Religion is a Mental Illness

From foster homes to Air Force, Cambridge and beyond: an interview with Rob Henderson — The Centre for Male Psychology

“The place that people feel least free to speak their minds are oftentimes university, which I found absolutely stunning.”

The Centre for Male Psychology

Do you ever hear a new concept, and suddenly realise that it has tapped into an important truth that had already been floating around on the hinterlands of your consciousness for some time? Well, 2019 saw the birth of one such idea: the concept of luxury beliefs (explained below), which was launched in the New York Post by Dr Rob Henderson, a former student of Yale and recent PhD graduate of Cambridge. The concept struck a chord with many people, and academia suddenly became very interested in this wunderkind Henderson. Unexpectedly, this interest hasn’t been reciprocated, leaving the academic world somewhat perplexed.

As an interviewer, it’s hard for me to say which is more interesting - the story of why Rob Henderson turned his back on contemporary academia, what he is doing next, or indeed what it is about his background that helped him recognise the phenomenon of luxury beliefs before anyone else did. Read on and decide for yourself.

John Barry (JB): You are interested in a range of topics in psychology, sociology, and anthropology. What drew you to studying psychology? 

Rob Henderson (RH): I suppose I’ve always been curious about human nature and social behaviour. What got me started on the academic track was when I was enlisted in the military – over 10 years ago now – I found a copy of How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker at an airport on my way to a deployment in Al Udeid. I picked up this book because I thought the cover and title were interesting. Hmmm… how does the mind work? So I picked it up on a whim, read the book, found it fascinating, and that just got me started in reading more psychology books, watching psychology lectures on YouTube, and that led me to decide to study psychology more formally. I applied to Yale and studied Psychology as an undergrad there. And while I was studying psychology, I was also experiencing a shift in the social environment, in the social class backgrounds of the people who were around me, and so naturally I connected what I was studying and these anecdotal observations. This contributed to my decision to keep studying psychology and get as much education as I could, and that led me to apply for a PhD in Cambridge which I finished in December of 2022.

JB: Was there any particular thing in Pinker’s book that hooked you?

RH: He talks about the desire for social esteem, recognition, respect. How well regarded we are by others is not a material reward, it lives in the minds of other people. Pinker links this to evolutionary psychology and how important social belonging and acceptance were in the human ancestral environment, and that was something I had never thought about at that point in my life in a conscious explicit way.

JB: Is this topic related to your PhD?

RH: I was a research assistant in Paul Bloom’s lab. He’s a developmental psychologist who studies the origins of morality in babies and young children, and that became interesting to me. I read Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind and read about moral foundations theory, so those interests led me to study this for my PhD. It’s unrelated to my public writing, but I do still study status. One of the studies we published a couple of years ago found that social anxiety, which is a proxy for preoccupation with status, is heavily correlated with how morally objectionable people rate various transgressions. One interpretation of this is the more concerned people are with their status, the more harshly they condemn moral wrongdoers.

JB: So this is something you published from your PhD?

RH: Yes, in the journal Scientific Reports. During my doctoral program, I led another set of studies as well, and co-authored a commentary and a chapter, but otherwise I don’t really have a strong interest to publish academic texts. It was an interesting experience just to see how peer review works and how academic publishing works, but I find writing for a broader audience more interesting and fulfilling. But it’s not that I don’t appreciate it – I spend a lot of time reading these papers and trying to pull out interesting tidbits or writing about them or sharing them online, but as far as formal academic papers go, there are probably not that many left in me.

JB: Sure. When you are writing for a wider audience it doesn’t mean that academics can’t read those articles too. Going back to your experiences in Yale and Cambridge, did they teach anything about male psychology?

RH: There is some teaching on sex differences, and there isn’t that much controversy about it there, but there isn’t that much specifically about men. My impression is that if you were to highlight challenges that men face, and controversies around male behaviour, well then it does have to be framed in one specific way. If you were to cast men as victims of anything in any way I think that would be treated very unseriously. That’s just my general impression. Sex differences are probably still ok to talk about, at least in academic environments among peers, but male psychology I don’t think is taken particularly seriously.

JB: It’s sad to see that even in the most prestigious universities. If they were to teach male psychology, what do you think would be the most important topics to cover?

RH: It’s interesting that a lot of this stuff is discussed in academic research. I wrote a piece a couple of years ago, for Bari Weiss’ outlet Common Sense (now The Free Press), and for that piece I did quite a bit of research on developmental psychology which found that boys appear to be more sensitive to environmental and parental inputs than girls - not that girls are unresponsive to these inputs – but boys who are raised in single parent homes, or particularly unstable or harsh environments, are much more likely to have detrimental health consequences, so later are more likely to experience poverty and unemployment, addiction, criminality and so on, and I think these things might be worth focusing on, especially as we continue to see more and more boys and young men lose interest in education and attaining gainful employment and rates of incarceration per capita appear to be rising too, especially among men across all ethnic groups in the lower socioeconomic strata. Men with low levels of education and income are more likely to be incarcerated than they were in decades past which to me indicates that this isn’t entirely about income. Poor people existed 50 years ago, but a poor man today is much more likely to be arrested than a poor man 50 years ago.

JB: Poor families are less likely to have the stability of a father in the home. Warren Farrell described prisons as ‘institutes of dad deprivation’, or something like that. It’s interesting that you say boys are more sensitive to environmental inputs, whereas the impression we get is that boys are tougher than girls. I wonder if boys are raised to be more tough because we know that if we don’t raise them to be tough they will be more sensitive than girls.

RH: I’ve never heard that hypothesis before, that’s really interesting. So we have this social pressure for men to be tough to counteract their intrinsic sensitivity… that seems plausible. Joyce Benenson has research showing that boys are immunologically more compromised than girls, more likely to be sick and to die from illness. This was a big surprise during the peak of the covid pandemic, that boys and men were more likely to contract and fall seriously ill and die from this illness. I’ve talked to some women about this and they were shocked to hear these statistics. In the popular imagination, men are sturdier, and though we may be physically stronger, in other ways perhaps men aren’t quite as naturally resilient as we thought.

JB: And men tend to fall in love more quickly than-

RH: They are more likely to say ‘l love you’, and say it first, which surprises a lot of people-

JB: Putting themselves in a vulnerable position, demonstrating vulnerability… and suicide? Maybe there is something to this idea of the vulnerability of men…

RH: Something that just came to mind John is that it may be that the most disagreeable, hostile, aggressive and resilient people are men, but that’s just the fatter tail in the right side of the distribution, but these men become the mental model with which we compare everyone else, so we think that men in general behave that way, whereas in fact we are thinking of only the top 5% or 1% of men who act in that way, whereas most men aren’t like that.

JB: From a psychological point of view, sometimes the most aggressive men are fending off people who might hurt them, because they may have experienced severe hurt or abuse in their past. I think sometimes the idea of ‘fragile masculinity’ is just used to sneer at men, but there is something to the idea that sometimes men who are broken have to put themselves back together in a way that is harder to break again in the future. But it might be a very abrasive persona that they adopt.

RH: There was a great memoir a while back by Nora Vincent called Self Made Man. This was about a woman successfully impersonating a man for a year, and one of the things that surprised her was, she describes men as carrying this armour around them that signals strength and toughness to the world because they know that if they appear weak or vulnerable, other men will sense that and take advantage. So this was something that she had to learn to cultivate herself, because if she dressed as a man but expressed vulnerability and tenderness then other men would immediately sniff this out and sense how exploitable she – or in this sense he – was. And I found that insightful, something that only a woman who is impersonating a man would pick up on. I don’t think a man would necessarily understand in an explicit, verbalized way what they are doing when they project toughness.

JB: The armour is ok but dropping the armour is necessary sometimes too. My colleague Martin Seager described how in group therapy with men the dynamic is different that in mixed sex groups because male groups will have a lot of joking around, or banter as we call it here. But quite quicky the dynamic will go from banter to sharing serious experiences and comforting each other, and just as quickly again the dynamic can shift back again to banter. Getting back to universities teaching male psychology, this is the kind of thing that might be interesting, or on clinical training courses at least. But I don’t think that happens. Do you think there is enough diversity of thought on campus?

RH: No. There isn’t enough diversity of thought, and it seems to be shrinking. One of the reasons I decided to come to Cambridge was because of what was happening in America, with political correctness, and professors being targeted, with students and faculty uniting to try to fire academics. I saw it first hand at Yale, and at Cambridge I’ve seen it as well. Famously there was the case of Jordan Peterson having his invitation revoked. I’ve also seen behind the scenes to examples of people who were less well known academics who have been fired or had offers rescinded for basically disagreeing, for their ideas. Not for anything they had done or any behaviour they directed at any individual, but just ideas that they have expressed, either in writing or in podcasts etc. and people took issue with it. Generally my heuristic is that for every example we hear of where someone gets fired, there are probably 10 others that we don’t hear about, of people who aren’t famous or well known, who are just quietly let go. One reason I decided to relinquish continuing a traditional academic career path, and why I decided to get involved with the University of Austin, which is this new university – UATX – which is launching in Texas, because they made explicit their commitment to freedom of expression and academic inquiry, which is what I hoped that all universities would be like when I first matriculated to Yale. But instead, the place that people feel least free to speak their minds are oftentimes university, which I found absolutely stunning.

JB: Tell me more about the University of Austin. Is it a physical university?

RH: It’s in the process of being built. At the moment we are running summer programmes. I believe the inaugural date for the first official cohort of undergraduates is in the fall of 2024 and it will be a physical university. The aim is to be a traditional liberal arts education where students can feel free to explore novel ideas. There are a lot of high profile people involved, for example Pano Kanelos the former president of St John’s College in Annapolis, he’s now the president of UATX, Bari Weiss, Dorian Abbot from the University of Chicago, Glenn Loury from Brown, Peter Boghossian and many other notable academics. It’s still the early stages but I’m hoping we are building what a university should be.

JB: Is this the beginning of a trend?

RH: I hope so. Not that UATX should be cloned, but I hope more universities attempt to reform higher ed.

JB: I hope so too. There are some really questionable ideas doing the rounds in Social Sciences departments these days, such as negative views of masculinity, and ideas about male privilege and patriarchy theory. You came up with the idea of ‘luxury beliefs’ a few years ago. Would you say that ideas like patriarchy theory are examples of ‘luxury beliefs’?

RH: So luxury beliefs I’ve defined as ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper classes while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. The idea of patriarchy might be a luxury belief. A lot of things fall under the umbrella of patriarchy, for example a lot of people think marriage and monogamy are an outgrowth of patriarchy. A lot of highly educated and affluent people will publicly denigrate marriage, patriarchy, masculinity… all these things in their mind falls into the same broad category. And yet these people are the most likely to get married, the least likely to get divorced, they would be the last people to consider raising their kids without a father or strong male role model in their lives. And yet by broadcasting this belief and spreading it they have inadvertently created a situation where lower income people are less likely to get married – there’s more single mothers, single parents, more kids growing up fatherless. What’s interesting is that if you publicly discuss the challenges of kids who grow up fatherless, a lot of the anti-patriarchy people will cast an eye of suspicion upon you, like ‘Why would this be a problem?’, ‘What’s so special about fathers?’, ‘Maybe it’s a good thing’, ‘The real problem is that single mothers don’t have enough financial support, and if they just had enough money… a stack of cash can replace a father’, and all of this I think is associated with an anti-patriarchy ideology, and yes it could be considered a luxury belief. It’s interesting to think about it: if you asked on a scale of one to ten ‘Are men a problem?’ higher educated people and more affluent people would probably score on the higher end of that scale.

JB: We are both fans of The Sopranos (I co-authored an article about the relevance to men in therapy). Almost none of the characters are likable in the Sopranos, so why is it so popular?

RH: It’s like with any good story, when they take you into someone’s world, into their inner life, then someone who you wouldn’t ordinally sympathise with, you suddenly adopt their perspective and understand where they are coming from. The therapy sessions between Tony Soprano and Dr Melphi was an amazing device, so you could get a glimpse into his psyche. There were flashbacks to his severely unstable and dysfunctional childhood, with his father who was a gangster and a murderer and his mother who was clearly mentally unwell. So he was immersed in chaos and criminality from a very young age. And the show does a great job of depicting Tony outside of his criminal enterprise. You see him as a husband, a father, a regular guy going about his day wrestling with a lot of the same questions that everyone else wrestles with. So they are showing the humanity inside these characters.

JB: In a way you are saying that by walking in their shoes we are able to empathise with these characters. In male psychology we use the term ‘empathy gap’ and in The Sopranos there are a couple of times where Tony Soprano is the victim of domestic violence-

RH: I saw that in your piece. It’s so funny I’m so blind to it, that when you wrote that… I remember when I watched it about two years ago during the lockdown and it didn’t even occur to me that it was domestic violence when women are slapping him or throwing things at him. I just thought ‘Oh it’s Tony, it’s fine. He’s a man.’

JB: Exactly!

RH: David Chase [screenwriter of The Sopranos] was walking a fine line. I think for the first three or four seasons at least he was sort of on Tony’s side, so it was easy for the audience to forget who this guy really is, and what he is capable of and what he’s done. But especially when you get to the final couple of seasons, like when Tony murders his nephew, and he orders the death of Adrianna, he’s just getting more and more morally compromised. Finally towards the end you start to understand. There’s a great book on evil by Roy Baumeister called Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Violence where he points out that if you want to understand evil, you have to suspend your judgement. You have to be willing to see things from the eyes of the perpetrator. But it’s even more important to remember that these people are evil and the rest of society needs to be protected from them. So it’s a tricky balance. They are still responsible for their acts even if you understand where they are coming from.

JB: I’ve sometimes said that one of the biggest challenges to forensic psychology is to be able to empathise with people who might have committed horrible crimes. I suspect some people are reluctant to because of the fear that if they empathise, they will then start to  sympathise-

RH: And they don’t want to justify what the criminal has done. Yes. I think if someone made a mini-series about Hitler or Stalin or Mao, that might be very uncomfortable for a lot of people! Any villain, if you make them the main character, they just become an anti-hero.

JB: An interesting phenomenon. Maybe in a related way, military history is full of heroes, but we usually think of the military is being a cause of psychological damage to men, through combat stress or bullying etc. One of the surprising things I found when writing Perspectives in Male Psychology was finding out that the military could be good for mental health. How much was this your experience of the US Air Force?

RH: One thing is a selection effect. The military in the past century has perfected their screening method – standardised tests of physical health – and maybe mental health to a degree – and proxies for intelligence, and then multiple appointments, and then basic military training which selects for people who are fairly mentally adjusted. There are lots of hoops - it’s a long and extremely intense experience especially for 17 or 18 year olds. Lots of people don’t make it – they don’t make it through all of the hoops. So up front a lot of people are screened out. And then the experience of the military is unique. They are very good at creating communities out of strangers. They have learned, maybe through trial and error over the course of centuries, how to take a bunch of random men from all parts of the world or country, and make them feel like family members, getting them to feel connected. Even things like the uniform – immediately your identity is stripped. In basic training they shave your head, you are put in uniform, everyone is called by their last name, so immediately you feel like you are part of this group. So there is community, comradery, structure, predictability. When you are deployed and in the midst of severe conflict, there can be unpredictability introduced but day to day you know what the rules are, what’s expected of you, how to advance in the rank structure, who you are responsible for, who your superiors are, how to behave. All of these explicit guidelines make life easier, especially for young men. In the outside world there are all of these questions like ‘Who am I? What am I doing?’  All of these anxieties around identity. But in the military your identity is very clear. Success is clearly defined. You get regular feedback, performance reports. For a lot of guys it’s like a video game – success and failure are very clearly defined.

JB: Could it work as therapy? Could you take Christopher Moltisanti (The Sopranos) into the military and help him?

RH: He has a severe temper problem. I just don’t know if he could handle subjugating himself to the military. I had a cousin who tried to join the marines. At basic training he punched one of the recruits and then he tried to fight a drill instructor. They kicked him out. I think that might happen to Chris too. But maybe AJ (the son of Tony Soprano) could have been ok? Or maybe the young Tony Soprano. He was a high school athlete, with a high IQ, it could have worked for him, before he got too caught up in a life of crime.

JB: You joined the Air Force at age 17. What motivated you to join, and did it prepare you for the life you have led since?

RH: I joined because I grew up in foster homes and I wanted to flee as soon as I could to escape the complete chaos and disorder around me. My friends had similar upbringings. I barely passed high school, just getting into a lot of trouble, and I knew that I wasn’t on a good track, and I wasn’t really ready for college. I wouldn’t have been a good student anyway at that age, I was just so undisciplined and unfocused. So the military was a very appealing option because I knew that it would immediately get me out of the environment I was in, at that time in Red Bluff, California. I knew it would immediately get me out of there, put me on a completely different track, put me around new people, give me a different kind of structure. There were also older adults too. So one of my teachers was in the Air Force – he suggested it. My best friend’s dad also recommended I join. So these two older men that I respected, both of them could see there was some latent potential, and once I got there, all of the things I mentioned before – the discipline, respect, comradery, setting goals, building good habits – all of those things really helped me.

The other thing that I think people focus less on with the benefits of the military is… well you are well aware of the ‘young male syndrome’? 18, 19, 20 are the most volatile years of a young man’s life, most likely to commit crimes, acts of aggression, impulse, drugs, speeding, but because the military has such an overpowering structure where every aspect of your life is controlled, you can’t make mistakes. I mean you can, but they make it very clear that if you fail a drug test for example, you go to military prison. You can’t get away with anything. So it presses fast forward on the most volatile phase of your life, and then by the time you finish your enlistment in your early 20s, you have cooled off, you’ve matured, you are a bit less impulsive and full of anger and hormones. So even if you didn’t learn any lessons at all, it was a period of your life that you couldn’t screw up too badly.

JB: That’s a very good point. You mentioned ‘young male syndrome’, I read recently that young people are less likely to take risks now than youngsters in the past.

