Further in the interest of fairness, here's a response to Singal in general, including his "When Children Say They’re Trans" story for the Atlantic that he defends there:
> "Behind a veneer of empathy and concern, Singal has supplied anti-trans narratives that the right has found appealing."
As an occasional listener to Singal's very good podcast (which covers mostly internet controversy), I have to say -- Singal comes across as thoughtful and empathetic, precisely because he actually seems to be thoughtful and empathetic.
So, briefly, a generally left-leaning, big city journalist writes several thoughtful, empathetic takes on trans children and gender dysmorphia that don't play into the established lefty narrative, and, of course, it gets treated as heretical. The problem is and was not that Singal is a bigot, or that he's just plain wrong. The greatest problem many have with Singal is that he is not following a prescribed narrative.
These issues are now a matter of public concern whether we like it or not. When politicians in my state are banning gender affirming medical procedures for trans children, we need more light not less, because (and this shouldn't be hard to believe) the real problem actually is the (half true) established narratives. Good journalism is good because it can help us understand more than two sides of an issue.
And when someone like Singal, who is obviously operating in good faith, is treated like a pariah when they dare to say something difficult and unpopular among their in-group, it makes me dislike the partisans for this issue more and trust them less.
> Singal defends conversion therapy and uses poor science to defend his claims. I'm not sympathetic.
This really does drastically overstate even the linked article's, not particularly thoughtful, case.
Saying Singal "obviously" operates in good faith is an exaggeration. Michael Hobbes on Twitter has a few threads regarding Singal where he shows how Singal likes to move the goalposts and accuse people of being "irresponsible" for making straightforwardly true claims (even ones that are supported by his own evidence). [ https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3ARottenInDenmark%20jesse&... ]
I'm pretty sure it's Hobbes who is acting in bad faith. Most of his links are to things that don't support his claims. For example, he'll claim that puberty blockers are completely reversible, but link to an NHS site that says some long term effects are unknown[1], and though GIDS claims the physical effects are reversible, GIDS was shut down due safety issues.[2]
Hobbes also accused Jesse of recruiting detransitioners from a transphobic website[3][4], but the site in question only allows females to join, so Jesse couldn't have used that site to find the people he interviewed for his article.
Lastly, Hobbes blocks his opponents, then screenshots their tweets and argues against them. This makes it much harder for his targets to respond to him and correct the record. It really seems like he doesn't care about what's true, just what he can get others to believe.
Singal claimed that the NHS removed a claim from their website that puberty blockers were reversible. Hobbes showed a screenshot from the NHS website showing that the claim was still there. Singal (and you) changed the topic from whether the NHS made a claim, to whether there were unknown long-term effects of puberty blockers. Hobbes is obviously correct here.
GIDS is being replaced with multiple centers providing similar services primarily due to issues with capacity, extreme wait times, and overcentralization, based on advice from the Cass Interim Report, which also noted issues with inconsistent care. Other organizations, including the Endocrine Society [0] and the APA [1], also describe puberty blockers as reversible.
Your second paragraph doesn't seem to be true. "The site in question" is 4thWaveNow, which is a blog; you don't 'join' it like a forum. I think you've got it confused with the dating website.
The unsafeness of the Tavistock clinic had nothing to do with puberty blockers - Tavi didn't prescribe[1] any puberty blockers to any child. And while the clinic provided by Tavistock is closing there will be many other clinics opening. Provision of gender affirming care to children is being expanded.
[1] This is the big problem with threads like these. You can just lie and no-one knows any different because there's so much disinformation being spread. You shouldn't spread disinformation, and you should feel bad about doing so.
The fact that you don't understand the basics (that Tavistock didn't do any prescribing) but you feel confident enough to comment is peak fucking HN. Bunch of dunning kruger cunts.
No, they did not. They only did psychological assessment, and then referred on to endocrinology who would then do their own assessment and decide whether or not to prescribe PBs.
Here's the NHS England stand commissioning contract. On page 17 there's a flow chart, and you can see that after the assessment phase there's a box that says "Refer to Endocrinology Clinic + ongoing GIDS input", and that box exists because GIDS have never prescribed PBs, they referred children on to an endocrinology service who did their own assessment and made their own decision about whether or not to prescribe. Page 18 has a further flow chart that explains the endo referral process. Page 19 describes the referral and separate assessment process used by the endo service. Page 25 gives further details about referral to the endo liaison team.
