BROADview In Brief

Strong undertow

Jack French on Flickr “Danger - Sneaker Waves?”

I don’t know how you’ve found yourself at BROADview, but I’m here because I was tossed into the proverbial gender sea several years ago, both personally and professionally, with no understanding of what had been happening in the world around me as I’d blithely sailed along. It felt like drowning, but I managed to save myself, first by floating along in confusion, then by paddling into reading and research. I now have a reasonably confident crawl as I swim through these stories about the fascinating and often disturbing views so many people across the globe currently hold about gender and sex. Sneaker waves can still surprise me, though, and the language in an old peer-reviewed paper that our researcher Alejandra found,  Psychophysiological and Subjective Sexual Arousal to Visual Sexual Stimuli in New Women, made me splutter. What in the heck was a new woman? A post-operative transsexual male, of course. The paper was originally published in 2005, long before gender was on my radar, and yet the disconnect between plain-old objective reality and a co-created cultural illusion was already well underway. Of course, I know that unusual ideas about gender were developing decades ago and that humans are historically irrational, with cycles of astonishing beliefs that come and go over decades and centuries. Yet it’s still alarming to see this language in a science paper from twenty years ago. Is there even a stable shore to return to anymore?

Moving forward to current events, let’s take a look at the latest in gender research news. There’s been a fair amount of coverage of the preprint of British neuropsychology professor Dr. Sallie Baxendale’s literature review, The Impact of Suppressing Puberty on Neuropsychological Function, which came out on Authorea last week. Bernard Lane, in particular, has a good analysis of it on his Substack, Gender Clinic News. I don’t think any neuropsychologist would be surprised to read that suppressing sex hormone levels in a critical developmental window could have long-term impacts on human cognition, but it’s clear that gender clinicians have not considered it at all. Would puberty blockers be as popular with physicians and parents if they understood that a teen’s IQ and/or executive function could be permanently impacted? I have to hope that a better conceptualization of the unknowns would raise more red flags, but I don’t understand how so many professionals dived into giving children these powerful medications based on so little evidence in the first place.

Speaking of evidence, the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine noted that the World Health Organization issued a new announcement on January 15th regarding its plans to develop WHO transgender healthcare guidelines, with three key takeaways:

1. The deadline for public comments has been extended to February 2nd. You can email comments to hiv-aids@who.int.

2. Members of the guideline development panel may continue to change.

3. The guidelines will focus only on adults because the WHO acknowledged that "the evidence base for children and adolescents is limited and variable regarding the longer-term outcomes of gender affirming care for children and adolescents."

All good news. One of the more controversial panel members, Florence Ashley of they/them/that bitch fame, has already dropped out (or been dropped). 

Therapist Peter Jenkins wrote on Critical Therapy Antidote about the steep drop in WPATH membership over the past year. They appear to have lost roughly 60% of their members quite suddenly. Perhaps that eunuch chapter in the SOC8 wasn’t such a hot idea after all, despite how very articulate, well-educated, and pleasant eunuchs are to be around. More on puberty blockers: The Daily Caller also managed to get clips from a 2022 WPATH training where Dr. Daniel Metzger, a WPATH-certified pediatric endocrinologist, said all the things about puberty blockers that gender clinicians loudly deny.

Meanwhile, ABC News reports that the Biden administration is spending $700,000 on a pregnancy prevention program for “transgender males.” The program is actually for trans-identified females. It turns out that they get pregnant at similar rates to other teen females but apparently use condoms and other methods of birth control and STD prevention at lower rates than their peers. So strange that unclear language may lead some young females to believe that they don’t need the same type of protection as other young females. Fortunately, the Center for Innovative Public Health is here to figure it out and proposes adapting and rebranding their Girl2Girl sexual health phone messaging program as #TranscendentHealth. That’ll fix things.