RH: They are still likely to be their most volatile years. I recently wrote an essay in The Free Press about why teenagers aren’t driving any more, and there are so many factors. As Jean Twenge says “The party’s on Instagram and Snapchat now”.  I think social media is more appealing to girls, but video games are appealing to boys, as outlets for aggression and accomplishment. You can get your 5 buddies from class and go on a raid on World of Warcraft. Well, men used to go on raids, actual physical raids, which aren’t a good thing to do, but boys get excited about it still, online. And that’s how they spend their Friday nights instead of going out and getting drunk and speeding on the highway. Maybe that’s ok, but taking some risks, testing your limits, in some ways is actually a good thing. I’m curious as to where this is going to go, when you have this generation who are afraid or unwilling to take risks.

JB: I wonder how this generation would fare if a war broke out, not on Xbox, but in reality.

RH: The Pentagon said that 78% of adults wouldn’t qualify for enlisting in the military. That’s 8 out of 10 men aged 17 to 24, primarily due to issues of obesity, lack of education, and criminal records, tattoos, mental health issues - if you have repeated episodes of depression and anxiety. Jonathan Haidt has shown how anxiety and depression are increasing in teenagers and young adults in the last 15 years or so, which is alarming. Maybe some of these issues are intertwined: if you are never leaving your house, if you are always living your life online, this is contributing to issues of depression and anxiety to some extent.

JB: If you were to give advice to a guy aged 17 coming from a similar background as yourself who was considering options for their future…?

RH: My advice would be different to someone from a straight-A’s background, but a background similar to me… Look at your friends and say ask yourself if this is the kind of person you want to be like in five years time, or 10 years. Or look at people around you who are a little bit older. I worked at a restaurant when I was a teenager and I saw guys in their early 20s, or mid 20s, still working there, not making very much money. The highlight of their week was getting paid on Friday and drinking away the weekend, smoking, doing drugs, partying, it just didn’t seem like the kind of person I wanted to be when I was 25 years old. So consider getting a different peer group, whether that’s joining the military, getting involved in sports, volunteering… find a different crew to hang out with.

JB: Good advice. I know you have started Substack this year, and are with the University of Austin. Are there any other new projects coming up?

RH: I’m putting the final touches to my book. I recently did a book cover reveal on my newsletter and on Twitter/X and will say more about the publication date soon. The book elaborates on some of the things we have talked about, using my life and the lives of my childhood friends as a framework for understand what is going on with young men today, the ‘lost boys’ phenomenon that’s going on in the US and western countries in general. So most of my time is invested in my book and my Substack.

Final thoughts There is no doubt that academia needs more people like Dr Rob Henderson who can bring a fresh perspective to a culture that in recent years has started going stale. Some people say it’s a shame that he has left academia, but they are missing the point: he is helping rediscover – or reinvent - academia, and all of us left frozen on the deck need to take notice. A bit like the boy in the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes, Rob Henderson has seen right through the facade of highbrow elitism and the ivory-tower illusion of today’s academic world. His story is without doubt an interesting one, and definitely one to follow in the coming years.

What Went Wrong? Campus Unrest, Viewpoint Diversity, and Freedom of Speech

Is freedom of speech harmful for college students? Why is this question even being asked? In light of recent eruptions of student protests a

Skeptic

• The creation of a school busing system for Oberlin, Ohio’s K–12 schools, paid for by the college.
• The establishment of special, segregated black-only “safe spaces” across campus.
• A more inclusive audition process in the Conservatory that does not privilege Western European theoretical knowledge over playing ability.
• The creation of a bridge program that will recruit recently-released prisoners to enroll at Oberlin for undergraduate courses.

• Asking, “Where are you from or where were you born?” or “What are you?” This implies someone is not a true American.
• Inquiring, “How did you become so good in math?” (to people of color) or suggesting “You must be good in math” (to an Asian), which is stereotyping.
• Proclaiming, “There is only one race, the human race” or “I don’t believe in race.” This denies the significance of a person of color’s racial/ethnic experience and history.
• Opining, “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” or “America is the land of opportunity.” This suggests that the playing field is level, so if women or people of color do not fill all jobs and careers in precise proportion to their population percentages, it must mean that the problem is with them, or that they are lazy or incompetent and just need to work harder.

Along with all of this, my view of women changed. I stopped thinking about empowerment and started to see women as vulnerable, mistreated victims. I came to see women as physically fragile, delicate, butterfly-like creatures struggling in the cruel net of patriarchy. I began to see male entitlement everywhere.

Feminism had not empowered me to take on the world—it had not made me stronger, fiercer or tougher. Even leaving the house became a minefield. What if a man whistled at me? What if someone looked me up and down? How was I supposed to deal with that? This fearmongering had turned me into a timid, stay-at-home, emotionally fragile bore.

Here’s what I do when catcalled: roll my eyes, if he’s Hispanic say “chinga tú madre!”, put earphones on, continue with life. — Isabelle Boemeke (@isaboemeke) February 10, 2016

1. We might be completely right but still learn something new.
2. We might be partially wrong and by listening to other viewpoints we might stand corrected and refine and improve our beliefs. No one is omniscient.
3. We might be completely wrong, so hearing criticism or counterpoint gives us the opportunity to change our minds and improve our thinking. No one is infallible. The only way to find out if you’ve gone off the rails is to get feedback on your beliefs, opinions, and even your facts.
4. Whether right or wrong, by listening to the opinions of others we have the opportunity to develop stronger arguments and build better facts for our positions. You know that the world is round and goes around the sun, that evolution is real, and that the Holocaust happened. But can you explain how you know these facts? What are the best arguments and evidences for these facts? Could you articulate them clearly and succinctly in a debate or conversation? As John Stuart Mill noted in his classic 1859 work On Liberty: “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”
5. My freedom to speak and dissent is inextricably tied to your freedom to speak and dissent. Once customs and laws are in place to silence someone on one topic, what’s to stop people from silencing anyone on any topic that deviates from the accepted canon? The justification of censorship laws in the consequentialist argument that people might be incited to discrimination, hate, or violence if exposed to such ideas fails the moment you turn the argument around and ask: What happens when it is you and your ideas that are determined to be dangerous? It is the Principle of Interchangeable Perspectives that I introduced in The Moral Arc: For me to expect you to listen to me I must be willing to hear you. If I censor you, why shouldn’t you censor me? If you silence me, why shouldn’t I silence you?

There’s no such thing as a transgender two-year-old

Stonewall has inadvertently exposed the dangers of trans ideology.

www.spiked-online.com

Stonewall is in trouble again. At the weekend the LGBT charity tweeted the extraordinary claim that ‘research suggests children as young as two recognise their trans identity’. The tweet linked to an article in the Metro, written by the mother of a four-year-old who says that her daughter’s nursery does not respect her ‘gender non-conformity’. Within hours of being posted, the tweet attracted scathing criticism from politicians across the political spectrum, fellow charities, medical professionals and child-safeguarding specialists.

Let us separate fact from dangerous fiction. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And tellingly, neither Stonewall nor the Metro actually pointed to this ‘research’, or any other evidence, to support their claim that two-year-olds can have a ‘trans’ identity. The simple reason for this is that such research does not exist.

What the studies in this field actually demonstrate is that young children develop an awareness and a recognition of biological sex – both of their own and that of others – at some point between the ages of one and three. These same studies also demonstrate that children develop an understanding of gender stereotypes. This is uncontroversial and has been known for some time.

However, there is absolutely nothing in these studies to suggest that a child as young as two can be ‘trans’. Stonewall’s tweet completely misrepresented the scientific position on this topic.

Certainly, a child may, during these formative years, exhibit behaviours and traits that are considered gender atypical. However, to extrapolate from this to suggest that a gender-atypical toddler has a ‘trans identity’ is dangerous and regressive.

So what are the facts in relation to ‘trans children’? Some children suffer from gender dysphoria, a mental-health condition. There are significant harms that can come with this – from trauma and internalised homophobia to an increased likelihood of being bullied. There is often an overlap between gender dysphoria and autism. As distressing as gender dysphoria can be for young people, 95 per cent of children suffering from it will, if given time and the right support, settle into their bodies.

Yet we are told by organisations such as Stonewall that we should ‘affirm’ a child’s ‘trans identity’, irrespective of his or her age. Stonewall even provides guidance on how parents and schools can enable young children to ‘socially transition’ – that is, to live as their chosen gender. But studies have shown that for children who socially transition prior to puberty, their gender dysphoria is more likely to persist, meaning they will be less likely to settle into their bodies.

Just as more and more children are being encouraged to socially transition, younger and younger children are being placed on puberty-blocking drugs. This can, in combination with the eventual use of cross-sex hormones, lead to sterility in adulthood.

As adults, it is our duty to protect children from irreversible harm and regret. We know, having been children ourselves, that children can be convinced of many things that they later completely change their minds about. That is a child’s prerogative. It is easy to see the danger that is lurking if society adopts Stonewall’s position that a child as young as two can be ‘trans’ and that he or she should be affirmed as such.

In the same tweet that claimed two-year-olds can be trans, Stonewall also stated that ‘LGBTQ-inclusive and affirming education is crucial’. It claimed that too many schools and nurseries teach a ‘binary understanding of pre-assigned gender’. Again, this is a complete inversion of the truth. In reality, far too many schools in Britain have been ideologically captured by the trans lobby.

For instance, I have seen teaching materials for primary schools that incorrectly suggest that sex is ‘assigned at birth’ by doctors, rather than simply observed as a fact.

Many of the school resources around gender rely on crass gender stereotyping. One set of teaching resources asks children whether they live on ‘Planet Boy’ or ‘Planet Girl’, which is determined by whether they like ‘girly’ or ‘boyish’ things. The book Pheonix Goes to School was recently promoted by Essex Library. It tells the story of a ‘gender non-conforming, transgender seven-year-old girl who was assigned male at birth (AMAB) and currently identifies with she / her / hers pronouns’. Phoenix’s love of ‘flowers’ and ‘dresses’ is apparently evidence enough that this is a girl trapped in a boy’s body.

Contrary to what Stonewall claims, gender ideology is rife in British schools and it is causing enormous confusion and harm to children.

Despite the madness of many of Stonewall’s claims, the charity still exercises a huge amount of influence on public life. Last year, BBC podcast Nolan Investigates Stonewall lifted the lid on Stonewall’s influence over numerous large UK organisations and even across government, mainly through its Workplace Equality Index and Diversity Champions programmes.

However, change is in the air. With each worrying statement that comes from Stonewall, more and more organisations are distancing themselves from the charity. In the past, whenever an organisation left one of Stonewall’s schemes, it would do so quietly, clearly fearful of a backlash. These days, organisations shout it from the rooftops. Just last week, minister Martin Callanan tweeted that he was ‘delighted’ that the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy had cut all formal ties with Stonewall.

Many of us who hold grave concerns about Stonewall have gone to great efforts to raise awareness of the dangers posed by the ideology it promotes. But when Stonewall is tweeting about the trans identity of two-year-olds, it seems it is doing a far better job of this than we ever could.

“At the base of social constructionist theories is the assumption that, since identities are constructed, they can always be constructed otherwise.” (Source)

‘I literally lost organs:’ Why detransitioned teens regret changing genders

A look at the alarming rise of teens who are changing genders and then “detransitioning” back.

nypost.com

“I was failed by the system. I literally lost organs.”

When Chloe was 12 years old, she decided she was transgender. At 13, she came out to her parents. That same year, she was put on puberty blockers and prescribed testosterone. At 15, she underwent a double mastectomy. Less than a year later, she realized she’d made a mistake — all by the time she was 16 years old.

Now 17, Chloe is one of a growing cohort called “detransitioners” — those who seek to reverse a gender transition, often after realizing they actually do identify with their biological sex. Tragically, many will struggle for the rest of their lives with the irreversible medical consequences of a decision they made as minors.

“I can’t stay quiet,” said Chloe. “I need to do something about this and to share my own cautionary tale.”

In recent years, the number of children experiencing gender dysphoria in the West has skyrocketed. Exact figures are difficult to come by, but, between 2009 and 2019, children being referred for transitioning treatment in the United Kingdom increased 1,000% among biological males and 4,400% among biological females. Meanwhile, the number of young people identifying as transgender in the US has almost doubled since 2017, according to a new Centers for Disease Control & Prevention report.

Historically, transitioning from male to female was vastly more common, with this cohort typically experiencing persistent gender dysphoria from a very young age. Recently, however, the status quo has reversed, and female-to-male transitions have become the overwhelming majority.

Dr. Lisa Littman, a former professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences at Brown University, coined the term “rapid onset gender dysphoria” to describe this subset of transgender youth, typically biological females who become suddenly dysphoric during or shortly after puberty. Littman believes this may be due to adolescent girls’ susceptibility to peer influence on social media.

Helena Kerschner, a 23-year-old detransitioner from Cincinnati, Ohio, who was born a biological female, first felt gender dysphoric at age 14. She says Tumblr sites filled with transgender activist content spurred her transition.

“I was going through a period where I was just really isolated at school, so I turned to the Internet,” she recalled. In her real life, Kerschner had a falling out with friends at school; online however, she found a community that welcomed her. “My dysphoria was definitely triggered by this online community. I never thought about my gender or had a problem with being a girl before going on Tumblr.”

She said she felt political pressure to transition, too. “The community was very social justice-y. There was a lot of negativity around being a cis, heterosexual, white girl, and I took those messages really, really personally.”

Chloe Cole, a 17-year-old student in California, had a similar experience when she joined Instagram at 11. “I started being exposed to a lot of LGBT content and activism,” she said. “I saw how trans people online got an overwhelming amount of support, and the amount of praise they were getting really spoke to me because, at the time, I didn’t really have a lot of friends of my own.”

Experts worry that many young people seeking to transition are doing so without a proper mental-health evaluation. Among them is Dr. Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist specializing in gender, sexuality and identity. A transgender woman herself, Anderson has helped hundreds of young people navigate the transition journey over the past 30 years. Anderson supports the methodical, milestone-filled process lasting anywhere from a few months to several years to undergo transition. Today, however, she’s worried that some young people are being medicalized without the proper restraint or oversight.

“I’m concerned that the rise of detransitioners is reflective of some young people who have progressed through their gender journey very, very quickly,” she said. She worries that some doctors may be defaulting to medicalization as a remedy for other personal or mental-health factors. “When other issues important to a child are not fully addressed [before transition], then medical professionals are failing children.”

According to an online survey of detransitioners conducted by Dr. Lisa Littman last year, 40% said their gender dysphoria was caused by a mental-health condition and 62% felt medical professionals did not investigate whether trauma was a factor in their transition decisions.

“My dysphoria collided with my general depression issues and body image issues,” Helena recalled. “I just came to the conclusion that I was born in the wrong body and that all my problems in life would be solved if I transitioned.”

Chloe had a similar experience. “Because my body didn’t match beauty ideals, I started to wonder if there was something wrong with me. I thought I wasn’t pretty enough to be a girl, so I’d be better off as a boy. Deep inside, I wanted to be pretty all along, but that’s something I kept suppressed.”

She agrees with Dr. Anderson that more psychological evaluation is needed to determine whether underlying mental health issues might be influencing the desire to transition.

“More attention needs to be paid to psychotherapy,” Chloe said. “We’re immediately jumping into irreversible medical treatments when we could be focusing on empowering these children to not hate their bodies.”

*  *  *

Until 2019, Marcus Evans was the Clinical Director of Adult and Adolescent Services at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, a publicly funded mental-health center in the UK where many youth seek treatment for gender dysphoria. But he resigned three years ago over what he viewed as the unnecessary medicalization of dysphoric adolescents.

“I saw children being fast-tracked onto medical solutions for psychological problems, and when kids get on the medical conveyor belt, they don’t get off,” Evans said. “But the politicization of the issue was shutting down proper clinical rigor. That meant quite vulnerable kids were in danger of being put on a medical path for treatment that they may well regret.”

Indeed, transitions are getting younger and hastier. Puberty blockers are commonly administered at the first sign of development to children as young as 9, according to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Testosterone and estrogen injections are frequently prescribed at age 13 or 14, despite the Endocrine Society’s recommendation of 16. And serious surgeries like mastectomies are sometimes performed on children as young as 13.

Although medical intervention for minors requires parental consent, many mothers and fathers approve surgery and hormone therapy at the recommendation of affirming medical professionals or even out of fear their child might self-harm if denied treatment.

“It’s very hard for parents to know exactly how to evaluate their own kids, and they rely quite heavily on experts to tell them,” said Jane Wheeler, a former regulatory health-care attorney who founded Rethink Identity Medicine Ethics, a non-profit that promotes ethical, evidence-based care and treatment for dysphoric children. “There’s obviously a lot of concern about the capacity for the adolescent or minor to fully appreciate what medicalization really means.”

Medical professionals typically follow the affirmative-care model, which is supported by the American Psychological Association, validating a patient’s expressed gender identity regardless of their age. As a result, detransitioners frequently report that getting prescriptions is a breeze. A total of 55% said their medical evaluations felt inadequate, according to Dr. Littman’s survey.

In Helena’s case, all it took to get a testosterone prescription was one trip to Planned Parenthood when she was 18. She said she was given four times the typical starting dose by a nurse practitioner in less than an hour, without ever seeing a doctor.

Chloe said she was fast-tracked through her entire transition — from blockers to a mastectomy — in just two years, with parental consent. The only pushback she said she encountered came from the first endocrinologist she saw, who agreed to prescribe her puberty blockers but not testosterone when she was 13. But she said she went to another doctor who gave her the prescription with no trouble.

“Because all the therapists and specialists followed the affirmative care model, there wasn’t a lot of gate-keeping throughout the whole transition process,” she recalled. “The professionals all seemed to push medical transition, so I thought it was the only path for me to be happy.”

Evans, the author of “Gender Dysphoria: A Therapeutic Model for Working with Children, Adolescents, and Young Adults,” now runs his own private practice with his wife in Beckenham, England, where he helps parents struggling with how to address their children’s dysphoria.

A variety of studies suggest that as many as 80% of dysphoric children could ultimately experience “desistance”— or coming to terms with their biological gender without resorting to transition. Which is why many professionals like Evans think it’s wise to hold off on potentially irreversible medical intervention for as long as possible. “I’m not against transition. I just don’t think kids can give informed consent.”

All these treatments run the risk of side effects that critics argue are too serious for children to fully understand. In the short term, puberty blockers can stunt growth and effect bone density, while the long-term effects are still unknown since they were only approved by the FDA in 1993. Side effects of testosterone include high cholesterol, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, blood clots and even infertility. Currently just three states — Arkansas, Arizona and Texas — have policies limiting gender-affirming treatments for minors, including surgery, hormones and speech therapy.

