Professors are apologizing for saying ‘male’ and ‘female.’ Students are policing teachers. This is what it looks like when activism takes over medicine.
I cannot adequately communicate the anger I feel when I see this garbage. Women fought for generations not to be second-class humans behind the ones with penises, and now we're even second-class WOMEN behind the ones with penises, too. CHESTFEED?! FRONT HOLE?! Our lifegiving body parts are obscene even to talk about now, after decades of struggle on the part of women to get doctors to take us seriously!
And does it strike anyone as weird that most of the freakouts are over the words "woman" and "mother?" I haven't seen a single shitstorm over Gillette selling itself as "the best a man can get" but Always gets raked over the coals until it removes the female symbol from its packaging. "Woman" is a triggering word, but humans are called "mankind."
I just have no more time for this transgender garbage anymore. None. It's misogynist (and homophobic) garbage, 100%. It's a woke way to hate women openly again. I have ZERO time for this.
Talking about gender identity is not denying science. Being transgender is not delusional. Only someone who doesn't know a transgender person would say that.
Your gender is determined by what's between your legs. No amount of revisionist, agenda-driven "science" will ever change that. This is a fad that will eventually blow over, like all extreme social phenomena.
Gender dysphoria is mental illness. It's no different than a white person believing that they're black.
With that said, trans folk absolutely have the right to live as they please. Their rights stop when mine are trampled, however.
I believe women's brains tend to be wired in a pattern that reinforces what we call femininity. I believe a man can be born with a female brain. I believe that person has the right to live and love in whatever way seems best to them. I believe they have the right to be medically treated based on the hormones that influenced their body's growth. That way may be one that treats higher testosterone and lower estrogen than I possess. I do not give up MY identity as a woman, mother, or as a mother who breastfed her child. I am not a birthing person. I am a woman. I would be a woman if I had never had a child.
Are you sure? Identifying as a gender not corresponding to one's biological sex is often phrased as "I am a woman," the speaker bearing an XX chromosome pair in every cell of his body and having a normally developed penis and testicles. If by "woman" and "man" we mean what they meant to English speakers until the last five minutes world-historically speaking, this is a deeply held, false belief, which causes the holder to have difficulty fitting into society and consequent suffering. Other such false beliefs are called "delusions" and are treated with psychotherapy. This one, for reasons no one has ever explained to my satisfaction, is instead to be met with "affirmation", with all of society expected to play along, replacing biological reality with the person's feelings, and "treated" by providing the holder with cross-sex hormones and surgery to turn them into a simulacrum of what they falsely believe themselves to be. Why? What in your experience knowing a transgender person convinces you that their self-identification is not a delusion? Please answer, if you deign to, only from your experience of acquaintance with one or more transgender persons, not from a canned recitation of fashionable gender ideology.
" an idiosyncratic belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument, typically a symptom of mental disorder."
Biological Women who identify as Men and are transgender do not ask for, or it seems based on the medical community's renaming of terms, require the 'renaming' of the words associated with 'man'. The opposite is not true. For whatever reason it is 'apparently' necessary to erase the definitions associated with 'woman' in order to acknowledge a transgender person who is biologically male and identifies as a woman. If a cisgender woman stands up and says 'This is wrong. I do not accept being erased.' they are attacked as a TERF. I know, I get it, the female of the species is supposed to be passive and lie down and take it, no matter what wrongs are committed against us, coming from biological men.
I do not accept being erased. I will gladly recognize any who identify as female. I do not accept being called a 'birthing person'. I am a woman. I breastfed my son (all biological genders have breasts by the way, there is NO NEED to rename the term). I did not chestfeed him. The female of the species produces the milk which nourishes their offspring in all of nature. If you are taking hormones to cause your body to produce the milk that it would not produce naturally because you (without intervention) produce testosterone, you are still producing a type of breastmilk. Call it breastmilk if you will, or mother's milk, but it is not 'parent's milk'.
Matt, I've said this to you before, and I'll say it to you again -- I don't understand why you're here. I know you said you're hoping to convert people to your cause. But you haven't convinced one single human being here to accept the Mad Hatter nonsense you peddle.
Your fellow traveler radicals believe men can be knocked up by women and then give birth to babies through their front holes. Surely, deep within the frontal lobes of your neocortex you realize this is off the wall baloney. We know you're not stupid or crazy, but you accept the most twisted pretzel logic just so you can maintain your status as a card carrying leftist.
One day, you'll wake up and realize you've wasted your life promoting the most ridiculous ideas that have ever cropped up on this planet. Until then whenever you post on this substack, you're tilting at windmills.
I simply accept that gender identity is more complex than you and your fellow travelers want it to be. I'm here to tell you that's okay. The world is not coming to an end because some people don't identify with their biological sex. I'm here to calm the out-of-control hysteria I'm seeing with people like you. Maybe someday you'll realize you've spent your whole life panicking over nothing.
The hysteria comes from those crying out loud against reality and insisting that everyone comply or else. What's coming out of the gender ideology cult is the most regressive concept of "gender" imaginable. A male can have feminine characteristics but that does not make him a female. Liking pink and wanting to put on a dress does not make someone female. What makes you female is your uterus and other apparatus. Period. Why not just let men be feminine and if they want to go out in public wearing dresses -- fine. But no matter what, when I'm looking at you, I'm going to see what's really there: A MAN WEARING A DRESS. Yesterday I saw a male on estrogen. That's right. Despite the dress and the tiny breasts? I saw a MAN ON ESTROGEN. Cry all you want, but the truth cries louder. You can't force people to believe what isn't true. You can only force them to comply with your delusion. And there lies the rub. NO ONE REALLY BELIEVES IT. Why? BECAUSE IT'S NOT THE TRUTH.
MM, I think the moon is made up of rocks and dust (with a possible iron core). Some people think that it is made up of green cheese. I must be an authoritarian/totalitarian for not taking green cheese crowd seriously. Shame on me.
Some people sincerely believe that the Earth is flat. Some people sincerely believe that the Earth is round. Which ones are the authoritarians / totalitarians? Or both? Or neither?
But when you say "gender," I fear you are simply accepting a cluster of stereotypes that label people. I refuse to accept those descriptors. I am a person with 2 X chromosomes in every cell of my body. No one can label my behaviors as anything but my own. I truly believe that there is in fact no such thing as gender. I think harm is being by the acceptance of the theory of gender. I accept that you believe differently. I wish you well.
@DarkWhite Lets also keep in mind that shaming white women is one of the main tenets of the so called "antiracism" graft. That is more-less the core of D'Angelo's "work".
This is all male dominated patriarchy. Where are the feminists? If they aren’t cowering in fear of being unwoke, they are leading the band over men thinking they are women and playing second fiddle. It’s nuts on so many levels.
The feminists are getting punched in the face (literally, and not like a 20 year old means when they say "literally"), threatened with rape and death, cancelled, and no-platformed. Many of them are fighting like mad against this, but they need security and armed guards to give talks and go to their classrooms. Nuts is the right word for it.
Some are but a lot are going along with the madness. It’s as dumb as those queers for Palestine idiots. They will be the first thrown off the buildings.
Feminism lately has been subject to what's basically regulatory capture. The old guard, the ones who fought like lions for us, are being hounded out by the mob. :-(
I agree with your core points, but disagree with your conclusion that misogyny is driving this movement. In fact, it seems to me that a significant majority of the loudest and most vicious proponents of this woke lunacy are women, not men. I could be wrong, but that is my impression.
Being pro-Trans is the equivalent of "We all Wear Pink on Wednesdays" among coastal, college educated women.
It is what everyone at the Cool Girls' table is doing, and upper middle class women generally got where they are by doing what the other Cool Girls do and obeying - or at least parroting - institutional authority.
My first job out of college was teaching at a private high school in Fairfield County. The women now promoting "Trans" were the school girls who went up to their teacher and said "Just tell me what I have to do to get the A." They would write a florid and enthusiastic defense of Hitler standing on their heads if a teacher said doing so would get them into Yale.
I think the Trans movement is also really good at exploiting empathy among this set.
It's all so performative. The affluent, mostly white women latching onto this for prestige and social status are the least likely to ever be thrown in prison or need a rape shelter. The worst that will ever happen to their own daughters is that they'll lose out on a sports championship, which mom can then morally pimp out on social media by posting about HOW VERY KIND MY CHILD IS for letting the Trans Girl win.
It was the same dynamic last spring. I live in Connecticut and my Facebook feed was full of suburban women declaring between their corporate Zoom meetings that riots that burnt down working class businesses and devastated poor neighborhoods were just "voices of the unheard" and the landscapers protesting not being able to work and make living were "selfish", all as they sat at their granite countertops in half million dollar houses in the neighborhood they moved to "for the schools."
"The worst that will ever happen to their own daughters is that they'll lose out on a sports championship ... "
But those same women would never sit still for their sons being screwed over like that.
There is a lot a certain kind of woman gains by caping for the penis: the big house, the hummer in the garage, the club membership ... Trans makes caping for the penis (and screwing over other women) a feminist act.
Oh, women can be misogynist. Sometimes I think that the reason sexism is allowed to continue is because backstabby women find it so useful as a weapon against the competition. The modern model of feminism has a lot in common with Bugs, Daffy, and Elmer, where they don't take the shotgun away from him, they just point him at one another.
I don’t think it is misogyny driving women supporting the trans movement but an over-developed sense of empathy. There is an unsung virtue in supporting the underdog (think “marginalized and disadvantaged communities”) and I think many women support the destruction of sex in an effort to help a “poor soul” even at the expense of women.
Men on the other hand will exploit this. There is no advantage (from a social status standpoint) for a man to compete against a woman (Note: this dates back 10’s of thousands of years.) and there is no social downside for a woman to compete against a man.
The trans movement provides for men, unable to compete against other men, an opportunity to compete against women with no social downside. They are, after all, “real women”.
Overactive empathy from women and misogyny from men. This is “in general” as there will be outliers.
Not if we take misogyny as being "a dislike, contempt or prejudice against women". Women being competitive against other women is not misogyny. Men being competitive against another person which happens to be a woman is not misogyny (outside of areas like sports). Words have meanings and it is important to try and get the correct word (or words) to capture something and in this case, I think misogyny is way off the mark . NOTE: Women tend to be aggressive against other women using reputation destruction while men tend to be more physical. Again, this is "in general" and not an absolute.
Calling anything that is a perceived injustice against a women "misogyny" is being sloppy and it will not allow diagnosing the problem. Like calling anything bad happening to a black person as "racism" calling any thing bad happening to a woman "misogyny" is simplistic and dilutes the meaning of each word.
That said, I do believe males wanting to compete against females in sports is deeply driven by misogyny in many cases (mostly the "contempt" part). I also believe an over-active sense of empathy is driving irrational support by both men and women for this behavior. Yes: I am saying too much empathy is a bad thing and not a desirable trait.
"Women being competitive against other women is not misogyny."
After a lifetime of feminism, I can't say how grateful I am for having some strange dude I don't know telling me what misogyny is. How on Earth did I manage before.
I think women are generally more inclined to be self-serving in terms of "morality" and that's what's behind this. In a recent faculty meeting, two millennial women informed me that their whiteness causes harm. This was a performance. It's about THEM and their moral superiority. It's certainly ignorant of cause and effect. After all, what good does it do for anyone -- black, white, or whatever -- that these two useful idiots are chomping at the bit to announce that their whiteness causes harm?
I see your point, but I still don't think the phenomenon you're describing can be characterized as misogyny. Your point about the lack of opposition to terms like "mankind" is also inaccurate. The movement to eliminate generic masculine terms has been going on for at least 20 years and is now accelerating, e.g. "humankind", "womxn", "latinx", etc.
The fact that some misguided women push this insanity doesn't stop it being misogynistic. The only people who suffer real consequences from this are women. We are losing our sports, our private spaces, and now our safety. Men can declare themselves women and will be put in women's jails. Rapes have happened in the UK because of this, but that's OK because it is only women who suffer the consequences. It has put women's rights back almost 100 years.
Total agreement. And teachers should grow a spine to replace the boiled spaghetti they have, and stop groveling to these ignorant kids. If they find their tactics don't work, they'll probably stop. They're like little children who test out how much they can get away with. Once you give in, you've lost.
Agree. All of this is just one more way men oppress, dismiss and disrespect women. There goal is to get rid of us and have a bunch of men prancing around pretending they are women. I am also tired and sick to death of this and about time we fight back.
I have posted this here before, but I want Katie and Bari to know that, as a formerly dysphoric female, I am very grateful for this kind of journalism. I wouldn't wish dysphoria on my worst enemy, and I am sincere in my desire to see good, science-based, effective and appropriate treatment for those who suffer from it. The current ideology prescribes a reckless one-size-fits-all approach, and is hijacking the safety and well-being of people suffering from dysphoria (and those who are not). It benefits no one. I am grateful for the help I received when I needed it, and that I was not pushed in a direction that may have permanently altered my body for the worse and/or fail to cure the psychological distress of dysphoria. Part of the reason I can stay grateful is because there are honest professionals out there who are committed to science-based medicine and care for the whole individual; doctors who see patients as people and not ideological battlegrounds. And again, part of the reason I am hopeful for those who may be suffering from dysphoria as they come of age now is because we've got equally brave journalists like you, Katie, who aren't going to cave in to the cultural milieu around them. As a fellow Seattelite, I admire your courage and tenacity, and am rooting for you and Bari, both. Your work may prove to be life-saving for somebody, if it hasn't already. Keep it up! Thank you!
I don't know if this helps, but I have a stepdaughter who insisted since age 5 that she was a boy named "Rob." Later, upon discovering boys, she rationalized it by claiming to be a "gay man."
