I mostly agree with this, but find this part annoying:
> "HRT, puberty blockers, and sexual reassignment surgery are not risk-free. HRT can increase the risk of blood clots, stroke, heart problems, high blood pressure, diabetes, and even infertility. Puberty blockers like Lupron can cause mood disorders, depression, and osteoporosis."
...specifically, I hate the framing "are not risk free". Consider the following three drugs:
- Drug 1 increases depression risk 60%, stroke risk 150%, and blood clot risk 200%
- Drug 2 increases cancer by 10%, liver disease 100%, and hypertension 30%
- Drug 3 increases osteoporosis by 150%
Do you have any strong opinions on which drug is better or worse?
Drug 1 is the oral contraceptive pill, Drug 2 is light to moderate healthy drinking well within the recommended guidelines, Drug 3 is puberty blockers
(I didn't include the mental health / depression side effects of puberty blockers because I couldn't find any studies that tried to quantify them - all studies I could find said the positive effects on mental health so outweighed the negative that it was impossible to get a nonanecdotal quantification of the negative - though my search was weak and might have missed something).
I think in a politically neutral world with no isolated demands for rigor, there's no way we would have settled on "anyone can take Drug 1 if they want to have consequence-free sex", "any adult can take Drug 2 if they think it's fun, and we turn a blind eye when teens use it without a prescription", and "no doctor may prescribe Drug 3, even for cases where someone is high risk of suicide without it, and state legislatures might specifically ban doctors from doing this".
Everything we do has risk, even driving cars and waking up in the morning. I have yet to find any attempt to quantify puberty blocker risks that doesn't make them look better than other things we do as a matter of course without even thinking about it, let alone better than other prescription drugs given after medical evaluation to people in serious distress.
This is a useful perspective, but I think it's important to look a little further out. 98% of those who take puberty blockers for gender dysphoria will later be prescribed cross sex hormones.
In addition to increasing risk of stroke and heart attack, testosterone at the levels prescribed for gender dysphoria causes pelvic floor dysfunction in 94% of women.
Many clinicians, even ones who identify as trans themselves such as WPATH President Dr. Marci Bowers, have concerns that there is a social contagion aspect of trans identity in the modern day, especially among young women.
It's difficult to justify a treatment that causes iatrogenic infertility (https://wpath.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Combined_Handouts.pdf), especially when it near-universally causes other life-altering health problems as well. This is especially relevant as the claimed mental health benefits of puberty blockers are not well-established and women are usually able to "pass" as men after beginning testosterone treatment at any age. Note that WPATH recommends puberty blockers to be prescribed at Tanner Stage II, which occurs typically before age eleven in girls.
I was a gender-nonconforming girl myself, and I'm worried that we are "blocking" the exact process that gets girls comfortable with puberty - puberty.
"I was a gender-nonconforming girl myself, and I'm worried that we are "blocking" the exact process that gets girls comfortable with puberty - puberty."
I object to the second half of this sentence - it's having the government force people who currently think they will hate an irreversible process to go through the process anyway, because "what if" they become comfortable with it once it happens? This seems dubious in general, and extra dubious when there are already thousands of people who were forced to go through it against their will, say they did not become comfortable, and say they're resentful they weren't allowed to take the option of blocking it.
I haven't looked into the side effect of cross-sex hormones much, but I mostly hear of puberty blockers being prescribed as a delaying tactic until trans teens are old enough to consent as adults to cross-sex hormones. I think allowing this delay is good.
For your argument to move me, you would have to argue that in a substantial proportion of cases puberty blockers *cause* later cross-sex hormone use, as opposed to the more natural interpretation where the same trans people who want puberty blockers as teens are also trans enough to want cross-sex hormones as an adult - and that this proportion of cases is so large that it overwhelms the benefits from allowing the people who genuinely/stably want to avoid puberty to do so.
Scott, the Dutch Protocol, the basis for modern trans medicine, prescribes puberty blockers followed by cross sex hormones. A significant part of the recent blow-up in the UK was because the GIDS National Healthcare clinic was following this protocol without ever pumping the brakes. Just one treatment after another, like an assembly line. See the BBC expo on the topic and the book written by the lead investigator Hannah Barnes titled "Time to Think".