For those who ultimately end up regretting their transition, the consequences of hormone therapy and surgery can be devastating. For Helena, testosterone caused emotional instability that culminated with two hospitalizations for self-harm.

While in the hospital she came to the realization that her transition was a mistake. “I saw a montage of photos of me, and when I saw how much my face changed and how unhappy I looked, I realized this was all f****d up and I shouldn’t have done it. It was a really dark time.”

Chloe said testosterone altered her bone structure, permanently sharpening her jawline and broadening her shoulders. She said she also struggles with increased body and facial hair. She has a large scar across her chest from her mastectomy, which disturbed her about surgery. “The recovery was a very graphic process, and it was definitely something I wasn’t prepared for,” she said. “I couldn’t even bear to look at myself sometimes. It would make me nauseous.”

Gravest of all concerns is her fertility. Although she’d like to have children one day, Chloe doesn’t know whether the viability of her eggs was compromised by years of testosterone injections. She’s working with doctors to find out, and her medical future is uncertain. “I’m still in the dark about the overall picture of my health right now,” she said.

•  •  •

The subject of detransitioning is often met with vitriol from the transgender activist community, which claims that stories like Chloe’s and Helena’s will be used to discredit the trans movement as a whole.

This is understandable, although unlikely, as research reveals that up to 86% of trans adults feel that transitioning was the right long-term decision for them. But, as more and more children are entrusted to make serious medical decisions with permanent implications, the numbers of disaffected detransitioners is almost certain to grow.

That’s why Dr. Anderson feels compelled to speak out on their behalf, as a transgender woman herself. “Some of my colleagues are worried that conversation about detransitioners is going to be more cannon fodder in the culture wars, but my concern is that if we don’t address these problems, there will be even more ammunition to criticize the appropriate work that I and other colleagues are doing.”

And, like Anderson, these young people — who will forever live with the consequences of hasty transition — refuse to be silenced. “I want my voice to be heard,” said Chloe. “I don’t want history to repeat itself. I can’t let this happen to other kids.”

“There was a lot of negativity around being a cis, heterosexual, white girl, and I took those messages really, really personally.”

Queer theory functions to complicate existing academic frameworks, and conceptions of social relations, by deconstructing the dominant, heteronormative structures undergirding extant scholarship (Marinucci, 2010). One theoretical strategy relies on an insistence on the social construction of gender and sexuality (see Butler, 1990). Theories of social construction claim that human identities are not inherent or essential (that is, having an essence), but rather emerge out of social relations and discourse. In Butler’s (1990) work, she understands gender as produced through repetitive practices of personal and social practices. In other words, one’s gender does not exist a priori discourse, but instead is constructed by characteristics and experiences. At the base of social constructionist theories is the assumption that, since identities are constructed, they can always be constructed otherwise.

My puberty was chemically delayed. I was their guinea pig

A former patient who went to the Tavistock clinic aged 12 talks to Lucy Bannerman

www.thetimes.co.uk|Lucy Bannerman

Alex* was a girl who desperately wanted to be a boy. From the ages of 12 to 16, “he” embarked on four years of experimental treatment, in a desperate bid to transform from female to male. Now 18 and trying to catch up on a chemically delayed adolescence, he feels the Tavistock treated him like “a guinea pig”.

The gender clinic that sent him into the medical unknown has no record of the outcome of his case, he says. It does not know the impact of those experimental drugs on his body, or the repercussions of this supposedly pioneering treatment on his life, he claims, because no one ever asked.

How, he asks, could the NHS’s main gender identity clinic for young people claim its controversial approach was working if it wasn’t recording the results?

Alex describes the service for young people struggling with their gender identity as a “drugs train”. Destination: adult sex change.

He was one of the very few young people who jumped off, deciding after four unhappy years on puberty blockers not to make that final, irreversible leap to cross-sex hormones. The vast majority of children referred by the Tavistock for hormone blockers continued with their transition once they became eligible at 18, but how they are getting on remains unclear as the clinic did not collect the data – a fact that High Court judges in the Keira Bell case noted was “surprising given the young age of the patient group, the experimental nature of the treatment and the profound impact that it has”.

At 18, Alex’s understanding of what it means to be “transgender” is now completely different from what it was when he first begged the clinic for help as a vulnerable 12-year-old.

He was seven when his mother first took him to the GP for advice. His parents had gone through a difficult divorce and, in a traumatic incident, which he still finds difficult to talk about, he was sexually assaulted by a boy in primary school. He rejected anything “girlie” as negative, covered his long hair with hats, envied his male peers and even now, in conversation, apparently unconsciously, equates femininity with “weakness”. (None of this, he says, would ever be explored in detail at the Tavistock.)

When Alex was ten, the GP eventually referred him to the local child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS), where they explored his anxiety and struggle to make friends. But the mention of identifying as a boy triggered a referral to the Tavistock. “We were told a million times, ‘They’re the experts on this.’ ”

Alex and his mother travelled to north London for the first consultation around 18 months later. “It wasn’t like CAMHS at all. They didn’t ‘discuss’. They kind of just accepted [from CAMHS] that you were trans” – as if the act of referral were confirmation of transgender identity itself.

“They said, ‘Oh yeah, you’re definitely trans.’ See you in a month.” At the end of the first session, before Alex had shared any personal history or discussed his feelings in depth, exploring for example, why he might not want to be a girl, he claims he was given forms for changing his name via deed poll. “It was like, ‘Have you done this yet?’ ” He was 12. “It was insane.”

“I think it was my fourth or fifth appointment, [when] they said there are drugs that will make you feel better. As a child I thought, yeah, miracle cure. What I really wanted was a ‘transgender guide to life’.”

As a gender non-conforming biological female who pictured, one day, possibly settling down with a wife, Alex really wanted to look like his male friends.

“I was tremendously anxious about looking like a girl. They said, ‘We think you’re the right age and you should try hormone blockers.’ They sell the drugs very early, very hard.

“I was a child. All I wanted was something to make me feel less horrified by my body,” Alex says, reflecting on the experience from the kitchen island of his family home in the west of England. “And I was listening to a doctor, so I went along with it,” his mother adds, shaking her head.

They went regularly to the endocrinology clinic at University College London Hospitals (UCLH). Alex liked the injections because enduring the large, painful needles made him feel brave and therefore manly.

He hoped that artificially halting the development of his female body would help him fit in more with the male peers whose lives he so envied.

Instead, what they did was keep him in a child’s body while his friends grew up. While the boys grew taller and hairier, Alex’s growth slowed and weight ballooned, with the weight going to the hips and breasts, accentuating exactly the female form he was trying to escape. The sudden weight gain also created angry, itchy stretch marks and a new anxiety about eating, which still remains. His little brother overtook him in height. “I felt even more depressed and isolated.” The hormone blockers also did exactly that – blocking hormones and keeping Alex in the asexual state of a child while his friends were having their first kisses and sexual relationships.

“The Tavistock was meant to be the godsent healing force to deal with all these issues. But uh uh,” he says. “No.”

He claims the clinicians failed to explain the possible side-effects or gain his informed consent as a minor.

“At first, I had insomnia. There would be days when I could not sleep at all, then days later I would crash. There were moments of euphoria, then the next day you’d just want to cry. Huge mood swings.”

Alex claims the only psychiatric evaluation during this treatment consisted of occasional form-filling, which wasn’t followed up. “Tracking? There was none.” If they actually gave a crap over what it was doing to my body, they would not have let me continue. If they had read those forms, they would have known I was not feeling any better. They just kept giving me higher doses.”

Alex claims he was also put on beta blockers during this time, until one day he collapsed in the school toilets, heart thumping in his chest, after running 1,500m in athletics. His mother called the clinic, demanding a review of the treatment. Alex came off the beta blockers but continued with the hormone injections until, aged 16, tired, overweight, depressed and increasingly lonely, he decided to walk away from the Tavistock altogether.

In his last consultation, aged 16, “I said to [the therapist], ‘I’m not doing it any more. This isn’t helpful. This isn’t what it says on the tin.’ I’m fed up being sold snake oil. It’s ridiculous.”

At that point, Alex and his mum claim the clinician invited Alex to step aside to make space for other young people on the waiting list – others, he allegedly implied, who were willing to continue to cross-sex hormones. “That’s when he said, ‘Well, we have hundreds of other trans people who want to talk to us…’ ”

“When you stop the drugs, they ditch you.”

The discussions about gender reassignment had proved to be the last straw. Though he identifies as transgender, Alex felt very strongly he did not want surgery.

“It was just assumed [I’d want that]. They kind of wait for you to go, ‘Oh, that’s great, I’ll put it on my calendar.’ Alex felt pressure to proceed down the medical pathway to prove his commitment to his trans identity.

“There was a feeling that you’re supposed to do this if you’re trans.”

When he resisted that path, Alex claimed “They frowned. For me it felt like they were saying, well, you’re not really trans then. You’re only trans if you’re willing to go this far.

“I’m a realist. I know, there’s nothing I can do that will change how I was born. I know that if they dig my skeleton up in years to come, it will be recognised as female. But the Tavistock could not deal with that. They wanted trans people who were young, who they could mould into their idea of what trans is.

“They have their view of what being trans is. And if you do not fit into that, you have no place in their service. I felt I was completely used to confirm their theories. It was insane.”

“The whole experience has been salt in the wounds. I’m still trans, but not in the way the Tavistock wanted me to be.

“I came to the conclusion that I would rather just deal with it on my own because this [treatment] is not helping.”

With the support of his mum and three siblings, he decided to come off the hormone blockers.

“They sat me down and said, ‘Listen, you need to come off of these because you might work out you’re just gay, but you’ll never know if you stay on them.”

“So I was like, ‘OK, just to shut you up.’ ” He stopped the blockers. “It was probably the best thing I ever did.“

Stopping the blockers has actually made me feel more free. It has actually given me the ability to pick what I want from my life without feeling like I have to fit in a certain box. I feel like I’m more able to present myself in a way that is more connected to how I actually feel.”

He realised that “just sitting down and having a good chat with my mum” provided more comfort than pills and injections.

His mother now believes the Tavistock’s approach was deeply unethical. “They were pumping Alex with an experimental drug, then beta blockers, then talking about surgeries. So to come out of that system without any follow-up – that is negligent.

“When you’re doing experimental treatment, you take literally every single scrap of data you can get and you analyse it. You don’t just ignore it.”

She also believes the blockers were pushed “too early”: “They are experimenting on our children with absolutely no knowledge about how that’s going to affect their growth or their brain development.

“They had no idea what that was going to do to Alex’s body. Why not allow all these normal developments to happen, then make a judgment? They are far too quick to dish it out.”

Alex is now preparing to go to university to study screenwriting. His favourite subjects were always English and drama but he resisted pursuing them because they were “girlie.” Now, he says, “I’m like, screw that. There are so many screenwriters I really admire who make amazing TV shows, so I want to do that.”

He will also be giving LGBT student politics a miss: he doesn’t believe his medical history should be politicised.

He is now catching up on adolescence and is relieved to have regained some height. The period he had been so dreading arrived when he was 18, but he now regards it as merely “a monthly inconvenience”.

Relationships remain a puzzle. Two years on, since coming off the blockers Alex has still not experienced any sexual feelings.

“When you watch shows and there’s, like, a fit girl, you say, ‘They’re fit,’ but you have no real understanding of what that means.

“That can really backfire, because you don’t know what is the correct way of checking people out. I don’t know how this works.

“You don’t really feel anything towards anyone. I imagine you’re supposed to get some feeling? I don’t know how to explain it really. But there is nothing. I feel like I can’t recognise what love feels like. Being in love and knowing you’re in love… I can’t even comprehend that concept. Because I don’t feel anything.”

It has been almost three years since his last consultation and he finds it astonishing that there has been no follow-up.

“I could have been in a mental hospital after really hurting myself. Worst-case scenario, I could have ended up killing myself.“

“I never got a phone call asking, ‘How has it been to come off the drugs?’ From their perspective, it would be useful for them to know what happened,” says Alex.

More than 10,000 distressed young people remain on the waiting list for the service, which is currently being reviewed.

Alex questions how much has been learnt. “I think of the young person who took my place. Are they going through the same thing I did?”

If the clinic hasn’t recorded the outcome of his case, he asks, how can it inform the care of the next young patient in that waiting room?

“I honestly look back and view the Tavistock and the blockers as some of the worst decisions I’ve made in my entire life. So it’s just horrifying to think that someone else, maybe someone even younger than I was, is being sold this same snake oil.

“How will they know what happened to me?”

Alex is not his real name

Therapists Have Betrayed The Parents Of Gender-Confused Kids

Therapists have lost all credibility because of their surrender to a destructive, unscientific ideology. We’ve harmed thousands of parents and kids.

thefederalist.com

There’s something rotten in the state of my profession, the mental health field. While therapists are usually the first to reach out to trauma victims, there’s one group we neglect. Even worse, we blame the victims.

I’m referring to parents of gender-confused kids, whose stories I am hearing firsthand in my office. Parents come to me because I’ve publicly objected to my profession’s faulty views about gender identity and its treatment. How many parents are unable to find help? Judging by the number of recently created organizations and online groups where such parents gather, there are thousands, and the numbers grow by the day.

My patients, and those in the parent-run groups, are shocked, overwhelmed, confused, and anxious. They’re not sleeping or eating. Many have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Why have they turned to one another for help? Why don’t more come to us – psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and counselors? We’re the ones with the degrees and experience.

They don’t turn to us because we have failed them.

Of course young people are also victims of the trans craze, but my focus here is their parents’ distress. It is massive and demands acknowledgement.

Following their teen’s bombshell announcement, most parents initially consult with gender therapists or clinics. The vast majority tell them they must unconditionally accept their child’s chosen identity, use a random, unfamiliar name, and help Sara bind her breasts and Michael tuck his genitals.

Parents object, suggesting a slower process and deeper exploration. They insist: we know our child! The ideologues dismiss their parental instincts. They see their discomfort, but brush it off.

Bad Advice

For those therapists, the parents are the problem. Not the child’s social anxiety, autism, irrational thinking, or social media addiction. No, the issue is mom and dad’s refusal to embrace their teen’s two-week-old identity and allow a kid to run the show.

The therapist shares that assessment with parents, sometimes in front of their child. In doing so, the gender specialist strikes heavy blows against a family in crisis, who turned to her with hope and trust: she undermines parental authority and weakens the parent-child bond.

As if that’s not enough, she refers them, following a hasty, incomplete evaluation, to an endocrinologist for hormones to block development. Safe and reversible, the therapist reassures the parents. Your child needs them now. In fact, it’s already late.

She speaks with authority and confidence. There’s a consensus among professionals, she explains. If you reject our advice, the risk of losing your child to suicide is increased.

She threatens this about their child — the center of their lives, their most precious relationship! The therapist may have spent only a short time with him or her, but she knows what’s best.

Some Parents Find the Facts

The parents go home, emotions reeling. Some decide to trust the expert and they’re soon at the endocrinologist’s office, signing consent for drugs that will prevent their teen’s physical, emotional, sexual, and cognitive development. Their child looks happy; they pray it lasts.

Others dive into the research. Sooner or later they are startled to learn the truth: If teens go through natural puberty there’s a 60-90 percent chance of desistance (outgrowing transgenderism, aligning with one’s biology). Changing names, pronouns, and presentation can be a slippery slope and decrease desistance. Once on puberty blockers, desistance is very rare.

Blockers are controversial, have a history of lawsuits, and their off-label use in healthy children is experimental. There is a risk of suicide in gender-questioning teens, but there is no evidence that transition lowers that risk.

No Consensus

Parents learn that the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Finland carefully examined the dangers of hormonal treatment of minors and minors’ ability to give informed consent for such treatments. As a result, those countries made U-turns in their policies; patients must wait until they are 18 for medical intervention. Similar concerns are coming out of New Zealand and Australia.

Bottom line: parents who look further than gender clinics and therapists discover a heated debate regarding how to help kids like theirs. There’s a consensus among experts, they were told. Are you kidding? There is no consensus whatsoever.

So the parents search for a therapist who won’t immediately affirm the new identity, but instead take it slowly, get to know their child, and figure out the appeal to her of a new identity. A clinician with a more cautious, nuanced approach — that’s all parents want. Another shock: there are almost none.

Counting psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and counselors, there are more than a million therapists in this country. I located a group of therapists who believe in long-term, exploratory talk therapy for gender-questioning youth, and there are only 60 members, with many outside the United States.

My Patient’s Sad Experience

My patient “Cheryl” is an example of a traumatized parent. Her 18-year-old autistic daughter, her only child, identifies as a man and has been on testosterone for six months. Cheryl is convinced she and her husband were misled by a gender clinic and that “Eva” did not have adequate evaluations and therapy. For the first time in her life, Cheryl is taking psychiatric medication for her constant crying, sleeplessness, and anxiety.

Cheryl feels she’s at odds with everyone: Eva, family members, friends, schools, doctors, therapists, politicians, the media, and the culture. On how many fronts can one person fight?

I was not surprised when Cheryl told me, “Sometimes I wish my daughter had cancer. The whole world would be there for me.”

Doctors at Johns Hopkins tell Cheryl to embrace her child’s “evolving sense of self.” But when she first heard the lowered pitch of Eva’s voice, Cheryl threw up. A double mastectomy is planned; the thought of it floods her with panic and horror. She fears for Eva’s physical and emotional health, including her sexual health.

Cheryl also grieves for the biological grandchildren she’ll never have. But there’s nothing to be done about any of it. Horror, fear, helplessness, and grief are Cheryl’s constant companions, outside of the days when she just feels numb.

We Must Challenge the Narrative

There are thousands of parents like Cheryl. Where are the psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and counselors who will validate their experiences without judgment? How is it we’re able to serve the emotional needs of sexual offenders and murderers but not the traumatized, grieving parents of transgender children?

It’s because to do so would challenge the entrenched narrative in our field: that denying biology is part of normal development, and if “transphobic parents” would just accept that, it will be all rainbows and unicorns for their kids.

