Thank you for this resource, and thanks in advance for your book. I’ve already begun sharing this outstanding article with people in my life. Yes, people need off-ramps from this, and I’m so grateful for your ramp-building ability.
Good! I can comment. (The poverty of disability/retirement) makes me a free subscriber.
I'm encouraged, Lisa. Seems to me, the whole "trans" thing hinges on 1 idea that can't be proven, or disproven. "Can a woman BECOME a man, or NOT", & the equivalent corollary "Can a man BECOME a woman, or NOT?" That's either "true", or "false", depending 100% on BELIEF, like religions.... I say "NO!"....The "LGBTQ+ mafia" says yes. So, I say, that "so-called "trans" is as "real" as Santa Claus. But NOT more real. KEEP UP the GOOD WORK!....
Adding my loud thank you, Lisa, for the Skeptic article - and for all your hard work, “crafting off-ramps made of prose”. I wish more people around me were asking the question “What the hell happened, and why are we battling over this?” so I could jump in with your piece. What do we say/do to make them ask that question?
It’s so hard to write about this topic without annoying either the believers or the nonbelievers.
Keep it up—we nonbelievers don’t have to approve of every phrase.
I thought the final sentence was appropriate. The gender clinicians are true believers; they believe their treatments benefit children. They’re wrong, but we won’t get through to potential doubters if we paint the clinicians as devils instead of misguided idealists.
Great article, I just don’t know if I’m the only one who had a bit of trouble with wanting the following section to be clearer :
“Males who are not feminine and same-sex attracted, and who often experience distress at their sexed bodies or social category later in life, are thought to be “autogynephilic”: attracted to the idea of themselves as women.11”
I wonder if you might want to be clearer that gender dysphoria in heterosexual males can also overlap with sexuality in a different way, as when it is associated with a history of sexual arousal to cross dressing in female clothing (aka transvestic fetishism) that is distinct from early onset gender dysphoria, which is commonly associated with same sex attraction and gender non conformity in childhood
I might have said “Some males who are not gender non conforming in childhood or same-sex attracted, *but* who have a history of sexual arousal in connection with cross dressing, may come to experience distress at their sexed bodies or social category later in life as well as a desire to live as women, which is thought to be motivated by “autogynephilia”: sexual attraction to the idea of themselves as women, to whom they are (heterosexually) attracted.11
I don’t know if you find this important but I think it’s relevant to distinguish between childhood onset gender dysphoria vs. adult onset gender dysphoria in males and how sexuality may be differently implicated in arriving at the common endpoint of trans identity and to understand that AGP pattern of sexual arousal isn’t necessarily synonymous with or associated with inevitable gender dysphoria, especially earlier in life
Maybe what I’m saying is that relationship between AGP and gender dysphoria could have been made clearer—that AGP sexuality is typically early onset and can be a precursor to adult onset gender dysphoria and trans id—it’s not that later onset non-homosexual type is referred to as autogynephilia
“Some of the policy decisions of the Trump administration were indeed overreach, such as banning all trans people from the military.”
And how did you reach this conclusion? I strongly disagree with it.
“Trans” people in the military, like “trans” people everywhere, demand access to opposite-sex spaces: toilets, changing rooms, showers. This is unacceptable in the military and everywhere else.
If there was a “trans” person in the military who agreed to use the correct-sex facilities, then fine. But no such person exists.
I've spoken and written about this quite a bit. If "trans" includes everyone who is gender nonconforming, as it is now understood, then banning the entire category is overreach. If you want to not allow people who've had vaginoplasty to serve combat because the daily dilation interferes with duties, that's a different story.
The question of medicalization goes beyond the consequences of these barbaric surgeries. I’m much more concerned about the psychological & medical consequences of people taking cross-sex hormones for years.
We know from the few studies we have that the free & unregulated use of steroids like these cause long-term damage, especially when men take estrogen & progesterone, and when women take testosterone. So far it’s mostly cardiovascular life-shortening effects (heart attacks & stroke risk). Cancers are much slower to develop but I’m betting they’re coming too eventually. The effects of testosterone on female bodies are devastating: bone & joint problems, the need for hysterectomies after several years on T, etc.
