The Week in Woke

A researcher wrote a scientific paper about the phenomenon of "Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD)," whereby teenagers who have never "identified" as any gender but their actual one suddenly declare they're the opposite gender. ROGD affects girls, who are much more susceptible to peer pressure, faddish trends, and groupthink than boys are.

The paper was published, but then rejected, by a scientific journal -- because trans activists insisted that their Politics trump Science.

My Research on Gender Dysphoria Was Censored. But I Won't Be.

Trans activists forced the retraction of my paper. Their efforts have redoubled my commitment to the truth.

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On March 29, I published an article in the prestigious academic journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. Less than three months later, on June 14, it was retracted by Springer Nature Group, the giant academic publisher of Archives, for an alleged violation of its editorial policies.

Retraction of scientific articles is associated with well-deserved shame: plagiarism, making up data, or grave concerns about the scientific integrity of a study. But my article was not retracted for any shameful reason. It was retracted because it provided evidence for an idea that activists hate.

The retracted article, "Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria: Parent Reports on 1655 Possible Cases," was coauthored with Suzanna Diaz, who I met in 2018 at a small meeting of scientists, journalists, and parents of children they believed had Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD).

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There is ample evidence that in progressive communities, multiple girls from the same peer group are announcing they are trans almost simultaneously. There has been a sharp increase in this phenomenon across the industrialized West. A recent review from the UK, which keeps better records than America, showed a greater than tenfold increase in referrals of adolescent girls during just the past decade.

But there have been virtually no scientific data or studies on the subject.

In part that is because researchers who have touched this topic have been punished for their curiosity. Just ask Lisa Littman. Ultimately, her paper on the subject resulted in an unnecessary "correction" by the journal that published it, and the loss of Littman's academic affiliation with Brown University, which prioritized activist outrage over Littman's academic freedom.

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Our article was based on parent reports of 1,655 adolescent and young adult children. Three-fourths of them were female. Emotional problems were common among this group, especially anxiety and depression, which many parents said preceded gender issues by years. Most of these young people had taken steps to socially transition, including changing their pronouns, dress, and identity to the other sex (or in some cases, to neither sex). Parents observed that after their children socially transitioned, their mental health deteriorated. A small number--seven percent of those whose parents answered Suzanna's survey--had received medical transition treatment, including drugs to block puberty, or cross-sex hormones.

Disturbingly, those young people with more emotional problems were especially likely to have socially and medically transitioned. The best predictor of both social and medical transition was a referral to a gender specialist. Some 52 percent of parents in our study who had received a referral said they felt pressured by the gender specialist to facilitate some sort of transition for their child.

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Almost immediately these activists began to lobby both the publisher of Archives of Sexual Behavior (Springer Nature Group) and the organization affiliated with the journal (International Academy of Sex Research, or IASR) to retract the article and to punish the editor of Archives, psychologist Kenneth Zucker, because he had published our work.

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Debate is essential to good science, but that is not what these activists want. They seek surrender. And that is what they got.

Randi Weingarten has barely ever worked as a teacher. But she's accumulated a huge government-funded pension at taxpayer expense, because of a rule that allows full-time union workers to pretend they're actually workers in the industry they're organizing in.

Randi Weingarten, the powerful president of the American Federation of Teachers, hasn't been a working teacher in more than a quarter of a century.

Of the six years she spent teaching social studies, half of them appear to have been as a substitute. Yet despite the long absence from her short tenure in the classroom, the union leader described herself during a recent congressional hearing as being on leave from Brooklyn's Clara Barton High School.

Through her decades of union activism, Weingarten has clocked service time as a public school teacher, enabling her to accrue an educators' pension on top of the more than $500,000 in annual salary and benefits she earns as a labor executive, according to records obtained by the Freedom Foundation. She would receive about $230,000 total over her first 15 years of retirement, according to the public sector union watchdog's analysis.

Weingarten has called that analysis "completely wrong," without explaining why. She did not respond to RealClearInvestigations' request, via the American Federation of Teachers' press office, to clarify where the Freedom Foundation erred.

Weingarten's work arrangement is not uncommon among public sector employees, thanks to a little-scrutinized feature often found in collective bargaining agreements: so-called "official time" or "release time" provisions. Such clauses enable employees to engage in union-related activities full- or part-time during their working hours, while sometimes continuing to earn salary and/or accrue benefits.

Woman complains that she has 800 tattoos, and can't seem to land a job.

She also complains that other parents at her kid's school don't invite her to visit.

One of the northern Virginia schools that has been a frequent offender in pushing trans ideology on to children -- Fairfax school district -- announces that an 84% or 88% majority opposing mixed-gender sex ed classes doesn't matter. Boys and girls will be taught sex ed because, of course, this is better for the transgenders, and they're the only people who fucking matter, ever, in any circumstance.

'Majority doesn't always dictate:' School board ignores 84% of parents on how to teach sex-ed and the inclusion of 'gender identity'

A school board in Virginia is ignoring a majority of parents who do not want to allow boys and girls to take sex education together. We spoke with one man who is running for Fairfax County Public School Board to give power back to the parents.