Few of us challenge that narrative, at least publicly, so parents have turned to one another in droves to cry, rage, and brainstorm. But they can’t even meet openly; the woke environment forces them underground. They fear losing their jobs and relationships, even their child, if exposed. Hence the secret meetings, private Facebook pages, made-up names, and extensive vetting. They hide in the dark as if they’re guilty of some awful crime.

This is an appalling betrayal of parents. To my colleagues: we’ve lost all credibility because of our surrender to a destructive, unscientific ideology. We’ve harmed thousands of parents and children, and they’ve had it with us.

Not too long ago, doctors performed frontal lobotomies as a cure for severe mental illness. They severed connections in the brain with crude instruments inserted through the eye socket. It was a barbaric but mainstream procedure, performed on about 40,000 people.

Right now in the United States, girls as young as 13 are having mastectomies and minor boys are castrated. What will it take to put the breaks on the massive transing of children? Call me a cynic, but I’m guessing a few huge lawsuits.

Trust me, the lawyers are coming, and victims will finally have a public platform. They will tell the world of the nightmare that descended on their precious children and families, leaving them traumatized and broken.

I eagerly await that day. Until it comes, I will be meeting with Cheryl every week, validating her story, helping her cope, and weeping along with her.

"When I tell people what I’m afraid of, nobody says to me ‘ooh, that makes sense. You should be afraid of that.’ They may be sympathetic to my suffering or they might laugh at how silly it is, but no one I have ever met has ever reinforced it.

In fact, I pay for a man to tell me at regular intervals that my fear is ridiculous. Perhaps not in so many words, but there’s actually a service for that. It’s called a therapist. That’s what therapists do, they politely tell you that your fears are ridiculous.

And although it’s been hard to beat this fear, it can be beaten. In large part because no one is reinforcing it. I can only imagine how much darker my darkest days would have been, and how much longer I would have suffered them had the whole world been telling me to be afraid.”

-- Allison Tieman

12 Reasons to Be Skeptical of Common Claims About Implicit Bias

Limitations in implicit bias research aren't always communicated to the public.

www.psychologytoday.com

KEY POINTS

• There is no consensually-agreed upon definition of implicit bias. This makes communicating about implicit bias quite difficult.
• The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is the most common method for measuring implicit bias. Yet it has several flaws and limitations.
• Those limitations, which are well-known among psychological scientists, are rarely acknowledged to the wider public, including students.

Implicit bias is in the air. Hillary Clinton famously declared that "implicit bias is a problem for everyone." When she was California Attorney General, now-Vice President Kamala Harris expanded implicit bias trainings for police and has attributed many things to implicit biases on her Twitter feed.

Given widespread distress over unconscious racism, many consulting firms now provide implicit bias trainings and assure you that they deliver. A simple Google search for "consultant, implicit bias training" yields pages and pages of hits. Is this kind of corporate response to the problem of implicit bias justified?

In a 2018 essay, West Virginia University sociologist Jason Manning argued that "unconscious racism" bears a resemblance to older superstitions about the evil eye and sympathetic magic—but rather than mysterious unseen supernatural forces, we have mysterious unseen unconscious forces. There are, of course, some differences between beliefs in the evil eye and unconscious racism. There is no evidence that people can harm you by looking at you, whereas there is a wealth of studies on implicit social cognition. But I argue that the comparison may still be justified because the evidence for unconscious racism is so weak.

A moral panic occurs when some substantial portion of a society creates a "folk devil"—members of the community considered deviant and dangerous—and exaggerates the dangers they pose. In one research report, for example, people massively overestimated the number of unarmed Black people killed by police in 2019, with more than half of all liberals surveyed estimating the number at 1,000 or more (when data indicated it was more likely to be around 27). And many people have been denounced or socially ostracized for opposing things like affirmative action and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, even though the majority of Americans, including majorities of Black and Hispanic respondents, oppose basing college admissions or hiring on ethnicity or race.

Others have been denounced or publicly shamed for a maladroit compliment of a supermodel or for sharing a peer reviewed sociology article, if doing so is viewed as deviant behavior or contrary to widely-held views. I personally have witnessed a talk in which a Jewish professor was publicly called a "grotesque Nazi" by physics professors for having described Obama as "half-black" (he has a Kenyan father and a White American mother). Such responses can be seen as evidence of a moral panic and the creation of "folk devils" surrounding the topic of racism.

Returning, however, to the implicit bias consulting firms—it's possible to find powerful testaments to the effectiveness of their trainings. But what does the science actually say—not just about the trainings, but about implicit bias more generally?

The workhorse method for assessing implicit bias is the Implicit Association Test (IAT). You can take several of these here to see what they are like for yourself. But before you do, you should consider these reasons to be skeptical about any claims about implicit bias.

1. The peer-reviewed scientific literature has witnessed a great walking back of many of the most dramatic claims made on the basis of the IAT and about implicit social cognition more generally.

Several researchers in this domain have put together this repository of over 40 articles (and growing) identifying flaws, artifacts, limitations, and threats to the validity of the IAT. Here are the titles of just a few of those articles:

• "More Error than Attitude in Implicit Association Tests"
• "Unconscious Racism: A Concept in Pursuit of a Measure"
• "Implicit? What Do You Mean? A Comprehensive Review of the Delusive Implicitness Construct in Attitude Research"

In fairness, there are still plenty of research articles that take implicit bias seriously, such as this one. The point is not that the notion has been completely debunked or the IAT shown to be completely worthless; I even do research using the IAT! Instead, the point is that most of the most dramatic claims about it have been debunked or, at least, shown to be dubious and scientifically controversial. These are not firm grounds on which to sell the public on the power and prevalence of unconscious racism or trainings to mitigate it.

2. There is no consensually-accepted scientific definition of implicit bias.

Across five articles, there might be three with different definitions and two that do not even provide a definition. No one knows what "implicit bias" even is—at least if "know" is taken to mean "a clear understanding shared by most scientists."

3. The IAT measures reaction times, not things that most people think of as bias.

Whether reaction times might be considered bias in some technical sense is beyond the scope of this essay. Reaction times are not what most people think of when they think about bias; the IAT does not directly measure racism, oppression, or unfairness. (Whether it does so indirectly with any reasonable success is controversial, as described next.) To claim reaction times constitute any sort of bias in the common understanding of the meaning of "bias" is to import a conclusion by fiat rather than evidence.

4. At best, the IAT measures the strength of association of concepts in memory.

When reaction times are faster for some pairs of concepts than others, it is possible that the two concepts for which reaction times are faster are more closely associated in memory. That's the only thing the IAT can directly show: the closeness of association of concepts in memory—not "bias," not "racism." But it goes downhill from there; a slew of statistical issues and methodological artifacts suggest that the IAT is not even a clean measure of strength of association.

5. The IAT may capture prejudice, stereotypes, or attitudes to some degree, but, if so, it is not a clean measure.

Critiques of the IAT have concluded that it contains more error than attitude or reflects actual knowledge about actual group differences and conditions; and that IAT scores reflect four separate phenomena, of which attitude is just one.

6. The IAT, as used and reported, has a potpourri of additional methodological and statistical oddities.

Although a deep dive into them is beyond the scope of this blog, the interested reader can find them laid out in gory and technical details here and in the online repository of articles.

7. Many of the studies that use IAT scores to predict behavior find little or no anti-Black discrimination specifically.

If "unconscious racism" was as powerful and pervasive as its advocates claim, one would expect some, and probably a great deal, of anti-Black discrimination in these studies. Its absence in many studies justifies significant skepticism about claims about the power or prevalence of implicit bias.

8. Whether IAT scores predict behavioral manifestations of bias beyond self-report prejudice scales is unclear, with some studies finding they do and others finding they do not.

Racial prejudice is real and is readily measured by self-report scales assessing attitudes towards various racial and ethnic groups. It is not clear that the IAT captures much beyond these self-report scales, though.

9. Procedures that change IAT scores have failed to produce changes in discriminatory behavior.

One might ask, then, the point of such procedures and why is there such enthusiasm for these trainings.

10. There is currently no clear evidence that implicit bias trainings accomplish anything other than teaching people about the research on implicit bias.

It's not that there is "no evidence." This is not a case of "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." It is a case of "there is tons of evidence, but most of it shows little or no effect."

11. There is no evidence that IAT scores are "unconscious."

Research finds that people are quite good at predicting their IAT scores.

12. Critiques and discussions of its limitations or weaknesses are often not presented when the IAT is taught to introductory psychology students. Gambrill & Reiman, 2011, defined propaganda as “encouraging beliefs and actions with the least thought possible” (p. e19516). Does extolling research on the IAT without presenting its limitations and weaknesses constitute "encouraging beliefs and actions with the least thought possible"? I leave that to you to decide. Regardless, this omission is contrary to the aims of science.

What This All Means

Here is my advice to you: Take an IAT or two (which you can here) if you have not already, just to see what the buzz is about. But now you are armed with enough information to reject any simple-minded proclamations about unconscious racism or the supposed power of implicit biases.

WIGGUM: OK, here's how the process works. You sit on the broom and we shove you off the cliff. MARGE: What?! WIGGUM: Well, hear me out, if you're innocent, you will fall to an honorable Christian death. If you are, however, the bride of Satan, you will surely fly your broom to safety. At that point you will report back here for torture and beheading. SKINNER: Tough, but fair.

Case Study: A Mother Rushes To Get Her 15-Year Old Daughter’s Breasts Removed

‘Time is of the essence’ for this mom eager to get her daughter a double mastectomy.

www.realityslaststand.com|Christina Buttons

On October 13, 2021, in a private Facebook group with nearly 13 thousand members called “Parents Supporting Parents of Trans Children,” a mother made a post about her daughter’s long history of mental health issues that has ultimately resulted in her pursuing a transition from a girl to a boy. In the post, the mother tells the group to “follow your child’s lead,” “even if you think it’s crazy.”

She goes on to describe the intense struggles her daughter—who she now refers to as her “son”—has experienced for many years before finally coming out as transgender. She reveals that seven years ago they began family therapy due to her daughter’s “emotional disturbance and psych diagnoses,” and says the daughter has been going to individual therapy sessions ever since.

The mother lists her daughter’s timeline of mental health issues, which include:

• Age 7: inappropriate internet searches
• Age 9: suicidal ideation
• Age 10: ADHD and anxiety
• Age 12: cutting

At age 13, however, the daughter came out to her mother as transgender, and only a year later met with a plastic surgeon, where her daughter informed the surgeon that she “wants them (breasts) just gone, because I want to be a boy.”

The mother says, seemingly with trepidation, that “at this point I realize my kiddo is trying desperately to tell me something he doesn’t yet fully understand himself, and he needs my help to navigate the murky waters” (our emphasis). The says she began educating herself about transgender issues, and started “being more vocal with my support of him as a person, even if I don’t fully believe his reasons” (our emphasis).

A month into the school year, the mother says her daughter is now “fully socially transitioned” as a boy at school. Classmates and even upperclassmen say they “have his back,” including the school Principal.

Eight months later, on June 8, 2022, the mother returned to the group to describe her “rollercoaster” week of getting insurance to approve her daughter’s “top surgery” (a euphemism for an elective double mastectomy) and “talking through last minute jitters” before checking her daughter into the hospital. To calm these jitters, the daughter brought a “comfort item”—a stuffed animal cat—demonstrating that she is still very much an emotionally immature and vulnerable child. It may as well have been a teddy bear.

But despite the comfort animal, the reality of the situation began to weigh heavily on the child, and the mother reported that “By the time the surgeon came back for a last minute consult, [her daughter] was nearly in tears and voiced that [she] was having second thoughts and didn’t feel [she] was emotionally ready.” So they called off the surgery, and went home.

The tears continued at home, and the mother says her daughter’s “mood tanked” out of regret for not going through with the surgery. But instead of reassuring her daughter that they would be supportive of any decision, including not going through with the procedure, she tells her daughter that “when he IS ready” she and the daughter’s stepdad would “do everything in [their] power to make it happen.”

Responding to a commenter, the mother coveys some regret in not pressuring her daughter more to have the surgery—”part of me feels like I should have nudged him just a little harder…”

In an earlier post on March 1, 2022, we discover that mother would like to have her daughter’s surgery over with soon while they are covered by Medicaid in order to avoid paying the deductibles and copay for treatments that will kick in once she re-marries and her and her daughter join the new husband’s health insurance.

She explains that her 14-year old daughter is already “*very* large chested,” which is a source for her dysphoria. But having a large chest at such a young age can make any girl feel self-conscious, and a hallmark of adolescence is to feel uncomfortable and anxiety toward your changing body. In every post, there is no convincing indication that her daughter actually suffers from true gender dysphoria instead of simply being an average teenage girl insecure with her body, who also happens to be suffering from a multitude of mental health issues.

The mother also says that “there’s a niggling urgency in the back of my head that we should schedule the surgery sooner rather than later,” given the uncertainty regarding the future legality of performing elective double mastectomies on minors in Texas.

Commenters are unanimously in favor of getting her daughter on the operating table as soon as possible. “Your son’s mental health can’t wait,” “do the surgery sooner rather than later,” “postpone your elopement” they say, displaying the sense of urgency that echoes the commonly stated false dichotomy of parents needing to choose between having a “trans child or a dead child.”

Another commenter tells the mother to “Move it forward as quickly as possible,” and to “Push it through.” The commenter also guilt trips the mother by telling her, condescendingly, “It’s not about you.”

Leading up to the May 11 surgery date, the mother reveals that she is having difficulty getting an “affirming” letter of support from her daughter’s former therapist, which is needed to authorize the surgery: “The information that she [sic] providing isn’t exactly affirming, at least not enough to sway Medicaid’s decision I don’t think.” Because the surgery is only a few weeks away, the mother stresses that “time is absolutely of the essence.”

In a comment, we then learn that the reluctant therapist has been her daughter’s therapist for the last four years, and the mother even states that the therapist “is well aware of his other mental health issues.” The therapist is also aware the daughter has claimed to be transgender for over a year.

The mother then reveals that the therapist’s original letter of support had included a quote from her daughter saying that she “‘wants to try out’ male pronouns and his chosen name.” The mother is worried that this is “not the most affirmative information,” and so she is going to provide the therapist with a letter template from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and “ask her to redraft” the letter.

One commenter directs the mother to “tell that therapist exactly what you need.”

The mother and group members appear to view doctors and therapists not as professionals whose advice they should heed and respect, but as obstacles in their way or people to order around to fulfill their every demand to obtain hormones and surgery for their children as quickly as possible.

Fast forward to “pre-op day,” the mother still does not have approval from the insurance company for the surgery because the daughter’s former therapist “has been hedging on writing a letter of support.” Rather than trust the expertise of the therapist most familiar with her daughter’s long history of mental health issues, the mother says she has been persistently “nagging her” for the letter.

However, it now appears the mother does not need the therapist to write a letter of support because—”GOOD NEWS!”—the surgeon told her that she can simply have an endocrinologist, who they’ve met with only a small number of times, write the support letter and it will be “completed in one business day.” The mother is ecstatic, and types in all caps, “THIS IS GONNA HAPPEN!”

Unfortunately the story ends abruptly here, as the mother has not posted any updates on the Parents Supporting Parents of Trans Children Facebook Group.

One thing to note about gender-affirming care is how quickly an entire history of mental health problems is immediately explained away and ignored the moment any child “comes out” as transgender. Instead of viewing the sudden emergence of a trans identity as yet another manifestation of underlying mental issues, “gender dysphoria” is immediately taken to be the root cause underlying all of it, with transition viewed as a panacea.

While this is only one case study, this is by no means rare. Every day, countless parents arrive in these private Facebook Groups seeking guidance from strangers. As we have reported elsewhere, these groups act as indoctrination centers for scared and confused parents—mostly mothers—looking for help and advice for their equally confused children who have succumbed to gender ideology. But instead of help, Group members guilt trip and shame parents into fast-tracking their children to hormones and surgeries.

We hope that by bringing these stories to light, we can help the public better understand the cult-like nature of these groups, and the true extent of the harm being brought upon vulnerable children in the name of “Social Justice” and “acceptance.”

“It’s not about you.”

Implications and Dangers of False Accusations of Racism

We Must Stop Condemning People on Insufficient Evidence

freeblackthought.substack.com|Free Black Thought

Racial prejudice has long been a thorn in humanity's side. It has long served as the primary impetus for some of humanity's most heinous deeds. Despite the international attention it has received, the many steps that have been taken to address it, and the progress that has been made, prejudice and discrimination nonetheless continue to exist and to negatively impact the lives of members of marginalized groups in numerous ways.

In the eyes of some, racism in society appears to be worsening, and racist remarks, actions, behaviours, and incidents appear to be on the rise. Almost every week, a new video of a person—typically white—apparently caught in the act of doing or saying something racist, circulates on the internet. The media opportunistically seizes on these incidents to highlight, if not exacerbate, the problem of racism.

While some suppose that racism is becoming more prevalent, others argue that racism has always been prevalent and is only becoming more visible as people become better educated and technology is available to capture incidents. Increasingly, “racism” is being used as a catch-all term to refer to any behaviour, attitude, or outcome a member of a minority group perceives as in any way negative.

In recent years, numerous unsubstantiated and even patently false claims of racism have deepened divisions in societies that cannot agree on how to come to terms with a past influenced by racial inequality.

One name immediately comes to mind with respect to false claims of racism: Jussie Smollett, the black Empire actor who orchestrated a hate crime and falsely claimed to have been the victim of a racist and homophobic attack. Smollett is believed to have staged the attack to increase his notoriety and advance his career. His false claims exemplify how racism can be used for personal gain.

This article discusses some lesser-known instances in which false allegations of racism have been leveled against others, with the accusers facing minimal or no consequences for their conduct.

There has been little research on the psychosocial and psychological consequences of false accusations of racism, but these can clearly have serious negative consequences for both the individuals accused and the groups to which they belong. In recent years, race relations have steadily worsened, according to polling data. A false accusation doesn’t hurt only the individual accused, but also their family and even the group they belong to.