Another issue that came to light is a common side affect of combining those two treatments is sterility.
Last but not least, the argument that puberty blockers mitigate depression severely lacks evidence. It's nearly non-existent. Europe is quickly coming to a consensus that puberty blockers should be highly restricted and only used in controlled studies. Finland, Sweden, Norway, and the UK have all gone in that direction. These are not countries that are prone to knee-jerk assessments and have been pro-trans medicine for some time.
I would add this to the manifesto. Puberty blockers really need to go.
Whenever I have seen people say that "the evidence for puberty blockers mitigating depression severely lacks evidence", it's been a shell game where they misunderstand the purpose of puberty blockers.
The purpose of puberty blockers is to block puberty. If you weren't undergoing puberty before, and you're still not undergoing it, nothing in your life has improved, and your depression also will not improve. All you can say is that things aren't getting worse. My impression is that when studies compare trans people who undergo puberty to those who don't, the ones who undergo puberty get worse, which makes sense because obviously if you hate being male then you will hate getting chest hair and having your voice deepen. Then anti-trans campaigners try to hide this fact by saying that the puberty blockers didn't *improve* the depression in a one-day-to-another sense so they're ineffective.
Forget the propaganda fight for a moment, let's talk about common sense. Do adult trans people who can't pass as their chosen gender seem unhappy? Do they put lots of effort into things like body hair removal, voice training, etc? Do you think, if they could wave a magic wand and reverse birth-gender puberty and look much more like their chosen gender and have appropriate body hair and voice patterns, they would do that? Obviously yes? Then what are we arguing about here? The fact that maybe it didn't literally drive them to suicide in enough numbers to show up in some specific study (though in other studies it did)?
My impression has always been that risk of permanent sterility on puberty blockers alone is extremely low. It's possible I haven't kept up with the latest evidence, but when I ask o3, it says that "dozens of studies show . . . ovulatory cycles return 6‑12 mo after last dose . . . no difference in pregnancy rate from untreated peers in women, sperm count normalizes 6-12 months after last dose in men, very low <1% risk of permanent sterility, no sign of lasting gonadal failure" - most of these studies were done in precocious puberty, but the few done in trans people seem to bear this out.
I agree side effects of cross-sex hormones are much higher. I would be happy to discuss them if I could get the anti-treatment side to first admit that the puberty blockers themselves are fine.
My impression is that the puberty blockers are used to help kids delay making a decision until they're past the age of consent. Once people are past the age of consent, it's none of our business. I worry that people on the anti-treatment side secretly understand this, but know they can't ban cross-sex hormones because people take those as adults, so they take it out on the kids by banning the safe-and-effective puberty blockers and forcing the trans people to undergo irreversible puberty. In order to build a constituency for this, they have to conflate the puberty blockers with the cross-sex hormones and get people to lump them in as "those scary trans medications with all the side effects". I think this is sloppy, and that without this bait-and-switch it would be pretty hard to make a case for banning the blockers.
In terms of whether this is "like an assembly line" or whatever other scare metaphor you want to use for it happening quickly - I've never done gender medicine myself, so I can't speak to the specifics, but in the kinds of psych I do, I feel like there's a weird cult of demanding too much medical history and evaluation before acting. People will come in suicidal, and doctors won't give them an antidepressant or therapy referral until they've had three appointments worth of evaluation about how their mother was cold to them in the third grade or whatever. These three appointments take a month or two, thousands of dollars, and often people can't afford them or end up in the hospital before having them or whatever. As far as I can tell this is useless. If you come in suicidal and saying you hate your life, and you're not having a major social crisis that gives you an obvious reason for this, and it's been going on for a while, then there isn't *zero* screening you have to do before starting treatment (you definitely have to screen for bipolar, and you can consider thyroid disease, etc), but anyone who can't do the relevant screening in one appointment is being culpably inefficient. I think this is a relic of psychoanalysis where people believe psychiatrists should have magic powers and be able to come up with some deep understanding of a person's inner life that reveals truths that the common man could never comprehend. But whether or not psychoanalysts can do this, the average psychiatrist can't, and acting like we need to wait for them to doesn't serve anybody. I don't know how much evaluation it should take to decide if someone is a good candidate for transgender hormones or whatever, but I would urge you to think of what questions you would want to ask first, then ask yourself whether all those questions could be asked in one or two sixty-minute appointments. I won't guarantee that real psychiatrists can't think of fancy questions that you can't, but I don't think they can think of an infinite number of those fancy questions, and there are diminishing returns after the twentieth or thirtieth. Again, I have never worked in this subfield, and I'm willing to believe there's some amount of history between the thirtieth and one hundredth question that could change your mind about whether someone should get transgender treatments, I just don't feel like the people shouting "assembly line!" have affirmatively made that case.