Why would a rational country pick soldiers & sailors who are purposefully making themselves sick to defend itself? The military won’t take people with naturally occurring endocrine problems (diabetes) or even those with really poor eyesight—and it’s not a civil rights issue. But doping with E or T is? BS!
Not everyone gets to do whatever they want all the time. I’m OK with the military refusing to employ& offer people who insist on these weird cosmetic procedures.
I agree with much of what you say—people need to be honest about tradeoffs. If an adult alters his or herself this way, it may mean giving things up, like military service, or a sports team. Perhaps believing that you have the power to change sex—to override nature, or God—leads to believing that you deserve/can get any and everything you want.
Thanks for your reply. I do wonder about the little gods this movement has fostered. So much of it seems to come from the MTF side, as one might expect.
All girls and women know, or must realize, that there are tradeoffs that our natural biology demands. Examples: Endometriosis afflicts so many women and alters the course of their lives. Women cannot continue to perform at the elite level of sport when pregnant/nursing! Having children will retard/delay one's professional life. Menopause with teenagers in the house: why lord, why? As Meghan Daum always says: Mother Nature is the biggest sexist.
I want soldiers to use the single-sex facilities appropriate to their immutable sex, and to wear the sex-specific uniforms appropriate to their immutable sex. If the male faux-vagina (actually an open wound) dilator agrees to use the male single-sex facilities, and wear male-designated uniforms, then fine. But I doubt that any faux-vagina dilator would agree to that. Access to wrong-sex facilities and wearing wrong-sex clothing are universal and unanimous demands of all “trans” people.
Again, I strongly disagree with your no-qualifications assertion that Trump’s EO was overreach, full stop. This was not appropriate in a piece that was intended to be an all-sides explainer.
>Consistent with the military mission and longstanding DoD policy, expressing a false “gender identity” divergent from an individual's sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service. Beyond the hormonal and surgical medical interventions involved, adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual's sex conflicts with a soldier's commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one's personal life. A man's assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.
You make good points, Mark. And I understand that inserting that strong opinion conflicts with the way the rest of the piece is reported—and I will ask the editor to shift so that I can make it clear that it's my opinion, not fact. That said: bans are very blunt instruments. As a liberal, I'm not a fan of them in general. I think having a policy about what conditions preclude service is fine. But a lot of the same people saying gender dysphoria isn't real are also saying it's a fine measurement to exclude people. We're all full of contradictions.
Gender nonconforming lesbians are not banned from the military. They love us because we make good soldiers. The ban on transgender-identified people across the board, is perfectly reasonable because:
- It disrupts troop cohesion to force other people to lie about a colleague's sex,
- Women have to deal with men in female spaces, and a percentage of transgender people are rapists just like some men are rapists. An even higher percentage of men are pigs about women's bodies so letting any man into the female shower will be disruptive.
- If a lesbian decides she's an "actual man" and gets a pretend penis, that surgery will eventually kill her. They have to extend the urethra through a piece of leg or arm tissue. It gets infected over and over, becomes antibiotic resistant and she eventually dies. It's costly and clearly the valid reason to not let someone in the military. There are many medical reasons to denying people the opportunity to serve.
- The public should not have to pay for elective surgeries just because someone wants to mimic the opposite sex. In my state, boobs on a man's chest is considered life-saving medicine. So it's free. Men move here to get their fake boobs. Facial feminization surgery is also considered life-saving medicine. That's bullshit. They're both elective surgeries.
Please check these policies before assuming that lesbians are banned too. And also, if you still say LGBT, please stop. We want a divorce from the TQ crazy.
Not every woman who thinks she's a man will go to the lengths (no pun intended) of getting a fake penis. However, women pretending to be men in the armed forces are putting themselves at risk of harm from the military men they live and work with. I don't think I need to spell it out. And, as you noted, the men are being compelled to embrace a lie for no defensible military purpose.
Thanks, Lisa. Can you explain to us why (if it is indeed true) Hilary Cass came to support the Pathways Puberty Blocker Trial? True...? I also read (And please correct me) that there has not been follow up of previous puberty-blocked patients, so that beneficence has not been established. True...? If so, is the Pathways trial medically ethical? What is happening with respect to this? Many thanks for corrections and clarifications.
