Atlantic Writer Tells Her Fellow Liberals: You're Living in an Anti-Scientific Media Bubble Impervious to Fact, Everything You "Know" About "Trans Affirming Medical Care" is a Lie

A writer at The Atlantic spills the beans and informs magazine's braindead Affluent Winebox Female Liberal audience that the "science" of transgenderism is entirely fictitious.

Oof. Karen's going to open and finish three whole wine boxes tonight.

The Liberal Misinformation Bubble About Youth Gender Medicine

How the left ended up disbelieving the science

Allow children to transition, or they will kill themselves. For more than a decade, this has been the strongest argument in favor of youth gender medicine--a scenario so awful that it stifled any doubts or questions about puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

"We often ask parents, 'Would you rather have a dead son than a live daughter?'" Johanna Olson-Kennedy of Children's Hospital Los Angeles once explained to ABC News. Variations on the phrase crop up in innumerable media articles and public statements by influencers, activists, and LGBTQ groups. The same idea--that the choice is transition or death--appeared in the arguments made by Elizabeth Prelogar, the Biden administration's solicitor general, before the Supreme Court last year.
Tennessee's law prohibiting the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat minors with gender dysphoria would, she said, "increase the risk of suicide."

But there is a huge problem with this emotive formulation: It isn't true. When Justice Samuel Alito challenged the ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio on such claims during oral arguments, Strangio made a startling admission. [Sh]e conceded that there is no evidence to support the idea that medical transition reduces adolescent suicide rates.

At first, Strangio dodged the question, saying that research shows that blockers and hormones reduce "depression, anxiety, and suicidality"--that is, suicidal thoughts. (Even that is debatable, according to reviews of the research literature.) But when Alito referenced a systematic review conducted for the Cass report in England, Strangio conceded the point. "There is no evidence in some--in the studies that this treatment reduces completed suicide," [sh]e said. "And the reason for that is completed suicide, thankfully and admittedly, is rare, and we're talking about a very small population of individuals with studies that don't necessarily have completed suicides within them."

Here was the trans-rights movement's greatest legal brain, speaking in front of the nation's highest court. And what [sh]e was saying was that the strongest argument for a hotly debated treatment was, in fact, not supported by the evidence.

Even then, [her] admission did not register with the liberal justices. When the court voted 6--3 to uphold the Tennessee law, Sonia Sotomayor claimed in her dissent that "access to care can be a question of life or death." If she meant any kind of therapeutic support, that might be defensible. But claiming that this is true of medical transition specifically--the type of care being debated in the Skrmetti case--is not supported by the current research.

Advocates of the open-science movement often talk about "zombie facts"--popular sound bites that persist in public debate, even when they have been repeatedly discredited. Many common political claims made in defense of puberty blockers and hormones for gender-dysphoric minors meet this definition. These zombie facts have been flatly contradicted not just by conservatives but also by prominent advocates and practitioners of the treatment--at least when they're speaking candidly. Many liberals are unaware of this, however, because they are stuck in media bubbles in which well-meaning commentators make confident assertions for youth gender medicine--claims from which its elite advocates have long since retreated.

Perhaps the existence of this bubble shouldn't be surprising. Many of the most fervent advocates of youth transition are also on record disparaging the idea that it should be debated at all. Strangio--who works for the country's best-known free-speech organization--once tweeted that [she] would like to scuttle Abigail Shrier's book Irreversible Damage, a skeptical treatment of youth gender medicine. Strangio declared, "Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on." Marci Bowers, the former head of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the most prominent organization for gender-medicine providers, has likened skepticism of child gender medicine to Holocaust denial. "There are not two sides to this issue," she once said, according to a recent episode of The Protocol, a New York Times podcast.

Boasting about your unwillingness to listen to your opponents probably plays well in some crowds. But it left Strangio badly exposed in front of the Supreme Court, where it became clear that the conservative justices had read the most convincing critiques of hormones and blockers--and had some questions as a result.

Trans-rights activists like to accuse skeptics of youth gender medicine--and publications that dare to report their views--of fomenting a "moral panic." But the movement has spent the past decade telling gender-nonconforming children that anyone who tries to restrict access to puberty blockers and hormones is, effectively, trying to kill them. This was false, as Strangio's answer tacitly conceded. It was also irresponsible.

