Kids poorly served by trans 'science'

Andrew Sullivan has been a leader in intellectual circles in the United States and was the principal proponent of same-sex marriage before it took off as a mainstream issue. He is a homosexual and is a victim of the HIV epidemic. He writes often about the experience of the gay community and has increasingly expressed concern that the ideology of transgenderism, which has been readily absorbed by Western elites, is bent on doing harm to gay people and all young people.

In his latest weekly column on his Substack The Weekly Dish newsletter (behind a paywall), Sullivan presses the question of who is looking out for kids since American schools are generally surreptitiously rolling out instruction in critical queer and gender theory in the kindergarten through primary school years. When children reflect the confusion that critical queer theory necessarily generates, the schools keep it all secret from parents, and this at the crucial time of puberty. 

When Sullivan examines some of the reading texts in use at public schools he finds a definite pattern throughout all the materials:

The words “boy” and “girl” are never used to refer to biological sex; and they are never used as a binary. You can be neither, both or something else. And this is taught to all kids.

[...] these words, “boy” and “girl,” used by most people to refer to someone’s sex, are re-made in a child’s mind to refer only to gender. “I’m not a girl. I’m a boy in my heart and brain.” When Calvin’s parents accept him, we get the mantra: “We love you if you are a boy or a girl or both or neither.” Sex is gone; gender is everything; gender can be anything, even non-human. In this [Human Rights Campaign]-recommended book, the baby “can’t decide what to be. Boy or girl? Bird or fish?” Yes: fish.

Before long, as you peruse the material, you see a consistent message being sent to children: that being a boy or a girl has nothing to do with your body; and that you can “become” either, both or “something else entirely”.

That is why Sullivan starts his column by stating, "Getting a grip on reality is not so easy these days..." because in the "approved" texts:

“Sex” [...] becomes a “pronoun assigned at birth.” Yes, you read that right. Biological sex is merely “what the doctors or midwives said when you were born.” It’s a word without meaning. And you will note that in the “snowperson” lesson, the human body has no part to play at all.  

Parents are beginning to hear their kids talk about “women with penises,” as more teenage girls suddenly announce they’re transitioning, and the White House doubles down on affirming puberty blockers for children, even as European countries begin to realize they overstepped. (In the U.K., Sweden, Finland, and France, medical authorities are sounding the alarm. But the Biden administration regards these drugs as essential.)

The key argument that Sullivan supports with evidence in this column is this:

It seems to me that any books that teach kids to be compassionate and accepting, and aware of different ways of being human, are a positive thing. I don’t doubt the good intentions behind them. Having some materials for a genuinely trans child is a good thing. But teaching all public school kids under the age of eight that their body has no reference to their sex is a huge development — and news to most American parents. And encouraging toddlers to pick pronouns like “ze” and “tree” is not exactly what parents send their kids to public school for. 

Implications of gender theory

He graphically exposes the horrendous implications of this kind of critical queer and gender theory:

These teaching materials aim to be inclusive of the tiny minority of trans children — but they do this by essentially universalizing the very rare experience of being transgender, and suggesting that everyone’s gender is completely independent of biological sex, and trumps it in any conflict. The only way to help trans kids feel better about themselves, this argument goes, is to tell the lie that their experience is everybody’s experience. We are all varieties of trans people now, choosing our sex and performing our gender.

But, of course, we’re not all varieties of trans; the overwhelming majority of humans, including gay humans, experience sex and gender as completely compatible — when they think about them at all. And our species is sexually dimorphic. When pushed to defend the idea that humans are not a binary sexual species, critical theorists lean on the “univariate fallacy.” That argues that any single exception to a rule completely demolishes the rule. If there are any exceptions to every human being male or female, even if they are a tiny percentage of the whole, then there is no sex binary.

But that’s bizarre. That a small percentage of people are attracted to the same sex, for example, does not invalidate the rule that humans are overwhelmingly heterosexual — and if this were not the case, humans wouldn’t exist at all. Gay people are the exception that proves the heterosexual rule. The much smaller number of trans people, likewise, does not disprove that the overwhelming majority of people are completely at ease with their biological sex. It actually proves it, by showing the terrible psychic cost of being otherwise. (Trans kids and adults deal with huge mental health challenges, and commit suicide at staggering rates.) Intersex and [Differences in sex development] people are not a separate species, or some kind of third sex, no more than people with Down Syndrome are anything but fully human. They are a variation in the sex binary. 