Nobody is immune to false racist accusations. It can affect otherwise decent workers, such as Dominique Moran, a restaurant manager who was wrongly labelled a racist and became the target of vile online abuse following the viral video of her allegedly refusing to serve a group of black men. It was later revealed the group of men portrayed as the victims were known to "dine and dash," meaning they would eat at restaurants but then flee when the bill arrived. By the time the facts of the incident were fully revealed, Moran had already lost her job and received hundreds of messages vilifying and threatening her and her family. Not only that, but she found herself dealing with fear, paranoia, distrust, and shame, demonstrating the psychological battles one can face as a result of false accusations. Moran eventually found work, but the incident left her with a sense of vulnerability she had never felt before.

In another incident, four women in Coventry, UK, were subjected to racial abuse as they attempted to enter a taxi. The perpetrator was quickly identified after the video went viral and his photos and social media handles were posted online. The only issue was that the wrong individual had been identified. Barney Schneider, a fourth-year Coventry University student, was mistaken for the man in the video due to an uncanny resemblance. Schneider was viciously attacked online, received threatening messages, and expulsion from his university was demanded. As in Dominique Moran’s case, revealing the facts did nothing to take back the unforgiving and wrathful abuse that Schneider had endured.

An older incident highlights how even public officials are vulnerable. Shirley Sherrod, Georgia State Director of Rural Development, was fired on July 19, 2010, as a result of media reports from an event the previous March at which she had addressed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Sherrod's remarks were condemned as racist by the NAACP, and US government officials demanded her resignation. Nonetheless, a review of her entire speech revealed that the excerpts were selectively edited and that her remarks, when understood in context, were about the importance of overcoming personal prejudices. The White House and NAACP officials later apologised for their criticisms, but this did not undo Shirley Sherrod's ordeal, which included character defamation and the loss of a significant position.

There is no doubt that racism is a multifaceted phenomenon that encompasses numerous barriers that prevent people from experiencing dignity and equality because of their race or origin, and that it extends beyond thoughts, words, attitudes, and behaviours. It is extremely important to emphasize that racism should not be taken lightly, but it also shouldn’t be used as a weapon to manipulate individuals, groups, or situations.

The dangers of false allegations of racism may be summarized thus:

• False accusations of racism are hurtful, disrespectful, and an affront to a person's integrity and character. There are negative consequences for those accused and their family members, including emotional, physiological, psychological, social, and economic consequences. People may not simply be able to “move on,” and such a stigma can follow a person for the rest of their lives.
• Unverified and false accusations of racism can be just as divisive in a country emerging from a history of racism as actual examples of racism. Such accusations may be detrimental to any projects aimed at fostering better race relations, re-establishing racial harmony, or progressing toward a future marked by racial equality.
• When false accusations of racism are made, it negatively impacts those who really are victims of racism, as employers, office-holders, and the public at large may come to take their genuine accusations less seriously.

Racism is generally not tolerated in western societies. A genuine case of racist discrimination may result in civil, criminal, and financial penalties. Individuals should be free to report racist incidents without fear of reprisal. However, accusations must be made responsibly, as unfounded charges of racism can have a detrimental effect on individuals, communities, and society as a whole. Perhaps those who make false accusations should face repercussions as serious as those faced by genuine perpetrators of racist acts.

Ada Akpala is a writer and podcaster. Born in Nigeria, she now resides in the United Kingdom. She specialises in debunking sensationalist and inaccurate narratives about current and historical events, particularly in regard to race. She believes that we are the rulers of our own life and refuses to accept the victimisation culture that has been sold to so many, particularly black people. She focuses on creating content that combats the victim mentality and empowers black people and others.

Through her website, her writing, her Patreon, and her podcast Challenge The Narrative, as well as other social media platforms, Ada continues to challenge the established narrative on race, social justice, and current events.

Discovering the Link Between Gender Identity and Peer Contagion

quillette.com

The following is excerpted, with permission, from Abigail Shrier’s newly published book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, Regnery Publishing (June 30, 2020) 276 pages.

In 2016, Lisa Littman, ob-gyn turned public health researcher, and mother of two, was scrolling through social media when she noticed a statistical peculiarity: Several adolescents, most of them girls, from her small town in Rhode Island had come out as transgender—all from within the same friend group. “With the first two announcements, I thought, ‘Wow, that’s great,’” Dr. Littman said, a light New Jersey accent tweaking her vowels. Then came announcements three, four, five, and six.

Dr. Littman knew almost nothing about gender dysphoria—her research interests had been confined to reproductive health: abortion stigma and contraception. But she knew enough to recognize that the numbers were much higher than prevalence data would have predicted. “I studied epidemiology… and when you see numbers that greatly exceed your expectations, it’s worth it to look at what might be causing it. Maybe it’s a difference of how you’re counting. It could be a lot of things. But you know, those were high numbers.”

In fact, they turned out to be unprecedented. In America and across the Western world, adolescents were reporting a sudden spike in gender dysphoria—the medical condition associated with the social designation “transgender.” Between 2016 and 2017, the number of gender surgeries for natal females in the United States quadrupled, with biological women suddenly accounting for—as we have seen—70 percent of all gender surgeries. In 2018, the UK reported a 4,400 percent rise over the previous decade in teenage girls seeking gender treatments. In Canada, Sweden, Finland, and the UK, clinicians and gender therapists began reporting a sudden and dramatic shift in the demographics of those presenting with gender dysphoria—from predominately preschool-aged boys to predominately adolescent girls.

Dr. Littman’s curiosity snagged on the social-media posts she’d seen. Why would a psychological ailment that had been almost exclusively the province of boys suddenly befall teenage girls? And why would the incidence of gender dysphoria be so much higher in friend clusters? Maybe she had missed something. She immersed herself in the scientific literature on gender dysphoria. She needed to understand the nature, presentation, and common treatment of this disorder.

Dr. Littman began preparing a study of her own, gathering data from parents of trans-identifying adolescents who’d had no childhood history of gender dysphoria. The lack of childhood history was critical, since traditional gender dysphoria typically begins in early childhood. That was true especially for the small number of natal girls who’d presented with it. Dr. Littman wanted to know whether what she was seeing was a new variant on an old affliction, or something else entirely. She assembled 256 detailed parent reports and analyzed the data. Her results astonished her.

Two patterns stood out: First, the clear majority (65 percent) of the adolescent girls who had discovered transgender identity in adolescence—“out of the blue”—had done so after a period of prolonged social-media immersion. Second, the prevalence of transgender identification within some of the girls’ friend groups was, on average, more than 70 times the expected rate. Why?

Dr. Littman knew that a spike in transgender identification among adolescent girls might be explained by one of several causes. Increased societal acceptance of LGBTQ members might have allowed teenagers who would have been reluctant to “come out” in earlier eras to do so today, for example. But this did not explain why transgender identification was sharply clustered in friend groups. Perhaps people with gender dysphoria naturally gravitated toward one another?

The rates were high; the age of onset had increased from preschool-aged to adolescence; and the sex ratio had flipped. The atypical nature of this dysphoria—occurring in adolescents with no childhood history of it—nudged Dr. Littman toward a hypothesis everyone else had overlooked: peer contagion. Dr. Littman gave this atypical expression of gender dysphoria a name: “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” (“ROGD”).

* * *

Many of the adolescent girls suddenly identifying as transgender seemed to be caught in a “craze”—a cultural enthusiasm that spreads like a virus. “Craze” is a technical term in sociology, not a pejorative, and that is how I use it here. (Dr. Littman never does.) It applies to Hula-Hoops and Pokémon and all sorts of cultural fads.

If this sudden spike in transgender identification among adolescent girls is a peer contagion, as Dr. Littman hypothesized, then the girls rushing toward “transition” are not getting the treatment they most need. Instead of immediately accommodating every adolescent’s demands for hormones and surgeries, doctors ought to be working to understand what else might be wrong. At best, doctors’ treatments are ineffective; at worst, doctors are administering needless hormonal treatments and irreversible surgeries on patients likely to regret them. Dr. Littman’s theory was more than enough to touch a nerve.

Activists stormed the Twitter page of PLoS One, the peer-reviewed scientific journal of the Public Library of Science that had published Dr. Littman’s paper, accusing her of anti-trans bigotry. They claimed that Dr. Littman had deliberately solicited parent reports from conservative, anti-trans parent groups. (In fact, over 85 percent of the parents self-identified as supporting LGBT rights.)

Journalists saw smoke and rushed over, flagons of gasoline in hand. A graduate student and self-described “transgender advocate” in Dr. Littman’s own Brown University department disparaged Dr. Littman in the press, calling her work shoddy—“below scientific standards”—and published an article accusing Dr. Littman of having been motivated by bias. Other transgender activists accused Dr. Littman of having hurt people with the paper. They called her work “dangerous,” and insisted it could lead to “worse mental health outcomes” for trans-identifying adolescents.

Brown University stripped its own press release on her paper from its website and replaced it with an apology from the dean of public health, who lamented that “the conclusions of the study could be used to discredit efforts to support transgender youth.” PLoS One’s editor in chief took the rare step of issuing an apology for not having provided better “context” for the research and promised additional review into possible “methodological errors” the paper might have contained.

Dr. Littman’s paper had already been peer-reviewed by two independent academics and one academic editor. But Brown and PLoS One knew a woke mob when they saw one. They decided it was best not to make any fast moves, to slowly hand over their wallets.

Diane Ehrensaft, a prominent child gender psychologist, told the Economist that Dr. Littman’s use of parent reports was akin to “recruiting from Klan or alt-right sites to demonstrate that blacks really were an inferior race.” (The “Klan,” in this case, was the parents, who had simply been asked questions about their own children.) Few cared that the surveyed parents had not expressed anti-transgender attitudes generally, but rather had expressed disbelief and upset that their daughters had adopted this identity “out of the blue” without any childhood history of gender dysphoria—and that following this identification, their adolescents’ mental health seemed to get worse.

None of the attacks acknowledged that parent report is a standard method for assessing child and adolescent mental health. (How else would you obtain the psychological history of a child?) Nor did any of these critics mention that the primary academic research used to promote “social transition” (changing an adolescent’s name and pronouns with school and friends) for gender dysphoric children similarly relies on parent surveys. PLoS One issued a correction that suggested Dr. Littman’s methods had not been made sufficiently clear, despite the fact that the words “parent reports” had appeared in the paper’s title.

Dr. Littman’s paper became one of the most widely discussed academic articles of 2018. Her analysis and conclusions drew praise from some of the most distinguished world experts on gender dysphoria. Dozens of parents wrote to her to thank her for giving name to the phenomenon they were observing in their adolescents.

But she was also widely tarred as a bigot and a bully. This, despite the fact that she had neither the security of tenure nor a faculty coauthor for cover. She wasn’t right-wing or anti-trans. She had spent several years working part-time for Planned Parenthood and, with her husband, contributed several pieces to HuffPost on such topics as the rotten GOP approach to healthcare, but the truth no longer seemed to matter much.

Psychology Today published an open letter from “transgender identified [and] cisgender allies… with vast expertise in gender and sexuality” purporting to refute Dr. Littman’s paper. The letter called her work “methodologically flawed” (for having relied on parental report) and “unethical” (for having reached its conclusions) and accused Dr. Littman of harboring “overt ideological bias” (for having dared examine the causes of trans identification at all).

Activist clinicians hunted Dr. Littman to the Rhode Island Department of Health (DOH), where she worked part-time as a physician consultant on projects related to the health of pregnant women and preterm infants. Her work there had nothing to do with transgender youth; it had nothing to do with young children or adolescents per se at all. Her interest in preemies stemmed from her years of training in obstetrics. Caring for preemies had been a passion of hers ever since she had given birth to a preemie of her own, just over one pound at birth.

The activists denounced Littman to her employer, the DOH, claiming that she had written a paper “harmful” to transgender youth. They demanded that the DOH “terminate its relationship with Dr. Littman immediately.” Adding a dash of threat, the authors airily suggested that the DOH might add “a gender-neutral restroom” to its facilities to send a message to the community “that trans and gender diverse lives are valued by DOH.”

The activists wanted a head on a pike. The DOH gave them Dr. Littman’s. Her paid consultancy was over.

* * *

I met Lisa Littman in a family-style Italian chain restaurant along Route 1 just outside of Boston. Her shoulder-length dark brown hair was lightly mussed from a busy workday and the stress of the traffic that had delayed her. Clutching her purse strap as she rushed toward our table, she looked every bit the suburban mom: eager to fill the unforgiving minute, hoping I hadn’t been waiting there too long.

She has large brown eyes, tortoiseshell glasses, a broad reassuring smile, and a nervous laugh. As she told me several times, she hates being interviewed. Based on her many follow-up questions about how I would ensure the accuracy of everything I wrote, it was clear she was telling the truth.

Excerpted, with permission, from Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, by Abigail Shrier, published by Regnery. © 2020 Abigail Shrier.

The New Definition of Racism - Wilfred Reilly, Commentary Magazine

Can we find a way out of Mr. Rogers’s neighborhood?

www.commentary.org

Words have to mean things. That isn’t a glib, throwaway line. Many of the most vicious battles in modern American public life are, in their essence, purely semantic fights—often focused on postmodern attempts to redefine previously consistent terms. The Title IX debate on college campuses centers to a remarkably large extent on whether “rape” is a fair description of essentially consensual sex facilitated by alcohol or drugs, and later regretted. Even the contemporary philosophical squabble over human agency seems to boil down to the question: “We now know that people often make decisions at the conscious level of the brain/mind, on the basis of their own genetics and experiences—but is it correct to call that free will or not?”

Across these battles, the postmodern left often holds something of a natural advantage, because—speaking less than half-jokingly—they have all the English teachers on their side. And, while some of the intellectual fights in question are purely theoretical, others matter quite a lot in real-world political and social terms. Perhaps the most relevant of these is the ongoing attempt, by widely read academics and public intellectuals such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, to redefine the concept of racism. In foisting upon us a new understanding of such a consequential term, this campaign leaps from the semantic into the substantive and seeks to reevaluate our thoughts and actions as individuals and as a nation.

For Kendi in particular, racism is properly thought of not as simple out-group bias, but rather as any system that produces disparate outcomes between or across racial and ethnic groups. He says this openly. In his book How to Be an Antiracist and again in an interview with Vox just after he had been minted a MacArthur “genius,” Kendi argues that there are only two possible explanations for a measurable difference in performance between two large groups in a given undertaking—say, standardized testing. These are (1) some form of racism within a social “system,” no matter how hidden and subtle, or (2) actual (I read him as meaning genetic) “inferiority” on the part of the lower-performing of the two groups. “There’s only two causes of, you know, racial disparities,” Kendi said on a Vox podcast. “Either certain groups are better or worse than others, and that’s why they have more, or racist policy. Those are the only two options.”

Disparities, in the Kendi model, are de facto evidence of racist discrimination. Moreover, Kendi’s proposition sets a clever rhetorical trap: His logical implication is that anyone who argues against Explanation No. 1 is, by definition, agreeing with Explanation No. 2. If you don’t accept racism as the culprit in performance outcomes, you must be endorsing group inferiority. Thus, should we accept his framing, simply to argue against “anti-racism” is to identify oneself as a racist. For the nonconfrontational—who dodge this trap by agreeing that all group gaps are either evidence of racism or the dread thing itself—Kendi proposes some social-engineering solutions to fix our racist system. These include the formation of a federal Department of Anti-racism, tasked with ensuring proper representation of all groups across all fields of American enterprise, regardless of performance.

In order to determine the value of Kendi’s proposed definition of “racism,” we must first examine the logic of his claims. The old business-world canard that “the problem with this whole argument is that it is wrong” comes to mind. It is remarkable that such an easily disprovable idea has become so globally popular. The contention that the only factor that might explain group differences in performance, at any given time, is either genetic inferiority or hidden racism is simply wrong as a matter of fact. And if Kendi were saying that temporary cultural underperformance demonstrated genuine “inferiority” across an entire race, that too would be wrong as a matter of fact.

Serious social scientists—from Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams on the political right to William Julius Wilson and John Ogbu on the left—have pointed out for decades that large human groups differ in terms of performance because of dozens of variables. Yes, these include culture (i.e., hours of study time per day). But they also include factors such as environment, region of residence, and even stochastic chance (or luck, to state it a bit more plainly).

One particularly obvious and noncontroversial example of such an “intervening independent variable” is age. According to the Pew Research Center, the most common (modal) age of black Americans is 27, and the most common age for white Americans is 58 (the median age gap, approximately a decade, is smaller). The most common age for Hispanics in the U.S.—across all regions and among both males and females—is 11. Vast differences such as these, which have nothing to do with inferiority, are certain to be reflected in measured group outcomes.

Geography is another powerful factor. Near-majorities of both American blacks and Hispanics still live in the South or Southwest, but a far smaller percentage of whites live in the same regions. This matters because test scores for all groups living in those regions have traditionally been lower than for those elsewhere in the country. Any analysis of group outcomes—from wealth and income statistics on the left to crime rates on the right—that fails to take obvious factors like these into account is dishonest or willfully ignorant.

Almost invariably, analyses that do take such factors into account find what might seem intuitively obvious to most thinking people: These variables explain group-performance gaps far better than “invisible racism” does. While she is sympathetic to arguments about the lingering effects of past oppression, the economist June O’Neill pointed out decades ago in the Journal of Economic Perspectives that the sizable gap in raw income between American blacks and whites shrinks to just 1 to 2 percent when adjustments are made for variables such as test scores, median age, and work experience. And the business-data company PayScale came to similar conclusions just last year regarding a range of commonly discussed race and gender pay gaps. Leaving aside its reductive circularity, a definition of racism as “group gaps” fails utterly if 98 percent of the gaps in question vanish when we adjust for basic non-raced variables such as “how old people are” or “what scores on the big test look like this year.”

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One would think that analyses such as these make an airtight case against theories of overriding systemic racism. And they do—which is why those who believe in such theories make a fighting retreat toward a god-of-the-gaps argument when faced with data that shrink racism as a factor. According to this argument, perhaps even those secondary metrics (age, regional difference, and so on) reflect some still deeper and more dispersed form of racism. This is one of the reasons we are told that standardized exams that test mathematics and similar academic skills are culturally biased against blacks. This is what activists began to argue in the 1970s and what some scholars are beginning to reassert once more. They’re both wrong. Putting to one side the fact that mathematics developed historically in multicolored Mediterranean and North African regions (we still use Arabic numerals today) rather than in, say, Norway, we know what predicts test scores: They track closely with patterns of study time for members of all racial groups. This has been the core “culturalist” argument against IQ hereditarians, who believe in group differences in intelligence, for decades.

