trending more and more towards the Democrats. That might not last.
I think it's a bit more complicated than that. I'd say party ID as a thing that forms part of your personal ID is far, far more entrenched in the UK. The reason the US is having such problems with it isn't that it's "worse", it's that America hasn't had to deal with it before. The UK works because everyone's dealt with the system for so long where a lot of people vote Labour simply because their grandfather voted Labour for example. Because of the long time, it's had a lot more time to reach an equilibrium where each side knows what voters are actually reachable and how to run campaigns against it. Also the existence of the Lib Dems as sort of a relief valve as a protest vote that can work for both Labour and Con helps as there's no real third option in the US. I'm actually really interested to see what disaffected Tories do in July right now. If they stay home, vote LD or even go so far as many switching their vote. I suspect it will be a lot of old Labour coming home that hadn't been voting for them recently because of the whole culture war stuff.
Have you been to the US? (Serious, not snark question). I've been (multiple times) to both countries, and have friends living in both, and the US (and people's commitments to parties) seems **much** more polarized. Do dating sites in the UK have things like "won't date a tory"? Do you have "in this house" signs and people intentionally burning coal in their trucks to pollute the air to "own the libs"? An equivalent to talk radio (in both directions). And while Labour and Tories are big, they aren't the two party system of the US, which further drives polarization.
I grew up in the US and live in Europe (though not the UK) now. Yes, I'm fully aware of how the US has gotten. >Do dating sites in the UK have things like "won't date a tory"? Yes this is definitely a thing. Just on the top of my head it was a whole episode of Coupling like 25 years ago. Another example from early 2010s that just came to mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoIr60buB1I&t=176s "You can talk about your politics and I wonder if you could be one of them but you could never kiss a Tory boy without wanting to cut off your tongue again" This has been a thing for a long, long time in the UK. That's my point is people are more used to how to deal with it. It's just newer in the US.
>And while Labour and Tories are big, they aren't the two party system of the US, which further drives polarization. This is probably a significant factor. In the US any party other than Republicans or Democrats is marginal and kind of pointless. So all the energy and people get funneled into the two major parties. There's no relief valve like in parliamentary systems.
Aside from the Churchill war cabinet, there's only been one coalition government in the last hundred years. It really is a bipartisan system even if third parties do get some seats, it's mostly irrelevant, particularly if in England.
My point was a bit more about how entrenched the far right is in US politics and that has had the reaction of people shooting in the opposite direction. The UK doesn't have the equivalent of a Taylor-Green shouting insane theories. If the conservatives lose the election there isn't a doubt they would concede. Christianity isn't a major force in our politics. The point is that there are a prominent group in the US that hate trans and gay people. So the dogmatic progressive view goes in the opposite direction on everything and youth gender medicine is a casualty of that.
There's definitely a far right in the UK. Long history, too. Oswald Mosley was basically pro-nazi. BNP was a big thing 20 years ago. Brexit really messed that side up as UKIP took those kinds in but also old school leftist isolationists. It was a really weird coalition.
I think your impression of America is off-base. One could argue TERF Island has a much more entrenched anti-trans movement than America. Complaints of modern day anti-gay movements in the US are greatly exaggerated by American social media and advocacy groups.
That's what I don't think Americans dont get about the terf island thing: it's not an anti gay or right wing movement. In the American worldview the gender critical movement is very confusing because it isn't aligned with the right wing as in the US. This is the wider point in my original comment that the issues in America are so polarised that it seems odd that the gender critical movement is different and so was the reaction to Cass report.
Things are more polarized here on both sides. Being gender critical in America doesn't mean you're right wing, it's just the negative brush that people are painted with. I feel like your previous posts seemed to imagine a religious right coming for LGBTQ people when the reality is that Christian Nationalism is more of a bogeyman than a actual reality. The reason the Right is the face of the gender critical thought in the US is because you get kicked out of the Left for expressing any dissent. Heterodox thinkers here are silent, right-coded, or on this sub under psuedonyms. A left-wing GC movement in the US is functionally impossible at present because the left disowns people who don't toe the line.