From the link you provide: "A standardised set of psychological questionnaires used in the GIDS clinic was completed at the time young people were deemed potentially eligible and referred to the medical clinic." and "Young people were considered for recruitment after lengthy assessment, spending an average of 2 years and up to 6 years within the GIDS psychological service before being referred to the endocrine clinic for assessment to enter the study." - I mean, come on.
One of the lead authors of the link you've provided: "Gary Butler". He's Professor Gary Butler, who works for the Department of Paediatric and Adolescent Endocrinology, at University College London Hospital NHS Trust. This is the service that provides endocrinology assessment and, if necessary, prescribing.
He doesn't work for Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust.
> Support for children and adolescents up to the age of 18 years has been provided through the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust in London for over 20 years. The GIDS was nationally commissioned by NHS England in 2009 and extended to Leeds in 2012, providing regular outreach clinics in other areas of the UK. Endocrine evaluation and support has been provided through University College Hospital London for over two decades, and Leeds Children’s Hospital since 2013. Care is provided according to an agreed service schedule,3 taking into account international guidance from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH)4 and the recent guidelines from the Endocrine Society.5
Puberty blockers would be "endocrine evaluation and support".
We can go pretty deep in the weeds in a thread that is AFAIK flagged and dead.
> Saying Singal "obviously" operates in good faith is an exaggeration.
From what I've heard and read of Jesse's, he seems to take great pains to be honest and fair. He seems to me to obviously be operating in good faith. Or as I would expect a curious, thoughtful journalist to act. But, yes, you and others may come to other conclusions.
And, unfortunately, my experiences re: Hobbes's journalism have not been as glowing. They've frankly been disappointing. Hobbes seems to lack the very compassion and empathy Singal seems to obviously have. Hobbes tends to paint what seem to me to be good-faith disagreements as grand moral violations.
But I may need to see more and maybe I'm mistaken?
> Singal likes to move the goalposts and accuse people of being "irresponsible" for making straightforwardly true claims
I think you need to be more specific re: this claim. Unsurprisingly, a link to all the subtweets someone has made about Jesse Singal isn't very helpful.
The word "seems" is kinda the crux of the issue here. Singal has the tone of a curious, thoughtful jouralist who enters into research with no pre-established biases, and Hobbes has the tone of a guy who gets into Twitter arguments. The problem is that tone is not important, what's true is important. You can't determinte the truth just through the tone of the person communicating with you. A tone of thoughtful neutrality doesn't make something true, and a tone of belligerence doesn't indicate a lie.
Obviously people need to make up their own mind, but I do hope that they'd read what Singal actually writes and not base their opinion on a mean-spirited, vengeful hit-piece like this.
Has he ever said anything like "trans rights" though? Why is a (seemingly) single, childless, straight and cis man involving himself so much in trans teenagers? He's got an Agenda and it isn't sitting right.
Wright's key points regarding 'sex realism', as I understand them, are that sex is not a spectrum (as many people are claiming these days) but a male-female binary, and that sex is still an important characteristic in many circumstances, such that it cannot realistically be supplanted by 'gender identity' or similar.
Seems like a reasonable viewpoint to me, and not one that would generally be considered offensive for others to mention.
An “intersex” person (now usually described by doctors or biologists as a person with a disorder of sexual development, or DSD for short) is either male or female, just like any other human being. So to use the rather silly terminology under dispute, “binary”. The “disorder” is a non-typical development of sexual characteristics of the person’s sex: a disorder of male development in a male, or of female development in a female. We can’t even mention the disorder without implicitly affirming the sex categorization that it affects. The “binary” is part of the definition of homo sapiens.
Every “intersex” person is either male or female. Many in that community object to others describing them as some kind of other sex and, especially, using their medical condition as an ignorant cudgel to advance the “trans” rights agenda.
This sounds like you're conflating biological sex (i.e., having both breasts and a penis) with gender (i.e., person IDs as female). I understand why; they use almost the same terms. However, it is important to note that, if you are describing a person who was assigned female at birth, and continues to identify as female, that's entirely describing their gender, not the state of their biological sex characteristics.
In other words, if a person experiences DSD, but self-identifies as male or female, what you are describing is not proof that sex is a binary, but rather proof that a person with DSD can experience gender dysphoria.
I don’t see where I’ve conflated anything, nor do I understand your attempt to show where I have. “Biological sex” is redundant; sex is a biological classification. There isn’t any other kind.
You argue that people who are intersex regularly identify as male or female, and do not like being pointed to as trans representation...but that's not describing their biological sex characteristics, that's describing their gender identity. You're describing someone who identifies as cis-male or cis-female, despite their biological sex characteristics.