She's married now - to a man - and has a very successful career. I don't think she's ever worn a dress in her life, but other than that, she seems to be very settled into her role as a woman. I'm sure glad her mom and dad didn't get her into the gender-dysphoria medical-alteration system when she was little. Choose your doctors wisely; some of them will surely hurt you. All best.
I think it is up to the psychiatric and psychological professionals to acknowledge the dysphoria, to accept gender-play as a means of coping with it but to insist, however compassionately, that your natural self, your natural body is natural and that you are completely fine as you are, however you wish to present yourself without losing your natural being. Be the unique person nature intended but no to mutilation and psychological torture. I think Camille Paglia’s model is the best: to be trans in essence, in spirit, in intellect. Why try to fit into the gender norms that the trans activists so rail against? That part makes no sense to me.
My comment was geared toward minors, and though I agree with you, I think it should be 21. There’s data which shows brains aren’t fully developed until the twenties.
Actually, I like 21 better as well. It's a significant decision and should not be approached lightly. I am all for trying to make the few actual trans persons as comfortable as possible while awaiting this age delimiter. We can debate what that looks like. But regardless, great care should be taken before jumping into this.
There ain't no "transition." That's the elephant in the room. I think the number of nucleated cells in the body is about 3 X 10^12, or 3,000,000,000,000. Each and every one of those cells contains either an XX or XY chromosome pair that determines your sex (unless you are one of the fortunately very rare intersex patients with other patterns). Neither hormonal manipulation nor surgery of any type alters that XX/XY pattern - any more than welding on a pair of wings turns a submarine into an airplane. The surgeons, endocrinologists (both of whom in my mind are committing gross malpractice), the patients, and their misguided parents are just fooling themselves.
I strongly disagree with this but to each his own. Your statement strikes me as snide and lacking in compassion. The body is only part of a human being. We also have a mind/psyche and emotional aspect. Regardless of your own stance on this, I don't believe that life is so binary and we have to find a way forward that accomodates outliers in a humane manner.
My only concern regarding transitioning is the rising number of youth declaring themselves trans and insisting on moving forward prior to their brains having fully developed - and then wanting to detransition after they have made ineradicable changes to themselves. The rising number of detransitioning people indicates that it is possible that they used gender dysphoria to fit in or fix some low self-esteem issues.
That's why I wrote below that we should make as comfortable as possible those who know for certain they are trans but who have to wait to physically transition.
We can be kind in trying to understand this issue instead of peremptory and insistent that the world is black and white and that's that. I find your regressive attitude unhelpful.
a. Nobody said the world was black-and-white. Straw man. b. I don't care about your feelings. I care only about policy that affects the public. c. "Transitioning" sexes does not exist. "Transitioning" is merely performing superficial surgery on accessible body parts; the surgeon is not "transitioning" or "de-transitioning" anybody; the blueprints that specify the patient's entire being - including the brain wiring that produces the "mind/psyche and emotional aspect" are not altered in the least. The patient is just post-op/post hormonal manipulation, nothing more. Wanting something with all your heart does not make it real. I'd like to have a pet unicorn, but they don't exist. Nor do "trans" people.
Good for you that you have a compassionate heart for hurting people. But ask yourself, do you actually know anything about this topic? Have you studied psychopathology, been trained in psychotherapy, or medicine? No. So your opinion, while compassionate, is no more helpful than your opinion about your favorite basketball team.
Gender dysphoria is not a matter of biological sex; no one here is denying the facts of biological sex. Dysphoria is psychological - some report find psychological relief in altering their bodies, some do not. No one here is arguing against chromosomes - that is a strawman rebuttal
As a psychotherapist who has treated many psychotic people over the years, I know that supporting delusion never helps the patient. Transitioning is supporting delusion. And those professionals who practice gender transition are making a tidy sum while breaking their oath to do no harm. Studies show that transition surgery doesn’t lower the suicide rate. They also show that most gender dysphoric children who don’t transition, eventually accept their gender and do better. What other major medical procedures that offer no benefit are supported by the AMA and are promoted by the medical profession in general?
You thankfully mention that the safety and well-being of people NOT suffering from dysphoria is being hijacked via one-size-fit-all diagnosis (and auto-'affirmation'), alongside the genuinely dysphoric. It's important to highlight this.
Skyrocketing numbers of teen girls, in particular, have been declaring special gender identities and getting ushered to testosterone and breast removal because they're now led to reinterpret themselves and their often typical teen angsts through the newly fashionable 'dysphoria' (Greek for 'unease', 'dissatisfaction', 'discomfort'). They get coached to reframe all manner of human struggles through its catch-all, thought-shaping lens, and told 'if you have dysphoria, that means you're trans'.
How many of us had even heard of dysphoria a decade ago? The existence of concepts shape perceptions, gathers believers.
Typical teen discomforts include the often bumpy ride from androgynous kid body to sexed adult. Especially for girls, having to negotiate painful, embarrassing bleeding, leering attentions, pressures from porn-skewed boys, uncertainties over sexuality. Then there's the social minefield that is teen girlhood. These can be particularly challenging for autistic girls, who far disproportionately get referred to the new gender clinics. The UK's GIDS provides data not being collected in the US's gender-med Wild West: 35-40% of under-18s being 'treated' there for 'gender identity' are on the autism spectrum. Other mental health conditions also have high representation.
Dysphoria has become too broad an umbrella term. One could also say that feeling dysphoria as defined is the normal human condition.
Genuine gender dysphoria exists. You are indeed lucky to have received appropriate, beneficial care (from the sound of it, mind-based rather than body-altering). Far more exactitude and scepticism is needed in defining what gender dysphoria is and is not, who does or does not suffer from it, and appropriate care responses. The present ideologically driven, heedless provision of wrong-sex hormones and disfiguring surgeries to those uttering the magic words 'I have dysphoria' is surely a maltreatment scandal, and on a huge scale.
Yes. And the British, who as you said are miles ahead of us when it comes to collecting data (through their National Health Service), recently tightened up the rules about providing medical treatments to children and teens who transition. As you can imagine, this setback to the woke agenda shocked the trans activist mob.
Late last year, Keira Bell, a biological female who was put on puberty blockers when she was just 16, began taking testosterone at 17, had a double mastectomy at 20, and detransitioned at 25, sued both the Tavistock Clinic, a woke activist provider of transition healthcare, and the NHS. Keira Bell won her case. As a result Tavistock and the NHS were no longer allowed to provide puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, or mutilating surgeries to any child or teen under age 17 without a court order. The US should and must do the same. We can no longer allow America's children to be indoctrinated and mutilated by the trans activist mob.
My understanding is that Keira Bell, together with an anonymous mother of an autistic teen girl in the 'care' of GIDS, brought a Judical Review against the Tavistock/GIDS. They didn't sue the Tavistock, as their aim was not personal financial recompense. Rather, they bravely sought a JR to try to get protections set in place against the harms heedlessly done to Keira and hundreds like her in the name of 'gender identity treatment'. They/their team succeeded.
It's a crucially important start in the pushback against the medical harms being carried out on vulnerable young because of the gender craze.
Yes, the US needs to wake up and begin to enact protections.
For those looking for measured, informative coverage of gender issues in the UK, The Times (no, not the New York Times, of course not) and The Spectator have been resolutely informative.
Another piece that strikes me is that people seem to want to shove others into a box with their preferences. For instance, growing up I was a tomboy, I loathed hitting puberty, liked sports and wasn't really concerned how I looked. I would probably now be told I was transgender, but I'm not, I was just being me. How many young people who have different ideas of how they want to interact in the world are getting the message that there is something wrong with them?
Great adendum. I was also (and still am) considered a tomboy. The current hip lingo with activists is something like "gender nonconforming", which is semantics to me (I've always used "tomboy"). But like you say, and I wholeheartedly agree, it is far too easy to conflated "nonconforming" with "dysphoria". It's like saying all skinny people are anorexic or all anorexic people are just skinny. Treating one as the other serves no one.
And isn't it REALLY insulting to apply the word "conforming" to whether a person behaves like a female, whatever that is supposed to mean. It's regressive! These gender ideologues define gender by a PERFORMANCE rather than just allowing people to be themselves! It's disgusting.
"Skyrocketing numbers of teen girls, in particular, have been declaring special gender identities and getting ushered to testosterone and breast removal"
Until recently this would rightly be labeled as child abuse.
Child abuse it is. Teen age girls as young as 13 are losing their breasts, not to cancer, but to the trans healthcare industrial complex of doctors, surgeons, therapists, hospitals, drug manufacturers, teachers, school districts, and activists. One day there will be a tsunami of class action lawsuits on behalf of these young girls who were taken advantage of by adults they never should have trusted.
I just had a round with Duke University Clinics. Their orthopedic pre-check-in process is done via a Web-based application that requires answering two questionnaires - one about one's mental health (none of your business, thankyouverymuch) and a second on demographics. One of the demographics questions was, "Gender assigned at birth." I informed the clerk, the doctor, and the physical therapist that "Gender is a language construct;" medicine has to do with sex. And sex is not "assigned at birth." It is DETERMINED nine months earlier - at conception - when two single-stranded DNA moieties from egg and sperm fuse. From that point on, unless you are a very unfortunate - but very rare - individual, your sex is either male or female - XX or XY - and no amount of mutilating surgery or sex-confused mental illness can change that."
They deleted that entire woke questionnaire from my check-in sheet; I'm sure it's still there on others'.
My husband and I had to sit through a Title IX tribunal. When asked what his prefered pronouns were, my husband answered "Mr". The left has lost their fucking minds.
I filled out a survey for my bank. The question on sex was male female binary. I wrote on the comments that it was garbage. Funny, I never heard back from them.
And anyone who craps themselves over being misgendered really needs help. I've BEEN misgendered -- and I'm a fairly femme-looking 125lb woman! When my hair is up and I'm in a black raincoat, and someone sees me out of the corner of their eye, I'm called "sir" sometimes. WTF cares?!
I have a deep voice. Strangers call me sir most of the time when I talk on the phone. I have a unisex name. I just pretend they are correct, even though I am a woman.
I'm already getting some pushback from a similar iteration of my comment on Twitter. Apparently mine is a straw man argument and I'm branding trans and non-binary individuals as 'mad' - (I was referring to the trends Katie highlighted in her article as madness - not individual people).
While these ideological trends haven't become apparent in the main down here in Australia, I am seeing hints of them beginning to seep into the field.
As Katie writes - there are key biological difference between males and females in endocrinology, symptom presentation (acute myocardial infarction for eg) and structural anatomy (abdominal aortic aneurysm) that can have profound implications for patient safety in the event of a critical event. Not having the most critical intelligence available - that of biology - can be the difference between saving a life or losing that life.
I could not have a patient death on my conscience because of that lack of Intel. It would devastate me.
The example of the trans guy who was pregnant and the baby died -- I think about the doctor who treated that person. So sad for them. And the trans guy who was pregnant and couldn't admit they were having sex with men and might be pregnant -- that is straight up mental illness.
And indeed it was called 'Gender Identity Disorder' until gender ideologues pressured the compilers of the DSM to get rid of that accurate descriptor, in 2013. Mustn't call a disorder of bodily self-perception, akin to disorders like anorexia or apotemnophilia, disordered. The movement must be grown, recruits and believers acquired, so get rid of the 'mental illness' label.
So it got re-named 'gender dysphoria' instead. They wanted it no longer to be recognised as outright mental illness yet stay in the DSM so that the desired self-disfiguring drugs/procedures would be funded.
Precisely! And there is LIFELONG medical care and treatment needed by the trans community, which is not the case for lesbians/gays. There's a whole market here that the greedy and immoral are happy to tap into.
No, these people are mad. Have you ever seen the video of the man (and he looks like a man ) that goes into a convenience store and the clerk called him ma’am and he freaked out and threatened the guy? They are nuts.
The majority ought to be considered. Not the loud vocal minority. I am in the hospital right now. I have a right to have my health as a woman considered. That does not make me transphobic. It is time to stand up to this hysteria.
I've always been a "live and let live" person who respects everyone's right to fair treatment. However, it's starting to feel like the needs of the few eclipse everyone else's rights to not be subjected to these new "rules". As a biological female, I want my healthcare professionals to be addressing my medical needs based on science, not ideology.
I'm also concerned that the oh-so-hard-fought-for rights of women are being trounced in the name of transgender activism (see women's sports for example), which is really pissing me off if I'm honest. Why are women always expendable?!!!!!
Dave, respectfully, I think the women competing in olympic weightlifting and countless other athletic programs who are now obligated to compete against biological males may beg to differ.
I’m not. Once you trace the ideological underpinnings of the trans movement (CGT and CQT), BLM (CRT) and the very idea of “systemic racism” you realize they all stem from a common thought process.
You can’t defend one of the above’s religious views and go against another. It’s logically impossible. That is why there is such lock step in the phases and beliefs.
Critical Theory belongs in a museum next to The Mien Kampf, Das Kapital and the Confederate flag.
“Everyone’s terrified of being cancelled.” This the whole current cultural zeitgeist in a nutshell. I think those holding the sword of Damocles over everyone’s heads are enjoying themselves just a bit too much.
I'm a bit of a student of WWII - where the direct deaths of 55M people, indirect of many more, was made possible because in the 'thirties, Hitler correctly surmised that the Good Guys - France, England, Belgium, Holland - were so traumatised by WWI that they wouldn't risk another war by taking him out. He was correct. So once again a dictator pushes, pushes, pushes until he MUST be dealt with, but by that time he is so strong that the issue itself is in question.
I believe that here in the United States we are in those times again, but we have two assets: the Second Amendment of course - but far, far more important, the First. The enemy knows this and is trying so silence those like Bari for everything they are worth. Don't let them. The Left knows it's gone too far, and if fair, the 2022 election will be a bloodbath, so they are using the next 1-1/2 years to consolidate their power. In the meantime we have to fight back every way we can. Nothing less than everything we hold dear is on the line. We inherited this freedom. Let's not lose it for our children.
