Happy Sunday and a big hello to my new followers! 👋
I’m in NYC again this week, with a lot going on family-wise, so I’m keeping it short today. But I came across something last week that stopped me dead in my tracks. I just have to share it.
I’ve written about my irritation with Andrew Sullivan before. But he wrote something in last week’s newsletter that really takes the biscuit. And I quote:
I don’t want all child sex changes banned; I want them safe, moderated, rare, pursued carefully, backed by clinical trials and longterm assessment of cases. If this wave were not accompanied by a crusade to indoctrinate the very young in elementary schools into believing that their sex has nothing to do with their body, I’d rest easier. I just don’t want gay kids being sterilized and maimed for life because of misdiagnosis forged by ideological fervor.
As the kids say, I simply cannot with this bullshit. How can he say in one breath that he doesn’t want child sex changes banned, and in the next acknowledge the reality that they maim and sterilise kids? He is literally saying it’s ok to physically destroy children, but only in moderation and if they are not gay. Because he’s a sophisticated, metropolitan, liberal — he doesn’t want to ban things, like those ghastly populists!
I can’t read this man’s mind. But I’m willing to guess that the reason he is able to say such an insane thing is because the social pressure to stay in good graces of the sophisticated, metropolitan, liberal, in-group is so very strong, he simply cannot go against it. And in the sophisticated, metropolitan, liberal, in-group which exerts such a huge influence on the professional managerial class, cutting off healthy breasts of girls and castrating boys, jacking them up on synthetic cross-sex hormones, seems legit. And to say otherwise makes you an apostate. So he simply cannot make the clean, categorical break that is required.
Either you think it’s ok to carve up children or you don’t, Andrew. I’m afraid you and your fellow liberals cannot have it both ways.
Appalling, I agree. As a hand surgeon, I think no one would fault me for refusing to remove a healthy hand, even if the patient claims there in an alien implant in it (true story). Yet, how is this different? A psychiatric disorder has caused a patient to reject a healthy body part. I know removing the body part will not alter the mental illness. Prima non nocere, right?
I think I know the answer to why Sullivan can say he's against child sex changes and yet stop short at supporting a complete ban . . . and it comes from a deeply conservative attitude towards policymaking for an imperfect world.
Economist Thomas Sowell (an amazing thinker and writer - if you haven't already, please do check him out! I recommend A Conflict of Visions.) has often stated: "There are no solutions, only trade-offs." and the best example of this offered recently was podcaster/writer Coleman Hughes' invitation to his listeners to imagine the extent of the total control over a population that would be necessary to 100% eliminate murder. Would living conditions in a society, where everyone was surveilled and constrained enough so that murders could no longer happen (leaving aside whether that could be even possible to achieve in the real world), be humane?
Yes, murder is still illegal in most modern law-abiding societies . . . so this is a case where civilizations over the millenia have decided the occasional infringement of the privacy of some by the authorities in order to keep violent deaths in check is worth it . . . but there are also counterbalancing traditions that individuals who have killed other individuals may appeal to (self-defence, lesser charges by calling the killing manslaughter or negligent, etc., etc.) There are always edge cases . . .
So Sullivan, I suspect, is humbly aware of the reality that any policy (no matter how well-designed), once implemented WILL lead to some unintended consequences. And this will always be the case, because life's complicated and none of us can tell the future. If we switch our attention to certain patterns of behavior in our societies in response to other bans of the past (Abortions, Alcohol) and others currently still in place (certain Drugs), none of these bans were particularly effective at eliminating their target . . . reducing it, maybe . . . but mostly pushing whatever it was into the shadows, compromising its quality, empowering a whole lot of unsavory entrepreneurs, and arguably leaving a lot more collateral damage and suffering in their wake.
Sullivan is well-aware that none of us are omniscient when it comes to the inner lives of every single family of a mentally distressed child; and so he is demonstrating that humility by leaving open the possibility of a transparent and well-regulated system of medical science to continue operating in this area (although is a much more constrained fashion than the wild-west medicine show that is the case currently in the U.S. and other countries).
I have read with interest about the latest regulatory developments in Florida. According to this story, two boards of Medicine proposed banning Transgender medicine for under-18s EXCEPT treatment as part of IRB-approved long-term research (one later dropped this). AND youth already in the middle of such treatments would be allowed to continue. When it comes to issues where emotions are high and the availability of good-quality data is low, this is about the best a democratic process can hope to achieve.