Well, I can't explain it entirely, other than to say that she heard from people who felt helped and people who felt harmed, and that "low-quality" evidence is not evidence that it doesn't work or is harmful. So if she's applying the same lens to this that she might other fields—like, say, do GLP 1's improve heart health or something—then maybe she will find the risks are reasonable. I know they weren't able to get the data from the adult centres. But I agree that the best thing to do would be to follow-up with those who already took blockers, before trying them again. Also, they tried and failed to replicate the Dutch study anyway.
Another two questions: First, what body (e.g., GLAAD or HRC or whatever) promulgated the idea that gender identity is completely independent of the body? And second, is it (common) practice for gender medicine practitioners to claim that with surgeries and hormones one can actually change his/her sex? Thanks again.
I think that the message about changing sex came less from practitioners directly. Rather, by teaching that gender identity is fixed and the body is mutable, kids without the capacity to understand came to believe they could change sex. But I'm glad you raised this as I need to make sure I convey this in the book. As for gender identity: it's complicated. Because once it escaped the medical context and mixed with queer theory and social media—from man/woman to demi-girl and bigender etc—it took on a life of its own. That said, groups like GLAAD and HRC, that pivoted around 2015, ran with it.
I'm all for Lisa's campaign to provide some "off ramps," so long as the people taking 'em are honest about the fact they've changed their minds, and so long as they actually do take the exit: In other words, please let's not allow "reasonable" people to double-talk us into a continued imposition of trans ideology's rituals in speech and action onto the culture.
After reading Helen Lewis's strangely stubborn insistence on confusing readers by referring to male human beings as "she," while characterizing Justice Thomas' use of accurate terms as "gratuitous disrespect," I think we're going to have to wait a long time before this lunacy loses its hold on our society.
The Supreme Court’s Utterly Mainstream Ruling on Women’s Sports
The justices position themselves at the center of American public opinion.
Okay, I haven't read this yet. I do not think that using sex-based pronouns is gratuitous disrespect. In many ways I wish I were a purist and always did it. I think it's vitally important to use sex-based pronouns in crime reporting, for instance, though I think what's more important is making clear the sex of the person being reported on. I sometimes use identity-based pronouns, especially when occupying the mindset of someone whose experience I'm conveying. In theory, those words don't change the material reality of sex. Yet we know that they do shape the understanding, and often policy, so there is some overlap between the way we describe things and material reality. But I believe that in some cases, it's okay to use identity-based pronouns. I will read Helen's piece, though.
Yeah, I used to use preferred pronouns for trans-identified public figures whose work I admired and for whom I felt esteem (never thinking about how their behavior likely impacted their own families, children). Now that I've experienced the emotional blackmail practiced by someone who's taken on a "trans" identity, I cannot ignore the ugly realities inherent to that sort of behavior.
Remember that book Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne? It's about the end of the Comanche way of life and a tribe leader, Quanah Parker who recognized that conditions were so changed that to cling to the old ways would mean his people could not survive. In the affairs of humans, I think we're different from animals in that survival depends on more than adapting to our physical environment (clean air & water, sufficient food, etc.), but also to environmental factors that are byproducts of collective mindsets. I think natural selection, the process of culling species with attributes or deficiencies that make them a "bad" fit when environmental conditions suddenly change, is also at play when it comes to cultural traits among humans beings.
A short digression: (Thomas Sowell's did fantastic work identifying basic traits of culture -- habits, values, etc.-- held in common by different minority groups living within larger cultural majorities all over the globe. He coined the term "middleman minorities" to help explain the motivations behind human populations' recurring habit of slipping out of a state of general toleration into periods of very ugly mass behaviors towards those minorities. His combination of historical research and economic analysis helps strip away the myopia that comes when we over-focus on identity, I think, and his framing provides a much better way to understand the Jewish plight than the concept of antisemitism. )
Anyway, to relate this to the whole "when is it OK for honest people to engage in the shared fiction (thanks, Kathleen Stock!) of a cross-sex identity, I am thinking that perhaps the cultural conditions under which the practice of "politely" referring to a man who mimics a female (or a woman who mimics a male) by "preferred pronouns," was merely a harmless indulgence have passed. Cultural conditions have been impacted by all sorts of destabilizing factors (loss of meaning, alienation, scarcity, etc.), so that observing the rules of language that are currently the most efficient means by which you can instantly get across what you actually mean to the most native speakers of that language has become essential. In times of abundance and ease and safety, we can tolerate playing around with nonsense; but the mood of the majority has changed. Just like the era of the Minstrel wearing blackface has gone, perhaps the era of the beloved "Tranny" has passed. Too many of us have seen the knock-on effects of collective toleration for that level of self-indulgence . . .