It may SEEM like a reasonable viewpoint to you, but it's not grounded in reality.
Saying sex is a binary is excluding anyone that doesn't fit within that binary. And if that's something you can't imagine, then it's not a subject you should have or voice an opinion on.
You might disagree with this point of view, but that doesn't make it unreasonable.
As Wright notes in https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/sex-is-not-a-spectrum, this view of sex as a binary system is based on the concept of male and female being the two discrete halves of the reproductive system in humans (and other anisogamous species):
"Biological sex [...] is connected to the distinct type of gametes (sex cells) that an organism produces. As a broad concept, males are the sex that produce small gametes (sperm) and females produce large gametes (ova). There are no intermediate gametes, which is why there is no spectrum of sex. Biological sex in humans is a binary system."
Surely this is not an unreasonable starting point for an evolutionary biologist to extrapolate from?
It’s grounded in the reality 99.98% experience - that individuals are biologically differentiated into the male (inseminating) or female (gestating and nursing) reproductive role.
Stress reproductive role there - as unique individuals they have limitless other personal and social roles they can fulfil, and to be honest I don’t see these as naturally gendered, nor feel it would be desirable for it to be so.
Well, you could downvote - but, given as the first paragraph seems to be biological fact, perhaps you could instead mount a reasoned defence of gendered personal and social roles, and why they should have primacy over sex as defining components of the identities of “man” and “woman”.
As someone born in the 60s, a time when gendered roles began to be considered limiting and harmful, I would genuinely love to see a defence - at least one beyond “It makes people with gender dysphoria happy” (which is a good thing, but not obviously the right thing given the opportunity for discrimination between genders and expected conformity to normative gender stereotypes).
The trick here is that we're looking at dogwhistles.
To someone outside the theater of culture-war this takes place in, this looks like a series of perfectly ordinary statements. Of course sex is binary, and that statement doesn't sound like it conflicts with gender being a spectrum, because sex and gender are obviously separate.
However, to someone who has lived within this theater of culture-war--who have been dealing with this rhetoric as rhetoric, which is what it is--this is a red flag. "Sex is binary" is the opening salvo in a common rhetorical strategy, which goes "Sex is binary, you're either male or female" -> "I'm just stating a fact, no need to be defensive" -> "See, this is why I don't trust trans people" -> "This is why you shouldn't trust trans people, they contradict basic facts like sex being binary". Notice the magic trick here--by picking phrasing that's plausibly deniable, and then framing any reaction to it as "disagreeing with Science", this guy can make it look like he's disagreeing with trans people, and make it look like trans people are somehow in the wrong for this, without ever actually having to stop and explain why.
That's not even getting into the fact that, frankly, "sex is binary" isn't actually correct. There are plenty of examples of species that don't actually fit into a binary sex model correctly--species which can reproduce both sexually and asexually, species which can change sex in order to find mates more reliably, and even cases where more than two sexes can be observed (such as in bees, for whom "worker", "drone", and "queen" all have different sexual characteristics). This goes against what most of us were taught when we were young, but that's part of the rational approach to the world: sometimes the model that we were given when we were in elementary school is wrong, and a newer model is a more accurate description of what's going on.
And that's part of the goal, here. "Sex realism", here, has nothing to do with reality, just as "religious fundamentalism" rarely has anything to do with the fundamentals of whatever religion is involved. Rather, "sex realism" is a rhetorical strategy which uses the aesthetics of skepticism to make one's argument seem sensible, polite, and rational. It relies on the audience never actually questioning whether the "sex realist" is describing reality, or reading beyond the face value of what they are saying.
The especially insidious part of this tactic is the way it weaponizes the reactions of people who understand what the dogwhistle means. People like me, who have spent hours upon hours discussing these things, immediately recognize the tactic at play--and more often than not, react loudly and angrily. After all, I've seen this conversation play out over and over, and invariably the guy claiming to just be a sex realist turns out to be an asshole, just like how the guys who claim to be "race realists" inevitably start citing things like the 13/50 argument (which is a whole other can of bad-statistics worms). But that's part of the plan--when I or someone like me says "What the fuck, get out" in response to the initial statement, that's when the sex-realist turns to the audience and says, "See how upset this person is over these definitely true things I just said! Clearly, if they're losing their cool this badly, I must be right!" And this works, because it short-circuits past the part where the sex-realist's argument is evaluated. By framing things in this way, the sex-realist can convince members of the audience to trust him before evaluating his argument, which lets him avoid actual scrutiny of what he's claiming.