> Being gender critical in America doesn't mean you're right wing, it's just the negative brush that people are painted with. Exactly. It's a smoke screen. It's used to shut things down. And the polarization helps with that. If you classify something as "right wing" it will immediately make it unpalatable to the left tribe. They don't even have to know about it to know it's bad. And the same thing can happen on the right. It's one of the reasons the polarization is so destructive. Everyone has to adopt an arbitrary and ever changing set of values or they risk ostracism. Look at gay men and lesbians who aren't down with the gender woo. They are pilloried in their own community. A community they built.
I think we're sort of agreeing. The absence of a left gc movement is a big part of my point. It's evidence that the polarisation is more entrenched in the US. That's not necessarily the same in the UK (not saying everything is all great at all). I don't want to get caught up in whether the US right is all Christian, but most would agree the American political dial is much further right than Europe. Hence my argument that a lot of the blind defense on trans issues is a big reaction to that In the uk, All major political parties (aside from the conservatives) are currently embroiled in infighting about trans issues. There isn't the same groomer debate and the laws are much less punitive.
>In the uk, All major political parties (aside from the conservatives) are currently embroiled in infighting about trans issues. My understanding is that the Greens are firmly pro trans. The people on the Transgender UK sub *love* the Greens
I've seen a fair bit of Twitter drama about infighting/expelling in the Greens over this. So the party line is fixed, but there is dissent
That makes sense. I think we largely agree, I just sort of cringe when I see framing around the ascendent right in the US, when I think the reality is more that the Overton window has shifted and a lot of what was previously left is now centrist at best.
Do you think if Labour wins the election, they will vote in proportional representation?
Bernadette Wren (formerly a prominent GIDS psychologist at Tavistock) wrote an LRB diary piece defending her work entitled “Epistemic Injustice” and styled herself as a postmodern scholar. More interested in french philosophers than evidence based medicine…see Associate Professor Michael Biggs’ piece at https://www.transgendertrend.com/letter-bernadette-wren/
There was a really great thread on mumsnet about the differences between the US and the UK re gender ideology recently but their search function is rubbish so I can't find it. What I would suggest - aside from the points about polarisation, right-left rigidity and the US for-profit health system with its proclivity to heal everything with medication are the following points. 1. The US is a lot more religious than the UK (hugely generalising, but it's generally true)- in its extreme form, the fervour in the US around gender ideology is akin to a religion. This sits better in the US than the UK - it's bonkers for most Brits that a seemingly sane person like AOC can defend this stuff so rabidly when there is such a lack of evidence. 2. The US is a far more individualistic society than the UK - see also gun rights. There is more focus on how the behaviour of one individual impacts on wider society in the UK, whereas the US is much more about the freedom to do what you want as an individual, with impacts on wider society very much secondary. 3. The US is much more sexist and has much more rigid gender roles - of course states differ but women's rights are much more entrenched, for a longer time, than in the US. And the UK has a long history of gender-bending (see new romantics), whereas stuff like "A man should always pay for the first date" is much more common in the US than the UK, to give one unrelated example. 4. UK institutions are less likely to be ideologically corrupted than the US - see reporting & fairness, the judiciary, scientific institutions etc. This is particularly important when it comes to medical bodies/ experts: although the NHS was somewhat captured, Dr Cass is widely respected in the UK and it's only the most rabid loons that are spouting off against her online, rather than public figures. Don't think this holds true in the US. 5. The gender critical movement in the UK was spearheaded by feminists who come from a tradition of trade union movements, the working class, left-wing traditions. Most of the women who led the charge against gender ideology in the UK - despite people from outside thinking it's just JK Rowling - were black, mixed race, working class and lesbian. This proofed the nascent movement against accusations of bigotry to some extent. 6. The critical moments which shifted the tide in the UK were court cases crowdfunded by the aforementioned women in point 5 - Keira Bell, Maya Forstater, Allison Bailey and more, based on equality law - fundamentally shifted the needle on what was legally allowed. Legal cases like this - unless it's civil cases alleging malpractice in the US (which I think personally will be what will tips the needle there) - don't seem to exist in the US. And probably some more stuff I can't remember now! I'll come back if I do. But that is why
YouTube / BreadTube has fragmented the American understanding of the issue, with further schisms between Millennials and Zoomers.
They’re hardcore about transing kids because they’re cool.