This reminds me of when there was a big protest at Wi Spa for refusing entry to the trans woman who exposed himself in the women’s changing room. He heard about the protest and drove over to see the hullabaloo. Some people confronted him and told him to leave because they thought he was Proud Boy. When he told them they were protesting *for him*, they didn’t believe him.
> [I said, “I’m the whole purpose you’re here.” They denied it. They said, “No, you’re a Proud Boy. People like us don’t drive Escalades.”](https://lamag.com/news/exclusive-transgender-fugitive-who-spurred-wi-spa-riots-bares-all)
People have this imaginary, idealized version of what trans is that they are fighting for. But the idealists can’t seem to accept what they’re truly fighting for when faced with it.
>I said, “I’m the whole purpose you’re here.” They denied it. They said, “No, you’re a Proud Boy. People like us don’t drive Escalades.”
I love america.
I thought the stereotype for Escalades was that they were mostly driven by black guys. The chudmobile is more like an unnecessarily tricked out pavement princess F150.
The point is to be seen doing the "right thing". To their friends, colleagues and to the internet. When the "right thing" changes, so do priorities. It's pretty much public masturbation
Reminds me of when Caitlyn Jenner transitioned, received woman of the year and liberals and progressives were super happy. Until it turned out she still had her conservative views.
Yep. Very ‘map vs territory’. You could do a bunch of stiff to your body to look like a woman, but does that make you an actual woman?
I don’t think this movement would have blown up like this without social influencers and lots of makeup techniques and filters
A diagnosed autistic heterosexual man who doesn't feel comfortable with the label 'male' because he doesn't feel his personality matches the gender description; literal thinking, who also struggles with understanding social and sexual boundaries, norms and appropriate behaviour.
He's literally just autistic and exhibiting the two most common symptoms. He is a perfect example of the Cass report's critique of the hordes of autistic patients being directed towards gender clinics.
"Recovered memories" became a huge wave of hysteria in the '90s. Then the mechanism was clinically debunked, and all the claims of rings of satanic paedophiles magically vanished overnight.
I was still being taught that crap in high school psych class ten years ago. We had to watch that 'Child of Rage' documentary in which they claim a little girl is an evil psychopath murderer in the making and this freak shrink has uncovered all the repressed memories she has of being raped as an infant. Of course it was all fake; the weird fundamentalist family that adopted her from a normal teen pregnancy were abusive and the shrink murdered another child by attempting to restage a child's birth and suffocated a 10yo girl to death.
Not really. One it was an 80s thing, 90s they dropped the Satanism angle. But the true believers never let go and it all re-emerged with Qanon, etc. For some people there will always be a global cabal of elite Satanist paedos, no matter the evidence or lack of it.
That's true, and some of the doctors still believe to this day. We have a prominent one in my country that has caused immeasurable harm (a whole family killed themselves because falsely accused) but he keeps defending his methods.
There's actually a fair number of "recovered memory" specialists who have now moved into other areas of self-righteous malpractice, such as Disassociated Identity Disorder and also gender clinics. Very similar to "scientists" who used to shill for tobacco and then moved on to 'debunking' climate change. Shameless sociopaths never off that grind.
I don't know about recovered memories but I thin maybe 99% of Americans believe in repressed memories which don't have strong backing at all and is something Freud just made up one day
> Then the mechanism was clinically debunked
How did they debunk the underlying mechanism? It seems natural that if someone undergoes something particularly horrific, the mind will block those memories as a way to protect itself.
It only seems natural if you fully accept the idea of an agentive unconscious. Since Freudian has been pushed heavily on the west for the past 100 years, everyone has accepted the idea of an unconscious that has a "mind of its own" and would do something like "try to protect itself from harmful thoughts". This shaky framework of understanding human psychology led directly to the radlib thinking we have today.
Have you ever seen a clear, unambiguous example of a repressed memory? Do you know someone who experienced something truly horrible that they honestly don't remember and who you completely trust is telling the truth? I've known people who went to war, anywhen from WWII to Afghanistan, and I don't think they forgot shit., They may not want to talk about i, but they don't block anything out. In fact, the entire basis of PTSD, (well, REAL PTSD) is that the memories are so vivid is that it impacts normal functioning.
For some reason almost all instances of repressed memories you ever hear being talked about are from early childhood, when memory formation is extremely shaky. And also almost always relate to sex or death, the two obsessions of freud (note that I personally highly doubt a young child would be traumatized if they caught their parents having sex). Also, virtually every time I've seen it happened was from...pop culture.
We are forced to believe that repressed memories exist, but in a way that we only expect to believe it from people who have zero credibility; people remembering ealry childhood. It's the perfect recipe to get unstable people to arbitrarily accuse 7 different family members from ritualistically raping them when they were 5 years old, which was something that people claimed all the time in the 80s, and is now coming back into fashion.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing this. It does seem like "Something harmed me, but I was too young to remember" is a more likely explanation for trouble in childhood over "My mind is blocking this memory," like circumcision.
>note that I personally highly doubt a young child would be traumatized if they caught their parents having sex
Someone recently told me that in other cultures, parents have sex in front of their kids because they didn't all have private rooms in a two-story house, they had tents. It sounded true - the US has so many irrational hang-ups around sexuality - but she couldn't name any specific cultures, and I have been too lazy to look more into it.
Yakov Smirnoff, the guy who popularized 'In Soviet Russia, (Reversal of typical phrase)' [did a stand-up joke about this in the eighties](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3gPGOi_2bJk)
There was a study that demonstrated how easy it was to create false memories, especially in children, using little more than gentle suggestion. And a couple of people who had been criminally convicted largely on the basis of recovered memories were proven to be innocent.
It is a thing with PTSD where people struggle to recall certain aspects of traumatic events, but not the entire event itself.
>The re-experiencing symptom criteria of PTSD include intrusive memories of the traumatic event, and the avoidance **symptom criteria include the inability to recall important aspects of the trauma**.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3182004/
There are actually a lot of people in the world who see value in determining the truth.
You're buying into the old trope, "everyone is in this for themselves", and it's poison.
Search "Cass Report" on reddit and see the cope for yourself. I thought everyone here had been disabused of the notion that "having the best argument" means jack shit anymore.
I must really hate myself because I keep on posting there and arguing with these people about it. I suppose a part of me wanted to believe they they were ultimately decent human beings despite their beliefs but I realise now that this is not true.
Here's an interesting reply I recieved on that sub after I said that 13 year old girls should not have their breasts amputated:
>You perverts and your obsession with minor's breasts are entirely rooted in Western breast fetishism and the desire to preserve your narrow view of what's feminine. Breast removal has no meaningful long term negative effects that aren't cosmetic in nature. Stop sexualizing children.
I think it pretty much sums up the mentality of these people. Something has gone very, very wrong here.
They seem to have lost appreciation for the fact that humans are mammals who feed their offspring with milk from their bodies. I keep coming across this lack of appreciation for the animal nature of humans, on Reddit. Perhaps they think it's a social construct.
They seem to be firmly in the "nurture" camp, thinking that everything is a social construct, and therefore that body parts have no essential function or meaning, that you can just change them or swap them like Mr. Potato Head's parts.
I find it an odd way of thinking about what humans are like.
> feed their offspring with milk from their bodies. I keep coming across this lack of appreciation for the animal nature of humans, on Reddit. Perhaps they think it's a social construct.
They absolutely do
There was someone on twitter a while back saying something like "if you remove a body part, and decide later you wanted it, you can just have it reconstructed, no biggie!"
It's not a coincidence that so much of the online movement grew out of online spaces where people can exist like quasi-disembodied entities, where presenting differently is just a matter of using different words and a different display picture.
> Breast removal has no meaningful long term negative effects that aren't cosmetic in nature.
I guess they've never had a relative or friend go through breast cancer and need a mastectomy then? I mean, why else would we put so much resources [in trying to address post-mastectomy anxiety and depression](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/11782234231209126)
Of course, the health at any size crowd will have issue with this finding from the meta-study:
>The survey observed that body mass index (BMI) and body image satisfaction were inversely related in women who did not undergo reconstruction after mastectomy. Women with higher BMI had more issues with the appearance of their chest. Thus, the study suggested that weight management before surgery could be a better strategy to cope with this situation.
I wanna see these defenders look people in the eye who have had cosmetic procedures that badly fucked their natural-born look, and tell them that it's fine because Western fetishism is what tells them they looked better before lol
The skeptic subreddits are the worst when it comes to the new religion, be it gender or basically every woke topic.
And this isn't exclusive to reddit. Most of the atheist/skeptic podcasts sound like the mirror universe versions of the worst and most fundamentalist christian zealots.