How is it that an infinitesimal group of mentally ill people get to drive the conversation and no one says stop or you can be as nuts as you want but we won’t follow your delusion? If this is what we can expect of future doctors, we might as well revert to shamanism or witch doctors because those “credentialed” “doctors” won’t actually be practicing medicine.
I guess that pregnant woman who thought she was a man didn’t have the full addadicktome procedure and have the lady parts yanked out eh? So she must have had sex with a real man through her vagina. It’s just nuts even thinking about it. Those people are literally insane.
Yes. They are literally insane. I recently watched a youtube video about a trans man (biological female)who gave birth to a baby conceived with a trans woman (biological male). The trans man (biological female) who actually gave birth insisted on being listed on the birth certificate as the baby's "father!"
So basically, two mentally ill people found each other and procreated through a classic heterosexual relationship. However, the trans man female obviously kept all her plumbing and the trans woman man kept his as well. Sheesh.
Is this the same couple where the trans mother (biologically a male) tried to breastfeed, really in this case, chest feed, the baby? Any other year, that would have been child abuse.....now it makes it to YouTube!
Yes, indeed. This is the very same couple where the biological father, still equipped with a well functioning penis, tries but fails to chest feed the baby. Of course, everyone in Trans World celebrates this lunatic's attempt to defy the basic laws of biology and common sense. Meanwhile that poor little infant scratches his tiny head and wonders why out of all the billions of possible parents on earth he got stuck with the booby prize.
Equating transgendered people with insanity is bigoted. And it's cruel. Why can't you accept that there is a spectrum of gender that goes from very female to very male (Think Dolly Parton and John Wayne.), and in the very middle you'll find females who are more male than some men and some men who are more feminine than some women. Why does that horrify you so much? Why is it so terrible that some people are just different from the norm? I find it interesting.
A disproportionate number of young biological girls now seeking to become the opposite sex do have mental disorders including autism, anxiety and depression. Unfortunately, their woke transgender therapists are prevented from treating those problems and are only allowed to "affirm" the girls as transgender.
You picked two of the very worst examples of masculinity and femininity. Dolly Parton is a successful entertainer and a very shrewd businesswoman. Aside from the wigs and plastic surgery there's nothing feminine about Dolly. She probably has ten times as many stereotypically masculine traits as feminine traits. And those traits have absolutely no effect on her sex which is female.
John Wayne was an actor which has never been a notably masculine occupation. He played tough guys on screen but those who knew him in real life said his tough guy persona was a "living lie." He wasn't tough. He was awkward and shy. But regardless of the disconnect between his on camera persona and his true personality, John Wayne was a biological male.
Sex is based on biology, not personality traits or interests. I recently bought a heavy duty electric stapler used by the most macho men in the construction industry. I also know how to tie an electrician's knot. Does that mean I'm a man trapped in a woman's body and need to start pumping myself full of testosterone?
My college roommate's born female (adopted) daughter has been living as trans male for the last few years (end of 6th grade through 9th grade so far). She got the idea from a trans male who she (I can't seem to do the pronoun change) played video games with via the internet -- lived in different states. A friend suggested that perhaps the interest in being a boy is as straightforward as her bio mom (who she has an open adoption relationship with) eventually married and had three sons. Could it be that she might think her bio mom wouldn't have chosen adoption if she were born a boy? No one will even pursue that---it goes straight to affirmation. She is on her second boy name change. There's a whole lot here that needs to be unpacked!
I hope your former roommate is getting the girl some psychological help and with someone who is not goading her into this but trying to help her see what is really what.
They were but the MO in the psych world is to simply affirm. Parents are refusing her any hormone blockers or surgery. She will have to make those decisions as an adult and they are pretty convinced she will change her mind by that time. The reason this is so obviously mental illness is that she has changed her male name once already, still has all of her dolls and is still cutting. If you are content with this gender transition, you would be self-harming.
Yes. And who knows who that out of state gamer really was. Preteen girls, many of whom are autistic, depressed, anxious, or otherwise troubled (like your roommate's daughter), are being catfished online by trans activists eager to pad the ranks and enlarge the flock.
Why does it require separate pronouns and amputation of healthy body parts just to have a personality? Does it bother you so much that a woman might be better than a man at math or target shooting or fixing cars that, if she bests you at these things, she's obviously not a woman?
There are NO women who are more male than most men. There are simply bigoted, narrow-minded individuals who delude themselves that being good at science, having short temper, wanting to serve in the armed forces, liking boxing or weightlifting makes one male. It doesn't. Women who are good at boxing or judo are not male women -- they are female women who are good at boxing and judo.
And you are a sexist bigot for looking at these perfectly normal women and thinking, "Wow, she's good at guy things so she's part guy!"
You are a bigot who can't imagine that the word "woman" can encompass the whole of human potential. And what about men who are naturally good at things like cooking, raising kids, or flower arranging? How g/d dare you call them less male because they don't adhere to some garbage stereotype that you seem to think is engrained into the fabric of the universe.
This is one of the problems, isn't it? The fact that so many trans persons glom on to stereotypical expression of feminine and masculine. I wish we had an honest medical system that could/would study this. We are missing answers and understanding because we won't look directly at these things.
And those feminine men or masculine women are still men and women. Their dna didn’t change and won’t change. What’s cruel is encouraging people to mutilate themselves rather than get mental help. Why are you pushing mental illness?
Because if he doesn't, he'll have to admit that some women are better at traditionally male things than he is, and HIS masculinity will be called into question. The only way he can reconcile this is by saying that women who are smarter or taller or a better shot than he is are actually men inside.
"Why can't you accept that there is a spectrum of gender that goes from very female to very male...?" is based on a religious ideology and is similar to an evangelical Christian saying: "Why can't you accept Jesus Christ came to Earth to be crucified and resurrected as a conduit for forgiveness of your sins?"
That is the easiest answer. What right does a small minatory have to force the majority into a religious view-point where sex and gender are disassociated?
This is the point the radical left is not wanting to accept and everyone dances around.
Pretty much. And, as an old-school liberal who fled from the religious fundie experience of my youth in Appalachia, I don't appreciate that the left has now become the fundies I flee from. I will not be coerced into any belief system, damn it! I reserve the right to make up my own mind.
What is with people? “You will adopt my belief system or be punished!” SSDD. Just utterly ridiculous.
And I will NOT submit. No matter how bad it gets. I will fight this any way I can. Any doctor who asks for my pronouns is fired, immediately, if not sooner. Any doctor who refuses to treat me as a biological woman is fired. Any doctor who calls me a post-menopausal person - fired. I have begun avoiding answering identity questions on surveys as a form of protest - unless it's unavoidable. They will have to pry objective reality out of my cold, dead hands.
This is always a classic response: those alarmed by the issue, and calling attention to it are first of all called insensitive and lacking in empathy...
I was always the person standing up to my ultra conservative Catholic family defending the rights of gay and lesbians to live as they please. However, it is my skepticism of orthodoxy that led me to question trans activism following the public cancelations of Dawkins and Rowling. The idea of labeling all honest inquiry regarding the nature of sex/gender as tantamount to violence did not sit well with me. This hyper focus on language and its power reminded me of what I had read and learned about Scientology. I always wondered, how could otherwise intelligent people be manipulated in such a way by an ideology? Well, now we see this at large mostly with individuals who have graduated college within the last 5 to 10 years.
Yes. Transgender activist wokedom, like it's CRT cousin, isn't just some kooky new religion. It's a cult as coercive and dangerous as anything the Scientologists, Moonies or Sullivanians could cook up.
It's almost the exact opposite of CRT -- CRT is taking something that's not really a thing medically and carving it into concrete. Trans is taking something that IS a medical thing -- biological sex -- and acting like it doesn't exist.
I’m currently reading Cynical Theories. In it, Lindsay and Pluckrose go over the idea of the “blurring of boundaries” as a key element of postmodernist thought. They explain how the focus on fluidity/ambiguity and the denial of categories is something that the field of queer studies retains from postmodernism. On the other hand, CRT scholars (e.g., Crenshaw) apply postmodernism while simultaneously critiquing its rejection of the concept of “identity.” Obviously, the idea identity is key to CRT. I recommend the book if you haven’t read it. It is quite informative.
With this gender nonsense, the left is proving to be as anti-science and anti-truth as the right wing they so deride. Binary sex is a defining feature of human biology, and that of many of our fellow animals.
Pretending it suddenly doesn't exist is simply denying scientific truth. Affirming people's delusions is denying reality — same as those who don't believe in evolution.
Pretending a transgender woman was never a man is lying; it's rewriting history! I remember how outraged I was when I read Caitlyn Jenner's Wikipedia entry, which said that "she" won the Olympics and "she" won all these Athletic events. No, "she" didn't. She was a man at the time, and he won men's events with a male body. That's simply reality. It is not hateful and not violent to point that out.
When people ask me which sex my daughter was assigned at birth, I tell them nobody assigned her anything. The nurse called to inform me of her sex as detected in a prenatal blood test at four months' gestation. And lo and behold, she came out female.
Both the Republicans and Democrats will throw science under the bus as soon as it disagrees with their personal beliefs.
For the Republicans (and this is what drove me away from Republicans having grown up in a small Kansas town) it was the idea the Earth was greater than 10,000 years old and evolution was heresy. While the vast majority have come around there are still Republicans which doubt climate science not on data but on silly statements. This includes things like saying "Volcanoes emit more green house gasses than man does every year" or "People are just to small to have any measurable impact on the Earth ass a whole". Both of these are patently false. Personally, I argue the models and believe the INM-CM4.8 is a much better model than the CMIP5.
For Democrats it is ignoring economics and sociology and to a much lesser standpoint climate. When progressive economic policies fail, as predicted by conservatives, in the exact mater predicted by conservatives, the response of Democrats is "we didn't try hard enough." This has been true for the past 60 years. We see it now with Democrats rejecting data and biology in trans and racial issues. When the best performing ethnicity in the US are Nigerians and their dependents, how can you say (with a straight face) the US is a "systemically racist" country. The statement is easily falsifiable. As for climate, Democrats will say CO2 is the greatest threat to humanity we have ever faced but then they are 100% unwilling to use Fission power, our strongest arrow in our quiver, to address the issue in the short turn.
Both parties are happy to put religious beliefs (and I put the idea of "systemic racism" in the realm of religion) before empirical data when it is needed.
" ... they are 100% unwilling to use Fission power, our strongest arrow in our quiver, to address the issue in the short turn."
OMG this drives me bats. Nuke is clean, safe, and our only hope to maintain anything like our current level of technology. Wind, solar, and geothermal are good supplements, but that's as far as they go.
It drives me crazy when they point to Chernobyl or the Fukushima Daiichi plant as an example of the dangers of nuke. Chernobyl was an obsolete, shit design -- anything is dangerous when it's poorly designed -- and it took one of the largest tsunamis in the history of Japan to take FD down! Plus the fix is fairly straightforward.
Nuke is like air travel: the safest thing ever by far, but when it f*cks up, it makes the news. Meanwhile, cars and coal do a hell of a lot more damage but by ones and twos and no one hears about it.
You mean, “when it f*cks up, it kills and sickens thousands of people and leaves vast swathes of land uninhabitable for decades”. I understand that we are learning more about nuclear plant safety all the time, but anything built by fallible humans is never going to function 100% reliably. It may come close, but there will be more nuclear disasters eventually. Also, safely dealing with spent fuel is still a problem that appears to me to not quite be solved. I get that nuclear is a solution to global warming, but I wouldn’t want a nuclear power plant near where I live.
Where do I start? Denying the reality of climate change, COVID-19, vaccine safety/efficacy, certified elections, evolution, etc...The right has a long recent history of being embarrassingly anti-science. But they don't have a monopoly anymore.
Just a question. How many people on the left (even elected representatives) called the 2016 elections illegitimate? Do you remember the Mueller investigation? I also remember out current VP (during the election) saying she would never take a vaccine developed under the then President Trump.
Both the left and right have a long history with accepting election results as well as vaccine safety (Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy popularized the entire anti-tax thing).
The left has a long history of being anti-science as well, for example data on economics is almost rejected out of hand.
Oh, the climate thing is pretty straightforward. The extreme right are out of their minds on global warming, and the extreme left is out of their minds on biology. I always say they only differ on which scientists they put up before the firing squad: astronomers or biologists.
This otherwise excellent piece is marred by this absurd paragraph:
"In 2019, the New England Journal of Medicine reported the case of a 32-year-old transgender man who went to an ER complaining of abdominal pain. While the patient disclosed he was transgender, his medical records did not. He was simply a man. The triage nurse determined that the patient, who was obese, was in pain because he’d stopped taking a medication meant to relieve hypertension. This was no emergency, she decided. She was wrong: The patient was, in fact, pregnant and in labor. By the time hospital staff realized that, it was too late. The baby was dead. And the patient, despite his own shock at being pregnant, was shattered."
Was this absurdity intentional? We are in this situation precisely because people refuse to call a spade a spade, and it is not helping when the people who are purporting to report the truth on the matter, such as Katie, play along with "preferred pronouns". "He" was not pregnant. She was. Her baby died and she was shattered because reality, as it is wont to do, reasserted itself over her delusions. The activists react so violently to people speaking the truth because maintaining their delusion relies upon everybody playing along.
When people with apotemnophilia insist that they do not need or want one of their limbs, we do not affirm their delusion by amputating the healthy limb. We try to get them treatment to bring their mental outlook in line with objective reality. Why do we treat genitalia or sex differently?
Exactly. Another example is anorexia nervosa. People with anorexia harbor the belief that they are fat when they are clearly not. We certainly don’t affirm this erroneous belief by helping them further restrict their caloric intake! Same thing with agoraphobia, obsessive compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, etc.