P.S. At the risk of kowtowing to the "judge the message by the messenger" mentality that seizes even the most clear-thinking of us at least some of the time, please believe that I (a mother of an 18-year-old female who is currently terrifying my husband and me with her stated intentions to express her "authentic self" with the help of a local clinic very soon.) am not inclined to believe that there is anything redeeming about using drugs and cosmetic surgery to spare children the experience of learning how to accept their bodies. However, I have to be honest with myself about the very real evils of extending political power into too many areas of human life.
“none of these bans were particularly effective at eliminating their target . . . reducing it, maybe . . . but mostly pushing whatever it was into the shadows, compromising its quality, empowering a whole lot of unsavory entrepreneurs, and arguably leaving a lot more collateral damage and suffering in their wake.”
Reminds me of what was imposed on us in the pandemic…
As members of a secular and "Westernized" class, my family escaped from Iran to seek refuge in America after the revolution of 1979. Growing up, my family and other refugees in the same social circles believed America was the apex of human civilization (unfortunately so did the Shah, otherwise he would have told Jimmy Carter to go FUCK himself as he cracked down on the Islamists like he should have). In those halcyon days, we used to make fun of the Shia radicals in the "old country" who would self-flagellate themselves on Ashura, marking the death of Imam Hussein. We thought of "those people" as backward because they were so caught up in religious fervor, they could not see "reality."
Little did we know back then that American New Left Nihilists aka "Liberals" were another radicalized religious sect that was about to foment a cultural revolution of their own. As it stands, the fundamentalist American "Liberals" are much worse than the Iranian ones. For one thing, while Shia radicals only flagellate themselves during Ashura holiday, self-hating white liberals beat up on themselves 24/7-365 days a year. Furthermore, Shia radicals are only close minded when it comes to cultural matters, such as women's dress. They would never in a thousand years claim that "math is racist" or modern "science is oppressive" because many of the founders were European.
Looking back, some of the things those Shia radicals said about a "corrupt Western" society built on nihilism have turned out to be true. It is with great humility that I've learned the lesson that a so called "Harvard trained" intellectual is infinitely more radical and closed-minded than the most religious Shia cleric from the Qom seminary in Iran!
This is a fantastic comment and deserves a whole post to itself!! Let me just say that I’m fascinated by Iran and have always been very impressed by the Iranians I’ve met.
Thank you so much Jenny, your Substack is the only one I look forward to reading every week. I enjoy every post!
I was very sad to read about the loss of your ex-husband and I hope that time will help heal the pain for you and your son. Looking forward to your next article!
It is grotesque & delusional to believe that slicing off bits of people will make them more comfortable with their bodies. It is patently false, as many who have mutilated themselves have attested. We are living through a moral panic much worse than the Salem witch trials. This self-mutilation craze is only the most horrendous expression of a whole series of harmful trends that smack of Maoist cultural revolutionary tactics.
Agreed. I think between transing kids, the boom in sex abuse for internet content and force masking/vx-img them, America’s treatment of its children will go down as a historical horror on par with the worst of the 20th century.
I wake up every morning thankful that I don't give a rat's festered ass about staying in good graces of the sophisticated, metropolitan, liberal, in-group. What a prison to be trapped in!
It sounds like a little simple biblical truth would be helpful. Genesis 1:27 says, "God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them." Psalm 139:13-14 says, "For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful..."
I think this is common amongst people who don’t have or want children. I notice that Jessie Singal also tries to keep his options open as in “it might be right for some kids” so “don’t ban it you, right wing authoritarian.”
I think you can only hold this position if you can only consider the question in the abstract— which incidentally is the only way you can avoid making a judgement.
The point is not that there might some few kids who would do “okay” or even better medicalized. In theory there could be but we need to have the moral courage to just say this is an unequivocally bad thing to do to children. You can’t just maintain the fiction that we are balancing two sides of a scale.
And from what I can see it really isn’t possible at this point to know whether kids would be better off transitioning or not, because no one has studied it. What we do know is that in adults the serious health implications only really become apparent at around the ten year mark.
Beyond that I think this idea that being your authentic self is the highest good is what gay rights became. Yes, there was unequal treatment and injustice, but round about 1995 or so it became primarily about recognition. affirmation and inclusion. If you accept that idea , even a little it’s hard to stand up against anything posed on those terms. That’s why parents have such a hard time standing up against it.
I agree overall except where you say it’s impossible to know if trans kids are better off or not - I’m comfortable taking the position that they are not, studies be damned. Which actually may also be what you are saying- I’m jetlagged. ✈️
There is an old legal maxim along the lines of, "Hard cases make for bad laws." I thought of this when reading "that there might [be] some few kids who would do 'okay' or even better medicalized." Sure - abstractly - who could disagree with that? But to make those (I'm going to guess extremely) few cases the basis for passing laws will make for bad laws.