As for European countries, if they want me to take their opinions on what medications are safe and effective seriously, they should let people take melatonin. Then we can talk.
Do you have any thoughts at all about trans identity as social contagion? Again, this is coming from clinicians who identify as trans such as WPATH President Dr. Marci Bowers.
"Bowers told me she now finds early puberty blockade inadvisable. 'I’m not a fan of blockade at Tanner Two anymore, I really am not,' she told me, using the clinical name of the moment when the first visible signs of puberty manifest. 'The idea all sounded good in the very beginning,' she said. 'Believe me, we’re doing some magnificent surgeries on these kids, and they’re so determined, and I’m so proud of so many of them and their parents. They’ve been great. But honestly, I can’t sit here and tell you that they have better — or even as good — results. They’re not as functional. I worry about their reproductive rights later. I worry about their sexual health later and ability to find intimacy.'"
[...]
"'As for this [Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria] thing,' Bowers said, 'I think there probably are people who are influenced. There is a little bit of ‘Yeah, that’s so cool. Yeah, I kind of want to do that too.’'"
[...]
“'When you have a female-assigned person and she’s feeling dysphoric, or somebody decides that she’s dysphoric and says your eating disorders are not really eating disorders, this is actually gender dysphoria, and then they see you for one visit, and then they recommend testosterone — red flag!' Bowers said. 'Wake up here.'”
"'There are people in my community who will deny that there’s any sort of ‘social contagion’ — I shouldn’t say social contagion, but at least peer influence on some of these decisions,' Bowers said of the growing number of trans kids. 'I think that’s just not recognizing human behavior.'"
Note: I am still in favor of allowing cross sex hormones. Even though the evidence for using them isn't great either, the benefits seem to outweigh the negatives. Also I forgot to mention that the shift in Europe is for having more therapy during early transition, not just "affirming" but getting to the root of the child's issues before making irreversible changes to their body.
"[I]t would be wrong to pre-emptively ban an entire category of people from public facilities merely because they commit certain crimes at a higher rate." I find this statement shocking. That's the only reason we don't have mixed sex changing areas.
My mother was flashed by a man while showering with her fifth grade swim team back in the 70s. He ran in to the locker room, exposed himself, and ran out. Note that he had to sneak, and risked prosecution. In 2025, that act is now legal in parts of the United States. Those same men who still exist and still want to expose themselves to children can walk right in, undress, and stay as long as they want.
Look up Tier III Child Sex Offender Richard Cox. He looks like someone who you'd hire to play a pedophile in a movie, and has indecent exposure convictions going back to the 90s. He was able to freely enter locker rooms and flash women and girls because of trans inclusive laws. Women and girls in Virginia have more rights on the street than when undressing. Please read the letter Cox wrote, it's in the article linked below. He was within his rights to show his penis to children. His victims may lose their case against him.
Again from your article: "Voyeurism, indecent exposure, sexual harassment, and sexual assault are already illegal."
No, they aren't. In the state of California any man can legally enter a changing area, look at undressed girls and women, and expose himself. See repeat sex offender Darren Merager. Merager is also an obvious man with a long history of indecent exposure, but was only able to be charged because he had a visible erection while flashing women and girls. If he hadn't, they would have had no case.
It's certainly possible to call these offenses "rare," but keep in mind that most cases are not prosecutable. California legally defined male locker room voyeurism and indecent exposure out of existence.
"If the goal is to prevent voyeurism, indecent exposure, sexual harassment, and sexual assault, no additional laws specifically targeting trans people are necessary."
