BROADview in Brief

Gender Yips!

Photo by Peter Forster on Unsplash

Dianna Kenny, on Australian gender reporter Bernard Lane’s Gender Clinic News, wrote this week about society’s gender version of the malady that struck Simone Biles at the Tokyo Olympics:

I believe that society has developed the “gender yips”—the loss of the automatic comprehensibility of gendered language that was once universally accepted to define and describe our scientifically acquired knowledge of biological sex and the fundamental concept of sexual dimorphism—men, women, ova, sperm, mother, father, husband, wife, son, daughter, brother, sister.

Amen, sister! Oh, wait, am I allowed to call her that?*

I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week, about words that were once acceptable and are now considered blasphemous, even though they are neutral descriptors. Or: they were. Now simply naming someone’s sex—not to mention relegating them to the sports category or the prison cell associated with it—is sometimes verboten, even illegal. More on this next week, but today I want to say: let us try to push past the noise and speak the truth—with a whisper, a sigh, a shout, I don’t care. Truth hits everybody, as the best rock band of the 80s once sang. (Don’t agree about The Police? Fight me! That said, I have no idea what the lyrics mean, and until yesterday I thought it was “truth hurts everybody.”)

The big headline of the week was “How a Supposedly Scientific Report Became a Weapon in the War on Trans Kids,” New York Times’ columnist Lydia Polgreen’s nearly 5,000-word piece “debunking” the Cass Review. As many have pointed out, she seems to have decided it was a bad document and then looked for reasons to confirm her belief. Later in the day, the headline was changed to “The Strange Report Fueling the War on Trans Kids.”

It’s not strange, or supposedly scientific. It is the most thorough document ever on the history and controversies around pediatric and adolescent gender medicine, the result of talking to people from all sides of the debate. The entire goal was to create a report that pushed past politics, so the activist journalists politicizing it are doing everybody a disservice—especially gender dysphoric kids. As someone who has also talked to many, many different stakeholders over the years, and tried my hardest to empathize with each of them, I support Cass’s efforts, and I sure can’t argue with the conclusion: the evidence to support radical medical interventions is very, very weak. Polgreen points out that there’s no evidence that therapy works, either. So if there’s no evidence that double mastectomies work to alleviate gender dysphoria, and no evidence that therapy works, which should you pick as first line intervention? Hm….

I think this is appallingly sloppy, misleading, and dangerous, and Polgreen is not equipped to write about this subject. They closed comments quickly, and didn’t publish mine. Please write a letter to the editor.

Leor Sapir broke the news that the American Society of Plastic Surgeons—the trade group that represents those doing gender nullification surgeries and the like—is not on board with the other groups that endorse the affirmative model of care. ASPS “has not endorsed any organization’s practice recommendations for the treatment of adolescents with gender dysphoria,” they told Sapir, admitting the “considerable uncertainty as to the long-term efficacy for the use of chest and genital surgical interventions” and “the existing evidence base is viewed as low quality/low certainty.”

Award-winning “journalist” Erin Reed shockingly objects to this categorization, and claims evidence to disrupt it, sending out a press release from ASPS last night that is not currently available anywhere else.

“ASPS has not endorsed any organization’s practice recommendations for the treatment of adolescents with gender dysphoria. ASPS currently understands that there is considerable uncertainty as to the long-term efficacy for the use of chest and genital surgical interventions for the treatment of adolescents with gender dysphoria, and the existing evidence base is viewed as low quality/low certainty. This patient population requires specific considerations. ASPS is reviewing and prioritizing several initiatives that best support evidence-based gender surgical care to provide guidance to plastic surgeons. As members of the multidisciplinary care team, plastic surgeons have a responsibility to provide comprehensive patient education and maintain a robust and evidence-based informed consent process, so patients and their families can set realistic expectations in the shared decision-making context.”

“It’s important to note that, as an organization and specialty guided by evidence, the Society’s stance on this issue has remained consistent: More high-quality research in this rapidly evolving area of healthcare is needed. To that end, ASPS efforts in this area include capturing clinical data on gender surgery procedures for adults and the development of practice resources to better aid members in implementing best practices in offering gender-surgery services when higher quality evidence is available. ASPS supports transgender patients’ constitutional protections and right to dignity, privacy, and humane medical care.” “Further, it has always been the Society’s position that members should be able to provide medical care without fear of government-sanctioned penalties and criminalization – and ASPS opposes any attempts at legal encroachment into the practice of medicine.”

Well, that doesn’t seem so different from what Sapir says. They’re not claiming that gender-affirming care is evidence-based and lifesaving, as the other associations are. But neither do they support bans.

In other news: Ilana Glazer says getting pregnant helped her embrace her nonbinary identity! That makes a lot of sense because… I cannot finish that sentence. Simon Cowell will now allow transgender boys to audition for boy bands. I guess that could preclude the need for a male who can sing falsetto?

Massachusetts will offer nonbinary birth certificates to newborns, because everybody knows that a baby’s sex is completely irrelevant, and pediatricians don’t use it to measure baby’s growth or health in any way.

Lawsuits continue! Has anyone done an analysis of how much money has been spent to fight laws and guidelines either preventing or insisting on schools sharing kids’ social transitions with parents? This week, Iowa won an appeal to ban books and restrict teachings related to gender identity. Who knew the courts were the place to decide curricula?

Meanwhile, in Taiwan, sex marker changes may be restricted to those with a gender dysphoria diagnosis. However, many transsexuals have told me that they lied about their symptoms to get the interventions they wanted. Who gets to decide whose pain is severe enough to warrant a legal fiction?

British psychotherapist James Esses, kicked out of his training program over his gender-critical views, won an apology and a settlement from the institution.

Olympic champion Imane Khelif showed a softer side in a makeup company video.

A NH trans girl won the right to play on the girls’ tennis team.

What else have you read, watched, or listened to this week that you’d like to share? Please leave in the comments!

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*CORRECTION: An earlier version identified Lane, not Kenny, as the author. My apologies!