BROADview in Brief

The state of American gender medicine, women in Scotland, and bathrooms...again

Photo by Hush Naidoo Jade Photography on Unsplash

What else could we lead this week’s news round-up with but Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala’s clear-eyed and devastating description of the state of international vs American gender medicine in The Free Press? It’s a tale of flawed research, a bizarre culture of hubris, fanaticism, suppression, and silence amongst clinicians in the field, and an American advocacy juggernaut of LGBT and medical lobby groups determined to shut down contradictory evidence. It’s common for medicine to get ahead of science, but how disastrous to involve thousands of American children in this type of crude medical and psychological experimentation in the 21st century. Given how often researchers have abused children in the past, I can’t be surprised, sadly.

If you haven’t heard of Dr. Kaltiala before, Gender: A Wider Lens had an excellent interview with her last year (in their audio-only days). No one can say she’s not trying to encourage an ethical reexamination of the evidence…except trans activists like Erin Reed of the Erin in the Morning substack, who constantly attacks the person rather than engage with the data when it comes to gender medicine. 

Meanwhile, this week’s Wall Street Journal Future View column asked college students whether transgender treatments should be available to minors, and I must say that the responses gave me a lot of hope. I know that more of my own friends and acquaintances are willing to speak up about their concerns about pediatric transition now when even a year ago most were either unaware or afraid to wonder out loud. What are you seeing out there?

Fanning out across the US:

• In Tennessee, two teenagers have asked the US Supreme Court to block the new Tennessee law banning gender medicalization for minors. If the Court agrees to take the case, there may be a last word on the constitutionality of the increasing number of state laws blocking pediatric medical transition. 

• Wyoming kept itself in the gender headlines as the University of Wyoming was forced to pay the legal fees for a local evangelist and agree to stop censoring his speech. Todd Schmidt had sued university administrators when they banned his on-campus table after he posted a sign saying, “God created male and female and Artemis Langford is a male.” Interestingly, Clair McFarland for the Cowboy State Daily referred to this as Langford’s “sexual identity,” which I suppose is in contrast to Langford’s “gender identity.” I’ve always thought of sexual identity in terms of sexual orientation, but we’re exploring new meanings all the time in this arena!

• I’ve written about some school districts in New Jersey rescinding their parental transgender secrecy policies, but that did not happen in Toms River, New Jersey. It will be interesting to see how their school board elections play out--they vote in an off-year cycle and have three of nine seats in play on November 7th. 

• Isn’t it strange that we’re still talking about school bathrooms in the US? I thought the Supreme Court had basically settled that issue by refusing to take the Gloucester County, Virginia, case back in 2021. Apparently not, and the number of states and school districts restricting who uses which bathroom continues to mount. This time, it’s St. Charles County, Missouri, where the mother of a trans-identified student is threatening to sue the Francis Howell School Board if they pass a policy requiring students to use bathrooms and locker rooms schools based on their sex, although each school must also have a gender-neutral bathroom/locker room available.

• Further west, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has temporarily blocked similar bathroom legislation from going into effect across Idaho. 

• Ah, gender, could there be a word that confounds and confuses more than thee? Why can’t we just say sex when we mean sex? Oklahoma is having none of that, as television station KOCO reported from Oklahoma City. Advocates spoke out against the State Board of Education’s policy of banning gender (sex?) redesignations on school records at their latest meeting. In response, State Superintendent Ryan Walters said, “​​We don't need to be going back and correcting records based on transgender ideology. We have two genders. Those are the genders that are set." Sigh.

• And in California, State Attorney General Rob Bonta has joined a 19-state liberal coalition filing an amicus brief in a Montgomery County, Maryland Board of Education lawsuit, supporting that county’s policy that allows its schools to include LGBTQ+ books in their mandatory language arts curricula.

Looking across the Atlantic, I must admit that while I knew Sex Matters has been campaigning for clarification in the language around sex in the UK Equality Act, I thought it was superfluous. As a layperson, the language seemed clear. I was most definitely proved wrong as For Women Scotland lost its appeal about the meaning of the word ‘woman’ in law this week. The Scottish Court of Session ruled that “…individuals without a GRC [Gender Recognition Certificate], whether they have the protected characteristic of gender reassignment or not, retain the sex in which they were born. No conflation of the protected characteristics is involved. A person with a GRC in the female gender comes within the definition of ‘woman’ for the purposes of section 11 of the Equality Act…” meaning that they’ve changed not just their gender but also their sex. Of course, one point is that relatively few people in the UK have a GRC--roughly 6,000 vs over 250,000 who identify as trans. Hence, the common British practice of opening up sex-segregated spaces willy-nilly (haha) based on self-identification is not legal, but by the same token, it’s possible that females may no longer be able to group themselves together as females (so much for that lesbian speed dating?) although certain Equality Act exceptions could still apply. We’ll see how this plays out over time.

In other global news:

• There is ongoing drama in the British switchover from the Tavistock GIDS to the new NHS gender identity service. Surprise!

• Barbie Kardashian seems to be coping with Irish prison life much better in a male prison wing.

• If you haven’t watched the new Dutch documentary The Transgender Protocol, which reviews the original Dutch research on puberty blockers, you really should. It was produced by Zembla, a documentary television series created under the auspices of Dutch public broadcasting. They made a point of talking to all sides on the issue but most especially turned to Dutch experts in evidence-based medicine to weigh in. 

• In a real-life Korean version of Gaslight, the South China Morning Post revealed that a South Korean Olympic athlete, Nam Hyun-hee, broke off her relationship when she discovered her fiancé was a con artist using both male and female identities to swindle investors. 

• And still in the Far East, Taiwan held its annual Trans March this past week. Reporter Daniel Yo-Ling updated readers on trans rights in Taiwan and the state of the trans movement for The Diplomat.

• Last week, I wrote about Canadian nurse Amy Hamm’s ongoing discipline hearing. An update is that psychiatrist James Cantor was approved as an expert witness and has now testified before the panel. Hamm’s hearing is expected to continue into next week.

• OUT in Perth reported that American transman Scott Newgent has announced a December 9th Scream Louder event in Sydney. Newgent advocates against pediatric gender transition after experiencing some of the worst possible side effects from gender medicine as a 40+-year-old adult. Despite their weird attempt to connect Scream Louder with Kellie-Jay Keen, I appreciated that OUT in Perth laid out Newgent’s experiences and linked to a previous Newgent interview for their readers.

By the time you read this, I will be on my way to Denver for Genspect’s latest Bigger Picture conference, where we will discuss many of these issues and more. I’ll be the one with dark circles under her eyes from catching a 5:15 a.m. flight--please say hello if you see me! I’d love to meet you. I had a neighbor introduce himself to me this week because he’d seen me out wearing my Blocked and Reported hoodie and is a fellow Herzog/Singal fan…should we encourage Lisa to get some BROADview merch so we can recognize each other out in the wild? Let me know in the comments below or through this form. Have an excellent weekend, whatever you’re wearing--there will be a lot to talk about next week!

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With eternal gratitude for the research assistance of Alejandra Q.