I agree with this, but men who say they identify as women commit sex crimes at the same rate as other men. Defining the word "woman" as "an individual who self-identifies as a woman," like California did in 2019, legalizes male voyeurism and indecent exposure in women's changing areas. It's not a law "specifically targeting trans people" to revert to the pre-2019 definition of woman, nor is it calling all trans people "perverts who creep on women in women’s spaces." It's acknowledging that all men pose the same risk to the safety of women and girls, regardless of their identity, and that trans inclusive laws facilitate serious violations of dignity.
"Given our culture’s rather strong bathroom norms, the reasonable standard to me is that people should use the bathroom of the gender they pass better as, though this should be norm rather than law."
Cool - what do we do about the people who are sexually aroused by violating norms?
I mostly agree with this but feel it confuses an important point about sex and gender -- both of these are arbitrarily defined. Typically, whoever is designing the study that requires creating two groups will determine a definition that's useful to what they want to study. We could define man as 5'10 and taller or 160 lbs and heavier or however we want, and these definitions wouldn't necessarily be any worse to divide up sports, though people might balk at the naming.
Chromosomes are, for the majority of the population, binary, and primary sex characteristics typically follow them. But I know (with certainty);zero people's chromosomes (including my own). I know a few people's primary sex characteristics. We instead almost entirely interact with people's sex and gender through their secondary sex characteristics, which are much more normally distributed and somewhat more malleable.
I do think "trans women are women" is a bit of an ellision or misdirection. I am at least skeptical that trans women have more insight into how to get little girls into computer science than cis men. But I think the actual ask is that if someone wants to be viewed as a woman socially, you view them as a woman socially. In theory, though, that should mean very little! I certainly don't try to treat female colleagues differently, and it's rare that secondary sex characteristics would matter (to me) when primary ones don't. But then all that's really left is to not be an asshole. Which is generally good advice when dealing with people who are different than you.
How have commentators reacted to your emphasis on trans acceptance being predicated on passing? Personally, I like it, but it degrades the basic concept of being able to choose your own gender. If I and the community of women get to bar a trans woman from a locker room because she doesn't pass, we're the ones deciding her gender, here operationalized as access to the room. She has no more choice in the matter than she did at birth, when she was assigned a male gender by doctors almost certainly without hesitation.
Although that is significantly more power than cis women have, or in my experience take, at present.
I think it’s important not to confuse personality traits that are socially learned with personality traits that are biologically determined. “Male aggression” is very culturally variable in how it’s expressed, as well as the idea of women being “naturally nurturing.” On a less sex-based scope, the Dunning-Kruger effect/Illusory Superiority effects are largely culturally variable, the halo effect reflects positive cultural values rather than a consistent subset of values, and the cashless effect has different effects on different generations. Adequate research of psychological/behavioral phenomenon should test to see if that behavior is determined by culture rather than biology.
To paraphrase someone else (idk who), “After 30 minutes of observations, an evolutionary psychologist walking around the gardens at Versailles concluded that the trees evolved to be naturally pruned because it gave them a biological advantage and allowed them to have more offspring.”
See this *is* useful because now we can expect to have reasonable dialogue.
One note: the Blanchard typology is highly suspect and pretty charged regardless. It's a bit like the Myers Briggs, or worse Freudian analysis of trans studies. It's worth going a little more in depth about why exactly he's not respected as an authorty anymore.
The problem is that we now considered "inclusion", having more providence than actually maintaining a healthy society. Any public policy is going to either cause a disparity or a exclusion between groups. This explains were the bad liberal ideas that had come about in the last sixty years. Answer to have women's sports, is too bring back freedom of association by reforming Civil Rights Law.
I mostly agree with this, but find this part annoying:
> "HRT, puberty blockers, and sexual reassignment surgery are not risk-free. HRT can increase the risk of blood clots, stroke, heart problems, high blood pressure, diabetes, and even infertility. Puberty blockers like Lupron can cause mood disorders, depression, and osteoporosis."
