Here I am, for a second week in a row, ready to talk shit about some dweeb who penned a braindead article at City Journal.
Just in case you weren’t here last week: City Journal is the policy rag that The Manhattan Institute publishes. The Manhattan Institute is an anti-LGBTQ+ (these days, chiefly anti-transgender) conservative think tank that employs scumbags like Leor Sapir, who spends most of his time denying that trans kids are taking their own lives over relentless abuse and oppression from people like him and his friends.
This week, an article by Colin Wright caught my eye. It is titled: How Many Girls on Testosterone Is Too Many?
Intriguing question, Colin, and one that probably shouldn’t have been asked! Certainly not by an “academic advisor” for the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine, an anti-trans hate group comprised of pro-conversion therapy ghouls whose favorite pastime is spreading medical misinformation to harm as many trans people as humanly possible. SEGM’s members are huge fans of the medical pseudoscience fringe theory Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, which they invented from whole cloth.
Colin’s article flirts with the concept of ROGD without naming it outright.
He opens, wrongly, by saying: “For years, we were told not to worry about pediatric gender medicine because it was vanishingly rare. Puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, we were assured, were reserved for a tiny number of carefully assessed children with severe and persistent distress.”
First and foremost, I want to be clear that this was never the argument anybody made in favor of trans youth healthcare. When we talk about the vanishingly small number of trans kids worldwide, and the low rate at which they medically transition, we are mostly drawing attention to the absolutely bonkers amount of scrutiny and hatred they are receiving. State and federal governments work in concert to do them harm, they are a constant topic of conversation in the media, and (this one’s particularly relevant to you, Colin) assholes write think pieces about why they don’t deserve to exist.
It’s a very difficult and stressful time to be a trans kid. Unlike when I was young, access to knowledge about gender identity is readily available, and more abundant than ever. These kids are much better informed than we ever were… but now they must endure relentless attacks on the healthcare that saves their lives from bigots and bullies who question their right to happiness.
Colin goes on to say that “when new data show that these treatments aren’t so rare, the same defenders suddenly change their tune: the numbers are no longer reassuring because they are small; now they are reassuring because they are large.”
He suggests that we, the defenders of children trying to access lifesaving healthcare, are hypocrites. “Any outcome,” he says, “can be interpreted as proof that ‘gender-affirming care’ is successful.”
Yeah, that’s almost right! Any outcome that results in happier kids leading fuller lives is, in my eyes, a success. A glut of research makes it clear that medical transition, for kids who need it, improves quality of life and sometimes saves lives. More research can always be done in this field (except when anti-trans activists ensure that more research cannot be done in this field), but there is absolutely no credible studies that suggest medical transition leads to worse outcomes for trans kids.
Period.
Colin gets to the heart of his article by referencing a study shared by a very angry guy with a blog who is constantly name searching himself on the internet. This study, he suggests, proves that progressive locales like Oregon, where trans people are more likely to be supported by their peers and legislators, can lead to a dangerous explosion in the number of trans kids being pathologized by doctors.
Oh, wow, that’s so scary! Unless you actually read the study, which surveyed 868,740 insured adolescents, of which only 8,480 (that’s 0.98%) received a diagnosis related to their being transgender or gender-diverse. Only 23% of those 8,480 adolescents received medical gender-affirming care, whether that was puberty blockers or hormone therapy. The study’s authors conclude that, even though medical interventions had increased, they “remained limited to a minority of adolescents with a TGD-related diagnosis.”
“Even within a supportive policy and insurance environment,” reads the closing statement of the study’s abstract, “access remained limited, with variation by age and insurance type. These findings highlight the need for ongoing monitoring to inform clinical practice, health system capacity, and policy planning.”
Despite the study clearly showing that there is simply no problem to be found, Colin insists the results are alarming. He suggests that puberty blockers are somehow causing children to become trans, despite the fact that we’ve been prescribing blockers to cisgender experiencing precocious puberty since the 1980s without issue. He references Kenneth Zucker, an anti-trans activist with a very storied history, who says that even social transition could be dangerous for kids. He describes Zucker as “one of the world’s leading experts on childhood gender dysphoria,” which is absolutely laughable.
Colin asks his most important questions at the end of his article: “What result would make you reconsider? Would it be one in 100 girls on testosterone? What about one in 50? What rate of regret or detransition is too high? Would you accept that as evidence that suicidality and mental health don’t improve after treatment? How many systematic evidence reviews must conclude that the evidence of benefit is extremely weak while the risk of serious harm is significant?”
Here’s my answer: The number of kids identifying as trans and pursuing safe, proven medical treatments to remedy their gender dysphoria has absolutely no bearing on my feelings about those treatments. What I’m concerned about is the efficacy of those treatments, which is exceedingly high, and the overall rate of regret among those who pursue it, which is exceedingly low. I’m sure that isn’t what you wanted to hear, considering your entire journalistic career was constructed on the belief that torturing kids with conversion therapy until they bury their queerness enough to satisfy their torturers is a good thing, actually.
Here are my questions to you, in turn: How many independent studies confirming that social and medical transition are lifesaving are you willing to ignore? Why are you only interested in the pseudoscientific beliefs of your peers who spend all their time fattening their wallets by crusading against innocent, marginalized children? How many broken or dead trans kids will it take to satisfy you, Colin?
Get back to me!