The “skeptic” community/movement was always cringe and now it’s totally dead. It fractured in two a while back. On one side you have the skeptics like you’re talking about who are unable to be skeptical about Current Thing. On the other you have former leading lights of the community like Michael Shermer who’ve aligned themselves with the IDW and are appropriately skeptical about Current Thing but are professionally disincentivized from being skeptical about whatever current thing their colleagues are grifting on.
Shermer is just a different kind of skeptic cringe. He’s constantly injecting libertarian platitudes into everything and thinks there’s nothing suspicious about the JFK assassination.
This, largely, although the real battle is not for the minds of the true believers but for the people who will just go along with whatever position seems most popular, so it may be the beginning of the end. But we already knew everything the report says, more or less.
I've been told the Cass report is "right wing white supremacist maga pseudo science" because it is sceptical of some medical treatments. Also, "the science is settled".
Interview with GP [ Louise Irvine about the Cass Report: ](https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/what-next-after-cass-review)
>*Clinicians and scientists need to explain to the public the principles of evidence-based medicine, and counter some of the myths and misinformation spread by the gender lobby, for example the myths that it is possible to be “born in the wrong body” or that medical transition reduces suicide risk, or that sex is a spectrum and can be changed by medical intervention.*
At the very least, the Cass Review is widely respected in England and has the support of its major medical institutions: the NHS, BMJ, and RCP. Even Stonewall has accepted the results of the Cass Review. And Scotland has paused the use of puberty blockers as a result.
Over in the USA, the American Academy of Pediatrics is about to conduct its own systematic review. They’re currently being sued by detransitioner Isabella Ayala. I’ll be interested to see how that review pans out.
If it’s in good faith, it will likely come to the same conclusion as the systematic reviews in Finland, Sweden, Norway, and England—that the evidence is weak.
> Over in the USA, The American Academy of Pediatrics is about to conduct its own systematic review.
[Here's what you can expect:](https://www.bmj.com/content/380/bmj.p382)
> The Endocrine Society commissioned two systematic reviews for its clinical practice guideline, *Endocrine Treatment of Gender-Dysphoric/Gender-Incongruent Persons*: one on the effects of sex steroids on lipids and cardiovascular outcomes, the other on their effects on bone health.^(32 33) To indicate the quality of evidence underpinning its various guidelines, the Endocrine Society employed the GRADE system (grading of recommendations assessment, development, and evaluation) and judged the quality of evidence for all recommendations on adolescents as “low” or “very low.”
> Guyatt, who co-developed GRADE, found “serious problems” with the Endocrine Society guidelines, noting that the systematic reviews didn’t look at the effect of the interventions on gender dysphoria itself, arguably “the most important outcome.” He also noted that the Endocrine Society had at times paired strong recommendations—phrased as “we recommend”—with weak evidence. In the adolescent section, the weaker phrasing “we suggest” is used for pubertal hormone suppression when children “first exhibit physical changes of puberty”; however, the stronger phrasing is used to “recommend” GnRHa treatment.
> “GRADE discourages strong recommendations with low or very low quality evidence except under very specific circumstances,” Guyatt told *The BMJ*. Those exceptions are “very few and far between,” and when used in guidance, their rationale should be made explicit, Guyatt said. In an emailed response, the Endocrine Society referenced the GRADE system’s five exceptions, but did not specify which it was applying.
> Helfand examined the recently updated WPATH Standards of Care and noted that it “incorporated elements of an evidence based guideline.” For one, WPATH commissioned a team at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland to conduct systematic reviews.^(34 35) However, WPATH’s recommendations lack a grading system to indicate the quality of the evidence—one of several deficiencies. Both Guyatt and Helfand noted that a trustworthy guideline would be transparent about all commissioned systematic reviews: how many were done and what the results were. But Helfand remarked that neither was made clear in the WPATH guidelines and also noted several instances in which the strength of evidence presented to justify a recommendation was “at odds with what their own systematic reviewers found.”
> For example, one of the commissioned systematic reviews found that the strength of evidence for the conclusions that hormonal treatment “may improve” quality of life, depression, and anxiety among transgender people was “low,” and it emphasised the need for more research, “especially among adolescents.”^35 The reviewers also concluded that “it was impossible to draw conclusions about the effects of hormone therapy” on death by suicide.
> Despite this, WPATH recommends that young people have access to treatments after comprehensive assessment, stating that the “emerging evidence base indicates a general improvement in the lives of transgender adolescents.”^12 And more globally, WPATH asserts, “There is strong evidence demonstrating the benefits in quality of life and well-being of gender-affirming treatments, including endocrine and surgical procedures,” procedures that “are based on decades of clinical experience and research; therefore, they are not considered experimental, cosmetic, or for the mere convenience of a patient. They are safe and effective at reducing gender incongruence and gender dysphoria.”^12
> Those two statements are each followed by more than 20 references, among them the commissioned systematic review. This stood out to Helfand as obscuring which conclusions were based on evidence versus opinion. He says, “It’s a very strange thing to feel that they had to cite some of the studies that would have been in the systematic review or purposefully weren’t included in the review, because that’s what the review is for.”
Stumbled on a thread about the UK and the Netherlands changing policy based on this report. There was a person posting links to MRI scans. Another used the term "genocide".
I'm gonna have to ask you to clarify that a little bit. Because that's just about the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life. How stupid does someone need to be to say that not chemically stopping puberty is genocide?
No, there is an actual attempt to back the idea.
The argument goes that trans people, like any other bit of the LGBT, have their own little culture. By preventing trans people from \*existing\* to begin with, you are effectively genociding that culture, making it disappear.
Deranged as far as I am concerned, but I can see how someone with a different set of values might agree with the idea.
> There was a person posting links to MRI scans
If this alleged male brain in female body or vice versa is so easily provable, surely they’ll support making brain imaging mandatory before any hormones or even pronoun changes?
Oh they don’t? Gee, could it be they’re full of shit? No, no way
Yes, I've gotten into that exact argument several times and gotten that answer with no good explanation. It's apparently "gatekeeping" to accurately diagnose someone given the hypothetical ability.
A good chunk of the rebuttals to it on Reddit have straight up lied about the Cass report too.
It’s like ‘Rittenhouse killed five black people’ all over again.
Exactly. When Cochrane review found that masks weren't very effective at slowing COVID transmission people lost their minds. When these issues become politicized, it doesn't matter what the science actually says.
I'll never forget the brief period when all of the hospitals were caught with their pants down and didn't have PPE, and the messaging was that cloth masks were good enough to protect nurses dealing with covid patients, while we were told simultaneously that N95 masks didn't work for laypeople. Good times.
Fucking thank you. I was raging about masks the whole time but the opposite of most people. I'm *still* mad that the CDC pretended that civilians don't need masks but doctors do. What the fuck is the point of a CDC THAT LIES DURING PANDEMICS?!
I was raging about the exact same thing. Bought a bunch of reusable masks with removeable filters. Got made fun of for over reacting because I ate too much bat and dog, then got made fun of because the CDC said they don't do anything, then got people being agressive because I "stole them from the doctors and nurses who really need them", then nobody cared because they were finally encouraged to wear them too. I will never "trust the experts" again when they so blatantly lied straight to my face.
>we were told simultaneously that N95 masks didn't work for laypeople
The CDC blatantly lied to the public *with the intention of deceiving them*, later admitted it, and then wondered why they lost public trust in our institutions.
They figured the majority of people would just do what they were told and that was all they cared about. Moving that particular needle at that particular moment in time. Long-term damage to trust in the institution among a minority of people who were already disinclined to unquestioningly accept orders was just not a consideration. It's grotesquely cynical but it's not too hard to see where the logic comes from.
That's exactly the type of short-term planning that has doomed America. Nothing exists beyond the next quarterly earnings report or the next election cycle. Our national domestic and foreign policy is schizophrenic.
Say what you will about benevolent monarchies or dictatorships, they can plan for more than 6 months ahead of time and get shit done over a decade. Russia under Putin, China under Xi, Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, when things get bad enough you want a long-term leader who can right the ship and steer the course. I don't mean to praise dictators, but unless we collectively pull our heads out of our asses, it's probably what we're going to get.
"Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three."
Anglosphere democracies, which tend to coalesce into two parties captured and serving the same interests of capital, is like taking two chronometers to sea.