I mean, stands to reason, right? 😂 Though I know where Nancy is coming from and I think she’s right. People with common sense such as yourself are an endangered species in the PMC.
There is NO clinical/medical reason to mutilate a body for a mere "idea" that is unattainable and which the "surgery" will only create a fake non-working version of the fantasy.
I hope you do, that would be very useful. On the subcategory I raised, have you ever heard a report or story about any girl/woman who becomes a "man" without having surgery? It seems this option of foregoing surgery and still enjoying a new gender identity is a male privilege, because I've heard of so many cases of it (and there are probably many more, since I don't keep up on this issue).
I'm going to an event tomorrow about a somewhat related issue, so I likely will write about it in the next week or so. In the meantime, look up Deprogrammerxxx on Youtube, or watch this primer.
I have a hunch which I have not verified because I don't spend a lot of time researching this issue or reading about it, but I've read enough to wonder. Surely some of the readers here and Jenny have heard of many cases of trans-women (males who claim to become females) who never have surgery, but retain their genitals. Lia Thomas the swim champion for example, celebrated by the Mainstream as a woman, yet still swings his penis and balls around in the women's shower and locker rooms. Recently that spectacle on British TV of another trans-woman who performed nude, playing the piano with -- as a mainstream newspaper reported -- "her penis". So my hunch here is that far fewer boys are cajoled into sawing their penises off, compared with the girls who are to saw their breasts off. My hunch is that the differential is something like 60% boys, 100% girls. The question would be why? But someone needs to do the research.
There are a good few astute researchers out there, and following them has lead me to see a broad array of categories of people who try to change sex and these groups have strikingly different demographics and reasons for doing so. Maybe I should do a Substack about it.
Its insane. There is no *safe* "sex" change. The entire concept is a huge lie.
Carving up the body, drugging it with hormones in amounts *never* designed (by biology) for that sex, is abuse of the body and individual.
From an individual's perspective, it is self harm when they are of an age they can sort of make a decision (eg post 18).
If its a child, then it is medical abuse.
These "surgeries" and the drug regime should be banned for ALL people - adult or child. I do not agree that an "adult" can make a decision to go for this. They can't. The complications and harm are still there. Even if they pretend otherwise.
There is NO clinical reason to "treat" a mental health disconnect with one's sexed/physical body by surgical or drugged means to "change" the body. None.
There is a line to be drawn on extreme body modification. This is definitely well over that line.
As a plastic surgeon, it embarrasses me that anyone in my profession will consider these procedures on minors. Inexcusable and indefensible.
Eric, Thank you for sharing your perspective and I would love to hear more about this - pls feel free to email me. Best, Jenny Holland
Appalling, I agree. As a hand surgeon, I think no one would fault me for refusing to remove a healthy hand, even if the patient claims there in an alien implant in it (true story). Yet, how is this different? A psychiatric disorder has caused a patient to reject a healthy body part. I know removing the body part will not alter the mental illness. Prima non nocere, right?
I think I know the answer to why Sullivan can say he's against child sex changes and yet stop short at supporting a complete ban . . . and it comes from a deeply conservative attitude towards policymaking for an imperfect world.
Economist Thomas Sowell (an amazing thinker and writer - if you haven't already, please do check him out! I recommend A Conflict of Visions.) has often stated: "There are no solutions, only trade-offs." and the best example of this offered recently was podcaster/writer Coleman Hughes' invitation to his listeners to imagine the extent of the total control over a population that would be necessary to 100% eliminate murder. Would living conditions in a society, where everyone was surveilled and constrained enough so that murders could no longer happen (leaving aside whether that could be even possible to achieve in the real world), be humane?
Yes, murder is still illegal in most modern law-abiding societies . . . so this is a case where civilizations over the millenia have decided the occasional infringement of the privacy of some by the authorities in order to keep violent deaths in check is worth it . . . but there are also counterbalancing traditions that individuals who have killed other individuals may appeal to (self-defence, lesser charges by calling the killing manslaughter or negligent, etc., etc.) There are always edge cases . . .