After England restricted the use of puberty blockers in 2020, the government asked an expert psychologist, Louis Appleby, to investigate whether the suicide rate for patients at the country's youth gender clinic rose dramatically as a result. It did not: In fact, he did not find any increase in suicides at all, despite the lurid claims made online. "The way that this issue has been discussed on social media has been insensitive, distressing and dangerous, and goes against guidance on safe reporting of suicide," Appleby reported. "One risk is that young people and their families will be terrified by predictions of suicide as inevitable without puberty blockers."

When red-state bans are discussed, you will also hear liberals say that conservative fears about the medical-transition pathway are overwrought--because all children get extensive, personalized assessments before being prescribed blockers or hormones. This, too, is untrue. Although the official standards of care recommend thorough assessment over several months, many American clinics say they will prescribe blockers on a first visit.

Meanwhile:

During the fake "Pride Month" of June, our publicly-funded libraries become key communications and command nodes for woke gay zealots, writes James John Murawsi of Real Clear Investigations.

While librarians and their supporters consistently decry critiques of their LGBTQ advocacy as censorship, less attention has been paid to the actual content of the books the librarians promote. RCI's review of dozens of titles on display, lots of them heavy on pictures and graphics, found some gender identity books aimed at children as young as 2 years old, and others that put LGBTQ in the vanguard of a political revolution against the capitalist patriarchy.

Among the queer histories, biographies and teen fiction, some books are written for queer-affirming families to support youngsters whose sexual interests span nonbinary pronouns, transgenderism and pansexuality. A recurring trope in these books is the glamorization of medicalized sex changes as brave and heroic, with several books featuring children proudly discussing their chest binders and displaying chest scars from top surgery.

For elementary schoolers, there's "Gender Identity for Kids: A Book About Finding Yourself, Understanding Others, and Respecting Everybody!" This 98-page primer recommended for children ages 7-10 introduces young readers to such concepts as sex assigned at birth, intersex, transgender, agender, bigender, pangender, polygender, misgender, genderfluid, genderqueer, genderflux, neutrois, androgyne transphobia, as well as overtly leftwing political concepts including patriarchy, colonization, intersectionality, safe spaces, and allyship.

"Their gender is fluid," the book says of a child named Finn, "which means it can change direction over time, just like the wind or the clouds in the sky!"

Teens can find fantasy novels such as "Whiskey When We're Dry," which is set in 1885 and tells the story of a female homesteader who cuts her hair and binds her chest, and "Rainbow Rainbow," which features a nonbinary writer "on the eve of top surgery," a sperm donor, and a "sex-addicted librarian."

A surprising number of books expressly criticize heterosexuality, the nuclear family, and the gender binary as obstacles to liberating humanity from capitalism, racism, colonialism, and other forms of oppression purportedly produced by white, male, Christian, Eurocentric cultural norms. A nonfiction work on display, "The Tragedy of Heterosexuality," describes straight culture as oppressive, repellent, repulsive, and pitiable -- in short: "a sick and boring life."

The books consistently define queerness as anything and everything that's not heterosexual and "cisgender," an expansive understanding of the gay pride movement also affirmed by several of the libraries that display identity flags or bookmarks celebrating an omnium-gatherum of sexual identities that constitute the movement's pantheon: Demisexual, Bisexual, Intersex, Asexual, Agender, Nonbinary, Genderfluid, Pangender, Polyamory, Polysexual, and Two-Spirit.

Although wokeness is in retreat in some quarters -- corporations are scaling back DEI programs and 24 states have moved to block medicalized sex changes for minors -- librarians have emerged as the unlikely shock troops of the queer resistance. Their version of what the movement stands for and what should be celebrated during Pride Month offers a more militant crusade against conventional society than many Americans may realize.

BBB Update: Hakeem Jeffries, still filibustering, proclaims that the passage of the bill means "a deportation machine will be unleashed on steroids."

Second look at the BBB...?!?!

posted by Ace at 01:05 PM

| Access Comments