In 2017, the liberal-centrist Brookings Institution released a widely circulated article demonstrating that white high-school students study nearly twice as much as black high-school students, with Hispanic students falling in between the two. There are a variety of complex reasons for this, including social class, family stability, the prioritization of other activities such as athletics, and—no doubt—the effects of racism in the past. Perhaps unsurprisingly, grades and test scores follow exactly the same pattern. What’s more, Asian students out-study and thus outperform all white groups—an important phenomenon, in that theories such as Kendi’s provide no coherent way to explain it. Can anyone seriously argue that contemporary U.S. society is institutionally biased toward Korean or Indian-American kids (or Jews) and against blond-haired Anglo-Saxon gentry sprigs?

At least a few left-leaning thinkers are currently dealing with the confusing reality of high performance and successful minorities by hiding it. One recent method has been to formally reclassify Asian Americans as “white” in official documents. For those of us who are more confident in our theories, however, there is no mystery here to decipher: The same set of variables, influenced by past and current bias but also by many other things, explains why some minority groups are currently “beating” whites and why others are not. And one more than suspects that these factors largely explain the distribution of white income in the U.S., where wealthy white groups such as Australian Americans take in 200 to 300 percent more in annual household income than poorer ones such as Appalachian Americans. There is no coherent woke response to these points, beyond moving the causal focus of the original argument back one step and then calling anyone who still disagrees with them a racist.

In addition to its insufficient explanatory power, another weakness of the newly proposed definition and theory of racism is its lack of any coherent causal mechanism. To provide an example, Michelle Alexander argues in The New Jim Crow that black and Hispanic overrepresentation in the criminal-justice system is due to bigotry. To this claim, a quantitative scholar of political science or criminal justice would respond by saying that group crime rates explain the gap in incarceration rates. The next argument, chess-match style, would be that some form of subtle racism must explain the crime-rate gap. But we then have to ask: How? What is the mechanism that inflicts a given set of social problems on black Americans today (and often afflicts working-class whites to the same degree)? And why did this mysterious mechanism have far less influence on genuinely abused black folks in the past—with all “non-whites” making up 24 to 27 percent of sentenced prisoners even during the 1930s (blacks make up 52 percent of non-Hispanic prisoners today)? What’s more, how is it that this mechanism is ineffective when it comes to virtually all African and South Asian immigrants in the U.S. today? During the fairly typical year of 2018, all Asian Americans combined—including dark-skinned South Asians—committed just 127,651 violent crimes  in the U.S. versus 2,531,480 for non-Hispanic whites and 1,087,895 for the smaller black population? On a per capita basis, the Asian violent-crime rate breaks down to one such crime annually for every 153 citizens or residents of Asian descent, versus one crime per 79 among white Americans. And according to a somewhat classic but methodologically sound 1998 article produced by the National Bureau of Economic Research, native-born black Americans are “much more likely to be incarcerated” than black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean. Why? Such questions are never answered, and the argument dies on the spot.

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The Kendi definition of racism so popular today simply fails when subjected to logical analysis. This leaves thinking people facing an obvious question: “So what does racism mean?” Fortunately for us, this is a query with a simple answer: Racism continues to mean what it has always meant. Tribalism is an ancient human vice, dating back to before the Bible, and virtually every dictionary, at least until the Great Awokening of the past few years, has defined “racism” in much the same way for decades: genetically or ethnically based animus against members of a human out-group. The Free Dictionary definition is typical of the genre and quite good. It says that racism is the belief that genetic race “accounts for differences in character or ability” and that “one race is superior” to one or more other races, and it is almost always combined with dislike, prejudice, or “discrimination.”

Racism, in this real sense, is not a vague synonym for reverse karma, as it often seems to be in contemporary writings on the left. It is not “that thing that makes those who have previously suffered continue to struggle today.” It is a practical phenomenon that can be quantified and opposed. Further, and significantly, it is a vice that members of all races are capable of, and that is often expressed at the level of the individual. A major, if rarely discussed, problem with defining racism as a matter of statistical output at the systemic level is that it moves society’s focus away from most actual and demonstrable manifestations of racism—the slurs, fistfights, and muggings, and the simple refusals to promote someone “not quite like us”—that citizens do occasionally face in their pursuit of a good life. Using the older and better definition, we can categorize a range of individual statements and attitudes (“blacks/whites/Jews are inferior”) as definably racist and focus on opposing them as they arise.

Real racism is evidenced not by performance gaps alone but rather by proven discrimination. And such discrimination can be measured in a multitude of ways in this era of sophisticated statistical methods. Any facially racist laws or policies that remain in place—and there may be a few—constitute unethical discrimination and demand that we rid ourselves of them. It can be argued that the same is true for statutes that seem to treat otherwise identical people of different races differently after all major nonracial characteristics have been adjusted for (urban marijuana laws might be an example of this). We, as a society, might even choose to be skeptical of policies that produce large pre-adjustment racial gaps and that do not seem to serve any necessary purpose. There’s a fascinating debate around exactly this issue as it pertains to a string of legal cases dealing with workplace qualifications such as aptitude testing. The point is, bias is bad, and we should fight it.

We’ve seen enough of the fashionable arguments about racism to know that they’re only detrimental to that fight. The claim that “we know significant racism exists because the thing we have defined as significant racism exists” is not serious. If we were to accept it wholesale, it would mean, among other things, that the United States is a Korean-supremacist country. According to the proposed definition of racism, there’s no other way to interpret the outsize success of Korean Americans. This is why words must mean something. Rather than embracing the absurd, or choosing to deny the reality of continuing residual racism, thinking liberals, centrists, and conservatives need to reclaim the classic meaning of a critical term. If not, the proposed definition will become the definition. In a haunting indication of what’s to come, Merriam-Webster revised its definition of “racism” in 2020 to include “systemic racism.”

Ibram X. Kendi was born Ibram Henry Rogers. It is time we left Mr. Rogers’s intellectual neighborhood and got back to consensus reality before the real meaning of the word becomes a cultural artifact.

A transgender psychologist has helped hundreds of teens transition. But rising numbers have her concerned

Erica Anderson took more than half a century to come out as a woman. Now she works with teens in a rush to transition.

www.latimes.com

BERKELEY — Day after day, emails pour into Erica Anderson’s inbox from parents struggling to support their teenagers coming out as transgender.

“He’s been depressed and anxious since the pandemic began, and over the past few days he has shared with me that he’s pretty sure he’s trans,” said one message about a 17-year-old.

“I am very worried that my child is being pressured into wanting to take [puberty] blockers, ‘because that is the next step,’ ” said another. “We are supportive and have helped them to socially transition, but the medical part somehow for her at 13 does not seem right.”

“How do we decide whether an adolescent in the throes of so much turmoil can make such a medically consequential, irreversible decision?” another said about a 15-year-old’s pleas for testosterone injections.

The parents come to Anderson, 71, in part because she herself is transgender. Anderson also stands out because she is one of the few clinical psychologists specializing in transgender youth to publicly question the sharp rise in adolescents coming out as trans or nonbinary.

She has helped hundreds of teens transition. But she has also come to believe that some children identifying as trans are falling under the influence of their peers and social media and that some clinicians are failing to subject minors to rigorous mental health evaluations before recommending hormones or surgeries.

“I think it’s gone too far,” said Anderson, who until recently led the U.S. professional society at the forefront of transgender care. “For a while, we were all happy that society was becoming more accepting and more families than ever were embracing children that were gender variant. Now it’s got to the point where there are kids presenting at clinics whose parents say, ‘This just doesn’t make sense.’ ”

Her skepticism — and her willingness to speak directly to the public — puts her at the center of America’s culture war over trans kids.

Legislation to ban gender-affirming medical interventions for anybody under 18 has been passed or introduced in more than a dozen conservative states. In February, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has described gender surgeries as “child abuse,” instructed state officials to prosecute parents who allow their kids to medically transition — a directive that Anderson condemned as “horrifying.”

On the other side, trans activists want to tear down barriers to transitioning, with some accusing Anderson of having abandoned them.

“From the very beginning of the history of psychology, cisgendered, heterosexual psychologists made this grand notion that trans and queer people were crazy and couldn’t make decisions for themselves,” said D. Ojeda, senior national organizer at the National Center for Transgender Equality in Washington.

Anderson sees herself in the middle.

“The people on the right … and on the left don’t see themselves as extreme,” she said. “But those of us who see all the nuance can see that this is a false binary: Let it all happen without a method or don’t let any pass. Both are wrong.”

[..]

The first U.S. gender clinic dedicated to youth opened in Massachusetts in 2007. Today there are more than 60.

In 2017, federal health researchers surveyed high school students in 19 school districts and found that 1.8% identified as transgender — 2½ times the best estimate made five years earlier.

Clearly, the decline in social stigma has allowed more teens to come out.

Anderson, though, began to wonder whether that was the full story. About 2016, when she began working with the Child and Adolescent Gender Center at UC San Francisco Benioff Children’s Hospital, she noticed a growing group of transgender youth: adolescents who had not appeared to question their gender much, or at all, before puberty.

Some drifted from one identity to the other: gender-questioning, trans, nonbinary, gay. And many of their cases were complicated by anxiety, depression, autism, bipolar disorder or other mental health conditions that predated their desire to transition.

“A fair number of kids are getting into it because it’s trendy,” she told the Washington Post in 2018. “I think in our haste to be supportive, we’re missing that element.”

At the same time, she was careful not to overstate her point.

“I can assure you, transgender identity is not something one catches,” she said in an interview the following year after being elected the first transgender president of the U.S. arm of the World Professional Assn. for Transgender Health, or WPATH.

As millions of teenagers across the U.S. went into quarantine in 2020, Anderson found herself meeting more and more parents who were startled when their children came out as trans. The UC San Francisco adolescent gender center where she worked saw a total of 373 new patients last year — up from 162 in 2019.

The teens tended to tell similar stories: They were in online school, had a lot of time on their hands and were spending more time on social media. TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, and even video games, allowed teens to craft virtual identities that they could then try out in the real world.

Online, a stream of transgender influencers and activists told teens that if they felt uncomfortable with their bodies, or didn’t fit in, maybe they were trans. Some coached kids on how to bind their breasts, how to change their name and pronouns at school, how to push their parents for testosterone.

“To flatly say there couldn’t be any social influence in formation of gender identity flies in the face of reality,” Anderson said. “Teenagers influence each other.”

In four decades as a psychologist, Anderson had witnessed waves of adolescents develop eating disorders and repressed memory syndrome. Research suggests that peer influence and social trends played a key role. Was gender identity really the only sphere of adolescent development immune from social influence?

“What happens when the perfect storm — of social isolation, exponentially increased consumption of social media, the popularity of alternative identities — affects the actual development of individual kids?” Anderson said. “We’re sailing in uncharted seas.”

#  #  #

In early 2021, Anderson logged into a Zoom meeting with a team of experts at UC San Francisco to meet a new patient and his family.

He was 13, and about two months earlier he had started identifying as male. According to his parents, it wasn’t until puberty that he had shown any sign of distress over gender.

A pediatrician had already put him on testosterone, even though he had not met with a psychologist.

“Why is this kid on testosterone so precipitously?” Anderson asked her colleagues.

It did not take long for the team to agree to discontinue the hormone and offer a referral to a gender specialist.

Numerous studies show that transgender teens are more likely than their peers to experience depression and anxiety and that gender-affirming care can help relieve those problems.

But questions remain about how to weigh the benefits of medical interventions against the risks, which include sterility, decreased bone density and other potentially permanent side effects.

Most studies demonstrating the benefits focus on teens who went through extensive mental health evaluations or adults who currently identify as transgender. Neither group may be representative of teens seeking care today — much like the universe of people who apply to college differs from the universe of those who graduate.

Nobody comprehensively tracks how often adolescents in the U.S. receive gender-affirming medical interventions, and what few statistics exist on how often those who transition go on to regret the decision are highly contested.

Most experts agree that teens should get an evaluation before receiving medical interventions. The debate within the field is over how rigorous it should be and whether mental health professionals should be involved.

In December, WPATH proposed new standards of care for transgender youth: minimum ages of 14 for hormone therapy, 15 for chest masculinization and 17 for genital surgeries — and only after comprehensive assessments showing patients meet the “diagnostic criteria of gender incongruence” and demonstrate “persistent” gender incongruence or nonconformity for “several years.”

Unlike Anderson, some healthcare providers see the proposal as a setback because they say it adds roadblocks compared with the current guidelines, which are more than a decade old.

They suggest that teenagers can be trusted just as much as adults when it comes to knowing their gender identity, and point out that the latest proposed guidelines for adults eliminate any requirement for mental health assessments.

“Being trans or gender diverse is not a mental illness, and compulsory psychotherapy is not the standard of care in the gender-affirming medical model,” said Dr. AJ Eckert, medical director of the Gender and Life-Affirming Medicine Program at the Anchor Health Initiative in Stamford, Conn., and the state’s first out nonbinary trans doctor.

“Forcing transgender and gender diverse youth through extensive assessments while their cis peers are affirmed in their identity without question conveys to [them] that they are not ‘normal,’ ” they said.

Eckert also dismissed the idea that peer pressure is driving some teens to identify as trans: “Is it trendy to be one of the most marginalized and vulnerable groups?”

In Eckert’s program, a patient learns about treatment options during a one-hour intake interview. Therapy is not required.

For Anderson, a member of the American Psychological Assn. committee that is writing guidelines for transgender healthcare, providers who pursue medical treatment for children without rigorous evaluation risk committing malpractice. She said clinicians should not dismiss cases like that of Keira Bell, who sued Britain’s only youth gender clinic, claiming that after “a series of superficial conversations” with social workers she was prescribed puberty blockers at 16 and underwent a mastectomy at 20 — only to regret the decision and later resume life as a woman.

“Giving over to hormones on demand will result in many more cases of poor outcomes and many more disappointed kids and parents who somehow came to believe that giving kids hormones would cure their other psychological problems,” Anderson said. “It won’t.”

#  #  #

Anderson’s website promises to “help you become your authentic self” and her Twitter bio proclaims “Working for a radically inclusive world for _all_ transgender people.”

Some cases, she says, are relatively straightforward. After a year of weekly conversations with Liz, a 15-year-old who had no mental health issues and had long questioned her gender before she came out as a girl, Anderson wrote a letter of support this year for a puberty blocker implant and estrogen patches.

Many cases are more complicated. Take Cody, a 16-year-old with tousled pink hair and a high, lilting voice, who identifies as trans male.

He and his parents allowed The Times to observe a recent Zoom session with Anderson, their second one-on-one meeting. She began by asking him what words he used to describe his gender.

“That’s hard,” he said. “The way I describe it is vaguely abstract … I’m a guy, but slightly to the left.”

“OK,” Anderson said. “Well, orient us. Right and left — what’s that?”

“Oh, to the left just means slightly not,” Cody said. “If you take, like, a normal guy? And then just kind of take away a little bit of the guy part, but you don’t go anywhere.”

Cody has ADHD and expressed suicidal thoughts during the pandemic. His parents came to Anderson at the end of last year after he said he wanted to go on hormones. They weren’t ready to agree to any irreversible physical changes until he spent more time exploring his gender identity.

After his first session with Anderson, he complained to his mom that he felt interrogated.

But Anderson starts from the premise that questions are the key to understanding.

In her view, gender-affirming care is not accepting everything a teen says at face value, but engaging with the patient in an empathetic, open-minded way. She thinks of it as something of a detective game — listening to the kids and parents and piecing together the history.

So Anderson kept on asking questions.

What did Cody mean, she asked, when he referred to his gender as abstract?“

Not one or the other,” he said. “But also in, like, multiple other dimensions.”

“A lot of the people I’m friends with experience gender more as like a specific vibe rather than a physical category,” he went on. “One friend says that their gender is the same vibe as a raccoon. They’re not saying that their gender is a raccoon. They’re saying that their gender has the same, like, chaotic, dumpster vibes as raccoons.”

“Dumpster?” Anderson asked. “What would the human version of that be like?”

“There isn’t one; it’s just the same chaotic energy that their gender has,” Cody said. “Which is why it’s, like, very hard to explain. It’s just kind of like a dialect — a way to talk about gender that just kind of builds up within groups.”

Anderson does not presume to understand how everyone who identifies as transgender thinks. While she embraces a somewhat conventional female identity — sleek blond hair, manicured red nails, a glittery pink iPhone — many teens cultivate more esoteric ideas of gender.

Some feel uncomfortable as girls but do not identify with cisgender men. Many opt for androgynous looks: baggy pants, hoodies, short hair. Sometimes they want top surgery but are not interested in hormones. Or they want just enough testosterone to lower their voice but not enough to grow body hair. Some, she believes, construct gender identities so idiosyncratic that they struggle to develop shared meaning.

After asking Cody more about his history of gender distress, his chats with his parents and what might ease his discomfort, she arranged to meet him the following week.

It would likely take months of exploration or longer to decide whether Cody was ready for hormone therapy.

[..]

Over the last few months, some European countries have reversed course and urged more caution.

In February, health authorities in Sweden, a pioneer in trans healthcare, said that “uncertain science,” rising numbers of people who regret transitioning and potential side effects prompted the nation to restrict using hormone treatments for most people under 18.

France’s National Academy of Medicine also advised caution in the use of blockers or hormones for youth, citing potential side effects. “The risk of over-diagnosis is real, as evidenced by the growing number of young adults wishing to ‘detransition,’ ” the academy said.

No matter how closely Anderson follows the guidelines for trans care, she worries she could make the wrong call.Every time she logs on to meet a client, she thinks of all the harms she could inflict — by inaction, by not being supportive enough, by rushing someone through the process.

Some activists have accused her of pretending to be an ally while justifying bigotry that restricts access to medical services.

“You are killing children with your hate,” one anonymous critic wrote on Twitter.

Last fall, Anderson left UC San Francisco to focus on her private practice. Since then she has written numerous op-eds and given various interviews. She has organized transgender women’s luxury retreats in the Mexican Riviera and online seminars for parents of transgender kids. But she is also angling for a new career as a television host — filming a pilot for a show in which she hopes to educate the public about diverse identities and bring “some kind of sanity to a highly polarized environment.”