So Sullivan, I suspect, is humbly aware of the reality that any policy (no matter how well-designed), once implemented WILL lead to some unintended consequences. And this will always be the case, because life's complicated and none of us can tell the future. If we switch our attention to certain patterns of behavior in our societies in response to other bans of the past (Abortions, Alcohol) and others currently still in place (certain Drugs), none of these bans were particularly effective at eliminating their target . . . reducing it, maybe . . . but mostly pushing whatever it was into the shadows, compromising its quality, empowering a whole lot of unsavory entrepreneurs, and arguably leaving a lot more collateral damage and suffering in their wake.
Sullivan is well-aware that none of us are omniscient when it comes to the inner lives of every single family of a mentally distressed child; and so he is demonstrating that humility by leaving open the possibility of a transparent and well-regulated system of medical science to continue operating in this area (although is a much more constrained fashion than the wild-west medicine show that is the case currently in the U.S. and other countries).
I have read with interest about the latest regulatory developments in Florida. According to this story, two boards of Medicine proposed banning Transgender medicine for under-18s EXCEPT treatment as part of IRB-approved long-term research (one later dropped this). AND youth already in the middle of such treatments would be allowed to continue. When it comes to issues where emotions are high and the availability of good-quality data is low, this is about the best a democratic process can hope to achieve.
P.S. At the risk of kowtowing to the "judge the message by the messenger" mentality that seizes even the most clear-thinking of us at least some of the time, please believe that I (a mother of an 18-year-old female who is currently terrifying my husband and me with her stated intentions to express her "authentic self" with the help of a local clinic very soon.) am not inclined to believe that there is anything redeeming about using drugs and cosmetic surgery to spare children the experience of learning how to accept their bodies. However, I have to be honest with myself about the very real evils of extending political power into too many areas of human life.
“none of these bans were particularly effective at eliminating their target . . . reducing it, maybe . . . but mostly pushing whatever it was into the shadows, compromising its quality, empowering a whole lot of unsavory entrepreneurs, and arguably leaving a lot more collateral damage and suffering in their wake.”
Reminds me of what was imposed on us in the pandemic…
Thanks Heather, for your always interesting and thoughtful perspective.
As members of a secular and "Westernized" class, my family escaped from Iran to seek refuge in America after the revolution of 1979. Growing up, my family and other refugees in the same social circles believed America was the apex of human civilization (unfortunately so did the Shah, otherwise he would have told Jimmy Carter to go FUCK himself as he cracked down on the Islamists like he should have). In those halcyon days, we used to make fun of the Shia radicals in the "old country" who would self-flagellate themselves on Ashura, marking the death of Imam Hussein. We thought of "those people" as backward because they were so caught up in religious fervor, they could not see "reality."
Little did we know back then that American New Left Nihilists aka "Liberals" were another radicalized religious sect that was about to foment a cultural revolution of their own. As it stands, the fundamentalist American "Liberals" are much worse than the Iranian ones. For one thing, while Shia radicals only flagellate themselves during Ashura holiday, self-hating white liberals beat up on themselves 24/7-365 days a year. Furthermore, Shia radicals are only close minded when it comes to cultural matters, such as women's dress. They would never in a thousand years claim that "math is racist" or modern "science is oppressive" because many of the founders were European.
Looking back, some of the things those Shia radicals said about a "corrupt Western" society built on nihilism have turned out to be true. It is with great humility that I've learned the lesson that a so called "Harvard trained" intellectual is infinitely more radical and closed-minded than the most religious Shia cleric from the Qom seminary in Iran!
This is a fantastic comment and deserves a whole post to itself!! Let me just say that I’m fascinated by Iran and have always been very impressed by the Iranians I’ve met.
Thank you so much Jenny, your Substack is the only one I look forward to reading every week. I enjoy every post!
I was very sad to read about the loss of your ex-husband and I hope that time will help heal the pain for you and your son. Looking forward to your next article!
Sincerely,
MJ
It is grotesque & delusional to believe that slicing off bits of people will make them more comfortable with their bodies. It is patently false, as many who have mutilated themselves have attested. We are living through a moral panic much worse than the Salem witch trials. This self-mutilation craze is only the most horrendous expression of a whole series of harmful trends that smack of Maoist cultural revolutionary tactics.
Agreed. I think between transing kids, the boom in sex abuse for internet content and force masking/vx-img them, America’s treatment of its children will go down as a historical horror on par with the worst of the 20th century.
Oh, they do want to ban things... It’s just that going all Josef Mengele on straight kids isn’t one of those things.
Which says it all, doesn’t it? Horrifying.
I wake up every morning thankful that I don't give a rat's festered ass about staying in good graces of the sophisticated, metropolitan, liberal, in-group. What a prison to be trapped in!