A minor quibble on this point: ‘In order to come to any kind of resolution, we need to distinguish between subjective and objective truths—as Skeptic founder Michael Shermer puts it, “what is actually true, not just what we want to believe is true.”’ If the “subjective”/“objective” truth distinction is intended to capture the contrast you quote Shermer making then you are misusing the concept of truth. Someone wanting to believe that something is true does not capture a special sort of truth rightly labelled “subjective”. “True-for-me” is not a property of beliefs, but an attitude towards them. Truth is a wonderfully transparent concept, so please don’t psychologise it!
I would have wanted a less abrupt ending. More on what is happening now.
The whole thing is so insane... And the "allies" will never admit there are only two sexes, no matter how bizarre their claim is. They prefer trans-affirming lies over truth. How can you talk to someone like that?
Appreciate the thorough discussion. The fact that the concept of "gender identity" remains an oblique one should have put the brakes on a medical and legal movement that has impacted individuals who believe in "gender identity," distinct from gender dysphoria, and those who don't. There are significant legal ramifications to blue state legislation that codifies the idea that someone's internal sense of self defines them legally. IMHO transgender orthodoxy has evolved into a religion and should be protected under the Freedom of Religious Expression under the First Amendment, protecting believers from discrimination in housing and employment, but shielding the rest of us from having to act according to others' beliefs.
Thank you for this resource, and thanks in advance for your book. I’ve already begun sharing this outstanding article with people in my life. Yes, people need off-ramps from this, and I’m so grateful for your ramp-building ability.
Thanks so much, Lisa.
Yes, the point of your piece wasn't to preach to the choir.
In appreciation, for all you do.
A big thanks to Michael Shermer too.
Good! I can comment. (The poverty of disability/retirement) makes me a free subscriber.
I'm encouraged, Lisa. Seems to me, the whole "trans" thing hinges on 1 idea that can't be proven, or disproven. "Can a woman BECOME a man, or NOT", & the equivalent corollary "Can a man BECOME a woman, or NOT?" That's either "true", or "false", depending 100% on BELIEF, like religions.... I say "NO!"....The "LGBTQ+ mafia" says yes. So, I say, that "so-called "trans" is as "real" as Santa Claus. But NOT more real. KEEP UP the GOOD WORK!....
Thank you for your wise, concise writing on this topic! You help me stay sane.
Really good. And given the complexities, relatively succinct.
Though I’m not a subject-matter expert on this topic, armed with this essay I feel more confident in discussing it.
Thank you.
So well done!!
Adding my loud thank you, Lisa, for the Skeptic article - and for all your hard work, “crafting off-ramps made of prose”. I wish more people around me were asking the question “What the hell happened, and why are we battling over this?” so I could jump in with your piece. What do we say/do to make them ask that question?
It’s so hard to write about this topic without annoying either the believers or the nonbelievers.
Keep it up—we nonbelievers don’t have to approve of every phrase.
I thought the final sentence was appropriate. The gender clinicians are true believers; they believe their treatments benefit children. They’re wrong, but we won’t get through to potential doubters if we paint the clinicians as devils instead of misguided idealists.