I like your comment - it made me consider my confusion when I heard the paragraph. I agree that it appears the author is falling in line - but I think they were making a different point.
By setting the scene with 'he' - the author puts the reader/listener in the frame of mind of the triage nurse. To me this emphasizes the point of the whole article - we all set our sexpectations about someone based on their perceived sex. In most circumstances this may result in no more than hurt feelings.
If you look at the historical demise of cultures like the Romans and the Greeks there are many parallels to our society here in the US. These cultures rose due to ingenuity, scientific discovery, the ability to protect their citizens, and a common sense of purpose. They fell when those things became "common" and these societies devolved into fragmented ideologies. When their leadership and cultural decisions became influenced by fringe groups espousing values that were not fundamental to the forming and establishment of these societies they no longer retained the glue that held them together and they fell apart. If we dod not as a society get a grasp on the things Bari writes about, we will follow suit.
As medical school faculty in a school not yet quite overwhelmed by this, I really feel for my colleagues who are in places where this is in full flower. (Visit the Pacific Northwest sometime.) As is intimated, but not quite brought out in the article, much of this is closely related to the current LCME (the licensing body for medical schools) mandate that student evaluations, for practical purposes, drive virtually all accreditation decisions. They also have applied race-based admissions and faculty criteria unrelated to ability to be a doctor to which schools must adhere. I have been teaching for decades and can say with assurance that medical students have no idea about how to become a doctor, whether biologic sex is important or not, etc. But they have been empowered and the "inmates running the asylum" analogy is so completely apt it is scary. They are generally "woke" so they drive these non-biologic assertions because LCME says they can. And schools have almost no choice...they are terrified of losing their accreditation because of this. That is why faculty sound so scared. We all KNOW how ridiculous this is. But we are threatened within inches of our lives because of the accreditation issues.
In the early 1900s, medical schools could pop up anywhere and teach anything. Abraham Flexner did an expose that pointed out that many of these schools were teaching garbage and most of those teaching things not based on science shut down. We have been blessed for 100 years with a decent medical school accreditation base because of this. One of the predicates of this entire "good century of medical education" was that the science and art of teaching bright and capable students to become the best doctors they could be would not be contaminated by politics. It would also not be subject to deprecation of qualification so that less qualified folks could go mangle other human bodies, or a departure from the then best known science supported facts. That is all now being assailed, and the result will be scary care for the next generations of patients.
I will digress from education and gender issues for a paragraph to give an unrelated example of how this approach is also evident outside medical education. Imaginary science is now being invoked everywhere and has become conflated with real science by the general populace. My favorite current example is the credence many imbue with wearing masks as a counter for Covid19. Masks have been studied for decades; as Fauci's note to a friend said, the virions are infinitely tinier than the holes in your ridiculous piece of cloth, unless you are wearing a freshly fitted N95 mask. But "experts" invent vague associations ( the actual facts just do not agree -- check out a scattergram of all 50 states' mask requirements vs. COVID -- Correlation coefficient is 0.023 -- there is no correlation) and "important scientists" (often Warhol 15 minute of fame seekers; sometimes just misguided folks) tell everyone this is important and many, without any scientific grounding, blindly follow. (Full disclosure: as with most science, not everything is crystal clear. There may be up to a 0.5% positive impact of masks -- this is the same as decreasing the speed limit from 70MPH to 69.5MPH. Do we see an obsession with doing that?) Mask shaming is also great for the holier-than-thou virtue signalers among us. [Incidentally, no tinfoil hat here. I believe that the vaccines ARE of enormous value and was among the first vaccinated. Unfortunately, telling untruths and truths together leads many to assume everything they are told is an untruth.] A great case: Japan, where virtually 100% of the population is mask compliant is having a COVID19 crisis; they matter virtually immaterially if at all. The facts are clear, but the dialog is to ignore the facts and make up tangential stories that transmit effective untruths. Anyone who tries to have a science-based conversation about this is cancelled...for non-scientific reasons. Some great epidemiologist cannot say a word. Scary.
Back to medical education and ignoring biology. Every doctor of my acquaintance (I do not know every one so I am sure there are five exceptions somewhere) knows how ridiculous this entire "sex is just a social construct" idea is. But admission requirements to medical school have been greatly diminished ("We need holistic evaluation, not competence evaluation") and virtually all schools have gone to pass/fail so that the less-good doctors-to-be can be hidden. The students then admitted have primacy as to how things should be done and how they should be taught. Not only is this crazy, but it leads to this kind of nonsense dialog. Unfortunately, the students coming out now will be afraid to ask the right questions (for many conditions, it DOES make a BIG difference as to actual biologic sex). The sad result is that being taught to pretend otherwise will deprecate health care for all.
Most physicians over 40 I know have a pact with others of our ilk to care for each other until the oldest of us passes. This is completely new -- we used to preferentially go to younger physicians because their hands are steadier and their brains are more youthful. But they are now coming out as less competent doctors. This gender discussion is just an example of a much larger, and scarier problem. Where is Abraham Flexner when we need him?
The pact by traditionally trained, over-40 physicians to care for each other in the knowledge that their youngers are no longer reliably selected and trained for excellence is telling. Completely understandable, and chilling.
"Overall, we find that combinations of various commonly available fabrics used in cloth masks can potentially provide significant protection against the transmission of aerosol particles."
The use of the word "potentially" tells me the results of this so-called study were, by the author's own admission, inconclusive.
Since we're being all scientific here, to my mind the real question is, "Do masks reduce disease transmission?" If they do not, then whether masks filter out lots of particles is moot, isn't it? (And by the way, appeal to authority - one's own authority in this case - is a logical fallacy. But that's ANOTHER discipline.)
You appealed to your own authority as "medical school faculty", did you not?
Yes, of course the real question is "Do masks reduce disease transmission?" And the evidence is simply overwhelming that they do (for an individual wearing one that fits well). There is no question whatsoever that virus particles are carried in liquid droplets with a range of sizes, and that simple masks block a significant fraction of these, the fraction blocked varying with droplet size. And the fewer virus particles that reach your respiratory system, the less likely you are to get infected. I don't see how you can possibly dispute that last point. Even if the probability of infection as a function of virus particles inhaled is nonlinear (which is likely), it is almost certainly monotonically increasing.
"You appealed to your own authority as "medical school faculty", did you not?"
You are incorrect. I did not. I WAS on faculty at a med school, incidentally, but I did not mention that or use it to bolster my argument. And it's not "credentialism;" it's the Appeal to Authority Fallacy.
re: masks block a fraction of droplets and that is irrefutable evidence of effectiveness. Not necessarily so. I'm sure you've had linear algebra; think "more variables than equations". There could be many reasons that argument is fallacious. Maybe masks block the large particles, and it's the tiny ones that penetrate the breathing passages deeply enough to cause infection, for one example. The larger a particle, the less deeply it goes into the lung, (true) so masking it out does nothing. (Thank God for that - I just inhaled a piece of foam from a defective aircraft oxygen-delivery mask last week. It got only partway down before impacting the bronchial wall, and I was able to cough it up.)
The respiratory tree is a very reliable but very complex system. Simple arguments - Bill of Occam notwithstanding - are rarely the final answer. One needs to go to the final question: do masks lessen infection rates? From what I am seeing in print, you'd do as well to lay chicken bones at your door. I'll find you some cites when I get a few minutes.
If most med schools have made all of their courses pass/fail, how are students matched to residency programs? My understanding was that the best med students had the highest chances of being admitted to the most sought after residencies. But if most applicants have passed all their courses, grades are no longer a useful signal.
This is exactly the next level of incipient problem. There is now virtually NO way to rank residents. So the very best will try to be retained by their host institutions who know they are good...at least some of the time. The point of all of this removal of any evaluation of students (and as pointed out by Gordon Freeman above) is to make sure that there is as little relevant consideration of physician aptitude and as much of virtually everything else (Social Justice Warrior score, TransGender score, whatever) in both the selection of medical students and in their evaluation. This means that other than a handful, by necessity most of the other residents matching will be randomly assorted (or assorted by criteria generally unrelated to being the best physician) rather than by qualifications or aptitude or performance. Of course, this can only deprecate the delivery of medical care...and it will.
I stated my thoughts in the comments section of Bari's previous piece, so I won't go over the same terrain--suffice it to say that this state of affairs can only be described as catastrophic, with the potential for a generations-long impairment of the U.S. healthcare delivery system itself.
One aspect that has had only the scantest attention in these discussions is the radical restructuring of the med school admission process. Right or wrong, for the last 100 years or so, med school admission could be described as jumping through a prescribed set of hoops that are designed solely to filter out for admission only those who are most devoted and motivated to become doctors. Even when the era of Affirmative Action began, this did not materially change in any significant way. Yes, disadvantaged groups were often given a little extra help across the finish line (because they needed and deserved the extra consideration), but overall standards and expectations of trainees remained unchanged, turning out competent, (mostly) caring, practitioners, year after year.
However, in the last 5-10 years, this workable system was almost entirely dismantled, in a nihilistic race to the bottom to appease the Woke minority. As someone who follows these trends, it has been shocking, even traumatic, to watch highly-qualified, utterly dedicated premed students struggle to gain access to their dream, and forced to watch marginally qualified, but expertly intersectional candidates being given preference, especially those with the most "interesting" combinations of sex, gender, sexual identity, etc., human traits that have absolutely no bearing on how well-suited one is for a career in medicine, or even the ability to master the med school subject matter.
I see no sign of this abating, because current medical leaders have almost entirely abdicated their responsibility for preserving a high-quality, SAFE, system of health services delivery. It is not too strong to say they deserve severe sanctions, not just civil but criminal, for their grotesque failures. Unfortunately, that is unlikely to happen until it is addressed forcefully in legislation and the courts.
I agree wholeheartedly. I’m a professor in a medically-related field at a major university. We have always bent the admissions criteria to admit individuals from disadvantaged groups. As long as the applicant wasn’t grossly below the criteria (i.e., within the waitlisted range), I had no problem with that. However, my department has since removed the GRE requirement (because it’s racist, of course) and we are now admitting graduate students who would have been summarily rejected without even reviewing their applications (e.g., with GPAs in the 2.0 range). Meanwhile, students with 4.0 GPAs who are not members of those groups are getting rejected. Granted, under most circumstances, the weak students are not going to kill other people in the course of their jobs. However, I certainly wouldn’t want my family members to work with them!
I cannot adequately communicate the anger I feel when I see this garbage. Women fought for generations not to be second-class humans behind the ones with penises, and now we're even second-class WOMEN behind the ones with penises, too. CHESTFEED?! FRONT HOLE?! Our lifegiving body parts are obscene even to talk about now, after decades of struggle on the part of women to get doctors to take us seriously!
And does it strike anyone as weird that most of the freakouts are over the words "woman" and "mother?" I haven't seen a single shitstorm over Gillette selling itself as "the best a man can get" but Always gets raked over the coals until it removes the female symbol from its packaging. "Woman" is a triggering word, but humans are called "mankind."
I just have no more time for this transgender garbage anymore. None. It's misogynist (and homophobic) garbage, 100%. It's a woke way to hate women openly again. I have ZERO time for this.
I am a woman, a female adult human.
I would still be a woman even if I chose not to wear lipstick, dresses, or high heels.
I would still be a woman even if I chose not to have children.
I would still be a woman even if I took cross sex hormones, removed body parts, had my birth certificate changed, or decided to call myself Max.
I would still be a woman because I was born female. My sex was not "assigned" at birth. It was created the moment I was conceived as an XX, not an XY.
I will always be a woman, and nothing the trans mob claims can ever change that.
Nancy, Amen sister! Say it louder for the folks in the back!
Well, you're certainly entitled to feel that way. Is it okay for other people to see themselves differently? Or are you an authoritarian/totalitarian?
It's not ok to deny science when you're teaching it. Someone's delusion is not science, I am sorry.
Talking about gender identity is not denying science. Being transgender is not delusional. Only someone who doesn't know a transgender person would say that.
Your gender is determined by what's between your legs. No amount of revisionist, agenda-driven "science" will ever change that. This is a fad that will eventually blow over, like all extreme social phenomena.
Gender dysphoria is mental illness. It's no different than a white person believing that they're black.
With that said, trans folk absolutely have the right to live as they please. Their rights stop when mine are trampled, however.
Trans adults. Treating and operating on children is a crime
There is a difference between biological sex and gender identity. Do you also think that being gay is a mental illness?
I believe women's brains tend to be wired in a pattern that reinforces what we call femininity. I believe a man can be born with a female brain. I believe that person has the right to live and love in whatever way seems best to them. I believe they have the right to be medically treated based on the hormones that influenced their body's growth. That way may be one that treats higher testosterone and lower estrogen than I possess. I do not give up MY identity as a woman, mother, or as a mother who breastfed her child. I am not a birthing person. I am a woman. I would be a woman if I had never had a child.
Are you sure? Identifying as a gender not corresponding to one's biological sex is often phrased as "I am a woman," the speaker bearing an XX chromosome pair in every cell of his body and having a normally developed penis and testicles. If by "woman" and "man" we mean what they meant to English speakers until the last five minutes world-historically speaking, this is a deeply held, false belief, which causes the holder to have difficulty fitting into society and consequent suffering. Other such false beliefs are called "delusions" and are treated with psychotherapy. This one, for reasons no one has ever explained to my satisfaction, is instead to be met with "affirmation", with all of society expected to play along, replacing biological reality with the person's feelings, and "treated" by providing the holder with cross-sex hormones and surgery to turn them into a simulacrum of what they falsely believe themselves to be. Why? What in your experience knowing a transgender person convinces you that their self-identification is not a delusion? Please answer, if you deign to, only from your experience of acquaintance with one or more transgender persons, not from a canned recitation of fashionable gender ideology.
Curiously, no one other than me has noticed my typo: the deluded male has an XY chromosome pair in every cell of his body.