Indeed!👏👏👏👏
It sounds like a little simple biblical truth would be helpful. Genesis 1:27 says, "God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them." Psalm 139:13-14 says, "For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful..."
I think this is common amongst people who don’t have or want children. I notice that Jessie Singal also tries to keep his options open as in “it might be right for some kids” so “don’t ban it you, right wing authoritarian.”
I think you can only hold this position if you can only consider the question in the abstract— which incidentally is the only way you can avoid making a judgement.
The point is not that there might some few kids who would do “okay” or even better medicalized. In theory there could be but we need to have the moral courage to just say this is an unequivocally bad thing to do to children. You can’t just maintain the fiction that we are balancing two sides of a scale.
And from what I can see it really isn’t possible at this point to know whether kids would be better off transitioning or not, because no one has studied it. What we do know is that in adults the serious health implications only really become apparent at around the ten year mark.
Beyond that I think this idea that being your authentic self is the highest good is what gay rights became. Yes, there was unequal treatment and injustice, but round about 1995 or so it became primarily about recognition. affirmation and inclusion. If you accept that idea , even a little it’s hard to stand up against anything posed on those terms. That’s why parents have such a hard time standing up against it.
I agree overall except where you say it’s impossible to know if trans kids are better off or not - I’m comfortable taking the position that they are not, studies be damned. Which actually may also be what you are saying- I’m jetlagged. ✈️
There is an old legal maxim along the lines of, "Hard cases make for bad laws." I thought of this when reading "that there might [be] some few kids who would do 'okay' or even better medicalized." Sure - abstractly - who could disagree with that? But to make those (I'm going to guess extremely) few cases the basis for passing laws will make for bad laws.
I don't have and have never wanted children, yet I say putting them on hormones and surgically mutilating them is an unequivocally bad thing to do.
I mean, stands to reason, right? 😂 Though I know where Nancy is coming from and I think she’s right. People with common sense such as yourself are an endangered species in the PMC.
Same here.
There is NO clinical/medical reason to mutilate a body for a mere "idea" that is unattainable and which the "surgery" will only create a fake non-working version of the fantasy.
None.
I hope you do, that would be very useful. On the subcategory I raised, have you ever heard a report or story about any girl/woman who becomes a "man" without having surgery? It seems this option of foregoing surgery and still enjoying a new gender identity is a male privilege, because I've heard of so many cases of it (and there are probably many more, since I don't keep up on this issue).
I'm going to an event tomorrow about a somewhat related issue, so I likely will write about it in the next week or so. In the meantime, look up Deprogrammerxxx on Youtube, or watch this primer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJggNpzRTpw
It's very dark and it doesn't exactly answer your question -- rather it presents one of the myriad agendas I believe is at play.
Women have historically passed as men. Often it was as soldiers or sailors. https://www.amazon.com/Masquerading-Male-Attire-Passing-1844-1920/dp/1476673616
I have a hunch which I have not verified because I don't spend a lot of time researching this issue or reading about it, but I've read enough to wonder. Surely some of the readers here and Jenny have heard of many cases of trans-women (males who claim to become females) who never have surgery, but retain their genitals. Lia Thomas the swim champion for example, celebrated by the Mainstream as a woman, yet still swings his penis and balls around in the women's shower and locker rooms. Recently that spectacle on British TV of another trans-woman who performed nude, playing the piano with -- as a mainstream newspaper reported -- "her penis". So my hunch here is that far fewer boys are cajoled into sawing their penises off, compared with the girls who are to saw their breasts off. My hunch is that the differential is something like 60% boys, 100% girls. The question would be why? But someone needs to do the research.
There are a good few astute researchers out there, and following them has lead me to see a broad array of categories of people who try to change sex and these groups have strikingly different demographics and reasons for doing so. Maybe I should do a Substack about it.
Its insane. There is no *safe* "sex" change. The entire concept is a huge lie.
Carving up the body, drugging it with hormones in amounts *never* designed (by biology) for that sex, is abuse of the body and individual.
From an individual's perspective, it is self harm when they are of an age they can sort of make a decision (eg post 18).
If its a child, then it is medical abuse.
These "surgeries" and the drug regime should be banned for ALL people - adult or child. I do not agree that an "adult" can make a decision to go for this. They can't. The complications and harm are still there. Even if they pretend otherwise.
There is NO clinical reason to "treat" a mental health disconnect with one's sexed/physical body by surgical or drugged means to "change" the body. None.
There is a line to be drawn on extreme body modification. This is definitely well over that line.
Thank you! I'm glad you're "on the case" and look forward to your thoughts on it.