TWIBS: Rowling “Cures” Trans Kids
She’s back, baby! JK Rowling brings us yet another stunningly braindead take on trans people. Thankfully, this one’s comically easy to disprove… but who, exactly, is Jo getting her rancid info from?
Humor by Alyssa Steinsiek
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s oldest column! Every Friday, Alyssa Steinsiek digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Well, we can shut it all down, folks. Unplug the transgendering machines, turn off the hormone rays, and start issuing refunds on the insidious dark money we’ve been taking from George Soros to pay off every major medical association in America. She’s figured it out.
Who, you ask? Why, JK Rowling, of course!
What, you wonder? Don’t be silly! She’s figured out how to treat transgenderedism in the youth! She’s riddled out how to untrans the kids! I thought Rowling was just a hack novelist who could barely string a decent sentence together, but it turns out she’s a pediatric endocrinologist who has tons of experience treating adolescents presenting with gender dysphoria!
Would you look at that! Hey, that’s us sorted, readers. We’ll be closing down Assigned Media effective immediately. It’s been one hell of a rodeo, but it looks like Rowling has called the game.
Sorry, give me just a moment… oh, dear… I’m now being told, through this fictional earpiece I’m wearing as a rhetorical device for higher ups giving me the scoop in real time, that Rowling is full of shit. Oops!
Let’s start by tackling what she actually said, that “the vast majority of children grow out of gender dysphoria if allowed to go through puberty.” That’s a weighty statement, and she does provide some “evidence” to back it up, but we’ll get into exactly who she’s citing in just a moment. First, let’s talk about how she’s obviously incorrect.
Mind you, more studies should be done. Hell, more studies probably are being done, but these things take time. What we know right now, however, suggests exactly the opposite of what the Queen of Partially Denying the Holocaust said: according to data collected by the Trans Youth Project, in a study involving 317 participants, after five years 94% of the kids who identified as binary transgender (i.e., trans girls and trans boys, not nonbinary youth) remained transgender.
Or consider this paper that discusses the results of multiple studies authored over the past few decades. The author of the paper, Christina Roberts, says that “only 20% of youth engaged in gender-nonconforming behavior before puberty will report a transgender gender identity as an adult,” but it’s important to remember that gender-nonconforming behavior is an extremely broad brush to paint with. Immediately after, she says that “100% of patients with a complete social transition, 60.1% with a partial transition, and 25.6% of patients who had not socially transitioned reported a transgender identity 7 years later.”
Those are huge numbers! Bigger in the first study, to be sure, but still significant in the second study. Even if you (falsely) believe that we’re overprescribing blockers and hormones to young people, you can’t deny that Rowling’s claim that the “vast majority” of trans kids will desist from expressing dysphoria or gender nonconforming identities is blown out of the water by those easily researchable facts.
So, now that we’ve debunked Jo’s off the cuff dipshittery, let’s talk about who she’s getting her hot goss about trans youth from: The Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine, better known as SEGM. Ominous thunder clap, abrupt sheet rain, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.
If you’re a fan of Assigned Media, you’ve probably heard of our Trans Data Library, a repository of anti-trans activists and organizations we put together for the free use of pro-LGBTQ+ activists and whoever else might need some pointers on who’s who in the world of professional transphobia. Naturally, we have an article on SEGM!
SEGM is, to keep it short and sweet, an organization whose membership is comprised of anti-trans activists working together to provide a sense of faux-professionalism to anti-trans activism. They are frequently called upon to file amicus briefs (“expert” statements provided to a court during litigation), and as we mention in our TDL article, a report from Yale School of Medicine makes it very clear just how dangerous and fraudulent SEGM is.
Though SEGM quickly altered their website to suggest that they are “not a membership organization” after our article about them was published, archived versions of the webpage listing their board of advisors remain accessible. Consider Stella O’Malley, an Irish therapist who actively engages in conversion therapy on trans youth. Or perhaps Marcus Evans, who alongside his wife Susan helped shutter the Tavistock Center’s Gender Identity Clinic in the UK, destroying every trans Briton’s only hope at pursuing gender-affirming care. What about Lisa Marchiano, the therapist who helped propagate the quack fringe theory Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, harming who knows how many trans kids in the process?
Alarming bedfellows, Jo! In fact, her reliance on SEGM for “facts” about trans kids makes it pretty clear that she hasn’t got a fucking clue. Like every other full-time transphobe, Rowling chooses to believe only the sources that already vindicate her most hateful, bigoted feelings about us and our community.
It’s a shame there isn’t a spell that makes idiots stop tweeting!
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer who spends too much time playing video games!