Great article, I just don’t know if I’m the only one who had a bit of trouble with wanting the following section to be clearer :
“Males who are not feminine and same-sex attracted, and who often experience distress at their sexed bodies or social category later in life, are thought to be “autogynephilic”: attracted to the idea of themselves as women.11”
I wonder if you might want to be clearer that gender dysphoria in heterosexual males can also overlap with sexuality in a different way, as when it is associated with a history of sexual arousal to cross dressing in female clothing (aka transvestic fetishism) that is distinct from early onset gender dysphoria, which is commonly associated with same sex attraction and gender non conformity in childhood
I might have said “Some males who are not gender non conforming in childhood or same-sex attracted, *but* who have a history of sexual arousal in connection with cross dressing, may come to experience distress at their sexed bodies or social category later in life as well as a desire to live as women, which is thought to be motivated by “autogynephilia”: sexual attraction to the idea of themselves as women, to whom they are (heterosexually) attracted.11
I don’t know if you find this important but I think it’s relevant to distinguish between childhood onset gender dysphoria vs. adult onset gender dysphoria in males and how sexuality may be differently implicated in arriving at the common endpoint of trans identity and to understand that AGP pattern of sexual arousal isn’t necessarily synonymous with or associated with inevitable gender dysphoria, especially earlier in life
Maybe what I’m saying is that relationship between AGP and gender dysphoria could have been made clearer—that AGP sexuality is typically early onset and can be a precursor to adult onset gender dysphoria and trans id—it’s not that later onset non-homosexual type is referred to as autogynephilia
“Some of the policy decisions of the Trump administration were indeed overreach, such as banning all trans people from the military.”
And how did you reach this conclusion? I strongly disagree with it.
“Trans” people in the military, like “trans” people everywhere, demand access to opposite-sex spaces: toilets, changing rooms, showers. This is unacceptable in the military and everywhere else.
If there was a “trans” person in the military who agreed to use the correct-sex facilities, then fine. But no such person exists.
I've spoken and written about this quite a bit. If "trans" includes everyone who is gender nonconforming, as it is now understood, then banning the entire category is overreach. If you want to not allow people who've had vaginoplasty to serve combat because the daily dilation interferes with duties, that's a different story.
The question of medicalization goes beyond the consequences of these barbaric surgeries. I’m much more concerned about the psychological & medical consequences of people taking cross-sex hormones for years.
We know from the few studies we have that the free & unregulated use of steroids like these cause long-term damage, especially when men take estrogen & progesterone, and when women take testosterone. So far it’s mostly cardiovascular life-shortening effects (heart attacks & stroke risk). Cancers are much slower to develop but I’m betting they’re coming too eventually. The effects of testosterone on female bodies are devastating: bone & joint problems, the need for hysterectomies after several years on T, etc.
Why would a rational country pick soldiers & sailors who are purposefully making themselves sick to defend itself? The military won’t take people with naturally occurring endocrine problems (diabetes) or even those with really poor eyesight—and it’s not a civil rights issue. But doping with E or T is? BS!
Not everyone gets to do whatever they want all the time. I’m OK with the military refusing to employ& offer people who insist on these weird cosmetic procedures.
I agree with much of what you say—people need to be honest about tradeoffs. If an adult alters his or herself this way, it may mean giving things up, like military service, or a sports team. Perhaps believing that you have the power to change sex—to override nature, or God—leads to believing that you deserve/can get any and everything you want.
Thanks for your reply. I do wonder about the little gods this movement has fostered. So much of it seems to come from the MTF side, as one might expect.
All girls and women know, or must realize, that there are tradeoffs that our natural biology demands. Examples: Endometriosis afflicts so many women and alters the course of their lives. Women cannot continue to perform at the elite level of sport when pregnant/nursing! Having children will retard/delay one's professional life. Menopause with teenagers in the house: why lord, why? As Meghan Daum always says: Mother Nature is the biggest sexist.
I want soldiers to use the single-sex facilities appropriate to their immutable sex, and to wear the sex-specific uniforms appropriate to their immutable sex. If the male faux-vagina (actually an open wound) dilator agrees to use the male single-sex facilities, and wear male-designated uniforms, then fine. But I doubt that any faux-vagina dilator would agree to that. Access to wrong-sex facilities and wearing wrong-sex clothing are universal and unanimous demands of all “trans” people.
Again, I strongly disagree with your no-qualifications assertion that Trump’s EO was overreach, full stop. This was not appropriate in a piece that was intended to be an all-sides explainer.
I take it, then, that Trump's ban excluded people who identify as gender nonconforming as well as those who identify as trans?