Women are xx; men XY.
Actually being transgender is a mental illness, called gender dysphoria. Delusional feels strong, but you can go there, if you want.
Strong, but I think it's accurate:
" an idiosyncratic belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument, typically a symptom of mental disorder."
Biological Women who identify as Men and are transgender do not ask for, or it seems based on the medical community's renaming of terms, require the 'renaming' of the words associated with 'man'. The opposite is not true. For whatever reason it is 'apparently' necessary to erase the definitions associated with 'woman' in order to acknowledge a transgender person who is biologically male and identifies as a woman. If a cisgender woman stands up and says 'This is wrong. I do not accept being erased.' they are attacked as a TERF. I know, I get it, the female of the species is supposed to be passive and lie down and take it, no matter what wrongs are committed against us, coming from biological men.
I do not accept being erased. I will gladly recognize any who identify as female. I do not accept being called a 'birthing person'. I am a woman. I breastfed my son (all biological genders have breasts by the way, there is NO NEED to rename the term). I did not chestfeed him. The female of the species produces the milk which nourishes their offspring in all of nature. If you are taking hormones to cause your body to produce the milk that it would not produce naturally because you (without intervention) produce testosterone, you are still producing a type of breastmilk. Call it breastmilk if you will, or mother's milk, but it is not 'parent's milk'.
Matt, I've said this to you before, and I'll say it to you again -- I don't understand why you're here. I know you said you're hoping to convert people to your cause. But you haven't convinced one single human being here to accept the Mad Hatter nonsense you peddle.
Your fellow traveler radicals believe men can be knocked up by women and then give birth to babies through their front holes. Surely, deep within the frontal lobes of your neocortex you realize this is off the wall baloney. We know you're not stupid or crazy, but you accept the most twisted pretzel logic just so you can maintain your status as a card carrying leftist.
One day, you'll wake up and realize you've wasted your life promoting the most ridiculous ideas that have ever cropped up on this planet. Until then whenever you post on this substack, you're tilting at windmills.
I simply accept that gender identity is more complex than you and your fellow travelers want it to be. I'm here to tell you that's okay. The world is not coming to an end because some people don't identify with their biological sex. I'm here to calm the out-of-control hysteria I'm seeing with people like you. Maybe someday you'll realize you've spent your whole life panicking over nothing.
Matt, the emperor is wearing no clothes. Stew on that.
It's not as deep and profound as you seem to imagine. There's nothing to stew on. It's a cliche.
The hysteria comes from those crying out loud against reality and insisting that everyone comply or else. What's coming out of the gender ideology cult is the most regressive concept of "gender" imaginable. A male can have feminine characteristics but that does not make him a female. Liking pink and wanting to put on a dress does not make someone female. What makes you female is your uterus and other apparatus. Period. Why not just let men be feminine and if they want to go out in public wearing dresses -- fine. But no matter what, when I'm looking at you, I'm going to see what's really there: A MAN WEARING A DRESS. Yesterday I saw a male on estrogen. That's right. Despite the dress and the tiny breasts? I saw a MAN ON ESTROGEN. Cry all you want, but the truth cries louder. You can't force people to believe what isn't true. You can only force them to comply with your delusion. And there lies the rub. NO ONE REALLY BELIEVES IT. Why? BECAUSE IT'S NOT THE TRUTH.
Bingo!
MM, I think the moon is made up of rocks and dust (with a possible iron core). Some people think that it is made up of green cheese. I must be an authoritarian/totalitarian for not taking green cheese crowd seriously. Shame on me.
Gender identity is how a person genuinely feels about their gender. Geology is not a comparable analogy. Did I really need to explain that to you?
Some people sincerely believe that the Earth is flat. Some people sincerely believe that the Earth is round. Which ones are the authoritarians / totalitarians? Or both? Or neither?
But when you say "gender," I fear you are simply accepting a cluster of stereotypes that label people. I refuse to accept those descriptors. I am a person with 2 X chromosomes in every cell of my body. No one can label my behaviors as anything but my own. I truly believe that there is in fact no such thing as gender. I think harm is being by the acceptance of the theory of gender. I accept that you believe differently. I wish you well.
Is truth to be determined by people's feelings? Or by political power? Historically, that way lies dictatorship and democide.
You are very angry about something. Not sure what.
Trolls just agitate pointlessly. I prefer the term "political gadfly".
As the Babylon Bee put it, what used to be "mothers" now "act as gender-neutral spawning bags for biologically male partners."
In other words, what women were medically considered for millennia before 1970-ish. Only now, it's woke.
@DarkWhite Lets also keep in mind that shaming white women is one of the main tenets of the so called "antiracism" graft. That is more-less the core of D'Angelo's "work".
This is all male dominated patriarchy. Where are the feminists? If they aren’t cowering in fear of being unwoke, they are leading the band over men thinking they are women and playing second fiddle. It’s nuts on so many levels.
The feminists are getting punched in the face (literally, and not like a 20 year old means when they say "literally"), threatened with rape and death, cancelled, and no-platformed. Many of them are fighting like mad against this, but they need security and armed guards to give talks and go to their classrooms. Nuts is the right word for it.
Some are but a lot are going along with the madness. It’s as dumb as those queers for Palestine idiots. They will be the first thrown off the buildings.
Feminism lately has been subject to what's basically regulatory capture. The old guard, the ones who fought like lions for us, are being hounded out by the mob. :-(
yes. Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug are rolling in their graves.
I literally know feminists who have been harrassed and banned for not embracing radical transgender ideology
There are many feminists fighting this nonsense. They get attacked as evil "terfs." I follow a bunch of them on Twitter.
I agree with your core points, but disagree with your conclusion that misogyny is driving this movement. In fact, it seems to me that a significant majority of the loudest and most vicious proponents of this woke lunacy are women, not men. I could be wrong, but that is my impression.
Being pro-Trans is the equivalent of "We all Wear Pink on Wednesdays" among coastal, college educated women.
It is what everyone at the Cool Girls' table is doing, and upper middle class women generally got where they are by doing what the other Cool Girls do and obeying - or at least parroting - institutional authority.
My first job out of college was teaching at a private high school in Fairfield County. The women now promoting "Trans" were the school girls who went up to their teacher and said "Just tell me what I have to do to get the A." They would write a florid and enthusiastic defense of Hitler standing on their heads if a teacher said doing so would get them into Yale.
I think the Trans movement is also really good at exploiting empathy among this set.
It's all so performative. The affluent, mostly white women latching onto this for prestige and social status are the least likely to ever be thrown in prison or need a rape shelter. The worst that will ever happen to their own daughters is that they'll lose out on a sports championship, which mom can then morally pimp out on social media by posting about HOW VERY KIND MY CHILD IS for letting the Trans Girl win.
It was the same dynamic last spring. I live in Connecticut and my Facebook feed was full of suburban women declaring between their corporate Zoom meetings that riots that burnt down working class businesses and devastated poor neighborhoods were just "voices of the unheard" and the landscapers protesting not being able to work and make living were "selfish", all as they sat at their granite countertops in half million dollar houses in the neighborhood they moved to "for the schools."
It's all such bullsh*t.
"The worst that will ever happen to their own daughters is that they'll lose out on a sports championship ... "
But those same women would never sit still for their sons being screwed over like that.
There is a lot a certain kind of woman gains by caping for the penis: the big house, the hummer in the garage, the club membership ... Trans makes caping for the penis (and screwing over other women) a feminist act.
💯
👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
So true
Oh, women can be misogynist. Sometimes I think that the reason sexism is allowed to continue is because backstabby women find it so useful as a weapon against the competition. The modern model of feminism has a lot in common with Bugs, Daffy, and Elmer, where they don't take the shotgun away from him, they just point him at one another.
I don’t think it is misogyny driving women supporting the trans movement but an over-developed sense of empathy. There is an unsung virtue in supporting the underdog (think “marginalized and disadvantaged communities”) and I think many women support the destruction of sex in an effort to help a “poor soul” even at the expense of women.
Men on the other hand will exploit this. There is no advantage (from a social status standpoint) for a man to compete against a woman (Note: this dates back 10’s of thousands of years.) and there is no social downside for a woman to compete against a man.
The trans movement provides for men, unable to compete against other men, an opportunity to compete against women with no social downside. They are, after all, “real women”.
Overactive empathy from women and misogyny from men. This is “in general” as there will be outliers.
Believe me, it's also misogyny. It's both.
Not if we take misogyny as being "a dislike, contempt or prejudice against women". Women being competitive against other women is not misogyny. Men being competitive against another person which happens to be a woman is not misogyny (outside of areas like sports). Words have meanings and it is important to try and get the correct word (or words) to capture something and in this case, I think misogyny is way off the mark . NOTE: Women tend to be aggressive against other women using reputation destruction while men tend to be more physical. Again, this is "in general" and not an absolute.
Calling anything that is a perceived injustice against a women "misogyny" is being sloppy and it will not allow diagnosing the problem. Like calling anything bad happening to a black person as "racism" calling any thing bad happening to a woman "misogyny" is simplistic and dilutes the meaning of each word.
That said, I do believe males wanting to compete against females in sports is deeply driven by misogyny in many cases (mostly the "contempt" part). I also believe an over-active sense of empathy is driving irrational support by both men and women for this behavior. Yes: I am saying too much empathy is a bad thing and not a desirable trait.
"Women being competitive against other women is not misogyny."
After a lifetime of feminism, I can't say how grateful I am for having some strange dude I don't know telling me what misogyny is. How on Earth did I manage before.
I think women are generally more inclined to be self-serving in terms of "morality" and that's what's behind this. In a recent faculty meeting, two millennial women informed me that their whiteness causes harm. This was a performance. It's about THEM and their moral superiority. It's certainly ignorant of cause and effect. After all, what good does it do for anyone -- black, white, or whatever -- that these two useful idiots are chomping at the bit to announce that their whiteness causes harm?
I see your point, but I still don't think the phenomenon you're describing can be characterized as misogyny. Your point about the lack of opposition to terms like "mankind" is also inaccurate. The movement to eliminate generic masculine terms has been going on for at least 20 years and is now accelerating, e.g. "humankind", "womxn", "latinx", etc.
The fact that some misguided women push this insanity doesn't stop it being misogynistic. The only people who suffer real consequences from this are women. We are losing our sports, our private spaces, and now our safety. Men can declare themselves women and will be put in women's jails. Rapes have happened in the UK because of this, but that's OK because it is only women who suffer the consequences. It has put women's rights back almost 100 years.
Yes - if by women you mean trans person identifying as “female”
Well said. You are not alone!!
Total agreement. And teachers should grow a spine to replace the boiled spaghetti they have, and stop groveling to these ignorant kids. If they find their tactics don't work, they'll probably stop. They're like little children who test out how much they can get away with. Once you give in, you've lost.
Agree. All of this is just one more way men oppress, dismiss and disrespect women. There goal is to get rid of us and have a bunch of men prancing around pretending they are women. I am also tired and sick to death of this and about time we fight back.
I have posted this here before, but I want Katie and Bari to know that, as a formerly dysphoric female, I am very grateful for this kind of journalism. I wouldn't wish dysphoria on my worst enemy, and I am sincere in my desire to see good, science-based, effective and appropriate treatment for those who suffer from it. The current ideology prescribes a reckless one-size-fits-all approach, and is hijacking the safety and well-being of people suffering from dysphoria (and those who are not). It benefits no one. I am grateful for the help I received when I needed it, and that I was not pushed in a direction that may have permanently altered my body for the worse and/or fail to cure the psychological distress of dysphoria. Part of the reason I can stay grateful is because there are honest professionals out there who are committed to science-based medicine and care for the whole individual; doctors who see patients as people and not ideological battlegrounds. And again, part of the reason I am hopeful for those who may be suffering from dysphoria as they come of age now is because we've got equally brave journalists like you, Katie, who aren't going to cave in to the cultural milieu around them. As a fellow Seattelite, I admire your courage and tenacity, and am rooting for you and Bari, both. Your work may prove to be life-saving for somebody, if it hasn't already. Keep it up! Thank you!
This comment means the world to me (and I'm sure Katie, too). Thank you. And wishing you all the best.
I don't know if this helps, but I have a stepdaughter who insisted since age 5 that she was a boy named "Rob." Later, upon discovering boys, she rationalized it by claiming to be a "gay man."
She's married now - to a man - and has a very successful career. I don't think she's ever worn a dress in her life, but other than that, she seems to be very settled into her role as a woman. I'm sure glad her mom and dad didn't get her into the gender-dysphoria medical-alteration system when she was little. Choose your doctors wisely; some of them will surely hurt you. All best.
I think it is up to the psychiatric and psychological professionals to acknowledge the dysphoria, to accept gender-play as a means of coping with it but to insist, however compassionately, that your natural self, your natural body is natural and that you are completely fine as you are, however you wish to present yourself without losing your natural being. Be the unique person nature intended but no to mutilation and psychological torture. I think Camille Paglia’s model is the best: to be trans in essence, in spirit, in intellect. Why try to fit into the gender norms that the trans activists so rail against? That part makes no sense to me.
I see no problem with transitioning physically if they truly desire it. But it should happen after they are 18.
My comment was geared toward minors, and though I agree with you, I think it should be 21. There’s data which shows brains aren’t fully developed until the twenties.
Actually, I like 21 better as well. It's a significant decision and should not be approached lightly. I am all for trying to make the few actual trans persons as comfortable as possible while awaiting this age delimiter. We can debate what that looks like. But regardless, great care should be taken before jumping into this.
Mid twenties for most but late twenties for those with ADHD.