...specifically, I hate the framing "are not risk free". Consider the following three drugs:
- Drug 1 increases depression risk 60%, stroke risk 150%, and blood clot risk 200%
- Drug 2 increases cancer by 10%, liver disease 100%, and hypertension 30%
- Drug 3 increases osteoporosis by 150%
Do you have any strong opinions on which drug is better or worse?
Drug 1 is the oral contraceptive pill, Drug 2 is light to moderate healthy drinking well within the recommended guidelines, Drug 3 is puberty blockers
(I didn't include the mental health / depression side effects of puberty blockers because I couldn't find any studies that tried to quantify them - all studies I could find said the positive effects on mental health so outweighed the negative that it was impossible to get a nonanecdotal quantification of the negative - though my search was weak and might have missed something).
I think in a politically neutral world with no isolated demands for rigor, there's no way we would have settled on "anyone can take Drug 1 if they want to have consequence-free sex", "any adult can take Drug 2 if they think it's fun, and we turn a blind eye when teens use it without a prescription", and "no doctor may prescribe Drug 3, even for cases where someone is high risk of suicide without it, and state legislatures might specifically ban doctors from doing this".
Everything we do has risk, even driving cars and waking up in the morning. I have yet to find any attempt to quantify puberty blocker risks that doesn't make them look better than other things we do as a matter of course without even thinking about it, let alone better than other prescription drugs given after medical evaluation to people in serious distress.
This is a useful perspective, but I think it's important to look a little further out. 98% of those who take puberty blockers for gender dysphoria will later be prescribed cross sex hormones.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0243894
In addition to increasing risk of stroke and heart attack, testosterone at the levels prescribed for gender dysphoria causes pelvic floor dysfunction in 94% of women.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38662108/
Many clinicians, even ones who identify as trans themselves such as WPATH President Dr. Marci Bowers, have concerns that there is a social contagion aspect of trans identity in the modern day, especially among young women.
https://thepostmillennial.com/president-of-leading-trans-org-admits-social-contagion-is-driving-surge-in-kids-identifying-as-transgender?
It's difficult to justify a treatment that causes iatrogenic infertility (https://wpath.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Combined_Handouts.pdf), especially when it near-universally causes other life-altering health problems as well. This is especially relevant as the claimed mental health benefits of puberty blockers are not well-established and women are usually able to "pass" as men after beginning testosterone treatment at any age. Note that WPATH recommends puberty blockers to be prescribed at Tanner Stage II, which occurs typically before age eleven in girls.
I was a gender-nonconforming girl myself, and I'm worried that we are "blocking" the exact process that gets girls comfortable with puberty - puberty.
"I was a gender-nonconforming girl myself, and I'm worried that we are "blocking" the exact process that gets girls comfortable with puberty - puberty."
I object to the second half of this sentence - it's having the government force people who currently think they will hate an irreversible process to go through the process anyway, because "what if" they become comfortable with it once it happens? This seems dubious in general, and extra dubious when there are already thousands of people who were forced to go through it against their will, say they did not become comfortable, and say they're resentful they weren't allowed to take the option of blocking it.
I haven't looked into the side effect of cross-sex hormones much, but I mostly hear of puberty blockers being prescribed as a delaying tactic until trans teens are old enough to consent as adults to cross-sex hormones. I think allowing this delay is good.
For your argument to move me, you would have to argue that in a substantial proportion of cases puberty blockers *cause* later cross-sex hormone use, as opposed to the more natural interpretation where the same trans people who want puberty blockers as teens are also trans enough to want cross-sex hormones as an adult - and that this proportion of cases is so large that it overwhelms the benefits from allowing the people who genuinely/stably want to avoid puberty to do so.
Scott, the Dutch Protocol, the basis for modern trans medicine, prescribes puberty blockers followed by cross sex hormones. A significant part of the recent blow-up in the UK was because the GIDS National Healthcare clinic was following this protocol without ever pumping the brakes. Just one treatment after another, like an assembly line. See the BBC expo on the topic and the book written by the lead investigator Hannah Barnes titled "Time to Think".
Another issue that came to light is a common side affect of combining those two treatments is sterility.