More than a decade after Anderson transitioned, she is not in touch with her ex-wife, but she has a happy relationship with both her adult children. After dating men and women, she has a girlfriend. She feels more accepted as a trans woman now than she ever imagined possible.

But she sometimes wonders whether she should quit working with trans youth.

“I have these private thoughts: ‘This has gone too far. It’s going to get worse. I don’t want any part of it,’ ” she said. “I worry that people will accuse me of setting the train in motion, as part of those who advocated the affirmative approach to gender in youth, even though that’s not a reasonable account of what happened.”

For now, Anderson continues to raise questions in her practice and in the media.

In doing so, she follows the advice she gives teens whose friends tell them “Don’t doubt it. You’re trans.”

“I have a dictum: When in doubt, doubt,” she said. “Questioning is a good thing. How are you going to find out if you are lockstep with whatever conclusion you come to first?”

How U.S. Schools Became Obsessed with Race - Robert Pondiscio, Commentary Magazine

Critical race theory took over in two ways: first gradually, then suddenly

www.commentary.org

We have been inundated of late with alarming stories about the radical transformation of schooling in the wake of George Floyd’s death last summer and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. To mention just a few: We hear of third-graders in Cupertino, California (home of Apple) forced to discuss their racial and sexual identities and rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.” We read about a New York City principal asking parents to determine which of eight “white identities” best describes them—from “white supremacist” to “white abolitionist”—and seeking their commitment to “dismantling whiteness and not allowing whiteness to reassert itself.” And we’ve seen reports of an Arizona state education department’s “equity toolkit” titled “They’re not too young to talk about race!” which recommends that white parents “can and should begin addressing issues of race and racism early, even before their children can speak.”

The daily drumbeat suggests there has been a violent leftward lurch in public education in the past year, but is it really something new? Critical race theory and “anti-racism” came to dominate K–12 education in two ways: gradually, then suddenly.

From the nation’s founding through the mid-19th century, education theorists from Benjamin Rush to Horace Mann hewed to the notion that a republic cannot long remain ignorant and free—hence the need for free and universal public education. From these founding ideals of citizen-making, Americans drifted over time to see education as serving chiefly private purposes, even if it also advances the commonweal. We expect schools to help our children get along with others and prepare academically for college and career, and to otherwise shepherd them toward a fruitful adult life. But as a profession, education has a long history of seeing schools as agencies to promote whatever was on the mind of “progressive” reformers of the era—from abolition, temperance, and turning immigrants into assimilated English-speaking citizens over a century ago, to promoting bilingualism and raising awareness of climate change more recently. As the education-reform veteran Chester E. Finn Jr. observes, “schools have long seemed like a swell place for adult causes to try to enlist kids.”

Education’s present focus is identifying and correcting racial inequity. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the current racialized view of American K–12 education and its outcomes is the exclusive project of classroom radicals and doctrinaire race and gender-studies theorists. A generation of teachers, administrators, and policymakers has been trained, encouraged, and even required by law to view their work through the lens of racial disparity. The “woke” revolution roiling our schools, with its Manichean view of oppressors vs. oppressed, is an overnight development that has been decades in the making. “Wokeness” on college campuses seeped into teacher training decades ago, while university schools of education have long seen themselves as an instrument for remaking society along lines more congenial to social justice activists.

_____________

Let’s start with California. Over the past two decades, its test scores, which once led the nation, have flagged. Its long-standing dominion over textbook content, which came about because of the sheer size of the state’s student population, has faded thanks to technology-driven changes in the publishing market. But now it has once again become a K–12 bellwether owing to the adoption by the state’s board of education in March of a controversial ethnic-studies curriculum. For now, that curriculum is voluntary, but not for long. A law that would have required every student in the state to take and pass a one-semester ethnic-studies course in order to graduate was vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom last year, but it has been reintroduced and is widely expected to pass. Many districts are moving forward anyway. Ethnic studies will be a graduation requirement in Los Angeles schools starting with the 2023–24 school year. Fresno, the state’s third-largest district, will require two semesters of ethnic studies starting this fall.

California’s “model curriculum” was met with intense debate and criticism when the initial draft was released in 2019. The state’s department of education received over 21,000 comments on the document, most criticizing it as one-sided or prejudiced. Jewish groups insisted the curriculum didn’t accurately reflect the American Jewish experience, and contained anti-Semitic lessons and ideas, including references to Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Since then, activists, advocates, and angry Twitter mobs have waged war over subsequent drafts, arguing over which groups and people deserved greater representation, and which offensive or misleading portrayals should be massaged or removed.

But these battles, however earnestly fought, betray a fundamental misunderstanding about what gets taught, and how difficult it is to keep inaccurate and even pernicious ideas out of American classrooms. Curricula are not handed down to teachers on stone tablets. Indeed, they are seldom, perhaps never, taught as written. What gets in front of students in most American classrooms is largely up to teacher discretion, making it nearly impossible to control—or even monitor—the content of children’s education or the ideals and values being valorized by their teachers. If the many factions battling over California’s model curriculum did so believing the fight would determine the shape that ethnic studies will take in classrooms, they were almost certainly mistaken.

Nearly every teacher in America—99 percent of elementary teachers, 96 percent of secondary-school teachers—draws upon “materials I developed and/or selected myself” in teaching English language arts, according to a RAND Corporation study. Google and Pinterest are the two most common sources of curricular materials cited by teachers. Nearly three out of four social-studies teachers in a separate RAND report agreed with the statement “Textbooks are becoming less and less important in my classroom.” Materials that teachers “found, modified, or created from scratch” make up the majority of what gets taught. Only one in four secondary-school social-studies teachers cited resources “provided by my school or district” as composing the majority of what they use in class on a given day.

Moreover, all this curriculum curation, creation, customization, and tinkering is not regarded as a flaw, but a feature of classroom practice. Teachers are trained to “differentiate instruction,” adapting or supplementing the curriculum to make it more engaging, accessible, or challenging based on the needs of individual students. Academic standards like Common Core mostly dictate the “skills” students are expected to demonstrate; they are largely silent on the specific content kids should learn. These practices and habits weigh heavily on the use of controversial curricula, whether officially “adopted” or not. Outsiders assume far more top-down control over classroom content than actually exists.

A good example of the “choose your own adventure” nature of curricula and instruction is the New York Times’ hotly debated 1619 Project, a conscious bid to “reframe” the conception of America from a democratic republic founded in 1776 to a “slavocracy” that began with the arrival of the first Africans in 1619. It put forth several widely discredited ideas as fact, including that the American Revolution was fought primarily to preserve slavery, and the claim of provocateur Nikole Hannah-Jones that “for the most part…black Americans fought back alone” against racism. The Wall Street Journal quoted Civil War historian James McPherson, who criticized the project’s “implicit position that there have never been any good white people, thereby ignoring white radicals and even liberals who have supported racial equality.”

Given these charged assertions, intense and acrimonious debate, and the 1619 Project’s dour view of American history, one might expect school boards, districts, and schools to exercise care and caution before formally adopting it for classroom use. And this appears to be so. A vanishingly small number of school districts has expressly authorized it for use in their schools, including Chicago, Buffalo, and Newark, New Jersey. However, the website for the Pulitzer Center, which partnered with the Times to produce a free and downloadable 1619 Project curriculum for K–12 classrooms, says it’s in use in all 50 states. There is no reason to suspect that the Pulitzer Center is exaggerating its claim to have “connected 4,500 classrooms…with the work of Nikole Hannah-Jones and her collaborators.” It’s a telltale glimpse of how controversial materials find their way into American classrooms. Teachers are doing what teachers do: searching, sampling, looking for lessons and readings on a given day to engage students, differentiate instruction, or launch a classroom discussion. It is impossible to know with any confidence the conditions under which selections from the 1619 Project are being introduced or discussed, what other readings are also assigned, or if any opposing points of view are offered. The classroom is a black box. Teachers, either individually or in grade-level or subject-matter “teams,” decide for themselves what gets read, discussed, and put in front of children—with little if any oversight.

They will never be convinced that cancel culture exists

Let's not waste our breath

sarahhaider.substack.com|Sarah Haider

In some parts of the landscape, it seems we are still debating this question.

A few days ago, journalist Adam Davidson, asked on Twitter:

“Can one of you believers in cancel culture just write one piece that gives evidence and doesn't just speak to a feeling you have? Maybe some data that helps your readers know the size and scale of this problem? Also, some examples of people actually fired?”

It seems absurd to me that anyone could still deny the existence of the phenomenon - in fact, so absurd that I literally don’t believe it.

However, others are not as cynical as me, and supplied Mr. Davidson with countless stories - occasionally their own. One man said he was suspended from the British Labour Party for saying “only women experience menopause”. Multiple women claimed similar losses, firings and suspensions over gender issues.

Others shared the dataset by FIRE cataloging 426 cases in the recent past of scholars targeted for ideological reasons. They noted that the scholars were ten times more likely to be targeted by those on the left. Another user shared a catalog of events that bubbled up in public discourse - nearly 300 incidents.

Most significantly, some pointed out that for every case that makes the news, there are likely scores more that don’t. Most of us cannot afford to make a stink about a traumatic incident, we cope and try to move on as best we can. The incidents that do rise to public consciousness do so usually because the person targetted is already in the public eye - and privileged enough to have a stage.

I was unlucky enough to once debate Billy Bragg on BBC about this issue, and I learned very quickly that my carefully prepared arguments were less than worthless. No amount of reasoning, anecdotes, or even data was going to convince him. I began to see what I see clearly now: that they aren’t denying the existence of cancel culture because they don’t see it - they are denying it because they still want to keep this weapon and don’t want to feel like bad people for using it. It is easier to just pretend a harm isn’t happening than to try and justify it (but of course, when cornered by reality, they will try that too).

The arguments usually progress down the steps of clown-world politics.

First, they will deny. Then, they will minimize (either the relevance or impact or both). Finally, they will outright justify.

Just yesterday, Greg Lukianoff and Komi German of FIRE wrote a piece in the Daily Beast with evidence of the existence of this culture. “And despite the denialism surrounding its very existence, we will demonstrate through empirical data and polling that cancel culture is not only a real problem, it is one that continues to expand in scope and size.”

A worthy pursuit by two earnest and thoughtful people. Too bad it won’t work.

* * *

At this point, it is profoundly naive to imagine that evidence will result in anything but a shift in goalposts. Not because they are fundamentalists on the issue - but because they are anything but.

I have directly engaged with literal Islamic fundamentalists in my work for years. The fundamentalists might be unhinged, moralistic zealots - but they are fairly straightforward debaters. And that is because they are grounded in principle - they actually believe what they say. And over the years, I have successfully changed the minds of fervently religious people through debate. My most frustrating encounters were instead with very liberal believers.

These were the Western-born-and-raised individuals who grew up with a variant of the faith most believers would consider utter heresy. And yet, despite their liberal upbringings and carefree enjoyment of the freedoms of the secular West, they would sputter indignantly when asked to even acknowledge the religious abuse and persecution faced by those who did not have such privileges. At first I thought the problem was simple ignorance - they had difficulty accepting what they themselves had not experienced. But the mountains of data, polls, historical and judicial analysis I presented made no difference either - to them Islam would always be a good and tolerant religion, and Muslims beleaguered, but model, minorities.

The reason was simple: as members of a religious group which was often considered marginalized, they could benefit from victim status among the general population. Meanwhile, as beneficiaries of a uniquely liberal upbringing within Islam, they were spared from the worst elements of the practice and community. They had both the freedoms of the West, and freedom from the worst of Islam - while appropriating and minimizing the suffering of others. They could have their cake and eat it too.

I learned a valuable lesson in dealing with these types. When someone sincerely holds a position, they will debate in earnest. When someone holds a position because it is in their favor to hold it, they will not. You must respond to the self-serving man by taking away the benefit he derives from an act - by turning the incentives around. Then, the same selfishness that keeps him in will lead him out.

The “what cancel culture?” guys are not like the fundamentalists - they are not sincere doctrinaires, but the beneficiaries of a brutally unjust system. The merits of the position they hold are irrelevant.

I’ll go further. They know that cancel culture exists. They like it, and want to keep using it. The only way to get them to stop is to turn that weapon against them.

* * *

I’m sure I’ve lost at least half my readers there, who probably didn’t expect such a militant position from me.

But frankly, I’m sick of this. I’m sick of seeing good people destroyed by this madness, and of watching others cower in fear because of it.

It has been years and years of life-ruining mobbings wreaking havoc on our discourse. The result is a suffocating atmosphere of self-censorship - which allows the most extreme to rule the day. Empowered in their role as the only actors who can openly advocate for their values, our culture appears to leap to their bidding. Meanwhile, the resentment of the disempowered grows. In the reprieve provided by the anonymity of the ballot box, they reveal their disgust at the ruling class and a rejection of their ideology. But the ruling class is incentivized to interpret this rejection in only one way: as a sign of hate and bigotry.

The denial of cancel culture is an attempt to maintain the semblance of victimhood, while behaving as a bully. This pretense of disempowerment is vital to their claims of moral authority - as I’ve noted before: wokeism (the religion of the elite) is a Will to Power, an anti-ideology. Their language and demands shift with the wind - what is woke one day will be contemptible bigotry the next, the only constant being the stupefying rate of change. The only thing that can arguably be called a “principle” is their approach to power. In their faith, power doesn’t belong to the people - it belongs to the powerless. And as it happens, the only legitimate arbiter of who is or isn’t powerless is the elite, woke class. As the self-defined electors and self-declared champions of the marginalized, they demand and then preside over the transfer of power, guiding it into place in a gesture we are assured is self-denying and altruistic.

But if it is the case that indeed the powerless are not so powerless, that they can strip “The Privileged” of their livelihoods for mere speech - then the moral justification underlying their ideology is exposed as plainly false.

Denial of cancel culture is not a matter of ignorance - it is a matter of political expediency.

* * *

Would you be incentivized to hold that fire was a bad thing if it had never burned you or anyone you knew - but disfigured those you happened to hate? What if you had the power to start these fires - but your enemies had comparatively little?

Maybe you enjoy the attacks or can justify them as worthwhile in service of some greater good, so you fan the flames. But you also don’t want to seem like the kind of person who would do such a horrible thing. So you pretend there is no harm done. And in the rare instances a blackened enemy corpse lands squarely in front of you and you can no longer deny its existence, it is too easy to simply shrug and say “well, what did she expect? She was playing with fire”.

The thing about empathy is that it is against our nature to apply it universally. It is a provincial emotion - one that grants grace to our friends and delivers fury to our enemies. The more humanistic emotion - compassion - is a difficult one to hold, and does not relay nearly the same kind of emotional satisfaction. So long as cancel culture strikes so unevenly, it will never go away. So long as the harms fall far more heavily on one side, it is in the interest of the other to continue weaponizing it.

The only way Good White Men like Mr. Davidson will recognize the harms of cancel culture is when it is them and their friends and loved ones, who suffer.

“But Sarah… Does this mean you are asking for more cancellations?”

This is indeed one of the conclusions that one can draw. But no, I don’t believe we must to stoop to cruelty to end it.

More importantly, I do not trust anyone who claims to be able to know when to put aside principle without losing their sense of right and wrong altogether. I cannot, now or ever, try to destroy an innocent person’s livelihood, nor will I advocate for others to do the same. This may be the doomed logic of the pacifist - and perhaps proof that I’m not cut out for cultural warrior status.

Nevertheless, a strategy that relies on the nobility of its enemy is not a strategy at all - it is a prayer.

And while it is dishonorable to cancel innocent bystanders of any political affiliation for any reason - what we can do is treat hypocrites with the same compassion and kindness they would mete out on others who find themselves on the wrong side of the mob.

When a canceller gets canceled, it is fairly common to see anti-woke liberals defend them - as if on a mission to prove their own magnanimity and integrity. But this is a misguided tact, and in practice more self-serving than morally justified.

There must be a cost to injustice - otherwise there is no hope of change.

Meanwhile, those of us who oppose the changes demanded by the woke must not waste our efforts on lost causes - like convincing disingenuous actors of the existence of the damage. Instead, our focus should be aimed at more fruitful pursuits, like understanding the roots of the decay, investigating why we are shifting into a culture of honor vs. a culture of dignity, why the administrative state and the environment of institutions are amenable to the demands of the woke, how changes brought upon by technology shift incentives, and most importantly what interventions can meaningfully address the problem.

• FIRE: The Targeting of Scholars for Ideological Reasons from 2015 to Present
• Twitter thread of over 400 cancelations

There’s something I can respect about a fundamentalist or an extremist. They’re all-in. They know what they believe, they know why they believe it, and they’ll tell you to your face. They’re honest about the fact that I, as a non-believer, deserve to burn in hell. I can actually work with this, because I know where I stand.

Modern moderate believers are frustrating because they’re trying to straddle the divide between their primitive superstitious beliefs and a modern, secular, diverse society. They’ll vacillate, equivocate, try to make it my fault their religion says I should burn in hell, and so on.

“If the Bible condones slavery, then I condone slavery. Because the Bible’s always right about every subject...”

-- Pastor Steven Anderson

Freud relates the story of a man who was accused by his neighbour of having returned a kettle in a damaged condition and the three arguments he offers.

    1. That he had returned the kettle undamaged     2. That it was already damaged when he borrowed it     3. That he had never borrowed it in the first place

How Ed Schools Became a Menace to Higher Education

quillette.com

Microaggressive acts can usually be explained away by seemingly nonbiased and valid reasons. For the recipient of a microaggression, however, there is always the nagging question of whether it really happened. … It is difficult to identify a microaggression, especially when other explanations seem plausible. Many people of color describe a vague feeling that they have been attacked, that they have been disrespected, or that something is not right. … In some respects, people of color may find an overt and obvious racist act easier to handle than microaggressions that seem vague or disguised. … The above incident [an account of a disagreement between the lead author and a white female flight attendant] reveals how microaggressions operate to create psychological dilemmas for both the White perpetrator and the person of color.

The atmosphere of the home is prolonged in the school, where the students soon discover that (as in the home) in order to achieve some satisfaction they must adapt to the precepts which have been set from above. One of these precepts is not to think.