Full development of the frontal lobe.
yes
There ain't no "transition." That's the elephant in the room. I think the number of nucleated cells in the body is about 3 X 10^12, or 3,000,000,000,000. Each and every one of those cells contains either an XX or XY chromosome pair that determines your sex (unless you are one of the fortunately very rare intersex patients with other patterns). Neither hormonal manipulation nor surgery of any type alters that XX/XY pattern - any more than welding on a pair of wings turns a submarine into an airplane. The surgeons, endocrinologists (both of whom in my mind are committing gross malpractice), the patients, and their misguided parents are just fooling themselves.
I strongly disagree with this but to each his own. Your statement strikes me as snide and lacking in compassion. The body is only part of a human being. We also have a mind/psyche and emotional aspect. Regardless of your own stance on this, I don't believe that life is so binary and we have to find a way forward that accomodates outliers in a humane manner.
My only concern regarding transitioning is the rising number of youth declaring themselves trans and insisting on moving forward prior to their brains having fully developed - and then wanting to detransition after they have made ineradicable changes to themselves. The rising number of detransitioning people indicates that it is possible that they used gender dysphoria to fit in or fix some low self-esteem issues.
That's why I wrote below that we should make as comfortable as possible those who know for certain they are trans but who have to wait to physically transition.
We can be kind in trying to understand this issue instead of peremptory and insistent that the world is black and white and that's that. I find your regressive attitude unhelpful.
a. Nobody said the world was black-and-white. Straw man. b. I don't care about your feelings. I care only about policy that affects the public. c. "Transitioning" sexes does not exist. "Transitioning" is merely performing superficial surgery on accessible body parts; the surgeon is not "transitioning" or "de-transitioning" anybody; the blueprints that specify the patient's entire being - including the brain wiring that produces the "mind/psyche and emotional aspect" are not altered in the least. The patient is just post-op/post hormonal manipulation, nothing more. Wanting something with all your heart does not make it real. I'd like to have a pet unicorn, but they don't exist. Nor do "trans" people.
Then we will have to agree to disagree. I hold a more expansive view of human existence that goes far beyond our mortal coil.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” —Hamlet, Wm Shakespeare
Be well. :-)
You are correct.
Good for you that you have a compassionate heart for hurting people. But ask yourself, do you actually know anything about this topic? Have you studied psychopathology, been trained in psychotherapy, or medicine? No. So your opinion, while compassionate, is no more helpful than your opinion about your favorite basketball team.
Gender dysphoria is not a matter of biological sex; no one here is denying the facts of biological sex. Dysphoria is psychological - some report find psychological relief in altering their bodies, some do not. No one here is arguing against chromosomes - that is a strawman rebuttal
You are correct.
As a psychotherapist who has treated many psychotic people over the years, I know that supporting delusion never helps the patient. Transitioning is supporting delusion. And those professionals who practice gender transition are making a tidy sum while breaking their oath to do no harm. Studies show that transition surgery doesn’t lower the suicide rate. They also show that most gender dysphoric children who don’t transition, eventually accept their gender and do better. What other major medical procedures that offer no benefit are supported by the AMA and are promoted by the medical profession in general?
Right you are! It's a bit like frontal lobotomies redux, eh? Surgery for mental disease. (How'd that work out?)
Yes!
You thankfully mention that the safety and well-being of people NOT suffering from dysphoria is being hijacked via one-size-fit-all diagnosis (and auto-'affirmation'), alongside the genuinely dysphoric. It's important to highlight this.
Skyrocketing numbers of teen girls, in particular, have been declaring special gender identities and getting ushered to testosterone and breast removal because they're now led to reinterpret themselves and their often typical teen angsts through the newly fashionable 'dysphoria' (Greek for 'unease', 'dissatisfaction', 'discomfort'). They get coached to reframe all manner of human struggles through its catch-all, thought-shaping lens, and told 'if you have dysphoria, that means you're trans'.
How many of us had even heard of dysphoria a decade ago? The existence of concepts shape perceptions, gathers believers.
Typical teen discomforts include the often bumpy ride from androgynous kid body to sexed adult. Especially for girls, having to negotiate painful, embarrassing bleeding, leering attentions, pressures from porn-skewed boys, uncertainties over sexuality. Then there's the social minefield that is teen girlhood. These can be particularly challenging for autistic girls, who far disproportionately get referred to the new gender clinics. The UK's GIDS provides data not being collected in the US's gender-med Wild West: 35-40% of under-18s being 'treated' there for 'gender identity' are on the autism spectrum. Other mental health conditions also have high representation.
Dysphoria has become too broad an umbrella term. One could also say that feeling dysphoria as defined is the normal human condition.
Genuine gender dysphoria exists. You are indeed lucky to have received appropriate, beneficial care (from the sound of it, mind-based rather than body-altering). Far more exactitude and scepticism is needed in defining what gender dysphoria is and is not, who does or does not suffer from it, and appropriate care responses. The present ideologically driven, heedless provision of wrong-sex hormones and disfiguring surgeries to those uttering the magic words 'I have dysphoria' is surely a maltreatment scandal, and on a huge scale.
Yes. And the British, who as you said are miles ahead of us when it comes to collecting data (through their National Health Service), recently tightened up the rules about providing medical treatments to children and teens who transition. As you can imagine, this setback to the woke agenda shocked the trans activist mob.
Late last year, Keira Bell, a biological female who was put on puberty blockers when she was just 16, began taking testosterone at 17, had a double mastectomy at 20, and detransitioned at 25, sued both the Tavistock Clinic, a woke activist provider of transition healthcare, and the NHS. Keira Bell won her case. As a result Tavistock and the NHS were no longer allowed to provide puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, or mutilating surgeries to any child or teen under age 17 without a court order. The US should and must do the same. We can no longer allow America's children to be indoctrinated and mutilated by the trans activist mob.
My understanding is that Keira Bell, together with an anonymous mother of an autistic teen girl in the 'care' of GIDS, brought a Judical Review against the Tavistock/GIDS. They didn't sue the Tavistock, as their aim was not personal financial recompense. Rather, they bravely sought a JR to try to get protections set in place against the harms heedlessly done to Keira and hundreds like her in the name of 'gender identity treatment'. They/their team succeeded.
It's a crucially important start in the pushback against the medical harms being carried out on vulnerable young because of the gender craze.
Yes, the US needs to wake up and begin to enact protections.
For those looking for measured, informative coverage of gender issues in the UK, The Times (no, not the New York Times, of course not) and The Spectator have been resolutely informative.
Good for her. It’s criminal
Another piece that strikes me is that people seem to want to shove others into a box with their preferences. For instance, growing up I was a tomboy, I loathed hitting puberty, liked sports and wasn't really concerned how I looked. I would probably now be told I was transgender, but I'm not, I was just being me. How many young people who have different ideas of how they want to interact in the world are getting the message that there is something wrong with them?
Great adendum. I was also (and still am) considered a tomboy. The current hip lingo with activists is something like "gender nonconforming", which is semantics to me (I've always used "tomboy"). But like you say, and I wholeheartedly agree, it is far too easy to conflated "nonconforming" with "dysphoria". It's like saying all skinny people are anorexic or all anorexic people are just skinny. Treating one as the other serves no one.
And isn't it REALLY insulting to apply the word "conforming" to whether a person behaves like a female, whatever that is supposed to mean. It's regressive! These gender ideologues define gender by a PERFORMANCE rather than just allowing people to be themselves! It's disgusting.
Correct.
"Skyrocketing numbers of teen girls, in particular, have been declaring special gender identities and getting ushered to testosterone and breast removal"
Until recently this would rightly be labeled as child abuse.
Child abuse it is. Teen age girls as young as 13 are losing their breasts, not to cancer, but to the trans healthcare industrial complex of doctors, surgeons, therapists, hospitals, drug manufacturers, teachers, school districts, and activists. One day there will be a tsunami of class action lawsuits on behalf of these young girls who were taken advantage of by adults they never should have trusted.
It still is
Correct
I just had a round with Duke University Clinics. Their orthopedic pre-check-in process is done via a Web-based application that requires answering two questionnaires - one about one's mental health (none of your business, thankyouverymuch) and a second on demographics. One of the demographics questions was, "Gender assigned at birth." I informed the clerk, the doctor, and the physical therapist that "Gender is a language construct;" medicine has to do with sex. And sex is not "assigned at birth." It is DETERMINED nine months earlier - at conception - when two single-stranded DNA moieties from egg and sperm fuse. From that point on, unless you are a very unfortunate - but very rare - individual, your sex is either male or female - XX or XY - and no amount of mutilating surgery or sex-confused mental illness can change that."
They deleted that entire woke questionnaire from my check-in sheet; I'm sure it's still there on others'.
My husband and I had to sit through a Title IX tribunal. When asked what his prefered pronouns were, my husband answered "Mr". The left has lost their fucking minds.
The journalist Aaron Sibarium says that his prounouns are he/he.
My preferred pronoun is Generalisima.
I'm glad you spoke up. If enough people start complaining about this nonsense, something may be done.
I filled out a survey for my bank. The question on sex was male female binary. I wrote on the comments that it was garbage. Funny, I never heard back from them.
Were you there as a patient? Or prospective employee? etc.
Patient. Post-op rotator cuff tear.
In my ICU, we make life and death decisions around our patient's care based upon their biology - *not* a social construct.
These developments are as alarming as they are insane and they must be pushed back against.
Lives are at stake here!
And anyone who craps themselves over being misgendered really needs help. I've BEEN misgendered -- and I'm a fairly femme-looking 125lb woman! When my hair is up and I'm in a black raincoat, and someone sees me out of the corner of their eye, I'm called "sir" sometimes. WTF cares?!
I have very short, gray hair and usually wear a long skirt or dress. A child once said to me, "Help me with the door, Mr. Lady!"
Is it okay that I laughed out loud? Mr. Lady is pretty f*cking cool when you think about it. Gotta love kids -- they're so up front. :-)
I laughed, too, after I held the door for her.
I have a deep voice. Strangers call me sir most of the time when I talk on the phone. I have a unisex name. I just pretend they are correct, even though I am a woman.
I'm already getting some pushback from a similar iteration of my comment on Twitter. Apparently mine is a straw man argument and I'm branding trans and non-binary individuals as 'mad' - (I was referring to the trends Katie highlighted in her article as madness - not individual people).
While these ideological trends haven't become apparent in the main down here in Australia, I am seeing hints of them beginning to seep into the field.
As Katie writes - there are key biological difference between males and females in endocrinology, symptom presentation (acute myocardial infarction for eg) and structural anatomy (abdominal aortic aneurysm) that can have profound implications for patient safety in the event of a critical event. Not having the most critical intelligence available - that of biology - can be the difference between saving a life or losing that life.
I could not have a patient death on my conscience because of that lack of Intel. It would devastate me.
The example of the trans guy who was pregnant and the baby died -- I think about the doctor who treated that person. So sad for them. And the trans guy who was pregnant and couldn't admit they were having sex with men and might be pregnant -- that is straight up mental illness.
It truly is straight up mental illness!
And indeed it was called 'Gender Identity Disorder' until gender ideologues pressured the compilers of the DSM to get rid of that accurate descriptor, in 2013. Mustn't call a disorder of bodily self-perception, akin to disorders like anorexia or apotemnophilia, disordered. The movement must be grown, recruits and believers acquired, so get rid of the 'mental illness' label.
So it got re-named 'gender dysphoria' instead. They wanted it no longer to be recognised as outright mental illness yet stay in the DSM so that the desired self-disfiguring drugs/procedures would be funded.
Precisely! And there is LIFELONG medical care and treatment needed by the trans community, which is not the case for lesbians/gays. There's a whole market here that the greedy and immoral are happy to tap into.
Of "course" men can get pregnant. Everybody knows that anal sex can cause babies. Where do you think state troopers come from?
Groan...... I know that's older than dirt, but I just couldn't resist.
No, these people are mad. Have you ever seen the video of the man (and he looks like a man ) that goes into a convenience store and the clerk called him ma’am and he freaked out and threatened the guy? They are nuts.
Oh, no! A woman having a testosterone storm! How did that happen?
She didn’t. HE had a testosterone storm.
The majority ought to be considered. Not the loud vocal minority. I am in the hospital right now. I have a right to have my health as a woman considered. That does not make me transphobic. It is time to stand up to this hysteria.
We're sending a team to the hospital ASAP to get you canceled ;) jk feel better.
My best wishes to you Sasha for a speedy recovery!
I've always been a "live and let live" person who respects everyone's right to fair treatment. However, it's starting to feel like the needs of the few eclipse everyone else's rights to not be subjected to these new "rules". As a biological female, I want my healthcare professionals to be addressing my medical needs based on science, not ideology.
I'm also concerned that the oh-so-hard-fought-for rights of women are being trounced in the name of transgender activism (see women's sports for example), which is really pissing me off if I'm honest. Why are women always expendable?!!!!!
Other women are allowing themselves to be expendable. Very proud of women like Bari and JK who aren't afraid to stand up.
Dave, respectfully, I think the women competing in olympic weightlifting and countless other athletic programs who are now obligated to compete against biological males may beg to differ.
True. For what it's worth, men are equal cowards about this, too. Everyone's terrified of being canceled.
I’m not. Once you trace the ideological underpinnings of the trans movement (CGT and CQT), BLM (CRT) and the very idea of “systemic racism” you realize they all stem from a common thought process.
You can’t defend one of the above’s religious views and go against another. It’s logically impossible. That is why there is such lock step in the phases and beliefs.
Critical Theory belongs in a museum next to The Mien Kampf, Das Kapital and the Confederate flag.
I agree with you completely. CRT is power-grab communism, except race has been substituted for class.
I'm pushing back too. Most people are staying silent though.
“Everyone’s terrified of being cancelled.” This the whole current cultural zeitgeist in a nutshell. I think those holding the sword of Damocles over everyone’s heads are enjoying themselves just a bit too much.
People have made a sport out of it.
The pendulum is swinging though. I think there will be an end to this madness soon.