Last but not least, the argument that puberty blockers mitigate depression severely lacks evidence. It's nearly non-existent. Europe is quickly coming to a consensus that puberty blockers should be highly restricted and only used in controlled studies. Finland, Sweden, Norway, and the UK have all gone in that direction. These are not countries that are prone to knee-jerk assessments and have been pro-trans medicine for some time.
I would add this to the manifesto. Puberty blockers really need to go.
Whenever I have seen people say that "the evidence for puberty blockers mitigating depression severely lacks evidence", it's been a shell game where they misunderstand the purpose of puberty blockers.
The purpose of puberty blockers is to block puberty. If you weren't undergoing puberty before, and you're still not undergoing it, nothing in your life has improved, and your depression also will not improve. All you can say is that things aren't getting worse. My impression is that when studies compare trans people who undergo puberty to those who don't, the ones who undergo puberty get worse, which makes sense because obviously if you hate being male then you will hate getting chest hair and having your voice deepen. Then anti-trans campaigners try to hide this fact by saying that the puberty blockers didn't *improve* the depression in a one-day-to-another sense so they're ineffective.
Forget the propaganda fight for a moment, let's talk about common sense. Do adult trans people who can't pass as their chosen gender seem unhappy? Do they put lots of effort into things like body hair removal, voice training, etc? Do you think, if they could wave a magic wand and reverse birth-gender puberty and look much more like their chosen gender and have appropriate body hair and voice patterns, they would do that? Obviously yes? Then what are we arguing about here? The fact that maybe it didn't literally drive them to suicide in enough numbers to show up in some specific study (though in other studies it did)?
My impression has always been that risk of permanent sterility on puberty blockers alone is extremely low. It's possible I haven't kept up with the latest evidence, but when I ask o3, it says that "dozens of studies show . . . ovulatory cycles return 6‑12 mo after last dose . . . no difference in pregnancy rate from untreated peers in women, sperm count normalizes 6-12 months after last dose in men, very low <1% risk of permanent sterility, no sign of lasting gonadal failure" - most of these studies were done in precocious puberty, but the few done in trans people seem to bear this out.
I agree side effects of cross-sex hormones are much higher. I would be happy to discuss them if I could get the anti-treatment side to first admit that the puberty blockers themselves are fine.
My impression is that the puberty blockers are used to help kids delay making a decision until they're past the age of consent. Once people are past the age of consent, it's none of our business. I worry that people on the anti-treatment side secretly understand this, but know they can't ban cross-sex hormones because people take those as adults, so they take it out on the kids by banning the safe-and-effective puberty blockers and forcing the trans people to undergo irreversible puberty. In order to build a constituency for this, they have to conflate the puberty blockers with the cross-sex hormones and get people to lump them in as "those scary trans medications with all the side effects". I think this is sloppy, and that without this bait-and-switch it would be pretty hard to make a case for banning the blockers.
In terms of whether this is "like an assembly line" or whatever other scare metaphor you want to use for it happening quickly - I've never done gender medicine myself, so I can't speak to the specifics, but in the kinds of psych I do, I feel like there's a weird cult of demanding too much medical history and evaluation before acting. People will come in suicidal, and doctors won't give them an antidepressant or therapy referral until they've had three appointments worth of evaluation about how their mother was cold to them in the third grade or whatever. These three appointments take a month or two, thousands of dollars, and often people can't afford them or end up in the hospital before having them or whatever. As far as I can tell this is useless. If you come in suicidal and saying you hate your life, and you're not having a major social crisis that gives you an obvious reason for this, and it's been going on for a while, then there isn't *zero* screening you have to do before starting treatment (you definitely have to screen for bipolar, and you can consider thyroid disease, etc), but anyone who can't do the relevant screening in one appointment is being culpably inefficient. I think this is a relic of psychoanalysis where people believe psychiatrists should have magic powers and be able to come up with some deep understanding of a person's inner life that reveals truths that the common man could never comprehend. But whether or not psychoanalysts can do this, the average psychiatrist can't, and acting like we need to wait for them to doesn't serve anybody. I don't know how much evaluation it should take to decide if someone is a good candidate for transgender hormones or whatever, but I would urge you to think of what questions you would want to ask first, then ask yourself whether all those questions could be asked in one or two sixty-minute appointments. I won't guarantee that real psychiatrists can't think of fancy questions that you can't, but I don't think they can think of an infinite number of those fancy questions, and there are diminishing returns after the twentieth or thirtieth. Again, I have never worked in this subfield, and I'm willing to believe there's some amount of history between the thirtieth and one hundredth question that could change your mind about whether someone should get transgender treatments, I just don't feel like the people shouting "assembly line!" have affirmatively made that case.