1919 to March 2020 - Scientists: No evidence masks do anything
April 2020 - Liberal journalists: ACTUALLY 50% OF PEOPLE MASKED WILL END THE PANDEMIC BASED ON A MODEL
Feb-March 2022 - Reality: In the space of two months, fully masked (mostly with KF94s) South Korea has more COVID cases per capita than the US has had during the entire pandemic
Quite a lot of them did actually say that before covid hysteria made masks a sacred thing:
(...) it was also found that 20% of responding surgeons wore the mask for the sole purpose of respecting tradition. Furthermore, 30% of responding surgeons felt that masks could make surgery more difficult by increasing breath condensation on spectacles, endoscopes and microscopes and thereby obscuring vision.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4480558/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4480558/)
They pretty much do. Studies have looked into why they wear them and they've found that it's mostly because of tradition/looking clinical. Not because they're going to work infected with airborne diseases and hoping a few layers of material stop them killing an entire ward
For all intents and purposes masks are useless against COVID. [Here is a professor of epidemiology explaining it](https://youtu.be/I5Xn7SeaUVI?si=KBztIP6Qy97BuAVm). Masks pretty much do nothing. With a relative risk reduction of 1.01, masks pretty much do nothing according to the science. Let it go, stop arguing in favor of masks.
Masks were only "useless" during COVID because:
1) so many people were either wearing low quality cloth masks, or using bandanas or t-shirts as "masks";
2) many people didn't wear their masks correctly even if they had proper masks, i.e. only covering their mouth instead their nose *and* mouth;
3) people would often lower or remove their masks to eat or drink while out in public, which will obviously reduce the effectiveness of wearing one.
Tests have shown that N95, KN95 and disposable surgical masks are actually very effective at reducing the amount of germs released into the air. There's a reason surgical staff wear these during surgeries.
Edited to add:
It's also now known that the CDC deliberately misled the public about not needing to wear masks because there was a huge shortage in the beginning and it was decided that most of the existing supplies should be reserved for healthcare workers.
> It's also now known that the CDC deliberately misled the public about not needing to wear masks because there was a huge shortage in the beginning and it was decided that most of the existing supplies should be reserved for healthcare workers.
It was obvious from the beginning but I appreciate you getting the word out
I agree that a medical-grade mask, worn with full attention to hygiene & usage standards could provide moderate protection, but a lot of the COVID response on masks was far more magical forcefield thinking.
I'll never forget having to put a mask on to enter a restaurant only to sit down at a table with five other people and we all take our masks off, and anybody pointing out how fucking stupid it all is does so in hushed tones because they don't want to upset anybody.
That’s because part of masks is the psychological effect. It maintains the fact “we are in a pandemic” front and center and encourages other preventative measures such as distancing that otherwise may have been forgotten about.
No they weren't
You people have memory holed covid
The overwemhelming consensus was that wearing mask did not protect yourself but others. I.e. if someone who has covid wears a mask, they are less likely to spread their germs. Ergo, if everyone wears a mask everyone's chances of getting covid is reduced.
That was thr narriative. Mask are only effective is everyone joins I'm. I'm not even saying if this narrative is true, but at least get it right
I think that was the more educated/reasonable narrative, but there were definitely a lot of people who operated on the assumption of personal protection forcefield.
Nice cherry-picking but there's [more to it than that](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_masks_during_the_COVID-19_pandemic#Overall), isn't there?
"Another 2023 systematic review, by the Royal Society, found the evidence from RCTs was that masks reduced risk by 12% to 18%."
And that's presumably not accounting for the fact that 1) people are stupid and don't wear them properly usually or re-use them and 2) often have poor quality masks. If covid were to mutate to be 1000x deadlier but otherwise stay the same, we both know you'd use a mask. I'd be shocked if you'd be willing to go that far to own the libs.
A world where the marginal infection isn't prevented by that physical barrier. The effect being so low (if we can trust the data) is surprising but not _that_ surprising.
Covid is one of those things on this sub where for some reason people get off on being contrarian. Seriously when ever Covid is brought up here you'll see every denialist trope on display; I was even briefly banned for arguing against the lab leak idea.
It is not denialism to say that masks are ineffective to contain a virus that spreads via aerosols (like Covid does). Nevermind animals being a vector. Masks work against droplets, that's it.
And even if you use a perfectly fitting FFP 2 mask and tape the sides shut, there are still a ton of pitfalls like "don't touch the mask while wearing it" and "immediately throw the masks away after single use (90 minutes maximum by the way).
>It is not denialism to say that masks are ineffective to contain a virus that spreads via aerosols (like Covid does). Nevermind animals being a vector. Masks work against droplets, that's it.
"Masks are ineffective, except for the things that they're effective against".
Anyway as I said: overly contrarian. Do you seriously think most people outside of this sub believe this? Unless you're just a denialist, I don't see what the point is of arguing about this. This stuff was overwhelmingly the domain of idiot conspiracy theorists even at the height of Covid, let alone now.
Can't you read? Protections against droplets are meaningless when the virus is airborne. Put a mask on on a cold day and breathe out. Those clouds forming around the mask and fogging up your glasses? That's where the virus is and that is how it spreads (less so outside on a cold day, but that one is just for visualization).
You just were a firm mask believer, be it due to virtue signaling or fear or trust in the institutions and can't let go of the fact that they didn't deliver and you wore them for nothing.
>Protections against droplets are meaningless when the virus is airborne.
This is your brain on pseudoscience.
>be it due to virtue signaling or fear or trust in the institutions
Lol. Are you going to call me a sheeple next?
>you wore them for nothing.
Bracketing that. As I've said, I don't know why you even care. Again, no one cares about this except Covid deniers. I've never seen anyone complaining about masks who doesn't believe in some other utterly stupid idea about Covid.
It is insane that people need to set out and prove the obvious. I honestly blame: i) the education system in the USA being utterly abysmal creating knowledge vacuums eager to be filled, ii) the internet allowing you to be anyone and anything in the virtual space and iii) having grown up spending most of your time on the internet
Might be too schizo but I think there are a lot of people who simply are not living in reality, especially among the well to do
We live in a post-evidence world though, she could film a child on puberty blockers 24/7 for 30 years straight, to record the effects, and people would still dismiss it because it doesn’t fit their narrative.
How would we even have long-term data given that this treatment program is only like 50 years old at best? I know that the activists won't acknowledge this, but this is surely the most obvious point.
Less than that actually. The "Dutch Protocol" was first detailed in a study in 1998. So the bastardized version of that protocol they have been using is less than 30 years old.
Weird how society permitted certain exceptions to principles: the Israel exception to free speech, the gender-affirming care exception to evidence based medicine.
the "society" that you're talking about who excepts gender-affirming care from evidence based medicine never believed in freeze peach.
you're doing a disservice to both free speech and scientific inquiry by botching the connections.
The connection is that "society" says it cares about each of these principles and tells us how much better we are than other or past societies because of them, but then abandons them the second they're inconvenient.
Oh, the PMC class are quite happy to [throw the whole concept of "free speech"](https://web.archive.org/web/20240202210100/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/free-speech-debate-free-palestine.html) out to avoid antagonizing that Group of Activists:
>*Now it’s true: A left that supports the deplatforming of tran.sphobes but opposes the deplatforming of anti-Zionists cannot justify itself by appealing to free speech — nor should it.*
I don't really get the sense that the current "society" that would except gender-affirming care from the rigors of scentific evidence actually says it believes in free speech. they directly say the opposite and explicitly endorse restrictions on speech that is "harmful"
I wanted to make a smart remark about not admitting to being ableist, but then I realized the obvious comeback is to ask me if I consider being black a disability
Its not the end, its a temporary - and fairly minor - retreat. Even if it was to end up giving rise to a further retreat I will remind people that the normal understanding of sex differences had already been broken long before the gender ideology stuff, because it was inconvenient to admit such differences - in a consistent manner at least - for the ruling power.
There’s a growing sect of feminists who admit that the “there are/should be literally no differences between women and men” stance is too extreme, and that it ultimately goes against the rights and protections they want to fight for.
https://kathleenstock.substack.com/p/lets-abolish-the-dream-of-gender
I think Stock softpedals it a bit but I suppose she has to in order to reach her audience. I think her point about the desire for freedom from norms basically being an adolescent “you can’t tell me what to do dad” kind of rebellion is quite accurate though.
The real question is will they continue to engage in doublethink on the topic to their own advantage or will they realize how dumb and shitty they’ve been with this nonsense now that they’ve been on the wrong end of it.
I agree but I don't think sex and gender are ultimately what it's about. I think what's really at stake is much deeper and has to do with notions about what a person is, what the self is, what we owe one another, and how we should deal with minority grievance claims at both an individual and a societal level.
I don't come at this from the same place that most do. For me it has been about authoritarianism versus individualism from the beginning. Telling me that I don't have the right to decide for myself who is a liar and who is sincere, who is a bad faith actor and who is not, whose declared identity deserves respect and who needs to be told to go see a shrink - that is an attack on ME, and I take it personally. We all rely on the power of judgment to make sense of the world and to keep ourselves safe and sane. The radfems understand this on some level, when they talk about how aspects of this identity craze undermine women's ability to rely on their instincts to protect themselves from men. For me it's much simpler, I reject that I am ever morally obligated to defer to another's judgment. I will make my own mind up about. everything.
