Has the spell of "genderism" been broken? In both the United States and Great Britain, there appear to be significant breakthroughs against the conspiracy of silence about the massive contradictions presented by gender ideology that have destroyed careers, damaged the health of children, and roiled the politics of both countries.
One of those breakthroughs has been the serious questions raised about two Dutch studies on transitioning children, on which almost all modern gender care for minors has been based. The studies, published in 2011 and 2014, documented the results of early pediatric intervention for gender dysphoria in children and found positive mental health benefits through the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.
In fact, both studies were fatally flawed. And yet, gender clinicians keep citing the flawed studies as a guide for treating children with gender dysphoria. Also, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) “Standards of Care” guidelines, the version under which the practice of medicalization of gender dysphoric youth became widespread, only references the Dutch experience.
More recent studies have totally debunked the major findings in the Dutch studies. The two efforts to duplicate the results from the studies — the most important test of any scientific theory — failed.
The Dutch studies suggested that the effects of puberty blockers were reversible. Further studies found that it was a dangerous oversimplification of the evidence. Most gender clinicians no longer rely on the Dutch studies as part of the diagnostic process.
Clinical psychologist Laura Edwards-Leeper has been a transgender advocate for her entire professional career, but has begun to question some key tenets of transgender ideology. In an interview in City Journal, she acknowledges that referring to children with gender dysphoria as "trans children" is misleading.
"These days, I worry that calling gender-distressed young children “trans” puts them on a more likely path toward medicalization, a path that can be very hard for some to get off."
She continued, "I’ve seen too many kids (and adults in their lives) assume that if the child identifies as trans at one point in time, they will always be trans. I feel strongly that we should do everything we can to prevent kids from feeling boxed into a particular identity or trajectory."
Edwards-Leeper has angered many trans advocates by straying from the reservation and rejecting what is euphemistically referred to as the "child-led" approach to transgender care. Accepting what a child is saying about their feelings about their bodies plays right into the gender clinic template of medicate first, ask questions later.
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Kathleen Stock, writing in Unherd, wonders if we're reaching a "trans tipping point."
For years, I watched as a small number of philosophers, on both sides of the Atlantic, took a barely comprehensible proposition from the internet — “trans women are women and trans men are men” — and tried to build a system around it. The central proposition was treated as non-negotiable; any datum that didn’t fit would have to be jettisoned. Those who objected were either insufficiently well-read, too stupid to understand complexity, or simply bad actors. Quiet lifers across the Anglosphere quickly read the (seminar) room and went along with things.
"Genderists in philosophy parachuted 'transwomen are women' into the middle of their webs, defined a 'woman' as anyone who said they were, and renamed the ensuing epistemological anarchy 'progress,'" writes Stock. It was incredible that the pressure on the academic community became so great that such "epistemological anarchy" became the rule, subsuming any questions about its logic and reason.
"Once in the semantic upside down, there was a lot of profitable work for these web-spinners to do: not just to re-theorize every human idea and practice formerly conceived of as sex-based, but also to build up a satisfyingly dark story about the women and men who would not comply," writes Stock.
What a tangled web the gender nazis weaved. But as with any ideology created to justify a ludicrous idea, the whole rickety logic structure began to collapse.
The higher they flew in daring reconstructions of familiar concepts, the further there was to fall, should their central proposition be later rejected. And surely it eventually would be. For “woman” and “man” are categories associated with distinctive visual appearances, and the adaptive capacity to discern the difference between them has been honed over millennia. Sometimes you just know you are looking at a man, despite what the people with the fancy titles are telling you. Indeed, it is a testament to the awesome chutzpah of the latter that they ever thought they could persuade people otherwise.
It's encouraging that even many trans advocates are taking a step back and treating gender confusion in children as possibly something besides "gender dysphoria." It's a huge step forward in protecting children from ideologically driven doctors and transgender advocates whose questionable tactics have destroyed enough young lives already.
