Can You Deinstitutionalize Groupthink?

The week in gender, 12/19/25

I’m making this post free as I want as many people as possible to understand my point about the Trump Administration’s announcements yesterday.

Non-gender rec of the week:

I love this song by Haim. And after this week—Reiners, Bondi, Brown, Trump being Trump—we need some beautiful music.

To the news…

Yesterday’s press conference at the Hubert Humphrey building in DC deserves a post of its own, but what I’ll say for now is: The same guys who said “God bless Donald Trump” and are discouraging parents from vaccinating their kids against measles repeated the talking points that some of us have been yammering on about for years. I would like to know the German word for “the feeling when people with no credibility speak the truth, people with some credibility are declared not credible when they speak it, and those with ‘credibility’ lie—and believe lies.”

The announcements from RFK Jr and others revealed a multi-pronged deinstitutionalization of gender identity. The book I’ve been working on forever is about how those ideas got institutionalized and how pushback against them was censored, which allowed terrible things to happen. Most liberals don’t realize the sneaky ways gender identity, and the medicating of it, were institutionalized—by making gender dysphoria a disability, or amending the Affordable Care Act to consider the refusal of gender medicine a form of discrimination. There was a multi-pronged approach over more than a decade to quietly strongarm just about every American institution and profession into participating in the affirmation industry.

Over the course of this year, Trump has gone about reversing those deinstitutionalizing techniques. And as of yesterday, the approach includes cutting off funding streams, insisting on an evidence-based approach, slapping warning labels on breast binders, and no longer considering gender dysphoria a disability.

The New York Times explained this as: “the federal government does not recognize even the existence of people whose gender identity does not align with their sex at birth.”

Who’s going to tell these reporters that people exist whether we call them what they want to be called or not? Descartes did not say “You affirm, therefore I am.”

What reporters should have done was explain how these ideas were institutionalized in the first place, in ways that had implications few of us understood. In the absence of any willingness to modify by those who upheld those moves, deinstitutionalizing is the equal and opposite reaction.

Otherwise known as: You brought this on yourselves.

The highlight of the press conference was the eminently reasonable NIH director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who conveyed why the medical community didn’t reform: groupthink had overtaken science.

I raised my hand high during the Q&A, but I didn’t get called on. My question was going to be: how do you deinstitutionalize groupthink, especially when the Trump administration is just as guilty of it?

Hopefully I’ll get to ask him someday.

What I’d also like to know is how are you going to help the thousands of children abruptly taken off the medications they’ve come to believe are medically-necessary and life-saving?

Sarah M and I will be recording a podcast about these changes, to be released Monday.

Headlines:

California school district near Nevada caught up in a dispute over transgender athlete policies — 12/18 (KCRA)

What Gender Dysphoric Children Really Need — 12/18 (Washington Post)

Missouri bill seeks permanent limits on transgender athletes — 12/18 (Fox2Now)

How cutting transgender instruction at Texas medical schools undermines health groups’ recommendations — 12/18 (Texas Tribune)

Fewer than half of transgender, nonbinary youth report others use their pronouns — 12/18 (K-12 Dive)

Families Challenge Abrupt End to Medical Care for Transgender Adolescents and Young Adults at Two Connecticut Hospitals — 12/17 (GLAD)

Pam Bondi wants FBI to offer bounties for ‘radical gender ideology’ groups, leaked memo shows — 12/17 (The Advocate)

Ken Paxton’s office launches tip line to encourage enforcement of Texas’ “bathroom bill” — 12/17 (Texas Tribune)

One in ten children receiving NHS gender care are self-medicating with sex hormones — 12/16 (New Statesman)

The Ten Best (and Five Worst) Pieces of Trans Journalism of 2025 — 12/16 (Assigned Media)

The risk of ideology in gender medicine — 12/16 (Kevin MD)

Gender transition and intellectual developmental disorders: a case report — 12/15 (Sexual Medicine)

House Republicans advance sweeping anti-trans bills ahead of holiday break — 12/15 (19th)

The state is making a list of transgender Texans. It’s using driver’s licenses to help. — 12/15 (KUT)

If you have other headlines, videos, papers to share, please leave in the comments.