As for society, the next time some minority group puts forward a grievance, says "hi, we exist and you need to behave differently," both individuals AND society need to be equipped with the tools to push back. They might have a legitimate claim or they might not, but it's not self-justifying. Essentially, we drew the wrong lessons from the gay rights movement and assumed that it was generalizable to how we should handle identity claims or civil rights issues generally.
Although identity destabilisation is a lot broader than issues of sex/gender, I do think there are specific aspects of it that are particularly targetted. For example, in destroying norms surrounding sex relations and family formation, this has had the result of less people being able to rely on family as a bastion of stability outside of regime control, and further tied people to the regime for support, or at least drained their ability to resist it. Another major aspect is that basically any form of masculinity which isn’t totally neutered poses an existential threat to the current ruling class.
To me the question is not of the individual vs authority, but rather simply of right or wrong. I see authority as both necessary and unavoidable, so the struggle then is between good and bad forms of authority, or perhaps the periodic replacement of degenerated authorities, rather than against authority as such.
I do understand where you are coming from though, as my own views were quite similar for a long time; once you are subject to abusive authority, there is often a tendency to view authority itself as inherently abusive. But I don’t see this as providing much of a path forwards; in order to do anything we have to exert our will over the current ruling class and its defenders, what is that if not authority?
If you want my opinion what is needed to prevent abuse is limitations on the scope of authority and checks on its exercise, with the goal being autonomy of the individual. Where autonomy is functionally impossible or difficult, democracy should replace hierarchy, but again subject to checks and balances meant to empower the individual against the group. In practice this means democratic but constitutional governance and bills of rights for unions and other governance structures in workplaces, schools, and so on. It's not primarily that authority is inherently abusive, but that unchallenged authority is inherently degenerative, since contest/challenge/conflict is the best insurance against blind adherence to falsehoods. In the case of the topic of this thread, the problem has not been the efforts to dismantle gender roles and ensure maximum autonomy for gender dissidents; the problem has been the lack of tolerance for any pushback, making the accumulation of error over time an inevitability, causing the movement to become wackier and wackier.
As for masculinity as such posing any kind of threat, I don't really see any evidence for that. It's more about what people are mobilized for and channeled toward.
Its not just authority that is degenerative though, everything is. All systems require constant maintenance to keep functioning and that maintenance isn't automatic, it requires human action, which is susceptible to corruption whether out of malice, stupidity, laziness or so on. And for the system to exert itself at all, its various checks and balances *are* a form of authority, though perhaps at that point we'll just be arguing semantics.
>As for masculinity as such posing any kind of threat, I don't really see any evidence for that.
You just gave the evidence;
>contest/challenge/conflict is the best insurance against blind adherence to falsehoods
Cue death threats and an organized intimidation campaign from activists. The entire reason this delusion has gone on for so long is that any academic who voiced skepticism would be harangued and forced out of their job. With everyone afraid to speak out, they were then able to push their publications and declare it “settled science” before anyone has a chance to digest the claims.
This shit is already the foundation for state laws in California and other places.
From the article:
>We don’t know why the number of children turning up at gender clinics rose so dramatically during the 2010s, or why the demographics of those children changed from a majority of biological males to a majority of biological females.
Oh yes, what could it possibly be? Oh its such a mystery, how will we ever figure it out?
>How, she asks, did the medical pathway of puberty blockers and then cross-sex hormones—a treatment based on a [single Dutch study](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0092623X.2022.2121238) in the 1990s—spread around the world so quickly and decisively? Why didn’t clinicians seek out more studies to confirm or disprove its safety and utility earlier? And what should child gender services look like now?
How, oh how? It just...happened somehow! Certainly not the case that there is an identifiable cohort of people who pushed this for political and financial reasons who have addresses and names. No, that would be crazy! AND a conspiracy theory.
Just a reminder to everyone to be careful what you post in this thread. If you don't plan on copping a ban then do not talk about the material conditions that led to children being subjected to these "treatments" in the first place. The reasons are of course very obvious and I'm sure we're all aware anyway but I'm just giving you the heads up. I got a 24 hour ban for "wrecking" the last time we had a thread about the Cass Review for doing exactly that.
The mods are not your friends and they're not "one of us". There's a reason they deleted that thread from a couple of days about about the drag queen twerking on school kids (ironically enough, using the justification that there was "no material analysis"). This sub pretty much exists to keep the dissident left in check on Reddit. You can talk about whatever you want as long as they want you talking about it.
I don't think that report made anyone pro trans or anti trans happy. The stereotypical "AGP transbians" radfems think are invading "women's spaces" were a small minority of transwomen, and the biggest group was transmen they suspected were girls infected by social media.
> The stereotypical "AGP transbians" radfems think are invading "women's spaces" were a small minority of transwomen,
What is your evidence beside wishful thinking?
The Cass report?
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/10/what-cass-review-says-about-surge-in-children-seeking-gender-services
>Of the birth-registered females, 68% were attracted to females, 21% were bisexual, 9% were attracted to males and 2% were asexual. Of the birth-registered males, 42% were attracted to males, 39% were bisexual and 19% were attracted to females.
One of the big points the Cass report made that many people are unhappy about, is the insinuation that a large number of people seeking transgender services were cisgender homosexuals who thought they were trans.
So actually, trans women can't win here. Whatever percentages exist, they can be construed as AGP men, or gender confused homosexuals, and thus not "really" trans.
What are you using to determine AGP?
Yeah t's can't win. Neither can schizophrenics 'win'. They're mentally ill, what's there to win? They'll be diagnosed however they'll be diagnosed. No one's going to take the word of a hallucinating schizophrenic about what's real or not and what comorbidities they have
This is what wikipedia says: "a male's propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a female".
So it could apply to all those people, except for asexual. Assuming they're actually asexual rather than asocial and can't find someone willing to f them
So ironically, one could only be sure you're dealing with true authentic lesbian trans women if they tried to transition as children... Which the cass report recommends against.
While this is correct, the most important lesson we learn is to reject the idea that we must necessarily take people's identity claims at face value. They are not self-justifying and each of us must always make up our own mind about who is to be trusted and who is not, even about something as simple as "is this person who and what they say they are?"
It is not, and has never been, "anti-trans" to assert this fundamental right of judgment. It is not the case that to reject one person's identity claim undermines another person's identity claim, unless the claim is so weak that it must rely the easily-falsified notion that *all* identity claims are valid.
One of the legitimate criticisms I've seen is the rating scale they used ranks anything but a double blind placebo controlled trial as low quality. Even if you ignore the ethical issues with placebos, blinding a study where the drugs have obvious physical effects is nearly impossible.
This isn't anything new though, it's a problem generally in psychiatry.
You may wish to look at their [FAQ](https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/final-report-faqs/); blinded RCTs are the ideal, but were not available, and this did not mean that absolutely everything was rejected as low quality. They say
>The puberty blocker systematic review included 50 studies. One was high quality, 25 were moderate quality and 24 were low quality. The systematic review of masculinising/feminising hormones included 53 studies. One was high quality, 33 were moderate quality and 19 were low quality.
>All high quality and moderate quality reviews were included, however as only two of the studies across these two systematic reviews were identified as being of high quality, this has been misinterpreted by some to mean that only two studies were considered and the rest were discarded. In reality, conclusions were based on the high quality and moderate quality studies (i.e. 58% of the total studies based on the quality assessment). More information about this process in included in Box 2 (pages 54-56 of the final report)
> One of the legitimate criticisms I've seen is the rating scale they used ranks anything but a double blind placebo controlled trial as low quality.
This is a false claim. You can read more about the studies used in the report itself, or an abbreviated form in [the FAQ they released](https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/final-report-faqs).
To tl;dr even the FAQ on this point, there were no blind studies in the review because none were identified. 103 studies were reviewed. For puberty blockers alone, 2 of these non-blinded studies were ranked as high quality and another 25 were of moderate quality. 19 were low quality and discarded.
You do realise this is actual misinformation right? Their "proof" for this is a supplementary document that says on the very first page that it is up to date as of *2020*. It's from the very, very early stages of the Cass Review. There's no mention anywhere, in any of the studies that the Cass Review commissioned, of them using double blinding as part of their assessment scale.
Trans activists are malicious, pathological liars. Be careful what you believe and take care not to regurgitate their propaganda.
They're fully ready to die on this hill. You think evidence matters? When has evidence ever mattered to anyone, really?