Looking across the US:

• The Supreme Court refused to hear Metropolitan School District v A.C. Case, a school bathroom lawsuit out of Indiana, thus allowing the lower court ruling in favor of trans students using bathrooms based on their gender identity to stand. Unyielding Bicyclist thinks this is a good thing: “I don’t want them touching any trans cases until about three years after the NYT Style section writes a trend piece about terfy gays.”

• The South Carolina legislation banning youth gender medicalization marched forward, as the state’s House of Representatives approved it 82-23. There are some school parental notification provisions included, although they’re not as extreme as those proposed by the most conservative legislators. The bill now moves on to the Senate.

• In California, the judge who found in favor of two teachers fighting Escondido Union’s policy of hiding student gender transitions from parents has ruled that the district must return the women to the classroom. Unfortunately, he declined to require the district to pay the women’s legal fees. Until districts face serious financial consequences for this type of harassment, it will continue, especially given California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s stance on the issue.

• A Florida family is suing the state for its ban on allowing trans-identified males to participate in female school sports. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t!

• It came up in the In Brief comments last week, and NPR also reported that healthcare clinics in Missouri and across the country are being priced out of providing gender-affirming care because of rising malpractice premiums. 

• KSL reported that Utah is the next state to bring forward sex-based bathroom bills. Republic Governor Spencer Cox stated, “What I can say generally is this is a concern for people in our state, is we have to protect women's spaces. That's very important to me. I think it's important that we have the discussions happening all across the country…I have no problem with that at all. But I hope we will do it in a respectful way, in a way that treats people with dignity, and that we can find the best solution with a very, very difficult issue." Cox is facing more conservative challengers in the Republican gubernatorial primary in June.

In global news, the Australian family courts have been presiding over some complex gender cases recently, as noted in The Australian. I was particularly intrigued by the linked article, “Family Court Judge Rules Father’s Gender Non-Conformity ‘Confused’ His Children.” Frankly, it seemed like the more important factor in the judge’s decision to award custody of the younger children to the mother was that the father constantly talked trash about mom to the kids: “(The father) appeared unable to prioritise the children’s needs ahead of his own negative feelings for the mother,” Justice Beckhouse said.” What a difficult situation.

• In Canada, a doctor has been given a three-month suspension for being “inappropriate and disrespectful” toward a trans patient. Amongst Dr. Raymond Brière’s crimes were misgendering and explaining (mansplaining?) to the patient that “he was biologically female.” Thanks to subscriber Emilie for bringing this up in last week’s comments. What say you, Canadians? En ce cas, lequel est con? Ah, so many ways to riff on that in this context, but I’ll restrain myself.

• Journalist Hannah Barnes has written an excellent overview of the continuing chaos surrounding the closure of the GIDS clinic in the UK for The New Statesman: “The desire to recruit people with different views ultimately led to placing Gids whistleblowers – those who had repeatedly raised concerns about the safety of the service and the clinical model it was operating under – alongside those they had either blown the whistle on, or who were still working under a system they had roundly criticised. It could never work.” Meanwhile, the BBC reports that the UK Care Quality Commission has given official approval to the first private clinic that will provide cross-sex hormones to over 16-year-olds after six appointments. This is progress?

I’ll wrap up by noting that gender identity and sex inevitably get entangled in current Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion controversies, so don’t miss evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven’s description of her mistreatment on the basis of her beliefs about sex thanks to Harvard’s DEI practices in The Free Press. I have had excellent DEI training in the past, which makes me all the sadder about the often unhelpful instruction of today. If you’re interested in learning more about evidence-based diversity training, I highly recommend Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn’t, ironically published by Belknap Press, an imprint of Harvard University Press. Hooven’s husband, MIT philosopher Alex Byrne, also has a new book out, The Trouble with Gender, and that’s what I’ll be reading this weekend. I hope you also have a good book to curl up with! Please share your thoughts below and through this form, and I’ll see you next week.

---

With heartfelt appreciation for the research assistance of Alejandra Q.