Activist trans groups like HRC or the ACLU may thereby be unwittingly putting gay children at risk, misleading them about their sex and their bodies, putting ideas in their head that in the current heated atmosphere could easily lead to irreversible life-long decisions before puberty. And none of this is necessary. It is perfectly possible to look out for the very few genuinely trans children, without revolutionizing everything we know about the human body and biology. It’s possible to be welcoming to gay kids without insinuating that their real problem could be being “in the wrong body”.

The revelations that Disney productions have been feeding children over many years with the mindset that reality does not matter, that you can be anything you feel, tells us how woke degeneracy can have a severe impact on whole generations. This would be part of the explanation as to why there has been, in many WEIRD countries, an eruption in the number of children expressing confusion about sexual identity, girls especially.  

The capture of social elites by ideological pressure groups linked to transgenderism, always under the guise of Christian "human rights", continues as academia bows to what is fashionable (usuing the term "acceptable") and "morally superior".

Scientific paper distorts the facts

Investigatory journalist and author Jesse Singal has just produced in-depth scrutiny of another case of the stupid deceit that this gender ideology engenders in those wishing to stay professionally virtuous.

This is Singal's finding, stated as a headline: Researchers Found Puberty Blockers And Hormones Didn’t Improve Trans Kids’ Mental Health At Their Clinic. Then They Published A Study Claiming The Opposite.

The authors are mostly based at the University of Washington–Seattle or Seattle Children’s Hospital. The publication of their article was backed by a PR campaign by the university, leading to national interest in the findings. Singal writes:

All the publicity materials the university released tell a very straightforward, exciting story: The kids in this study who accessed puberty blockers or hormones (henceforth GAM, for “gender-affirming medicine”) had better mental health outcomes at the end of the study than they did at its beginning. 

He adds:

It isn’t just the publicity materials; the paper itself tells a similar story, at least a few times.

However, - and it's a big however - Singal discovers that the dramatic findings claimed are nonsense:

What’s surprising, in light of all these quotes, is that the kids who took puberty blockers or hormones experienced no statistically significant mental health improvement during the study. The claim that they did improve, which was presented to the public in the study itself, in publicity materials, and on social media (repeatedly) by one of the authors, is false. [My emphasis]

The kids in the study arrived with what appear to be alarmingly high rates of mental health problems, many of them went on blockers or hormones, and they exited the study with what appear to be alarmingly high rates of mental health problems.

If there were improvement, the researchers would have touted it in a clear, specific way by explaining exactly how much the kids on GAM improved. After all, this is exactly what they were looking into — they list their study’s “Question” as “Is gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary (TNB) youths associated with changes in depression, anxiety, and suicidality?” But they don’t claim this anywhere — not specifically. They reference “improvements” twice (see above) but offer no statistical demonstration anywhere in the paper or the supplemental material.

I wanted to double-check this to be sure, so I reached out to one of the study authors. They wanted to stay on background, but they confirmed to me that there was no improvement over time among the kids who went on hormones or blockers.

That’s why I think the University of Washington–Seattle, JAMA Network Open, and the authors of this study are simply misrepresenting it.  

The researchers used a model that allowed for certain conditions relating to their research, but Singal finds that this cannot be the reason for the claimed findings. He finds the authors, so caught up in the ideological hot-house that this issue has become, pushed their findings to the limit and beyond:

It’s frequently argued that if kids don’t have access to this medicine, they will be at a high risk of killing themselves. I don’t know what this claim could possibly mean if it doesn’t mean that upon starting blockers or hormones, a trans kid with elevated levels of depression or suicidal ideation will experience relief. These researchers, firmly enmeshed in this debate, found that kids who went on these medications did not experience relief — and yet they don’t mention this worrisome fact anywhere in their paper.

Singal offers a thorough methodological critique of the research and calls in an research expert to check his areas of disagreement with the authors. 

His evidence builds to confirm that "the science has become completely intertwined with the politics". He fears that research efforts are now part of a race to prove just how wrong politicians are in introducing legislation that would limit the use of medical treatments for young sexually confused children, and that researchers may want to produce evidence showing the treatments work to win kudos from issue activists as well as professional colleagues.

A serious tone given the implications of failure can be discerned in Singal's conclusion: 

[W]e should maintain vigilance and call out half-baked science when it comes to the literature on youth gender medicine. Adolescent mental health and suicide research, in particular, is a vitally crucial area of science, and we should hold it to high standards. If we can’t agree that it’s wrong and potentially harmful to distort research on these subjects, what can we agree on?

In short, we must stick with reality, whether it's the common sense of the sex binary that sustains much of the natural world that Andrew Sullivan is defending, or the findings of scientific practitioners, where evidence is discovered that enables us to know reality, rather than having the character of our existence obfuscated in an ultimately useless effort to distort reality for civilisation-changing political or ideological ends.  

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