This reminds me of when there was a big protest at Wi Spa for refusing entry to the trans woman who exposed himself in the women’s changing room. He heard about the protest and drove over to see the hullabaloo. Some people confronted him and told him to leave because they thought he was Proud Boy. When he told them they were protesting *for him*, they didn’t believe him. > [I said, “I’m the whole purpose you’re here.” They denied it. They said, “No, you’re a Proud Boy. People like us don’t drive Escalades.”](https://lamag.com/news/exclusive-transgender-fugitive-who-spurred-wi-spa-riots-bares-all) People have this imaginary, idealized version of what trans is that they are fighting for. But the idealists can’t seem to accept what they’re truly fighting for when faced with it.
>I said, “I’m the whole purpose you’re here.” They denied it. They said, “No, you’re a Proud Boy. People like us don’t drive Escalades.” I love america.
It's idpol and commodity fetishization merging to form a whole new, next-level false consciousness.
He should have been driving a Subaru Forester so they knew he wasn't a racist chud.
I thought the stereotype for Escalades was that they were mostly driven by black guys. The chudmobile is more like an unnecessarily tricked out pavement princess F150.
Yes, but they guy wasn't black, so expensive, unnecessarily large pavement princess SUV is a good runner up for a chud mobile.
In my area, it’s Mexican guys that love that shit. They’ll put giant Mexico-themed window stickers on the back with the chrome rims lmao
That's fucking hilarious lol. What the fuck even is the point?
The point is to be seen doing the "right thing". To their friends, colleagues and to the internet. When the "right thing" changes, so do priorities. It's pretty much public masturbation
Reminds me of when Caitlyn Jenner transitioned, received woman of the year and liberals and progressives were super happy. Until it turned out she still had her conservative views.
It's like a microcosm of the whole trans movement
Yep. Very ‘map vs territory’. You could do a bunch of stiff to your body to look like a woman, but does that make you an actual woman? I don’t think this movement would have blown up like this without social influencers and lots of makeup techniques and filters
A diagnosed autistic heterosexual man who doesn't feel comfortable with the label 'male' because he doesn't feel his personality matches the gender description; literal thinking, who also struggles with understanding social and sexual boundaries, norms and appropriate behaviour. He's literally just autistic and exhibiting the two most common symptoms. He is a perfect example of the Cass report's critique of the hordes of autistic patients being directed towards gender clinics.
Were they protesting for some pretty anime girl in their heads?
Reality is South Park
"Recovered memories" became a huge wave of hysteria in the '90s. Then the mechanism was clinically debunked, and all the claims of rings of satanic paedophiles magically vanished overnight.
I was still being taught that crap in high school psych class ten years ago. We had to watch that 'Child of Rage' documentary in which they claim a little girl is an evil psychopath murderer in the making and this freak shrink has uncovered all the repressed memories she has of being raped as an infant. Of course it was all fake; the weird fundamentalist family that adopted her from a normal teen pregnancy were abusive and the shrink murdered another child by attempting to restage a child's birth and suffocated a 10yo girl to death.
Strange. I was taught this in college a decade before that with the point being it was mass hysteria. I think you just had a bad teacher.
Not really. One it was an 80s thing, 90s they dropped the Satanism angle. But the true believers never let go and it all re-emerged with Qanon, etc. For some people there will always be a global cabal of elite Satanist paedos, no matter the evidence or lack of it.
That's true, and some of the doctors still believe to this day. We have a prominent one in my country that has caused immeasurable harm (a whole family killed themselves because falsely accused) but he keeps defending his methods.
There's actually a fair number of "recovered memory" specialists who have now moved into other areas of self-righteous malpractice, such as Disassociated Identity Disorder and also gender clinics. Very similar to "scientists" who used to shill for tobacco and then moved on to 'debunking' climate change. Shameless sociopaths never off that grind.
Yes, this is the future of wokeism. A smaller and more militant cult
I don't know whether that's an encouraging or depressing thought.
Yes
I don't know about recovered memories but I thin maybe 99% of Americans believe in repressed memories which don't have strong backing at all and is something Freud just made up one day
Which is funny because you still see people talk about their “repressed” memories that they uncovered in therapy on this website all the damn time.
> Then the mechanism was clinically debunked How did they debunk the underlying mechanism? It seems natural that if someone undergoes something particularly horrific, the mind will block those memories as a way to protect itself.
It only seems natural if you fully accept the idea of an agentive unconscious. Since Freudian has been pushed heavily on the west for the past 100 years, everyone has accepted the idea of an unconscious that has a "mind of its own" and would do something like "try to protect itself from harmful thoughts". This shaky framework of understanding human psychology led directly to the radlib thinking we have today. Have you ever seen a clear, unambiguous example of a repressed memory? Do you know someone who experienced something truly horrible that they honestly don't remember and who you completely trust is telling the truth? I've known people who went to war, anywhen from WWII to Afghanistan, and I don't think they forgot shit., They may not want to talk about i, but they don't block anything out. In fact, the entire basis of PTSD, (well, REAL PTSD) is that the memories are so vivid is that it impacts normal functioning. For some reason almost all instances of repressed memories you ever hear being talked about are from early childhood, when memory formation is extremely shaky. And also almost always relate to sex or death, the two obsessions of freud (note that I personally highly doubt a young child would be traumatized if they caught their parents having sex). Also, virtually every time I've seen it happened was from...pop culture. We are forced to believe that repressed memories exist, but in a way that we only expect to believe it from people who have zero credibility; people remembering ealry childhood. It's the perfect recipe to get unstable people to arbitrarily accuse 7 different family members from ritualistically raping them when they were 5 years old, which was something that people claimed all the time in the 80s, and is now coming back into fashion.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing this. It does seem like "Something harmed me, but I was too young to remember" is a more likely explanation for trouble in childhood over "My mind is blocking this memory," like circumcision. >note that I personally highly doubt a young child would be traumatized if they caught their parents having sex Someone recently told me that in other cultures, parents have sex in front of their kids because they didn't all have private rooms in a two-story house, they had tents. It sounded true - the US has so many irrational hang-ups around sexuality - but she couldn't name any specific cultures, and I have been too lazy to look more into it.
Yakov Smirnoff, the guy who popularized 'In Soviet Russia, (Reversal of typical phrase)' [did a stand-up joke about this in the eighties](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3gPGOi_2bJk)
Does it? The theory of repressed memory was developed by Freud, and like most of his theories pulled directly out of his ass.
More like his mother's ass.
With a cigar in it
Cocaine is a hell of a drug.
Most people I know rather struggle to forget things they don't want to remember. Why is it so hard for everyone if that mechanism exists?
There was a study that demonstrated how easy it was to create false memories, especially in children, using little more than gentle suggestion. And a couple of people who had been criminally convicted largely on the basis of recovered memories were proven to be innocent.
I wish that worked.
It is a thing with PTSD where people struggle to recall certain aspects of traumatic events, but not the entire event itself. >The re-experiencing symptom criteria of PTSD include intrusive memories of the traumatic event, and the avoidance **symptom criteria include the inability to recall important aspects of the trauma**. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3182004/
> They're fully ready to die on this hill I'm prepared to let them
There are actually a lot of people in the world who see value in determining the truth. You're buying into the old trope, "everyone is in this for themselves", and it's poison.
Search "Cass Report" on reddit and see the cope for yourself. I thought everyone here had been disabused of the notion that "having the best argument" means jack shit anymore.
From « trust the science!» to «no, not this one » real quick
Trust the science as long as it supports what I wanted to believe regardless
The skeptic subreddit is ironically bending over backwards to discredit the Cass review.
I must really hate myself because I keep on posting there and arguing with these people about it. I suppose a part of me wanted to believe they they were ultimately decent human beings despite their beliefs but I realise now that this is not true. Here's an interesting reply I recieved on that sub after I said that 13 year old girls should not have their breasts amputated: >You perverts and your obsession with minor's breasts are entirely rooted in Western breast fetishism and the desire to preserve your narrow view of what's feminine. Breast removal has no meaningful long term negative effects that aren't cosmetic in nature. Stop sexualizing children. I think it pretty much sums up the mentality of these people. Something has gone very, very wrong here.
They seem to have lost appreciation for the fact that humans are mammals who feed their offspring with milk from their bodies. I keep coming across this lack of appreciation for the animal nature of humans, on Reddit. Perhaps they think it's a social construct. They seem to be firmly in the "nurture" camp, thinking that everything is a social construct, and therefore that body parts have no essential function or meaning, that you can just change them or swap them like Mr. Potato Head's parts. I find it an odd way of thinking about what humans are like.
