BROADview in Brief
This week's gender lowdown...
Wow, detransition was certainly in the headlines this week, from Lydia Polgreen’s befuddled musings in the New York Times about whether transition regret should derail the US trans youth medicalization project (TLDR: Shit happens and then you die, so drug the children. See Lisa’s takedown here), to Molly Hennessy-Fiske’s surprisingly nuanced profile of detrans advocate Prisha Mosley in the Washington Post, to new research papers on detransitioners (Littman et al. here and MacKinnon et al. here). Perhaps due to recently-filed detransition lawsuits, either naming the AAP or the author of its gender-affirming care policy statement, the American Academy of Pediatrics has now paused the publication of new gender-affirming care guidelines (maybe you can buy the book if you can cough up $10K in cash).
What else was going on across the country in gender news?
In Colorado, Jefferson County Public Schools found itself in hot water after putting a 5th-grade boy who identifies as a girl in the same bed as a girl while on a class field trip to Philadelphia and Washington, DC this past summer without informing either the girl or her parents.
The saga continues in Wyoming, as the sorority sisters suing Kappa Kappa Gamma for admitting transwoman Artemis Langford officially appealed the lower court dismissal of their case.
In Virginia, Williamsburg schools updated their policies to align with Governor Youngkin’s model transgender student policies (if you’ve forgotten, they include requiring parent involvement in school social transitions and sex-based sports and bathrooms).
A coalition of Democratic attorneys general from 21 states filed a brief opposing Idaho’s recent law requiring students to use school bathrooms based on their sex (the law is currently on hold as it’s reviewed in court).
Wisconsin Democratic governor Tommy Evers vetoed Republican legislation banning youth gender medicalization in that state. Republicans are still figuring out whether they’ll try to override the veto.
In really wild teacher union news in Oregon, the new Portland Association of Teachers contract requires that school administrators take a student’s gender identity, race, and other factors into account before taking disciplinary action. Discipline policies are normally the bailiwick of school boards and administrators and are usually not concretized in teacher contracts. In the past, administrators were typically exhorted to treat all students the same for similar offenses; now they’re being told to treat them all differently.
In California, the Women’s Liberation Front commissioned a new poll of likely voters on gender identity legislation. There’s been a pretty dramatic negative swing in the three years since they last surveyed Californians.
Transgender Georgia state employees can now get cross-sex hormones and gender surgeries through their employer medical plans, following the settlement of a lawsuit brought by the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund.
The CDC was blasted in the Daily Mail for switching from pregnant women to pregnant people in its most recent vaccine guidelines (this type of terminology change is gradually oozing through the entire CDC website).
Here are some recent papers and letters to the editor by gender clinicians that you may want to check out: Research and Analyses by Turban et al. Fail to Refute Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria by Chan Kulatunga-Moruzi and Supporting Autonomy in Young People with Gender Dysphoria: Psychotherapy Is Not Conversion Therapy by Robert D’Angelo. And speaking of gender therapy, the GETA network (Gender Exploratory Therapist Association) has now officially rebranded as Therapy First, and psychologist Elliot Kaminetzky has started Serenity Parent Consulting in the gender exploratory space. You can see him interviewed on The Radical Center: When Professionals Are Afraid to Speak.
Looking abroad, the British Women and Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch told parliament that gender-affirming care for minors should be considered a new form of conversion therapy, as noted by Dennis Kavanagh for Spiked. Meanwhile, ex-oh-so-briefly prime minister Liz Truss is bringing forward a private members bill to explicitly ban biological males from women’s bathrooms (this is already an option under their Equality Act 2010 but is not mandated).
Also in the UK, the trial continued in the case of two teenagers charged with the murder of 16-year-old trans student Brianna Ghey.
The BBC reported that under new prison guidance in Scotland, transwomen prisoners will go to men’s jails if they’ve been violent against women. Uh, what if they’ve been violent against men? This is causing a wee bit of conflict with those who believe the policy doesn’t go far enough.