I dearly hope so!
I'm a bit of a student of WWII - where the direct deaths of 55M people, indirect of many more, was made possible because in the 'thirties, Hitler correctly surmised that the Good Guys - France, England, Belgium, Holland - were so traumatised by WWI that they wouldn't risk another war by taking him out. He was correct. So once again a dictator pushes, pushes, pushes until he MUST be dealt with, but by that time he is so strong that the issue itself is in question.
I believe that here in the United States we are in those times again, but we have two assets: the Second Amendment of course - but far, far more important, the First. The enemy knows this and is trying so silence those like Bari for everything they are worth. Don't let them. The Left knows it's gone too far, and if fair, the 2022 election will be a bloodbath, so they are using the next 1-1/2 years to consolidate their power. In the meantime we have to fight back every way we can. Nothing less than everything we hold dear is on the line. We inherited this freedom. Let's not lose it for our children.
The adults (professors) need to stand up to these students and shut this crap down. Male has male parts. Female has female parts. Enough already.
At some point, if everyone would put their foot down, this craziness would stop...but everyone is too scared, with good reason.
How is it that an infinitesimal group of mentally ill people get to drive the conversation and no one says stop or you can be as nuts as you want but we won’t follow your delusion? If this is what we can expect of future doctors, we might as well revert to shamanism or witch doctors because those “credentialed” “doctors” won’t actually be practicing medicine.
I guess that pregnant woman who thought she was a man didn’t have the full addadicktome procedure and have the lady parts yanked out eh? So she must have had sex with a real man through her vagina. It’s just nuts even thinking about it. Those people are literally insane.
Yes. They are literally insane. I recently watched a youtube video about a trans man (biological female)who gave birth to a baby conceived with a trans woman (biological male). The trans man (biological female) who actually gave birth insisted on being listed on the birth certificate as the baby's "father!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUYSysoiuG0
So basically, two mentally ill people found each other and procreated through a classic heterosexual relationship. However, the trans man female obviously kept all her plumbing and the trans woman man kept his as well. Sheesh.
Is this the same couple where the trans mother (biologically a male) tried to breastfeed, really in this case, chest feed, the baby? Any other year, that would have been child abuse.....now it makes it to YouTube!
Yes, indeed. This is the very same couple where the biological father, still equipped with a well functioning penis, tries but fails to chest feed the baby. Of course, everyone in Trans World celebrates this lunatic's attempt to defy the basic laws of biology and common sense. Meanwhile that poor little infant scratches his tiny head and wonders why out of all the billions of possible parents on earth he got stuck with the booby prize.
Screwed from the get go. As I said, any other year, this would be pedophilia!
Do I dare admit I had to look up the word addadicktome?
Did you see where there is a companion operation chopadickfromme?
No, but thanks for that! LOL
Equating transgendered people with insanity is bigoted. And it's cruel. Why can't you accept that there is a spectrum of gender that goes from very female to very male (Think Dolly Parton and John Wayne.), and in the very middle you'll find females who are more male than some men and some men who are more feminine than some women. Why does that horrify you so much? Why is it so terrible that some people are just different from the norm? I find it interesting.
A disproportionate number of young biological girls now seeking to become the opposite sex do have mental disorders including autism, anxiety and depression. Unfortunately, their woke transgender therapists are prevented from treating those problems and are only allowed to "affirm" the girls as transgender.
You picked two of the very worst examples of masculinity and femininity. Dolly Parton is a successful entertainer and a very shrewd businesswoman. Aside from the wigs and plastic surgery there's nothing feminine about Dolly. She probably has ten times as many stereotypically masculine traits as feminine traits. And those traits have absolutely no effect on her sex which is female.
John Wayne was an actor which has never been a notably masculine occupation. He played tough guys on screen but those who knew him in real life said his tough guy persona was a "living lie." He wasn't tough. He was awkward and shy. But regardless of the disconnect between his on camera persona and his true personality, John Wayne was a biological male.
Sex is based on biology, not personality traits or interests. I recently bought a heavy duty electric stapler used by the most macho men in the construction industry. I also know how to tie an electrician's knot. Does that mean I'm a man trapped in a woman's body and need to start pumping myself full of testosterone?
My college roommate's born female (adopted) daughter has been living as trans male for the last few years (end of 6th grade through 9th grade so far). She got the idea from a trans male who she (I can't seem to do the pronoun change) played video games with via the internet -- lived in different states. A friend suggested that perhaps the interest in being a boy is as straightforward as her bio mom (who she has an open adoption relationship with) eventually married and had three sons. Could it be that she might think her bio mom wouldn't have chosen adoption if she were born a boy? No one will even pursue that---it goes straight to affirmation. She is on her second boy name change. There's a whole lot here that needs to be unpacked!
I hope your former roommate is getting the girl some psychological help and with someone who is not goading her into this but trying to help her see what is really what.
They were but the MO in the psych world is to simply affirm. Parents are refusing her any hormone blockers or surgery. She will have to make those decisions as an adult and they are pretty convinced she will change her mind by that time. The reason this is so obviously mental illness is that she has changed her male name once already, still has all of her dolls and is still cutting. If you are content with this gender transition, you would be self-harming.
Yes. And who knows who that out of state gamer really was. Preteen girls, many of whom are autistic, depressed, anxious, or otherwise troubled (like your roommate's daughter), are being catfished online by trans activists eager to pad the ranks and enlarge the flock.
Why does it require separate pronouns and amputation of healthy body parts just to have a personality? Does it bother you so much that a woman might be better than a man at math or target shooting or fixing cars that, if she bests you at these things, she's obviously not a woman?
There are NO women who are more male than most men. There are simply bigoted, narrow-minded individuals who delude themselves that being good at science, having short temper, wanting to serve in the armed forces, liking boxing or weightlifting makes one male. It doesn't. Women who are good at boxing or judo are not male women -- they are female women who are good at boxing and judo.
And you are a sexist bigot for looking at these perfectly normal women and thinking, "Wow, she's good at guy things so she's part guy!"
You are a bigot who can't imagine that the word "woman" can encompass the whole of human potential. And what about men who are naturally good at things like cooking, raising kids, or flower arranging? How g/d dare you call them less male because they don't adhere to some garbage stereotype that you seem to think is engrained into the fabric of the universe.
This is one of the problems, isn't it? The fact that so many trans persons glom on to stereotypical expression of feminine and masculine. I wish we had an honest medical system that could/would study this. We are missing answers and understanding because we won't look directly at these things.
Well said.
And those feminine men or masculine women are still men and women. Their dna didn’t change and won’t change. What’s cruel is encouraging people to mutilate themselves rather than get mental help. Why are you pushing mental illness?
Because if he doesn't, he'll have to admit that some women are better at traditionally male things than he is, and HIS masculinity will be called into question. The only way he can reconcile this is by saying that women who are smarter or taller or a better shot than he is are actually men inside.
"Why can't you accept that there is a spectrum of gender that goes from very female to very male...?" is based on a religious ideology and is similar to an evangelical Christian saying: "Why can't you accept Jesus Christ came to Earth to be crucified and resurrected as a conduit for forgiveness of your sins?"
That is the easiest answer. What right does a small minatory have to force the majority into a religious view-point where sex and gender are disassociated?
This is the point the radical left is not wanting to accept and everyone dances around.
Pretty much. And, as an old-school liberal who fled from the religious fundie experience of my youth in Appalachia, I don't appreciate that the left has now become the fundies I flee from. I will not be coerced into any belief system, damn it! I reserve the right to make up my own mind.
What is with people? “You will adopt my belief system or be punished!” SSDD. Just utterly ridiculous.
And I will NOT submit. No matter how bad it gets. I will fight this any way I can. Any doctor who asks for my pronouns is fired, immediately, if not sooner. Any doctor who refuses to treat me as a biological woman is fired. Any doctor who calls me a post-menopausal person - fired. I have begun avoiding answering identity questions on surveys as a form of protest - unless it's unavoidable. They will have to pry objective reality out of my cold, dead hands.
This is always a classic response: those alarmed by the issue, and calling attention to it are first of all called insensitive and lacking in empathy...
I was always the person standing up to my ultra conservative Catholic family defending the rights of gay and lesbians to live as they please. However, it is my skepticism of orthodoxy that led me to question trans activism following the public cancelations of Dawkins and Rowling. The idea of labeling all honest inquiry regarding the nature of sex/gender as tantamount to violence did not sit well with me. This hyper focus on language and its power reminded me of what I had read and learned about Scientology. I always wondered, how could otherwise intelligent people be manipulated in such a way by an ideology? Well, now we see this at large mostly with individuals who have graduated college within the last 5 to 10 years.
Yes. Transgender activist wokedom, like it's CRT cousin, isn't just some kooky new religion. It's a cult as coercive and dangerous as anything the Scientologists, Moonies or Sullivanians could cook up.
http://cultresearch.org/help/characteristics-associated-with-cults
It's almost the exact opposite of CRT -- CRT is taking something that's not really a thing medically and carving it into concrete. Trans is taking something that IS a medical thing -- biological sex -- and acting like it doesn't exist.
I’m currently reading Cynical Theories. In it, Lindsay and Pluckrose go over the idea of the “blurring of boundaries” as a key element of postmodernist thought. They explain how the focus on fluidity/ambiguity and the denial of categories is something that the field of queer studies retains from postmodernism. On the other hand, CRT scholars (e.g., Crenshaw) apply postmodernism while simultaneously critiquing its rejection of the concept of “identity.” Obviously, the idea identity is key to CRT. I recommend the book if you haven’t read it. It is quite informative.
I had a very similar experience and awakening, and I can totally relate.
It's predictable that questioning an authoritarian orthodoxy is labeled violence. That's how authoritarians deal with dissent: make it illegal.
Or “sacrilegious.”
Or '_____-phobic'.
With this gender nonsense, the left is proving to be as anti-science and anti-truth as the right wing they so deride. Binary sex is a defining feature of human biology, and that of many of our fellow animals. Pretending it suddenly doesn't exist is simply denying scientific truth. Affirming people's delusions is denying reality — same as those who don't believe in evolution.
Pretending a transgender woman was never a man is lying; it's rewriting history! I remember how outraged I was when I read Caitlyn Jenner's Wikipedia entry, which said that "she" won the Olympics and "she" won all these Athletic events. No, "she" didn't. She was a man at the time, and he won men's events with a male body. That's simply reality. It is not hateful and not violent to point that out.
When people ask me which sex my daughter was assigned at birth, I tell them nobody assigned her anything. The nurse called to inform me of her sex as detected in a prenatal blood test at four months' gestation. And lo and behold, she came out female.
Where is the evidence that the Right is actually anti-science? Left-wing straw-manning isn't evidence.
Both the Republicans and Democrats will throw science under the bus as soon as it disagrees with their personal beliefs.
For the Republicans (and this is what drove me away from Republicans having grown up in a small Kansas town) it was the idea the Earth was greater than 10,000 years old and evolution was heresy. While the vast majority have come around there are still Republicans which doubt climate science not on data but on silly statements. This includes things like saying "Volcanoes emit more green house gasses than man does every year" or "People are just to small to have any measurable impact on the Earth ass a whole". Both of these are patently false. Personally, I argue the models and believe the INM-CM4.8 is a much better model than the CMIP5.
For Democrats it is ignoring economics and sociology and to a much lesser standpoint climate. When progressive economic policies fail, as predicted by conservatives, in the exact mater predicted by conservatives, the response of Democrats is "we didn't try hard enough." This has been true for the past 60 years. We see it now with Democrats rejecting data and biology in trans and racial issues. When the best performing ethnicity in the US are Nigerians and their dependents, how can you say (with a straight face) the US is a "systemically racist" country. The statement is easily falsifiable. As for climate, Democrats will say CO2 is the greatest threat to humanity we have ever faced but then they are 100% unwilling to use Fission power, our strongest arrow in our quiver, to address the issue in the short turn.
Both parties are happy to put religious beliefs (and I put the idea of "systemic racism" in the realm of religion) before empirical data when it is needed.
" ... they are 100% unwilling to use Fission power, our strongest arrow in our quiver, to address the issue in the short turn."
OMG this drives me bats. Nuke is clean, safe, and our only hope to maintain anything like our current level of technology. Wind, solar, and geothermal are good supplements, but that's as far as they go.
It drives me crazy when they point to Chernobyl or the Fukushima Daiichi plant as an example of the dangers of nuke. Chernobyl was an obsolete, shit design -- anything is dangerous when it's poorly designed -- and it took one of the largest tsunamis in the history of Japan to take FD down! Plus the fix is fairly straightforward.
Nuke is like air travel: the safest thing ever by far, but when it f*cks up, it makes the news. Meanwhile, cars and coal do a hell of a lot more damage but by ones and twos and no one hears about it.
You mean, “when it f*cks up, it kills and sickens thousands of people and leaves vast swathes of land uninhabitable for decades”. I understand that we are learning more about nuclear plant safety all the time, but anything built by fallible humans is never going to function 100% reliably. It may come close, but there will be more nuclear disasters eventually. Also, safely dealing with spent fuel is still a problem that appears to me to not quite be solved. I get that nuclear is a solution to global warming, but I wouldn’t want a nuclear power plant near where I live.
Where do I start? Denying the reality of climate change, COVID-19, vaccine safety/efficacy, certified elections, evolution, etc...The right has a long recent history of being embarrassingly anti-science. But they don't have a monopoly anymore.
Just a question. How many people on the left (even elected representatives) called the 2016 elections illegitimate? Do you remember the Mueller investigation? I also remember out current VP (during the election) saying she would never take a vaccine developed under the then President Trump.
Both the left and right have a long history with accepting election results as well as vaccine safety (Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy popularized the entire anti-tax thing).
The left has a long history of being anti-science as well, for example data on economics is almost rejected out of hand.
