BROADview in Brief

Newsy bits from gender land

Photo by Dainis Graveris on Unsplash

Greetings from Edinburgh, where, as a visitor to Terf Island, I sought today to recreate the classic frustration of the UK reader on the hunt for a new book published with heterodox views on gender. With that in mind, I headed off in the rain to a large Waterstones bookshop to buy British Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies’ newly released Unfair Play: The Battle for Women’s Sports. I was not disappointed: it took two requests to staff and finally a trip to the stockroom to find a copy. I felt very British indeed and celebrated with afternoon tea in their upstairs café afterward! I’ll let you know what I think of Fair Play when I’ve finished.

Seriously though, what is it with booksellers and librarians and all the hiding and banning and palavering over books? As a former bookseller and a current librarian, I can see that it’s worse than usual, with much misinformation on the left and right. I sometimes despair over all the drama…so naturally, I’m now researching a deep dive on the issues. In the meantime, Kat Rosenfield is not just in despair; she’s alienated and wrote about it for the Boston Globe. As she points out in her piece, what feels like a disorienting lurch to the left on social issues by the Democrats may be creating a rising number of Americans who identify as socially conservative.  I hesitate to call these social positions leftist, however, and wonder how in the world some progressives have come to conflate teaching LGBT tolerance and accurate histories in public schools with teaching children the actual beliefs and practices of some LGBT organizations and community members. As Rosenfeld notes, we then end up in a bizarro world with local progressive politicians calling their community’s Muslim families “aligned with white supremacists and outright bigots” for raising perfectly predictable concerns. 

There were more excellent gender medicine commentaries out this week, with rationalists continuing to try hard to shine light on the problems with youth gender medicine in a way that progressives might be able to hear, including Amber Athey’s How They Treat Trans Children Across the Pond in the US edition of The Spectator--which virtually no progressives read, but which wouldn’t offend them (maybe) if you were to send them a link (unlike, say, a link to The Epoch Times--see below). Ditto for the Wall Street Journal, where Dr. Roy Eappen and Ian Kingsbury from Do No Harm penned The Endocrine Society’s Dangerous Transgender Politicization. And finally, Leor Sapir wrote  Why Europe and America Are Going In Opposite Directions on Youth Transgender Medicine for The Hill. The latter is probably the preeminent non-partisan political news source for US politicians and staffers in DC, so it’s significant that Sapir was published there, albeit with all the usual disclaimers. 

To understand an opposing view, the Harvard School of Public Health held a panel discussion last week on gender-affirming healthcare, which one of our readers called “breathtaking” (I think more in the sense of ‘holy cow’ than ‘amazing’ but watch for yourself).

Meanwhile, is there any progress with our friends to the north? In a word, maybe! The Canadian Paediatric Society published a new position paper on gender affirmation that falls into the plus ça change plus c’est la même chose category. It completely ignores Anglo-European concerns. But conservative politicians in New Brunswick brought in some education policy changes this month—including a parental notification requirement for name and pronoun changes—that take effect July 1. These changes are controversial among even New Brunswick conservatives, so it’s unclear whether Canadians with opposing views are starting to stir debate outside of the pages of The National Post. Same down here: After three New Jersey school districts shifted policies to inform parents if kids wanted to change names and pronouns, the Attorney General filed suit against them.

There are a few essential pieces to share this week on the science and psychology front. First, Reality’s Last Stand has a fascinating article by MIT philosophy professor Alex Byrne, The Gender Revolution Comes for Biology Textbooks. It’s wild to see how new beliefs about sex and gender have impacted the contents of our science textbooks in less than ten short years. (Check out this impassioned piece about “postmodern” medicine from RLS, too.)

FAIR in Medicine published in the New York Post on how the most mundane of administrative medical procedures—the assigning of billing codes—can have an outsized negative impact on detransition healthcare. Johanna Olson-Kennedy—of gender Pop-Tarts fame—is a co-author on a new paper on why evidence-based medicine isn’t appropriate for trans youth (surprise!).

It might behoove her to read this piece by Sarah C. J. Jorgensen, “Iatrogenic Harm in Gender Medicine.” Detransitioners’ experiences, she writes, suggest “that there are cracks in the gender-affirmation model of care that can no longer be ignored.” Her argument? “…the medical community must find ways to have more open discussions and commit to research and clinical collaboration so that regret and detransition really are vanishingly rare outcomes.” Detransitioners, she says, are “survivors of iatrogenic harm.”

Also in the science and psych category, I didn’t want this slightly older article Genspect article by Eliza Mondegreen to get missed by those of us with a particular interest in the crossover between gender ideology and eating disorders: Affirming Anorexia. 

I know that New York Magazine put out its massive Transgender Family Handbook this past week, but I don’t know where to begin with that. I’ll be very interested to read your comments about it below. While that magazine is offering how-tos for pediatric and adolescent transition, The College Fix reports that 13 clinics in red states may close.

There was some pro and con discussion last week after In Brief’s inclusion of a link to a new gender documentary by The Epoch Times. This news organization apparently has the reputation of being one step removed from Breitbart News, if that. I had to laugh because if you’d told me a few years ago that I would be horrifyingly amused by and nodding along in agreement with anything produced by Matt Walsh or The Daily Wire, I would not only not have believed you, I would never ever have seen it. I so deeply disagree with so many of their positions that it simply would have been unthinkable to look…and yet, there I was, as engrossed and dumbfounded as the other 170+ million people watching What Is a Woman? on Twitter at the beginning of June. With that said, we will bring you information from a wide variety of sources in this section—including some from media organizations that you might usually avoid. We will be transparent about sources and leave it to you, the reader, to make the final call on what to click through to. I encourage us all to keep our minds open, though. It’s why you’re here!

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