As for European countries, if they want me to take their opinions on what medications are safe and effective seriously, they should let people take melatonin. Then we can talk.
Do you have any thoughts at all about trans identity as social contagion? Again, this is coming from clinicians who identify as trans such as WPATH President Dr. Marci Bowers.
https://www.thefp.com/p/top-trans-doctors-blow-the-whistle
"Bowers told me she now finds early puberty blockade inadvisable. 'I’m not a fan of blockade at Tanner Two anymore, I really am not,' she told me, using the clinical name of the moment when the first visible signs of puberty manifest. 'The idea all sounded good in the very beginning,' she said. 'Believe me, we’re doing some magnificent surgeries on these kids, and they’re so determined, and I’m so proud of so many of them and their parents. They’ve been great. But honestly, I can’t sit here and tell you that they have better — or even as good — results. They’re not as functional. I worry about their reproductive rights later. I worry about their sexual health later and ability to find intimacy.'"
[...]
"'As for this [Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria] thing,' Bowers said, 'I think there probably are people who are influenced. There is a little bit of ‘Yeah, that’s so cool. Yeah, I kind of want to do that too.’'"
[...]
“'When you have a female-assigned person and she’s feeling dysphoric, or somebody decides that she’s dysphoric and says your eating disorders are not really eating disorders, this is actually gender dysphoria, and then they see you for one visit, and then they recommend testosterone — red flag!' Bowers said. 'Wake up here.'”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/23/opinion/trans-kids-privacy-gender-identity.html
"'There are people in my community who will deny that there’s any sort of ‘social contagion’ — I shouldn’t say social contagion, but at least peer influence on some of these decisions,' Bowers said of the growing number of trans kids. 'I think that’s just not recognizing human behavior.'"
Note: I am still in favor of allowing cross sex hormones. Even though the evidence for using them isn't great either, the benefits seem to outweigh the negatives. Also I forgot to mention that the shift in Europe is for having more therapy during early transition, not just "affirming" but getting to the root of the child's issues before making irreversible changes to their body.
"[I]t would be wrong to pre-emptively ban an entire category of people from public facilities merely because they commit certain crimes at a higher rate." I find this statement shocking. That's the only reason we don't have mixed sex changing areas.
My mother was flashed by a man while showering with her fifth grade swim team back in the 70s. He ran in to the locker room, exposed himself, and ran out. Note that he had to sneak, and risked prosecution. In 2025, that act is now legal in parts of the United States. Those same men who still exist and still want to expose themselves to children can walk right in, undress, and stay as long as they want.
Look up Tier III Child Sex Offender Richard Cox. He looks like someone who you'd hire to play a pedophile in a movie, and has indecent exposure convictions going back to the 90s. He was able to freely enter locker rooms and flash women and girls because of trans inclusive laws. Women and girls in Virginia have more rights on the street than when undressing. Please read the letter Cox wrote, it's in the article linked below. He was within his rights to show his penis to children. His victims may lose their case against him.
https://wjla.com/news/local/richard-cox-virginia-registered-sex-offender-transgender-women-locker-room-fairfax-county-oakmont-audrey-moore-rec-center-steve-descano-planet-fitness-parks-department-police-trespassing
Again from your article: "Voyeurism, indecent exposure, sexual harassment, and sexual assault are already illegal."
No, they aren't. In the state of California any man can legally enter a changing area, look at undressed girls and women, and expose himself. See repeat sex offender Darren Merager. Merager is also an obvious man with a long history of indecent exposure, but was only able to be charged because he had a visible erection while flashing women and girls. If he hadn't, they would have had no case.
https://apnews.com/article/lifestyle-spas-981ee4ca037c6cc453fec8ce487f7b3c
It's certainly possible to call these offenses "rare," but keep in mind that most cases are not prosecutable. California legally defined male locker room voyeurism and indecent exposure out of existence.