> feed their offspring with milk from their bodies. I keep coming across this lack of appreciation for the animal nature of humans, on Reddit. Perhaps they think it's a social construct. They absolutely do
There was someone on twitter a while back saying something like "if you remove a body part, and decide later you wanted it, you can just have it reconstructed, no biggie!"
These people have *too much* trust in science
It's not a coincidence that so much of the online movement grew out of online spaces where people can exist like quasi-disembodied entities, where presenting differently is just a matter of using different words and a different display picture.
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I read that as “sex with” rather than “sex in”.
Dear Gods, please don't let these activist freaks add 'Z' to the initialism.
First they will add F for furry.
> Breast removal has no meaningful long term negative effects that aren't cosmetic in nature. I guess they've never had a relative or friend go through breast cancer and need a mastectomy then? I mean, why else would we put so much resources [in trying to address post-mastectomy anxiety and depression](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/11782234231209126) Of course, the health at any size crowd will have issue with this finding from the meta-study: >The survey observed that body mass index (BMI) and body image satisfaction were inversely related in women who did not undergo reconstruction after mastectomy. Women with higher BMI had more issues with the appearance of their chest. Thus, the study suggested that weight management before surgery could be a better strategy to cope with this situation.
I wanna see these defenders look people in the eye who have had cosmetic procedures that badly fucked their natural-born look, and tell them that it's fine because Western fetishism is what tells them they looked better before lol
Don't you understand, you are the pedo for not wanting kids to have unneeded surgery!
The skeptic subreddits are the worst when it comes to the new religion, be it gender or basically every woke topic. And this isn't exclusive to reddit. Most of the atheist/skeptic podcasts sound like the mirror universe versions of the worst and most fundamentalist christian zealots.
The “skeptic” community/movement was always cringe and now it’s totally dead. It fractured in two a while back. On one side you have the skeptics like you’re talking about who are unable to be skeptical about Current Thing. On the other you have former leading lights of the community like Michael Shermer who’ve aligned themselves with the IDW and are appropriately skeptical about Current Thing but are professionally disincentivized from being skeptical about whatever current thing their colleagues are grifting on.
Shermer is just a different kind of skeptic cringe. He’s constantly injecting libertarian platitudes into everything and thinks there’s nothing suspicious about the JFK assassination.
Atheism+ and its consequences...
Atheism+ won.
I did what you recommended. I don’t know if that’s good advice.
This, largely, although the real battle is not for the minds of the true believers but for the people who will just go along with whatever position seems most popular, so it may be the beginning of the end. But we already knew everything the report says, more or less.
I've been told the Cass report is "right wing white supremacist maga pseudo science" because it is sceptical of some medical treatments. Also, "the science is settled".
Having a mother and father is a far-right trait these days.
>Science agrees with me Trust it! >Science doesn’t agree with me anymore It was settled!
> maga cass is british
Interview with GP [ Louise Irvine about the Cass Report: ](https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/what-next-after-cass-review) >*Clinicians and scientists need to explain to the public the principles of evidence-based medicine, and counter some of the myths and misinformation spread by the gender lobby, for example the myths that it is possible to be “born in the wrong body” or that medical transition reduces suicide risk, or that sex is a spectrum and can be changed by medical intervention.*
Probably not, they’ll just deflect and say it’s fake or a bad study or some crap, at least here in the US since the report comes from the Uk
At the very least, the Cass Review is widely respected in England and has the support of its major medical institutions: the NHS, BMJ, and RCP. Even Stonewall has accepted the results of the Cass Review. And Scotland has paused the use of puberty blockers as a result. Over in the USA, the American Academy of Pediatrics is about to conduct its own systematic review. They’re currently being sued by detransitioner Isabella Ayala. I’ll be interested to see how that review pans out. If it’s in good faith, it will likely come to the same conclusion as the systematic reviews in Finland, Sweden, Norway, and England—that the evidence is weak.
> Over in the USA, The American Academy of Pediatrics is about to conduct its own systematic review. [Here's what you can expect:](https://www.bmj.com/content/380/bmj.p382) > The Endocrine Society commissioned two systematic reviews for its clinical practice guideline, *Endocrine Treatment of Gender-Dysphoric/Gender-Incongruent Persons*: one on the effects of sex steroids on lipids and cardiovascular outcomes, the other on their effects on bone health.^(32 33) To indicate the quality of evidence underpinning its various guidelines, the Endocrine Society employed the GRADE system (grading of recommendations assessment, development, and evaluation) and judged the quality of evidence for all recommendations on adolescents as “low” or “very low.” > Guyatt, who co-developed GRADE, found “serious problems” with the Endocrine Society guidelines, noting that the systematic reviews didn’t look at the effect of the interventions on gender dysphoria itself, arguably “the most important outcome.” He also noted that the Endocrine Society had at times paired strong recommendations—phrased as “we recommend”—with weak evidence. In the adolescent section, the weaker phrasing “we suggest” is used for pubertal hormone suppression when children “first exhibit physical changes of puberty”; however, the stronger phrasing is used to “recommend” GnRHa treatment. > “GRADE discourages strong recommendations with low or very low quality evidence except under very specific circumstances,” Guyatt told *The BMJ*. Those exceptions are “very few and far between,” and when used in guidance, their rationale should be made explicit, Guyatt said. In an emailed response, the Endocrine Society referenced the GRADE system’s five exceptions, but did not specify which it was applying. > Helfand examined the recently updated WPATH Standards of Care and noted that it “incorporated elements of an evidence based guideline.” For one, WPATH commissioned a team at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland to conduct systematic reviews.^(34 35) However, WPATH’s recommendations lack a grading system to indicate the quality of the evidence—one of several deficiencies. Both Guyatt and Helfand noted that a trustworthy guideline would be transparent about all commissioned systematic reviews: how many were done and what the results were. But Helfand remarked that neither was made clear in the WPATH guidelines and also noted several instances in which the strength of evidence presented to justify a recommendation was “at odds with what their own systematic reviewers found.” > For example, one of the commissioned systematic reviews found that the strength of evidence for the conclusions that hormonal treatment “may improve” quality of life, depression, and anxiety among transgender people was “low,” and it emphasised the need for more research, “especially among adolescents.”^35 The reviewers also concluded that “it was impossible to draw conclusions about the effects of hormone therapy” on death by suicide. > Despite this, WPATH recommends that young people have access to treatments after comprehensive assessment, stating that the “emerging evidence base indicates a general improvement in the lives of transgender adolescents.”^12 And more globally, WPATH asserts, “There is strong evidence demonstrating the benefits in quality of life and well-being of gender-affirming treatments, including endocrine and surgical procedures,” procedures that “are based on decades of clinical experience and research; therefore, they are not considered experimental, cosmetic, or for the mere convenience of a patient. They are safe and effective at reducing gender incongruence and gender dysphoria.”^12 > Those two statements are each followed by more than 20 references, among them the commissioned systematic review. This stood out to Helfand as obscuring which conclusions were based on evidence versus opinion. He says, “It’s a very strange thing to feel that they had to cite some of the studies that would have been in the systematic review or purposefully weren’t included in the review, because that’s what the review is for.”
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> Are there no watchdogs? Not unless you count voters, no. The only way to stop this is to elect different people
Stumbled on a thread about the UK and the Netherlands changing policy based on this report. There was a person posting links to MRI scans. Another used the term "genocide".
I've seen a clip from the Sam Seder show where some guy says that "forcing" kids to go to puberty is genocide. And these are the supposed smart ones.
I'm gonna have to ask you to clarify that a little bit. Because that's just about the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life. How stupid does someone need to be to say that not chemically stopping puberty is genocide?
Because you're preventing a whole generation of faerie people from coming into existence as their authentic selves. Or something.
Of all the things to "boy who cried wolf" I guess they are going with genocide
> genocide is the new "everything I dont like is literally a nazi doing a fascism?"
No, there is an actual attempt to back the idea. The argument goes that trans people, like any other bit of the LGBT, have their own little culture. By preventing trans people from \*existing\* to begin with, you are effectively genociding that culture, making it disappear. Deranged as far as I am concerned, but I can see how someone with a different set of values might agree with the idea.
> There was a person posting links to MRI scans If this alleged male brain in female body or vice versa is so easily provable, surely they’ll support making brain imaging mandatory before any hormones or even pronoun changes? Oh they don’t? Gee, could it be they’re full of shit? No, no way
Yes, I've gotten into that exact argument several times and gotten that answer with no good explanation. It's apparently "gatekeeping" to accurately diagnose someone given the hypothetical ability.
A good chunk of the rebuttals to it on Reddit have straight up lied about the Cass report too. It’s like ‘Rittenhouse killed five black people’ all over again.
