We Can't "Both Sides" This Story
We have to cover *all* sides
Maybe the moment it all changed was August 15, 2017.
Three days before, alt-right leader Richard B. Spencer had convened the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA, to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. A twenty-year-old named James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of counterprotestors, killing thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer.
President Trump gave what many considered an anemic response, to say the least, condemning an “egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.” When, on the 15th, reporters pressed him on why he’d taken so long to “blast neo-Nazis” like Spencer, he answered that he wanted to get his facts straight. And the facts, to him, were that “you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”
Maybe that was the moment when even those most staunchly committed to the myth of objectivity in the media threw their hands up and decided we have to call hate hate, when “bothsidesing” became a buzz word. Fuck the fairness doctrine, they thought. There’s no comparing one side—peacefully protesting—with the other: driving a car into a crowd full of people who lionize confederate leaders and want a pure white state, murdering a young woman. Those sides can’t be balanced. And so the idea that you can’t “both sides” some stories was born—or at least, it matured.
It’s an argument that has been coopted by some who believe that the story of gender dysphoric youth has only one side: If you have gender dysphoria—or a cross-sex identity—you’re trans and need puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and possibly surgeries. Many who consider themselves progressive and read the New York Times or give money to Planned Parenthood assume that this is true. And they may assume that anyone poking around to complicate, or even dispel, this narrative is right wing, and doing so out of hate.
There is short-term evidence, largely based on convenience samples, that suggests improved mental health for young people with gender dysphoria who reported that they wanted puberty blockers and/or cross-sex hormones and got them. There are also objections to that research. In fact, name a bias and you can likely find some gender research to confirm it. You can talk to kids who are thriving after medical transition, and kids who are traumatized. You can find people who feel kids should be very carefully evaluated and that “medical gatekeeping” is important so that some kids can safely be sent on the medical path. You can find people who think kids should never be allowed to medically transition. And you can find people who think kids should be allowed to do whatever they want with no questions asked. And you can find people who think these ways on both the right and the left.
But you won’t hear those many sides in the press. And that is likely because the “no sides” idea has infiltrated us. That notion has been cultured, pickled, in a society which nurtures and rewards essentialist ideas and ideals. Perhaps young people, raised with the demand for moral purity within the Twittersphere, the nonstop “us versus them” mentality, have now joined newsrooms and feel it is their job to protect marginalized groups rather than to report dispassionately on them, however inconvenient the truths they discover.
But that’s not our job. Our job is to find the truths—all of them, even when they compete with our own ideas and even when they compete with each other.
I have stated publicly that I have no official position on banning medicalization of gender dysphoric youth. My position is that we should report on all the research around medicalizing them, and ask tough questions like: Are all gender dysphoric youth going to be persistently trans, and, if someone answers yes, what evidence do they have? We have research showing high desistance rates, and research showing low desistance rates. My position is that we should talk to the people who were helped and the people who were hurt. My position is that we should not politicize this messy, difficult topic. My position is that the press is not doing its job, and that tribalism should not infect newsrooms.
We can safely agree that the man who drove his car into a rally of protestors and killed Heather Heyer is not a very fine person. Even Trump called him “a disgrace to himself, his family, and this country.” But let’s not lump those who want to complicate the media narrative about kids with gender dysphoria into that category. When it comes to this debate, there really are very fine people on both sides.
I’m five years into this research and I am still confused, but I know this: Very few people have the full story, including me. I’ve gone over so much of the research so many times and I can’t paint a clear picture. And that’s where the press should be, and the public: Once you see it all, you realize what a mess it is. That’s what I want for the world, to see the mess. Then we can try to clean it up together.
You are so smart. Thank you for writing this.
Indeed, the story is complicated, and how gender dysphoria starts, develops and how best to treat it is not understood.
There is only one truth out there, but there are different values and risks that people are willing to take given how little is known about how to support these young people. In addition to the ignorance about this condition, however, the misinformation which results from dropping facts which are considered "inconvenient" is making it much much worse.
It is not helping young people with this distress to muzzle those reporting on outcomes (and the ignorance about outcomes, which is shocking, given that these medical interventions are readily available and encouraged, in spite of their drastic physical consequences) and asking questions about what is known and not known, and pointing out the huge gaps in our understanding of who can be helped how. It is not helping young people with this distress to not report treatments besides medical intervention, which have been successful for some (for who? there is no clinical test to say who won't only need therapy, time, psychiatric medication perhaps, to have harmony between their mind and body). It is harmful to young people and their families to be lied to about what their options are, what the risks and benefits and alternatives for each are, and about how much (or in this case, little) is known!
Thank you again! Please keep reporting on this!