Ireland is taking a more explicitly North American approach to transwomen prisoners and will continue to allow violent males to be placed in women’s prisons on a case-by-case basis.
In Australia, Bernard Lane wrote that it is unclear whether that country’s largest medical liability underwriter will insure gender affirmative practitioners against future lawsuits from 16 and 17-year-olds who later regret taking cross-sex hormones.
And finally, Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage was dropped by its Japanese publisher just weeks before the Japanese translation was due to hit bookstores. They seem to have freaked out about the scandalous title they themselves chose for Japanese readers: “That girl's become transgender, too: The tragedy of the sex-change craze being contagious through social media”
Looking for a little gender satire this weekend to take your mind off all the bad and sad events going on in the world? Eva Kurilova gave up her Disney+ subscription to check out Lady Ballers for you, and her review is in Distance Magazine this week. It sounds very funny, but only you can decide whether it’s worth a subscription to the Daily Wire+ (gulp). Please consider subscribing to BROADview first; we will shave Lisa’s head and put her on roller skates for my new musical concept: The Roller King and I. Lisa will sing Getting to Know You(r Gender) and Shall We Pass as she cavorts as a drag king on wheels during an NYC roller rink’s toddler time…what do you think? We’ll put it on right after Lisa drops her upcoming children’s album, Free to Be He/She/They.
Thank you so much for your comments and hot takes--the opinions on the WDI event in Portland last week were informative and fiery! You can reach me through this form, too. Have an excellent Friday and take a moment to check out Unyielding Bicyclist’s new Substack Bad Facts. The Bicyclist is kicking it off with two tricksters, a lesbian mom, and a diaper fetishist, so you know it’s going to be good!
With gratitude always for the research work of Alejandra Q.
Regarding the movie Lady Ballers, I can report that it is another movie on the rotten tomatoes site that demonstrates a schism between the public at large and members of the elite class of which professional movie reviewers generally are members. Currently, on rottentomatoes.com the audience score is 92%, while the "tatometer" score representing the professional reviewers is zip. My husband and I have noted a similar divide regarding movies that fail to conform to -- or (everyone clutch their pearls now!) actually push back against -- the "rules" of woke . . . but this is the most dramatic sign of "those who know better" disapproving of the unwashed masses via rotten tomatoes that I've seen yet. Personally, I suspect this movie is less art than a useful time capsule depicting the insanity of the times . . . but, who am I to judge (I've not even watched it . . .yet)? If it makes people laugh rather than marinate in helpless steely rage, I'm all for it!
I also want to underscore Kate’s encouragement to those who don’t yet do so to subscribe to Broadview, as a paid subscriber if you can. As one of many, many examples of Broadview’s importance, I have already received a response from someone to whom I sent the detrans lawsuit post. He asked whether I thought it would be useful for him to share the post with his Congress members (who are Dan Goldman, Schumer, and Gillibrand). Here is what I wrote to him, and I welcome other suggestions for actions we might recommend to people:
“Yes, to your question. If you decide to do it, it might be good to make a suggestion for action, eg, that the folks actually have a meeting directly with some detransitioners, no matter what their perceived political affiliation, listen with an open mind to what their concerns and needs are, and work to find ways to address them. It’s possible that Lisa Selin Davis will have contact information—she knows and has spoken with a number of detransitioners. Lisa lives in Brooklyn, may even be in Goldman’s district, and is a Democrat.
“You may get pablum as a response, if you get any response at all, but until more D voters become aware of this, and there is a structure on the Democratic side to make a more concerted push, all we really have to save the Ds from themselves is reaching out to our D reps on an individual basis as opportunities present themselves.
“Until then, it’s as Amos Oz wrote:
“Bring a bucket of water and throw it on the fire, and if you don’t have a bucket, bring a glass, and if you don’t have a glass, use a teaspoon, everyone has a teaspoon. And yes, I know a teaspoon is little and the fire is huge but there are millions of us and each one of us has a teaspoon.”
Thanks in advance for any practical suggestions for action anyone here may have.