"This shows the school board does not care about the parents," Tony Sabio, who is running for a position on the Fairfax County Public School board this year, said. "They feel a disservice, they don't feel their voices are heard."

During a community review asking if genders should be combined for sex education in grades four though eight, 84% said they do not support.

In a work session, the Fairfax county school board was presented with a poll showing 84% of parents are against children being taught "Family Life Education" together. It showed, out of the 2,656 respondents, parents overwhelmingly want classes separated by gender.

Currently, the students are separated by gender, but the proposal will combine the students' instruction starting in fourth grade.

Parents wrote overwhelmingly in the open-ended comments part of the survey that they were against teaching gender ideology in schools.

However, the Fairfax County School Superintendent, Michelle Reid, responded to the data by saying, "Honestly, the majority doesn't always dictate, right?"

"Honestly, the majority doesn't always dictate, right?" Fairfax County Public School Superintendent, Michelle Reid, responded to a survey, where 84% of parents, students, and teachers said they do not want to combine gender instruction for sex education.

"You know, what if students learned more than my generation did about other genders?" another school board member, Melanie Meren, said. "I think this is a step towards further accepting everyone and understanding people's biology. I mean, it's just straight-up biology."

"You can't discount 84%," Tony Sabio, was not buying it. "For the school board, and also the superintendent, to say the majority does not dictate. It's not the country we want to live in. It's not the country Fairfax County residents want to live in."

Another school board member, Karl Frisch, who outwardly identifies as gay, dismissed the data.

Elizabeth Scalia: "Pride Month is over; I have notes."

That's a funny headline. I'm going to star using the "I have notes" line.

She notes that her kid once complained when his birthday ended and he was no longer being treated like a lottery winner.

The memory resurfaced when I heard U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health Admiral Rachel Levine suggest a celebratory extension of Pride Month, announcing, "Let the 'Summer of Pride' begin!"

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A "Summer of Pride" seems a bit greedy, doesn't it? As I reminded my son after his birthday (and many times since), "The world is not about you. Other people matter, too, so stop sucking all the oxygen out of the room."

[I] respectfully suggest that our LGBTQ brothers and sisters take a look around and "read the room." Because the society that has largely accepted same-sex attracted people and same-sex marriage, and gender fluidity and gay families to a point perhaps never before imagined, is wondering why we need limitless celebrations of sexuality, and growing more than a little wary of instances where activism is pushed to the extreme. The people chanting "we're here, we're queer, we're coming for your children" at some Pride parades may have thought they were being humorously ironic, but the cheek didn't play well in a nation that is watching legislators attempting to strip parents of their rights to intervene in their children's care regarding "gender affirming treatment," either within medical practices or in schools, and in some cases advocating to physically separate children from their "non-affirming" parents for "the health, safety and welfare of the child."

The outsized advocacy for the medical transitioning of even adolescent children in America is running counter to the pull-back on such practices in most of Europe, where the brakes have basically been applied to the use of puberty blockers and the surgical removal of breasts or gonads for minors. This sort of prudence (and prudence is a virtue) indicates neither "hatred" nor a threat of "genocide" -- two words becoming quickly overused, by the way, which will eventually render them impotent.

But here's a thing worth considering: In major cities the ubiquitous rainbow flags weren't simply being carried or worn by parade marchers -- they were being installed by civic interests, and that's very telling. When scores of Pride flags are fitted in London's Regent Street, that's an action being underwritten by a government purchasing the flags and paying the workers who mount them. When a giant rainbow standard hangs front and center at the White House, ditto.

So, it might be time to recognize that "Pride" is no longer a grassroots movement needed to win civil rights and fight oppression. When your government is putting out taxpayer money to participate in a month-long celebration, maybe your worries should no longer focus on being oppressed -- at least not in any formal sense. Perhaps worry instead about your movement being overrun by extreme personalities, seemingly intent on repeating what are historically the ugliest instincts of humanity, until you become the oppressors.

A scholar applied to teach at UCLA. He was denied an offer because four years ago on a podcast, he said he wasn't sure if coerced "diversity statements" demanded by universities actually help the people they're supposed to help.

John Sailer @JohnDSailer

Dozens of psych students signed this letter demanding UCLA not hire Dr. Yoel Inbar. After that, he didn't get the job offer he was almost certainly going to receive.

His main offense: expressing skepticism about DEI statements. In his words, "It is not clear what good they do."

Maybeline released a new ad for lipstick. Guess what they hired as their spokemodel?

The gender-bender teachers either have DangerHair and Random Piercings, or else they look like this. What age of student is she trying to indoctrinate with the Sesame Street puppet, do you think?

Dr. Miriam Grossman, of the organization Do No Harm, blasts a Democrat witness for the term "sex assigned at birth." Sex is not "assigned" at birth, Dr. Grossman says, it is established at conception and recognized at birth -- or sooner.

posted by Ace at 06:24 PM

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