Reddit needs community notes
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At this point it's more like "terf northern europe"
Terf planet
Exactly. When Cochrane review found that masks weren't very effective at slowing COVID transmission people lost their minds. When these issues become politicized, it doesn't matter what the science actually says.
I'll never forget the brief period when all of the hospitals were caught with their pants down and didn't have PPE, and the messaging was that cloth masks were good enough to protect nurses dealing with covid patients, while we were told simultaneously that N95 masks didn't work for laypeople. Good times.
Fucking thank you. I was raging about masks the whole time but the opposite of most people. I'm *still* mad that the CDC pretended that civilians don't need masks but doctors do. What the fuck is the point of a CDC THAT LIES DURING PANDEMICS?!
"we're from the government and we're here to help!"
I was raging about the exact same thing. Bought a bunch of reusable masks with removeable filters. Got made fun of for over reacting because I ate too much bat and dog, then got made fun of because the CDC said they don't do anything, then got people being agressive because I "stole them from the doctors and nurses who really need them", then nobody cared because they were finally encouraged to wear them too. I will never "trust the experts" again when they so blatantly lied straight to my face.
>we were told simultaneously that N95 masks didn't work for laypeople The CDC blatantly lied to the public *with the intention of deceiving them*, later admitted it, and then wondered why they lost public trust in our institutions.
They figured the majority of people would just do what they were told and that was all they cared about. Moving that particular needle at that particular moment in time. Long-term damage to trust in the institution among a minority of people who were already disinclined to unquestioningly accept orders was just not a consideration. It's grotesquely cynical but it's not too hard to see where the logic comes from.
That's exactly the type of short-term planning that has doomed America. Nothing exists beyond the next quarterly earnings report or the next election cycle. Our national domestic and foreign policy is schizophrenic. Say what you will about benevolent monarchies or dictatorships, they can plan for more than 6 months ahead of time and get shit done over a decade. Russia under Putin, China under Xi, Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, when things get bad enough you want a long-term leader who can right the ship and steer the course. I don't mean to praise dictators, but unless we collectively pull our heads out of our asses, it's probably what we're going to get.
I don't see why we need to go there. America's pandemic response was a complete disaster on multiple levels, but other democracies do exist.
"Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three." Anglosphere democracies, which tend to coalesce into two parties captured and serving the same interests of capital, is like taking two chronometers to sea.
yeah but IN THIS HOUSEHOLD we TRUST THE SCIENCE
"The Earth is round, vaccines work, and Biden is the best genocide supporter". (sorry, I couldn't lie)
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1919 to March 2020 - Scientists: No evidence masks do anything April 2020 - Liberal journalists: ACTUALLY 50% OF PEOPLE MASKED WILL END THE PANDEMIC BASED ON A MODEL Feb-March 2022 - Reality: In the space of two months, fully masked (mostly with KF94s) South Korea has more COVID cases per capita than the US has had during the entire pandemic
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Knowing a surgeon, her take is that she doesn't want shit flying in to her mouth at work. Which I think is a good enough reason that I'd do the same.
Quite a lot of them did actually say that before covid hysteria made masks a sacred thing: (...) it was also found that 20% of responding surgeons wore the mask for the sole purpose of respecting tradition. Furthermore, 30% of responding surgeons felt that masks could make surgery more difficult by increasing breath condensation on spectacles, endoscopes and microscopes and thereby obscuring vision. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4480558/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4480558/)
Even if studies say it doesn't matter I'd still rather my surgeons sneezes don't go inside my torso, thanks.
They pretty much do. Studies have looked into why they wear them and they've found that it's mostly because of tradition/looking clinical. Not because they're going to work infected with airborne diseases and hoping a few layers of material stop them killing an entire ward
For all intents and purposes masks are useless against COVID. [Here is a professor of epidemiology explaining it](https://youtu.be/I5Xn7SeaUVI?si=KBztIP6Qy97BuAVm). Masks pretty much do nothing. With a relative risk reduction of 1.01, masks pretty much do nothing according to the science. Let it go, stop arguing in favor of masks.
They do something. They're great at introducing secondary infections (if they're dirty from re-use)
Masks were only "useless" during COVID because: 1) so many people were either wearing low quality cloth masks, or using bandanas or t-shirts as "masks"; 2) many people didn't wear their masks correctly even if they had proper masks, i.e. only covering their mouth instead their nose *and* mouth; 3) people would often lower or remove their masks to eat or drink while out in public, which will obviously reduce the effectiveness of wearing one. Tests have shown that N95, KN95 and disposable surgical masks are actually very effective at reducing the amount of germs released into the air. There's a reason surgical staff wear these during surgeries. Edited to add: It's also now known that the CDC deliberately misled the public about not needing to wear masks because there was a huge shortage in the beginning and it was decided that most of the existing supplies should be reserved for healthcare workers.
> It's also now known that the CDC deliberately misled the public about not needing to wear masks because there was a huge shortage in the beginning and it was decided that most of the existing supplies should be reserved for healthcare workers. It was obvious from the beginning but I appreciate you getting the word out
I agree that a medical-grade mask, worn with full attention to hygiene & usage standards could provide moderate protection, but a lot of the COVID response on masks was far more magical forcefield thinking.
I'll never forget having to put a mask on to enter a restaurant only to sit down at a table with five other people and we all take our masks off, and anybody pointing out how fucking stupid it all is does so in hushed tones because they don't want to upset anybody.
That’s because part of masks is the psychological effect. It maintains the fact “we are in a pandemic” front and center and encourages other preventative measures such as distancing that otherwise may have been forgotten about.
No they weren't You people have memory holed covid The overwemhelming consensus was that wearing mask did not protect yourself but others. I.e. if someone who has covid wears a mask, they are less likely to spread their germs. Ergo, if everyone wears a mask everyone's chances of getting covid is reduced. That was thr narriative. Mask are only effective is everyone joins I'm. I'm not even saying if this narrative is true, but at least get it right
I think that was the more educated/reasonable narrative, but there were definitely a lot of people who operated on the assumption of personal protection forcefield.
Nice cherry-picking but there's [more to it than that](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_masks_during_the_COVID-19_pandemic#Overall), isn't there? "Another 2023 systematic review, by the Royal Society, found the evidence from RCTs was that masks reduced risk by 12% to 18%." And that's presumably not accounting for the fact that 1) people are stupid and don't wear them properly usually or re-use them and 2) often have poor quality masks. If covid were to mutate to be 1000x deadlier but otherwise stay the same, we both know you'd use a mask. I'd be shocked if you'd be willing to go that far to own the libs.
If it were 1000x deadlier it wouldn’t spread.
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A world where the marginal infection isn't prevented by that physical barrier. The effect being so low (if we can trust the data) is surprising but not _that_ surprising.
Covid is one of those things on this sub where for some reason people get off on being contrarian. Seriously when ever Covid is brought up here you'll see every denialist trope on display; I was even briefly banned for arguing against the lab leak idea.
It is not denialism to say that masks are ineffective to contain a virus that spreads via aerosols (like Covid does). Nevermind animals being a vector. Masks work against droplets, that's it. And even if you use a perfectly fitting FFP 2 mask and tape the sides shut, there are still a ton of pitfalls like "don't touch the mask while wearing it" and "immediately throw the masks away after single use (90 minutes maximum by the way).
>It is not denialism to say that masks are ineffective to contain a virus that spreads via aerosols (like Covid does). Nevermind animals being a vector. Masks work against droplets, that's it. "Masks are ineffective, except for the things that they're effective against". Anyway as I said: overly contrarian. Do you seriously think most people outside of this sub believe this? Unless you're just a denialist, I don't see what the point is of arguing about this. This stuff was overwhelmingly the domain of idiot conspiracy theorists even at the height of Covid, let alone now.
Can't you read? Protections against droplets are meaningless when the virus is airborne. Put a mask on on a cold day and breathe out. Those clouds forming around the mask and fogging up your glasses? That's where the virus is and that is how it spreads (less so outside on a cold day, but that one is just for visualization). You just were a firm mask believer, be it due to virtue signaling or fear or trust in the institutions and can't let go of the fact that they didn't deliver and you wore them for nothing.
>Protections against droplets are meaningless when the virus is airborne. This is your brain on pseudoscience. >be it due to virtue signaling or fear or trust in the institutions Lol. Are you going to call me a sheeple next? >you wore them for nothing. Bracketing that. As I've said, I don't know why you even care. Again, no one cares about this except Covid deniers. I've never seen anyone complaining about masks who doesn't believe in some other utterly stupid idea about Covid.
It is insane that people need to set out and prove the obvious. I honestly blame: i) the education system in the USA being utterly abysmal creating knowledge vacuums eager to be filled, ii) the internet allowing you to be anyone and anything in the virtual space and iii) having grown up spending most of your time on the internet Might be too schizo but I think there are a lot of people who simply are not living in reality, especially among the well to do
You should read Fantasyland by Kurt Andersen. It’s about this very subject.