"If the goal is to prevent voyeurism, indecent exposure, sexual harassment, and sexual assault, no additional laws specifically targeting trans people are necessary."
I agree with this, but men who say they identify as women commit sex crimes at the same rate as other men. Defining the word "woman" as "an individual who self-identifies as a woman," like California did in 2019, legalizes male voyeurism and indecent exposure in women's changing areas. It's not a law "specifically targeting trans people" to revert to the pre-2019 definition of woman, nor is it calling all trans people "perverts who creep on women in women’s spaces." It's acknowledging that all men pose the same risk to the safety of women and girls, regardless of their identity, and that trans inclusive laws facilitate serious violations of dignity.
Here's an example: this man has hundreds of victims. They have no legal recourse. Cases like this are not rare and do not make national news.
https://x.com/bourne_beth2345/status/1919587896782402015
"Given our culture’s rather strong bathroom norms, the reasonable standard to me is that people should use the bathroom of the gender they pass better as, though this should be norm rather than law."
Cool - what do we do about the people who are sexually aroused by violating norms?
I mostly agree with this but feel it confuses an important point about sex and gender -- both of these are arbitrarily defined. Typically, whoever is designing the study that requires creating two groups will determine a definition that's useful to what they want to study. We could define man as 5'10 and taller or 160 lbs and heavier or however we want, and these definitions wouldn't necessarily be any worse to divide up sports, though people might balk at the naming.
Chromosomes are, for the majority of the population, binary, and primary sex characteristics typically follow them. But I know (with certainty);zero people's chromosomes (including my own). I know a few people's primary sex characteristics. We instead almost entirely interact with people's sex and gender through their secondary sex characteristics, which are much more normally distributed and somewhat more malleable.
I do think "trans women are women" is a bit of an ellision or misdirection. I am at least skeptical that trans women have more insight into how to get little girls into computer science than cis men. But I think the actual ask is that if someone wants to be viewed as a woman socially, you view them as a woman socially. In theory, though, that should mean very little! I certainly don't try to treat female colleagues differently, and it's rare that secondary sex characteristics would matter (to me) when primary ones don't. But then all that's really left is to not be an asshole. Which is generally good advice when dealing with people who are different than you.
How have commentators reacted to your emphasis on trans acceptance being predicated on passing? Personally, I like it, but it degrades the basic concept of being able to choose your own gender. If I and the community of women get to bar a trans woman from a locker room because she doesn't pass, we're the ones deciding her gender, here operationalized as access to the room. She has no more choice in the matter than she did at birth, when she was assigned a male gender by doctors almost certainly without hesitation.
Although that is significantly more power than cis women have, or in my experience take, at present.
whos the one trans woman she sounds hot and smart
I think it’s important not to confuse personality traits that are socially learned with personality traits that are biologically determined. “Male aggression” is very culturally variable in how it’s expressed, as well as the idea of women being “naturally nurturing.” On a less sex-based scope, the Dunning-Kruger effect/Illusory Superiority effects are largely culturally variable, the halo effect reflects positive cultural values rather than a consistent subset of values, and the cashless effect has different effects on different generations. Adequate research of psychological/behavioral phenomenon should test to see if that behavior is determined by culture rather than biology.
To paraphrase someone else (idk who), “After 30 minutes of observations, an evolutionary psychologist walking around the gardens at Versailles concluded that the trees evolved to be naturally pruned because it gave them a biological advantage and allowed them to have more offspring.”
See this *is* useful because now we can expect to have reasonable dialogue.
One note: the Blanchard typology is highly suspect and pretty charged regardless. It's a bit like the Myers Briggs, or worse Freudian analysis of trans studies. It's worth going a little more in depth about why exactly he's not respected as an authorty anymore.
The problem is that we now considered "inclusion", having more providence than actually maintaining a healthy society. Any public policy is going to either cause a disparity or a exclusion between groups. This explains were the bad liberal ideas that had come about in the last sixty years. Answer to have women's sports, is too bring back freedom of association by reforming Civil Rights Law.