Key paragraph of the text of the EO:
>Consistent with the military mission and longstanding DoD policy, expressing a false “gender identity” divergent from an individual's sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service. Beyond the hormonal and surgical medical interventions involved, adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual's sex conflicts with a soldier's commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one's personal life. A man's assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/02/03/2025-02178/prioritizing-military-excellence-and-readiness
You make good points, Mark. And I understand that inserting that strong opinion conflicts with the way the rest of the piece is reported—and I will ask the editor to shift so that I can make it clear that it's my opinion, not fact. That said: bans are very blunt instruments. As a liberal, I'm not a fan of them in general. I think having a policy about what conditions preclude service is fine. But a lot of the same people saying gender dysphoria isn't real are also saying it's a fine measurement to exclude people. We're all full of contradictions.
Lisa,
Gender nonconforming lesbians are not banned from the military. They love us because we make good soldiers. The ban on transgender-identified people across the board, is perfectly reasonable because:
- It disrupts troop cohesion to force other people to lie about a colleague's sex,
- Women have to deal with men in female spaces, and a percentage of transgender people are rapists just like some men are rapists. An even higher percentage of men are pigs about women's bodies so letting any man into the female shower will be disruptive.
- If a lesbian decides she's an "actual man" and gets a pretend penis, that surgery will eventually kill her. They have to extend the urethra through a piece of leg or arm tissue. It gets infected over and over, becomes antibiotic resistant and she eventually dies. It's costly and clearly the valid reason to not let someone in the military. There are many medical reasons to denying people the opportunity to serve.
- The public should not have to pay for elective surgeries just because someone wants to mimic the opposite sex. In my state, boobs on a man's chest is considered life-saving medicine. So it's free. Men move here to get their fake boobs. Facial feminization surgery is also considered life-saving medicine. That's bullshit. They're both elective surgeries.
Please check these policies before assuming that lesbians are banned too. And also, if you still say LGBT, please stop. We want a divorce from the TQ crazy.
Hear, hear!
Not every woman who thinks she's a man will go to the lengths (no pun intended) of getting a fake penis. However, women pretending to be men in the armed forces are putting themselves at risk of harm from the military men they live and work with. I don't think I need to spell it out. And, as you noted, the men are being compelled to embrace a lie for no defensible military purpose.
Thanks, Lisa. Can you explain to us why (if it is indeed true) Hilary Cass came to support the Pathways Puberty Blocker Trial? True...? I also read (And please correct me) that there has not been follow up of previous puberty-blocked patients, so that beneficence has not been established. True...? If so, is the Pathways trial medically ethical? What is happening with respect to this? Many thanks for corrections and clarifications.
Well, I can't explain it entirely, other than to say that she heard from people who felt helped and people who felt harmed, and that "low-quality" evidence is not evidence that it doesn't work or is harmful. So if she's applying the same lens to this that she might other fields—like, say, do GLP 1's improve heart health or something—then maybe she will find the risks are reasonable. I know they weren't able to get the data from the adult centres. But I agree that the best thing to do would be to follow-up with those who already took blockers, before trying them again. Also, they tried and failed to replicate the Dutch study anyway.
Another two questions: First, what body (e.g., GLAAD or HRC or whatever) promulgated the idea that gender identity is completely independent of the body? And second, is it (common) practice for gender medicine practitioners to claim that with surgeries and hormones one can actually change his/her sex? Thanks again.
I think that the message about changing sex came less from practitioners directly. Rather, by teaching that gender identity is fixed and the body is mutable, kids without the capacity to understand came to believe they could change sex. But I'm glad you raised this as I need to make sure I convey this in the book. As for gender identity: it's complicated. Because once it escaped the medical context and mixed with queer theory and social media—from man/woman to demi-girl and bigender etc—it took on a life of its own. That said, groups like GLAAD and HRC, that pivoted around 2015, ran with it.
I'm all for Lisa's campaign to provide some "off ramps," so long as the people taking 'em are honest about the fact they've changed their minds, and so long as they actually do take the exit: In other words, please let's not allow "reasonable" people to double-talk us into a continued imposition of trans ideology's rituals in speech and action onto the culture.
After reading Helen Lewis's strangely stubborn insistence on confusing readers by referring to male human beings as "she," while characterizing Justice Thomas' use of accurate terms as "gratuitous disrespect," I think we're going to have to wait a long time before this lunacy loses its hold on our society.
The Supreme Court’s Utterly Mainstream Ruling on Women’s Sports
The justices position themselves at the center of American public opinion.