The Twitching Generation

Around the world, doctors have noticed teenage patients reporting the sudden onset of tics. Is this the first illness spread by social media?

www.theatlantic.com|Helen Lewis

Three years ago, the psychiatrist Kirsten Müller-Vahl began to notice something unusual about the newest patients at her clinic in Hannover, Germany. A typical Tourette’s patient is a boy who develops slow, mild motor tics—blinking or grimacing—at about age 5 to 7, followed later by simple vocalizations such as coughing. Only about one in 10 patients progress to the disorder’s most famous symptom—coprolalia, which involves shouting obscene or socially unacceptable words. Even then, most patients utter only half a dozen swear words, on repeat.

But these new patients were different. They were older, for a start—teenagers—and about half of them were girls. Their tics had arrived suddenly, explosively, and were extreme; some were shouting more than 100 different obscenities. This last symptom in particular struck Müller-Vahl as odd. “Even in extremely severely affected [Tourette’s] patients, they try to hide their coprolalia,” she told me. The teenagers she was now seeing did not. She had the impression, she said, that “they want to demonstrate that they suffer from these symptoms.” Even more strangely, many of her new patients were prone to involuntary outbursts of exactly the same phrase: Du bist hässlich. “You are ugly.”

Müller-Vahl, a professor of psychiatry at Hannover Medical School and the chair of the European Society for the Study of Tourette Syndrome, was not the only one puzzled by this phenomenon. The global community of Tourette’s researchers is tight-knit, and as they talked it became clear that a shift in patients and symptoms was happening all over the world, at the same time. Before the pandemic, 2 to 3 percent of pediatric patients at the Johns Hopkins University Tourette’s Center, in Baltimore, had acute-onset tic-like behaviors, but that rose last year to 10 to 20 percent, according to The Wall Street Journal. Texas Children’s Hospital reported seeing approximately 60 teenagers with sudden tics between March 2020 and the autumn of 2021, compared with just one or two a year before that.

At an online conference last October, doctors in Canada, France, the United Kingdom, and Hungary pooled their knowledge. They had all seen an increase in patients with this unusual form of tic disorder. One teenager came from the Pacific archipelago of New Caledonia, which France once used as a penal colony; another came from the tiny South Atlantic island of St. Helena, to which Britain sent Napoleon for his final exile. “Very remote locations,” Andreas Hartmann, a consultant neurologist at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, told me via email. “Yet accessible to TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.”

Four months before the clinic in Hannover saw its first new-style patient, a 20-year-old German man named Jan Zimmermann had launched a YouTube channel called Gewitter im Kopf, or “Thunderstorm in the Head.” That’s how he describes living with his socially inappropriate, visually arresting symptoms: blurting out obscene words, throwing food, trying to nibble his friend Tim. In the past, he has set off fire alarms, pulled the emergency brake on the train, and once asked a cross-eyed HR manager, “Is the wall more interesting than me?”

Zimmermann now has 2 million YouTube followers and a bespoke app that allows users to download his “best tics” as sound files. On his merchandise page, you can buy hoodies, mugs, and a 25-euro doormat emblazoned with one of his most common sayings: Du bist heute besonders hässlich, or “You are particularly ugly today”—nearly the same phrase that kept coming out of Müller-Vahl’s patients.

Zimmermann calls his symptoms “Gisela” to suggest that they have a will of their own. Last May, he threatened legal action against an activist who called him a Nazi after he released a baking video in which he said, “In the oven, give my regards to Anne Frank.” (In Germany, where Holocaust denial and Hitler salutes are illegal, this was a particularly shocking thing to broadcast on the internet.) His lawyers suggested that, because Zimmermann himself faced marginalization, calling him a Nazi was absurd. And he could not be held responsible for the offense caused: After all, Gisela made him do it.

Zimmermann’s behavior seems to have influenced his viewers’ own tics. In a forthcoming study of 32 of her new-style patients, Müller-Vahl found that 63 percent threw food, and that the most common vocalizations were swear words such as arschloch (“asshole”) and fick dich (“fuck you”). Some parroted other phrases of Zimmermann’s, such as pommes (“fries”) or fliegende haie (“flying sharks”). But when her team began to question the teenagers in front of their parents, many denied watching Zimmermann’s YouTube videos.

Tammy Hedderly, a neurologist at the Evelina London Children’s Hospital, sometimes calls her new-style tic patients “Evies.” These girls “present thumping their chest, shouting beans, and falling to their knees,” she told the virtual conference. The nickname comes from a 21-year-old British influencer named Evie Meg Field, also known as @thistrippyhippie, who has 14.2 million followers on TikTok and nearly 800,000 on Instagram. Field has published a book called My Nonidentical Twin: What I’d Like You to Know About Living With Tourette’s.

Field’s signature tic—saying beans—is what alerted the British researcher Tara Murphy that the Tourette’s patient she saw on remote St. Helena must have been influenced by the internet. At the October conference, Murphy described how “LM,” a 16-year-old born and raised on the island, had tics from an early age but suddenly developed much more florid symptoms in early 2021: clicking, whistling, and saying beans. In other words, LM was an “Evie.”

Field herself has acknowledged her strange power. On September 25, she posted a video of herself looking sheepish with the caption: “me watching 95% of ppl with tics/tourette’s say the ‘beans’ tic knowing i’m the original source.” But Field and Zimmerman, who did not respond to requests for comment, are only two among dozens of “Tourette’s influencers” with large fan bases online. According to TikTok, videos tagged #tourettes have been viewed more than 5 billion times.

The unexpectedly wide appeal of these videos is surely bound up with transgression and the old-fashioned desire to rubberneck, mixed up with a backlash against “normies”—the neurotypical—and a proud assertion of the right to be different. The essence of coprolalia is violating social conventions, and watching those with Tourette’s shout and swear is just as compelling as watching an edgy comedian say the allegedly unsayable.

The teenagers who watch the #tourettes videos also find community, acceptance, sympathy, and validation. Less wholesomely, they find proof that the more eye-catching, disruptive, or rude the creator’s tics are, the more viral they go.

Katie krautwurst was a high-school cheerleader in Le Roy, New York, when the twitching began. In October 2011, she woke up from a nap and started to spasm. A few weeks later, her friend Thera Sanchez, also a cheerleader, began to experience the same symptoms. More and more girls followed: shaking, stammering, fainting, unable to control their arms as they flailed around their bodies. Eventually, at least 18 people in LeRoy—including one boy and a 36-year-old woman—were affected.

“Parents wept as their daughters stuttered at the dinner table,” The New York Times Magazine recounted months later. “Teachers shut their classroom doors when they heard a din of outbursts, one cry triggering another, sending the increasingly familiar sounds ricocheting through the halls. Within a few months, as the camera crews continued to descend, the community barely seemed to recognize itself.” The health authorities in Le Roy looked for a physical explanation: Was the town’s water contaminated? Its soil? Erin Brockovich—yes, that Erin Brockovich—appeared in town, ready to bust open a scandalous cover-up of industrial pollution. The New York State Department of Health tried to reassure parents at a public meeting that no such cover-up existed. Katie, Thera, and their mothers appeared on NBC’s Today show, the girls shaking and spasming, which drew nationwide attention to their cause. The segment portrayed the tics as a sudden interruption in otherwise contented lives. “When these started,” Thera said, “I was fine. I was perfectly fine. I felt good about everything. I was on honor roll.” She just woke up one day, she said, and the symptoms began.

The next day, however, the fever began to break. David Lichter, a Buffalo doctor who had treated several of the Le Roy girls, went public and revealed his diagnosis: conversion disorder, a now-outdated Freudian term for when psychological stress manifests as physical symptoms. Global experts began taking an interest in the case. “They were not all happy cheerleaders, living the American dream; they just weren’t,” Simon Wessely, a psychiatry professor at King’s College London with a long-standing interest in contested illnesses, told me. Later coverage filled in some important history: The week before Katie’s tics started, her mother, Beth, had had brain surgery. Thera, it emerged, had a difficult relationship with some members of her family. Another girl reported that she had a violent father.

Wessely, who is also an epidemiologist, described what happened in Le Roy as “a fairly standard incident of contagious tics.” When the girls went on television, he said, many specialist doctors saw them and began voicing their skepticism on social media. “Neurologists,” Wessely added, “often don’t bother with euphemisms: ‘They’re hysterical. That is not any known movement disorder in science.’” Eventually, the diagnosis of a mass psychogenic illness began to gain credence. Lichter’s main contribution to the debate, he told me by email recently, was to advise local news outlets—amid “a strong push from family members and other activists to find the ‘true’ cause of the problem”—that media attention was aggravating the outbreak.

In 2012, after communicating with neurologists who had evaluated two-thirds of the Le Roy patients, Wessely and Robert E. Bartholomew, a sociologist in New Zealand, co-authored an academic paper discussing the incident. They described the outbreak as an example of a mass psychogenic illness, or MPI—that is, an illness that arises in the mind and makes a group of people feel unwell at the same time. Such outbreaks were once called “mass hysteria.”

If Le Roy was the site of an MPI, then Katie, the popular cheerleader, might have been the index case, from whom others subconsciously took their cues—think of Abigail, the character in The Crucible responsible for the 1692 Salem witch trials. The researchers noted that such outbreaks of tics and twitches have traditionally been rare in Western contexts; they are more common in countries where a belief in witchcraft is widespread. But following similar incidents in North Carolina and Virginia, Le Roy was the third such case in a decade.

The Le Roy outbreak was also, unusually until that point, not confined to a single class or friendship group. Instead, the tics spread throughout the school. The researchers wondered if social media, then a new technology, might have influenced the pattern. The only adult affected by the twitches, a 36-year-old nurse, said that she mostly followed the town’s news through Facebook. Bartholomew and his co-authors wrote that, according to doctors who treated 12 Le Roy patients, “as soon as the media coverage stopped, they all began to rapidly improve and are doing very well”—a finding that subsequent local news accounts corroborate.

Since Le Roy, there have been more such incidents, including a 2012 outbreak of “hiccups” in Danvers, Massachusetts, which affected 24 students, mostly girls, at two high schools. (Ironically enough, Danvers is the site of Salem Village, where the witchcraft hysteria had broken out more than three centuries before.)

In August, Kirsten Müller-Vahl was ready to declare that the new-style tics also belonged in the category of MPIs. She wrote up her findings in a research paper called “Stop That! It’s Not Tourette’s but a New Type of Mass Sociogenic Illness.” In other words, society, and specifically social media, was spreading the disorder. Inevitably, her claims attracted attention in newspapers—“Is social media behind an epidemic of teenage tics?” asked the Daily Mail, the British tabloid—and among Tourette’s specialists.

Categorizing the new tic-disorder outbreak as a mass psychogenic illness would explain many of its notable features, such as the age and gender profile of patients. Bartholomew says that out of the 3,500 likely cases of MPIs that he has identified through history, “I would say 98 percent of them are majority female.” (Two possible exceptions are Gulf War and Havana syndromes.)

Are girls simply more prone to such illnesses? Early research does suggest that they are more affected by social-media pressures, after all. Or are doctors and authorities more ready to describe women’s symptoms as the modern version of hysteria? What is clear, though, is that something new is happening in the history of mass psychogenic illnesses. Previously, an outbreak was limited to one village, one classroom, one nunnery. “It has always been said that it’s spread by sight and sound; in the past, that’s been a limiting factor,” Bartholomew told me. But now we are a global village, and if tics can instead be spread through screens, then that tells us something about how strongly teenagers feel about the people they interact with online.

Evie meg field’s social-media bios and book subtitle reference her experience of living with Tourette’s. But after watching videos of her throwing around food, Hartmann and Müller-Vahl expressed doubts about the diagnosis. Hartmann suggested that some influencers, and some of those they influence, have something called “functional tics” layered—“like an onion,” he said—over mild to moderate Tourette’s. Some of their most visually arresting, most distinctive, most viral behavior might be the result of functional tics, not Tourette’s.

Experts have not reached a consensus about what to call their new-style patients, and how to classify their symptoms. Some use the phrase “tic-like behavior” to distinguish their movements from those caused by Tourette’s, while the concept of functional tics arises from another condition, called functional neurological disorder, or FND. (The word functional denotes a glitch in how the brain’s software works; the malfunction somehow affects the nervous system and produces unwanted, involuntary sounds and movements.) Indeed, Field’s memoir indicates that she received an FND diagnosis several years ago, following an unspecified trauma; she was diagnosed with Tourette’s only in October 2020, well after she became an influencer on TikTok. Not every twitch, click, or whistle is a sign of Tourette’s. For the girls who say “beans” or “flying sharks,” FND is the most common alternative diagnosis.

So why do we talk about Tourette’s influencers rather than FND influencers? Tourette’s is widely seen as having a physical cause rather than a psychological one. The diagnosis confers greater social legitimacy on influencers’ behavior, and is far less likely to offend patients than anything that smacks of “hysteria” or being “all in your mind.” Tourette’s also makes the teenagers’ inability to control their tics understandable to outsiders. “It’s a great feeling to have a name for my condition, which means I can easily tell people, ‘I have Tourette’s,’ if I need to,” writes Field.

Why should this particular set of symptoms arrive at this particular moment? Over Zoom, Robert Bartholomew told me that the pandemic—and the lockdown and homeschooling measures used to contain it—had created a “perfect storm” for an illness spread through social media. Teenagers were isolated from their friends, stuck at home with their families, spending hours alone with their screens, with their usual routines knocked out.

Other experts noted that the pandemic didn’t cause the new tic disorder—the first patients arrived in Müller-Vahl’s clinic before COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan—although lockdown measures may have exacerbated it. One hypothesis is that some of us are “tic prone,” but display tics only when triggered by stress or another illness. This fits with existing research showing that many members of Generation Z are anxious, isolated, and depressed, with body-image troubles worsened by the perfect bodies and aspirational lives they see on TikTok and Instagram. They are part of a grand social experiment, the first cohort to grow up with the internet on smartphones, the first generation whose entire lives have been shaped by the demands of social-media algorithms. Tics and twitches may be their unconscious method of saying: I want out.

Although tics can be profoundly debilitating, some may fulfill a short-term psychological need: Teenagers with them might be able to skip school, or to limit unwanted or stressful activities. They can make friends online, and find a ready-made community. They receive attention and sympathy from their families and from strangers on the internet. Those with coprolalia can break taboos without consequences: Gisela made me do it. (A disorder where you can swear and use slurs in public seems almost comically apt for the age of cancel culture.) Hartmann said that making Tourette’s content could be, in some cases, “the ultimate freedom. Suddenly you can behave like a jerk, and people will even congratulate you, and become subscribers to your YouTube channel.” That dynamic can make these tic disorders harder to treat. Nanette Mol Debes, a specialist at the Herlev Hospital in Denmark, explained to me that some of the affected girls have balked when told that they must stop their movements. “Sometimes patients are sad or angry, and say: ‘It’s been nice to have tics.’”

The other side of the story is that some of those with tics, whatever their cause, involuntarily harm themselves. Some have to give up hobbies or jobs they love. Evie Meg Field’s book ends with moving testimony from those with tics, such as “It can be hard to even sleep without medication,” and stories of being denied boarding to airplanes for repeatedly saying, “I’ve got a gun.” Given the COVID-related disruptions and the long-term underfunding of mental-health services, some struggle to access appropriate medical treatment—or even a diagnosis—for months on end. The suffering is real, whatever the cause.

The suggestion that tics have a psychological component is controversial with patient groups. Advocates for those with other contested illnesses, such as chronic Lyme disease, have reacted furiously to any suggestion that they are social or psychological in nature, and some researchers have been subject to abuse and even death threats. Although the backlash among patients with tic disorders has been far more muted, some people with functional tics reject the idea that TikTok is to blame. “I read the article and thought it was a load of crap,” Michelle Wacek told The Guardian after The Wall Street Journal reported on tic contagion. “TikTok is not giving people Tourette’s.” (Wacek has said that it is a coincidence that she was following Evie Meg Field before developing tics.) The Tourette’s influencer Glen Cooney has warned that the media frenzy might undo the good work done to reduce stigma around the condition, posting: “We will not stop spreading awareness because of a Karen with an opinion.”

The Tourette Association of America has taken a more nuanced view. The group’s CEO, Amanda Talty, told me that about half of the people living with Tourette’s or tic disorders go undiagnosed, and that raising awareness is a legitimate aim for influencers. She doesn’t fault Field for her followers’ tics. “It’s unfair for anybody to place singular blame on any one individual,” Talty said.

Still, prompted by the recent news reports, the association has issued guidance on distinguishing between Tourette’s and functional neurological disorder. The distinction matters because standard treatments for Tourette’s include antipsychotics or ADHD medications, which can have strong, unpleasant side effects. Those drugs are “not recommended” in treating functional tics, according to the Tourette Association, which generally favors cognitive behavioral therapy. “Reducing the consumption of tic-related videos will also increase the likelihood of recovery,” the association adds.

Tammy Hedderly, the London neurologist, worried that the German research paper on mass sociogenic illness would fuel suspicions that the teenagers could simply snap out of it if they wanted. She told me that one 14-year-old patient in her clinic had a “meltdown” when asked to stop watching Tourette’s videos. When talking with the boy, whose tics mirrored Field’s, Hedderly realized just how much the community on TikTok meant to him.

So what happens now? Bartholomew thinks that the current spate of sudden tic-like-disorder patients will eventually abate, when the conditions that created them change. “It’s a sign of the times,” he told me. “It’s a social barometer.” The tics are allowing teenagers to express something about the unbearable alienation and intimacy of modern life, which is lived so much through screens. Mass-psychogenic-illness outbreaks tend to stop when it becomes obvious that there is no chemical leak or secret biological weapon involved—which is why Bartholomew believes that recognizing them as social contagions is important, even if it offends people.

Kirsten Müller-Vahl told me that the reactions varied among her patients in Hannover when her team told them that they did not have Tourette’s—that something else was causing their tics and twitches. Some patients, she said, “were more or less cured after I offered the correct diagnosis.” Others could not accept that judgment. “They still think they suffer from Tourette’s,” she says; some patients keep running YouTube channels offering advice about the condition. When patients who have built an identity on being a Tourette’s influencer discover they do not have Tourette’s, Müller-Vahl said, she faces a poignant question: “I am asked: ‘How do I tell my followers?’”