TLDR: Wright is framing a simplified, not-really-correct statement as absolute truth, and then framing the people he opposes as unreasonable and irrational, to take advantage of the fact that human beings use trust to save processing power and avoid having to actually evaluate arguments.
I'm not sure why people talk about insects and goldfish and things like that, when someone says "sex is binary" and they are talking about humans, they mean "human sex is binary". Anything that may or may not be true about other species does not matter for the argument. I'll say "as a general rule, human sex is binary" if you really want that changed.
That's a bit more accurate, though it still sweeps a few edge cases under the rug.
Choosing phrases and words that more clearly express what you mean is a good thing. Communication is hard enough under normal circumstances, and on topics like this, things get even more complicated because of groups who are trying to conflate seemingly-innocent phrases with their own arguments (both to make their own arguments sound like there's already widespread support, and to make their opponents seem unreasonable, as I described above). You should try to be sure that you're saying what you actually mean, and try to avoid unintentional meaning from phrases that have been coopted by others.
On the other hand: Why, exactly, does it matter whether biological sex is binary or not? The other half of trying to say what you mean is understanding what you actually mean. What are you arguing toward?
If someone thinks biological sex is binary, that shows they're uninformed. Like gender, it is essentially a point cloud in n-dimensional space - largely bimodal, but with a few other notable clusters.
In the end, though, it doesn't matter. We are humans. Giving our biology the finger and doing what we want is an option. It is not a remotely new option, but both the accessibility and extent of that option are increasing over time.
Customized regimens of drugs and surgeries are available to achieve combinations of sex characteristics that simply do not occur naturally. Many insurance plans in the US will cover them.
We've just begun to scratch the surface of what is possible. I read an account recently of someone doing a YOLO by knocking out their DMRT1 gene with CRISPR. The goal was to alter hormone levels - and it seems to have worked.
I'm living the bleeding edge of some of this, the culture war is real, and it is heating up. All I want is to exist without oppression. This will likely play out similar to how it did for same-sex couples. Visibility and social acceptance has grown. We are now in the period of conservative people trying to put the genie back in the bottle. The effort will probably fail eventually - but much suffering will be caused in the process.
My choice is to stand up for myself - and do what I can to help those who cannot.
> If someone thinks biological sex is binary, that shows they're uninformed. Like gender, it is essentially a point cloud in n-dimensional space - largely bimodal, but with a few other notable clusters.
Not really though - if someone has carefully considered this topic and still regards the sex binary as the most appropriate model to apply, it's more likely to indicate they are considering function over form in their reasoning. In particular, reproductive function - i.e. why we all have sexed bodies in the first place.
With this model, sex isn't just an assortment of bodily features, but is based on the reproductive function around which several related aspects of our bodies have evolved, with male and female being the two types of anatomical pattern appropriate to each reproductive role.
However, I do understand that to those who want to believe that sex can be changed through pharmaceutical and surgical interventions, this view of sex as a functional biological system isn't as compelling as the 'point cloud' model, which comes with the implication that if these points can be changed somehow, then sex is too.
...This still ignores examples where sexual characteristics don't actually fit a binary, though. These are edge cases, yes, but they are edge cases that occur in nature. This is why cases like the bee example are important--bees have sexual trimorphism. Drones, workers, and queens all have different sexual characteristics that affect how they reproduce. Based on the reproductive function of bee anatomy, sex is not a binary for bees.
Also, I'd like to point out--for the record--that the ability to change one's sexual characteristics, and the presence or absence of sexual characteristics, has almost nothing to do with one's gender (beyond avoiding body dysphoria). This is an important distinction to make, because while we don't have full ability to change a person's sex (i.e., we don't have artificial wombs yet), a person's gender can be independent of their sexual characteristics (as evidenced not only by trans people, but also by intersex people who identify as cisgender).
Mind linking a source for the CRISPR thing? I was just thinking the other day that having a CRISPR-based "one and done" pill for hormone therapy would be awesome.
I know it's a controversial topic. I'd rather it wasn't, and that, given the wide-ranging impact on policy and law, people could discuss this freely without e.g. getting banned from online payment services and social media sites, being doxxed by activists, and so on.
If you know it's controversial, we now know "not one that would generally be considered offensive for others to mention" was, at best, being disingenuous. Is there anything else?
I meant generally as in, most people, who don't take an active interest in this topic.
I know it's controversial to those who do. But I think that in itself is worth challenging.
I mean, in the comment at the top of this thread, we have someone who became extremely offended at even the mere mention of someone with an opposing viewpoint to their own. In an article that isn't even about that topic. Does that seem a reasonable reaction?