By Helen Lewis
https://archive.ph/LQ8Hf
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/supreme-court-trans-student-athletes-womens-sports/687767/
Okay, I haven't read this yet. I do not think that using sex-based pronouns is gratuitous disrespect. In many ways I wish I were a purist and always did it. I think it's vitally important to use sex-based pronouns in crime reporting, for instance, though I think what's more important is making clear the sex of the person being reported on. I sometimes use identity-based pronouns, especially when occupying the mindset of someone whose experience I'm conveying. In theory, those words don't change the material reality of sex. Yet we know that they do shape the understanding, and often policy, so there is some overlap between the way we describe things and material reality. But I believe that in some cases, it's okay to use identity-based pronouns. I will read Helen's piece, though.
Yeah, I used to use preferred pronouns for trans-identified public figures whose work I admired and for whom I felt esteem (never thinking about how their behavior likely impacted their own families, children). Now that I've experienced the emotional blackmail practiced by someone who's taken on a "trans" identity, I cannot ignore the ugly realities inherent to that sort of behavior.
Remember that book Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne? It's about the end of the Comanche way of life and a tribe leader, Quanah Parker who recognized that conditions were so changed that to cling to the old ways would mean his people could not survive. In the affairs of humans, I think we're different from animals in that survival depends on more than adapting to our physical environment (clean air & water, sufficient food, etc.), but also to environmental factors that are byproducts of collective mindsets. I think natural selection, the process of culling species with attributes or deficiencies that make them a "bad" fit when environmental conditions suddenly change, is also at play when it comes to cultural traits among humans beings.
A short digression: (Thomas Sowell's did fantastic work identifying basic traits of culture -- habits, values, etc.-- held in common by different minority groups living within larger cultural majorities all over the globe. He coined the term "middleman minorities" to help explain the motivations behind human populations' recurring habit of slipping out of a state of general toleration into periods of very ugly mass behaviors towards those minorities. His combination of historical research and economic analysis helps strip away the myopia that comes when we over-focus on identity, I think, and his framing provides a much better way to understand the Jewish plight than the concept of antisemitism. )
Anyway, to relate this to the whole "when is it OK for honest people to engage in the shared fiction (thanks, Kathleen Stock!) of a cross-sex identity, I am thinking that perhaps the cultural conditions under which the practice of "politely" referring to a man who mimics a female (or a woman who mimics a male) by "preferred pronouns," was merely a harmless indulgence have passed. Cultural conditions have been impacted by all sorts of destabilizing factors (loss of meaning, alienation, scarcity, etc.), so that observing the rules of language that are currently the most efficient means by which you can instantly get across what you actually mean to the most native speakers of that language has become essential. In times of abundance and ease and safety, we can tolerate playing around with nonsense; but the mood of the majority has changed. Just like the era of the Minstrel wearing blackface has gone, perhaps the era of the beloved "Tranny" has passed. Too many of us have seen the knock-on effects of collective toleration for that level of self-indulgence . . .
A minor quibble on this point: ‘In order to come to any kind of resolution, we need to distinguish between subjective and objective truths—as Skeptic founder Michael Shermer puts it, “what is actually true, not just what we want to believe is true.”’ If the “subjective”/“objective” truth distinction is intended to capture the contrast you quote Shermer making then you are misusing the concept of truth. Someone wanting to believe that something is true does not capture a special sort of truth rightly labelled “subjective”. “True-for-me” is not a property of beliefs, but an attitude towards them. Truth is a wonderfully transparent concept, so please don’t psychologise it!
I would have wanted a less abrupt ending. More on what is happening now.
The whole thing is so insane... And the "allies" will never admit there are only two sexes, no matter how bizarre their claim is. They prefer trans-affirming lies over truth. How can you talk to someone like that?
Appreciate the thorough discussion. The fact that the concept of "gender identity" remains an oblique one should have put the brakes on a medical and legal movement that has impacted individuals who believe in "gender identity," distinct from gender dysphoria, and those who don't. There are significant legal ramifications to blue state legislation that codifies the idea that someone's internal sense of self defines them legally. IMHO transgender orthodoxy has evolved into a religion and should be protected under the Freedom of Religious Expression under the First Amendment, protecting believers from discrimination in housing and employment, but shielding the rest of us from having to act according to others' beliefs.
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