Oh, the climate thing is pretty straightforward. The extreme right are out of their minds on global warming, and the extreme left is out of their minds on biology. I always say they only differ on which scientists they put up before the firing squad: astronomers or biologists.
Oh my goodness. What kind of crazy people ask you which sex your daughter was assigned to at birth? Are these friends, coworkers, nurses, or what?
Official institutions: medical offices, schools, etc.
We need to call this evil what it is, not tiptoe around it.
Misogyny and homophobia, with a scattering of pedophilic croutons on top.
This otherwise excellent piece is marred by this absurd paragraph:
"In 2019, the New England Journal of Medicine reported the case of a 32-year-old transgender man who went to an ER complaining of abdominal pain. While the patient disclosed he was transgender, his medical records did not. He was simply a man. The triage nurse determined that the patient, who was obese, was in pain because he’d stopped taking a medication meant to relieve hypertension. This was no emergency, she decided. She was wrong: The patient was, in fact, pregnant and in labor. By the time hospital staff realized that, it was too late. The baby was dead. And the patient, despite his own shock at being pregnant, was shattered."
Was this absurdity intentional? We are in this situation precisely because people refuse to call a spade a spade, and it is not helping when the people who are purporting to report the truth on the matter, such as Katie, play along with "preferred pronouns". "He" was not pregnant. She was. Her baby died and she was shattered because reality, as it is wont to do, reasserted itself over her delusions. The activists react so violently to people speaking the truth because maintaining their delusion relies upon everybody playing along.
When people with apotemnophilia insist that they do not need or want one of their limbs, we do not affirm their delusion by amputating the healthy limb. We try to get them treatment to bring their mental outlook in line with objective reality. Why do we treat genitalia or sex differently?
Exactly. Another example is anorexia nervosa. People with anorexia harbor the belief that they are fat when they are clearly not. We certainly don’t affirm this erroneous belief by helping them further restrict their caloric intake! Same thing with agoraphobia, obsessive compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, etc.
Agreed. Instead of using pronouns, we can use phrases like "this person" or "this individual."
How about we call them "him" or "her?" Just a suggestion. Seems sort of obvious.
I like your comment - it made me consider my confusion when I heard the paragraph. I agree that it appears the author is falling in line - but I think they were making a different point.
By setting the scene with 'he' - the author puts the reader/listener in the frame of mind of the triage nurse. To me this emphasizes the point of the whole article - we all set our sexpectations about someone based on their perceived sex. In most circumstances this may result in no more than hurt feelings.
If you look at the historical demise of cultures like the Romans and the Greeks there are many parallels to our society here in the US. These cultures rose due to ingenuity, scientific discovery, the ability to protect their citizens, and a common sense of purpose. They fell when those things became "common" and these societies devolved into fragmented ideologies. When their leadership and cultural decisions became influenced by fringe groups espousing values that were not fundamental to the forming and establishment of these societies they no longer retained the glue that held them together and they fell apart. If we dod not as a society get a grasp on the things Bari writes about, we will follow suit.
And Arabic culture......
"Why the Arabic World Turned Away from Science
On the lost Golden Age and the rejection of reason "
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-the-arabic-world-turned-away-from-science
That's an interesting perspective. I wonder if you could elaborate on the fringe groups you mentioned.
As medical school faculty in a school not yet quite overwhelmed by this, I really feel for my colleagues who are in places where this is in full flower. (Visit the Pacific Northwest sometime.) As is intimated, but not quite brought out in the article, much of this is closely related to the current LCME (the licensing body for medical schools) mandate that student evaluations, for practical purposes, drive virtually all accreditation decisions. They also have applied race-based admissions and faculty criteria unrelated to ability to be a doctor to which schools must adhere. I have been teaching for decades and can say with assurance that medical students have no idea about how to become a doctor, whether biologic sex is important or not, etc. But they have been empowered and the "inmates running the asylum" analogy is so completely apt it is scary. They are generally "woke" so they drive these non-biologic assertions because LCME says they can. And schools have almost no choice...they are terrified of losing their accreditation because of this. That is why faculty sound so scared. We all KNOW how ridiculous this is. But we are threatened within inches of our lives because of the accreditation issues.
In the early 1900s, medical schools could pop up anywhere and teach anything. Abraham Flexner did an expose that pointed out that many of these schools were teaching garbage and most of those teaching things not based on science shut down. We have been blessed for 100 years with a decent medical school accreditation base because of this. One of the predicates of this entire "good century of medical education" was that the science and art of teaching bright and capable students to become the best doctors they could be would not be contaminated by politics. It would also not be subject to deprecation of qualification so that less qualified folks could go mangle other human bodies, or a departure from the then best known science supported facts. That is all now being assailed, and the result will be scary care for the next generations of patients.
I will digress from education and gender issues for a paragraph to give an unrelated example of how this approach is also evident outside medical education. Imaginary science is now being invoked everywhere and has become conflated with real science by the general populace. My favorite current example is the credence many imbue with wearing masks as a counter for Covid19. Masks have been studied for decades; as Fauci's note to a friend said, the virions are infinitely tinier than the holes in your ridiculous piece of cloth, unless you are wearing a freshly fitted N95 mask. But "experts" invent vague associations ( the actual facts just do not agree -- check out a scattergram of all 50 states' mask requirements vs. COVID -- Correlation coefficient is 0.023 -- there is no correlation) and "important scientists" (often Warhol 15 minute of fame seekers; sometimes just misguided folks) tell everyone this is important and many, without any scientific grounding, blindly follow. (Full disclosure: as with most science, not everything is crystal clear. There may be up to a 0.5% positive impact of masks -- this is the same as decreasing the speed limit from 70MPH to 69.5MPH. Do we see an obsession with doing that?) Mask shaming is also great for the holier-than-thou virtue signalers among us. [Incidentally, no tinfoil hat here. I believe that the vaccines ARE of enormous value and was among the first vaccinated. Unfortunately, telling untruths and truths together leads many to assume everything they are told is an untruth.] A great case: Japan, where virtually 100% of the population is mask compliant is having a COVID19 crisis; they matter virtually immaterially if at all. The facts are clear, but the dialog is to ignore the facts and make up tangential stories that transmit effective untruths. Anyone who tries to have a science-based conversation about this is cancelled...for non-scientific reasons. Some great epidemiologist cannot say a word. Scary.
Back to medical education and ignoring biology. Every doctor of my acquaintance (I do not know every one so I am sure there are five exceptions somewhere) knows how ridiculous this entire "sex is just a social construct" idea is. But admission requirements to medical school have been greatly diminished ("We need holistic evaluation, not competence evaluation") and virtually all schools have gone to pass/fail so that the less-good doctors-to-be can be hidden. The students then admitted have primacy as to how things should be done and how they should be taught. Not only is this crazy, but it leads to this kind of nonsense dialog. Unfortunately, the students coming out now will be afraid to ask the right questions (for many conditions, it DOES make a BIG difference as to actual biologic sex). The sad result is that being taught to pretend otherwise will deprecate health care for all.
Most physicians over 40 I know have a pact with others of our ilk to care for each other until the oldest of us passes. This is completely new -- we used to preferentially go to younger physicians because their hands are steadier and their brains are more youthful. But they are now coming out as less competent doctors. This gender discussion is just an example of a much larger, and scarier problem. Where is Abraham Flexner when we need him?
Very interesting observations, thank you.
The pact by traditionally trained, over-40 physicians to care for each other in the knowledge that their youngers are no longer reliably selected and trained for excellence is telling. Completely understandable, and chilling.
This is so scary, and it will not end well.
Your position on mask effectiveness FOR AN INDIVIDUAL (not a group, where compliance is the main issue) is not informed by physics, which is the relevant discipline here (my credentials: B.Eng. Applied Physics Cornell, Ph.D. Physics Stanford). Aerosol droplets that carry virus particles ARE blocked significantly by common mask materials: https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/newsreleases/2020/april/the-best-material-for-homemade-face-masks-may-be-a-combination-of-two-fabrics.html
The last sentence in the abstract :
"Overall, we find that combinations of various commonly available fabrics used in cloth masks can potentially provide significant protection against the transmission of aerosol particles."
The use of the word "potentially" tells me the results of this so-called study were, by the author's own admission, inconclusive.
Since we're being all scientific here, to my mind the real question is, "Do masks reduce disease transmission?" If they do not, then whether masks filter out lots of particles is moot, isn't it? (And by the way, appeal to authority - one's own authority in this case - is a logical fallacy. But that's ANOTHER discipline.)
You appealed to your own authority as "medical school faculty", did you not?
Yes, of course the real question is "Do masks reduce disease transmission?" And the evidence is simply overwhelming that they do (for an individual wearing one that fits well). There is no question whatsoever that virus particles are carried in liquid droplets with a range of sizes, and that simple masks block a significant fraction of these, the fraction blocked varying with droplet size. And the fewer virus particles that reach your respiratory system, the less likely you are to get infected. I don't see how you can possibly dispute that last point. Even if the probability of infection as a function of virus particles inhaled is nonlinear (which is likely), it is almost certainly monotonically increasing.
"You appealed to your own authority as "medical school faculty", did you not?"
You are incorrect. I did not. I WAS on faculty at a med school, incidentally, but I did not mention that or use it to bolster my argument. And it's not "credentialism;" it's the Appeal to Authority Fallacy.
re: masks block a fraction of droplets and that is irrefutable evidence of effectiveness. Not necessarily so. I'm sure you've had linear algebra; think "more variables than equations". There could be many reasons that argument is fallacious. Maybe masks block the large particles, and it's the tiny ones that penetrate the breathing passages deeply enough to cause infection, for one example. The larger a particle, the less deeply it goes into the lung, (true) so masking it out does nothing. (Thank God for that - I just inhaled a piece of foam from a defective aircraft oxygen-delivery mask last week. It got only partway down before impacting the bronchial wall, and I was able to cough it up.)
The respiratory tree is a very reliable but very complex system. Simple arguments - Bill of Occam notwithstanding - are rarely the final answer. One needs to go to the final question: do masks lessen infection rates? From what I am seeing in print, you'd do as well to lay chicken bones at your door. I'll find you some cites when I get a few minutes.
Just as a clarification, the person you replied to here didn't say they're medical faculty -- that was a different commenter.
You're right, that was the original commenter, Dr. K, to whom my first comment (with my credentials) was addressed.
Interesting that James chose to call me out for credentialism, but not Dr. K.
Instructional along your thinking line is this article. Masks have uniformly underwhelmed in the real world everywhere they have been tried. Apparently the biology overrides the physics. https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/horowitz-6-times-the-media-credited-masks-with-stopping-a-pandemic-that-then-spread-even-more
If most med schools have made all of their courses pass/fail, how are students matched to residency programs? My understanding was that the best med students had the highest chances of being admitted to the most sought after residencies. But if most applicants have passed all their courses, grades are no longer a useful signal.
This is exactly the next level of incipient problem. There is now virtually NO way to rank residents. So the very best will try to be retained by their host institutions who know they are good...at least some of the time. The point of all of this removal of any evaluation of students (and as pointed out by Gordon Freeman above) is to make sure that there is as little relevant consideration of physician aptitude and as much of virtually everything else (Social Justice Warrior score, TransGender score, whatever) in both the selection of medical students and in their evaluation. This means that other than a handful, by necessity most of the other residents matching will be randomly assorted (or assorted by criteria generally unrelated to being the best physician) rather than by qualifications or aptitude or performance. Of course, this can only deprecate the delivery of medical care...and it will.
Excellent...copied and pasted this response for future reference. Thanks.
How can so few people bring about this level of insanity?
I stated my thoughts in the comments section of Bari's previous piece, so I won't go over the same terrain--suffice it to say that this state of affairs can only be described as catastrophic, with the potential for a generations-long impairment of the U.S. healthcare delivery system itself.
One aspect that has had only the scantest attention in these discussions is the radical restructuring of the med school admission process. Right or wrong, for the last 100 years or so, med school admission could be described as jumping through a prescribed set of hoops that are designed solely to filter out for admission only those who are most devoted and motivated to become doctors. Even when the era of Affirmative Action began, this did not materially change in any significant way. Yes, disadvantaged groups were often given a little extra help across the finish line (because they needed and deserved the extra consideration), but overall standards and expectations of trainees remained unchanged, turning out competent, (mostly) caring, practitioners, year after year.
However, in the last 5-10 years, this workable system was almost entirely dismantled, in a nihilistic race to the bottom to appease the Woke minority. As someone who follows these trends, it has been shocking, even traumatic, to watch highly-qualified, utterly dedicated premed students struggle to gain access to their dream, and forced to watch marginally qualified, but expertly intersectional candidates being given preference, especially those with the most "interesting" combinations of sex, gender, sexual identity, etc., human traits that have absolutely no bearing on how well-suited one is for a career in medicine, or even the ability to master the med school subject matter.
I see no sign of this abating, because current medical leaders have almost entirely abdicated their responsibility for preserving a high-quality, SAFE, system of health services delivery. It is not too strong to say they deserve severe sanctions, not just civil but criminal, for their grotesque failures. Unfortunately, that is unlikely to happen until it is addressed forcefully in legislation and the courts.
I agree wholeheartedly. I’m a professor in a medically-related field at a major university. We have always bent the admissions criteria to admit individuals from disadvantaged groups. As long as the applicant wasn’t grossly below the criteria (i.e., within the waitlisted range), I had no problem with that. However, my department has since removed the GRE requirement (because it’s racist, of course) and we are now admitting graduate students who would have been summarily rejected without even reviewing their applications (e.g., with GPAs in the 2.0 range). Meanwhile, students with 4.0 GPAs who are not members of those groups are getting rejected. Granted, under most circumstances, the weak students are not going to kill other people in the course of their jobs. However, I certainly wouldn’t want my family members to work with them!