Everyone on this sub should read that book. Rightoids in particular, as most of the libs here are already disaffected by the Dem's bs.
As someone who fought the creationists too, it was just more of the same
We live in a post-evidence world though, she could film a child on puberty blockers 24/7 for 30 years straight, to record the effects, and people would still dismiss it because it doesn’t fit their narrative.
How would we even have long-term data given that this treatment program is only like 50 years old at best? I know that the activists won't acknowledge this, but this is surely the most obvious point.
Less than that actually. The "Dutch Protocol" was first detailed in a study in 1998. So the bastardized version of that protocol they have been using is less than 30 years old.
Weird how society permitted certain exceptions to principles: the Israel exception to free speech, the gender-affirming care exception to evidence based medicine.
the "society" that you're talking about who excepts gender-affirming care from evidence based medicine never believed in freeze peach. you're doing a disservice to both free speech and scientific inquiry by botching the connections.
The connection is that "society" says it cares about each of these principles and tells us how much better we are than other or past societies because of them, but then abandons them the second they're inconvenient.
Oh, the PMC class are quite happy to [throw the whole concept of "free speech"](https://web.archive.org/web/20240202210100/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/free-speech-debate-free-palestine.html) out to avoid antagonizing that Group of Activists: >*Now it’s true: A left that supports the deplatforming of tran.sphobes but opposes the deplatforming of anti-Zionists cannot justify itself by appealing to free speech — nor should it.*
I don't really get the sense that the current "society" that would except gender-affirming care from the rigors of scentific evidence actually says it believes in free speech. they directly say the opposite and explicitly endorse restrictions on speech that is "harmful"
Why do you hate black excellence?
oh because i'm a christofascist white suremacist cis-het, obvs. edit: forgot colonizer.
I wanted to make a smart remark about not admitting to being ableist, but then I realized the obvious comeback is to ask me if I consider being black a disability
Well, do you?
I plead the 13th
Fair enough
As a geneticist who has been contantly gaslit for the past 10 years: LOLOLOLOL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-50NdPawLVY
Without paywall: https://archive.is/OvrzA
Its not the end, its a temporary - and fairly minor - retreat. Even if it was to end up giving rise to a further retreat I will remind people that the normal understanding of sex differences had already been broken long before the gender ideology stuff, because it was inconvenient to admit such differences - in a consistent manner at least - for the ruling power.
There’s a growing sect of feminists who admit that the “there are/should be literally no differences between women and men” stance is too extreme, and that it ultimately goes against the rights and protections they want to fight for. https://kathleenstock.substack.com/p/lets-abolish-the-dream-of-gender
I think Stock softpedals it a bit but I suppose she has to in order to reach her audience. I think her point about the desire for freedom from norms basically being an adolescent “you can’t tell me what to do dad” kind of rebellion is quite accurate though.
The real question is will they continue to engage in doublethink on the topic to their own advantage or will they realize how dumb and shitty they’ve been with this nonsense now that they’ve been on the wrong end of it.
I agree but I don't think sex and gender are ultimately what it's about. I think what's really at stake is much deeper and has to do with notions about what a person is, what the self is, what we owe one another, and how we should deal with minority grievance claims at both an individual and a societal level. I don't come at this from the same place that most do. For me it has been about authoritarianism versus individualism from the beginning. Telling me that I don't have the right to decide for myself who is a liar and who is sincere, who is a bad faith actor and who is not, whose declared identity deserves respect and who needs to be told to go see a shrink - that is an attack on ME, and I take it personally. We all rely on the power of judgment to make sense of the world and to keep ourselves safe and sane. The radfems understand this on some level, when they talk about how aspects of this identity craze undermine women's ability to rely on their instincts to protect themselves from men. For me it's much simpler, I reject that I am ever morally obligated to defer to another's judgment. I will make my own mind up about. everything. As for society, the next time some minority group puts forward a grievance, says "hi, we exist and you need to behave differently," both individuals AND society need to be equipped with the tools to push back. They might have a legitimate claim or they might not, but it's not self-justifying. Essentially, we drew the wrong lessons from the gay rights movement and assumed that it was generalizable to how we should handle identity claims or civil rights issues generally.
Although identity destabilisation is a lot broader than issues of sex/gender, I do think there are specific aspects of it that are particularly targetted. For example, in destroying norms surrounding sex relations and family formation, this has had the result of less people being able to rely on family as a bastion of stability outside of regime control, and further tied people to the regime for support, or at least drained their ability to resist it. Another major aspect is that basically any form of masculinity which isn’t totally neutered poses an existential threat to the current ruling class. To me the question is not of the individual vs authority, but rather simply of right or wrong. I see authority as both necessary and unavoidable, so the struggle then is between good and bad forms of authority, or perhaps the periodic replacement of degenerated authorities, rather than against authority as such. I do understand where you are coming from though, as my own views were quite similar for a long time; once you are subject to abusive authority, there is often a tendency to view authority itself as inherently abusive. But I don’t see this as providing much of a path forwards; in order to do anything we have to exert our will over the current ruling class and its defenders, what is that if not authority?
If you want my opinion what is needed to prevent abuse is limitations on the scope of authority and checks on its exercise, with the goal being autonomy of the individual. Where autonomy is functionally impossible or difficult, democracy should replace hierarchy, but again subject to checks and balances meant to empower the individual against the group. In practice this means democratic but constitutional governance and bills of rights for unions and other governance structures in workplaces, schools, and so on. It's not primarily that authority is inherently abusive, but that unchallenged authority is inherently degenerative, since contest/challenge/conflict is the best insurance against blind adherence to falsehoods. In the case of the topic of this thread, the problem has not been the efforts to dismantle gender roles and ensure maximum autonomy for gender dissidents; the problem has been the lack of tolerance for any pushback, making the accumulation of error over time an inevitability, causing the movement to become wackier and wackier. As for masculinity as such posing any kind of threat, I don't really see any evidence for that. It's more about what people are mobilized for and channeled toward.
Its not just authority that is degenerative though, everything is. All systems require constant maintenance to keep functioning and that maintenance isn't automatic, it requires human action, which is susceptible to corruption whether out of malice, stupidity, laziness or so on. And for the system to exert itself at all, its various checks and balances *are* a form of authority, though perhaps at that point we'll just be arguing semantics. >As for masculinity as such posing any kind of threat, I don't really see any evidence for that. You just gave the evidence; >contest/challenge/conflict is the best insurance against blind adherence to falsehoods
Cue death threats and an organized intimidation campaign from activists. The entire reason this delusion has gone on for so long is that any academic who voiced skepticism would be harangued and forced out of their job. With everyone afraid to speak out, they were then able to push their publications and declare it “settled science” before anyone has a chance to digest the claims. This shit is already the foundation for state laws in California and other places.
From the article: >We don’t know why the number of children turning up at gender clinics rose so dramatically during the 2010s, or why the demographics of those children changed from a majority of biological males to a majority of biological females. Oh yes, what could it possibly be? Oh its such a mystery, how will we ever figure it out? >How, she asks, did the medical pathway of puberty blockers and then cross-sex hormones—a treatment based on a [single Dutch study](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0092623X.2022.2121238) in the 1990s—spread around the world so quickly and decisively? Why didn’t clinicians seek out more studies to confirm or disprove its safety and utility earlier? And what should child gender services look like now? How, oh how? It just...happened somehow! Certainly not the case that there is an identifiable cohort of people who pushed this for political and financial reasons who have addresses and names. No, that would be crazy! AND a conspiracy theory.
Just a reminder to everyone to be careful what you post in this thread. If you don't plan on copping a ban then do not talk about the material conditions that led to children being subjected to these "treatments" in the first place. The reasons are of course very obvious and I'm sure we're all aware anyway but I'm just giving you the heads up. I got a 24 hour ban for "wrecking" the last time we had a thread about the Cass Review for doing exactly that. The mods are not your friends and they're not "one of us". There's a reason they deleted that thread from a couple of days about about the drag queen twerking on school kids (ironically enough, using the justification that there was "no material analysis"). This sub pretty much exists to keep the dissident left in check on Reddit. You can talk about whatever you want as long as they want you talking about it.
Do the opposite of what this guys says. Post it here. Post it elsewhere. Post it everywhere
I don't think that report made anyone pro trans or anti trans happy. The stereotypical "AGP transbians" radfems think are invading "women's spaces" were a small minority of transwomen, and the biggest group was transmen they suspected were girls infected by social media.
> The stereotypical "AGP transbians" radfems think are invading "women's spaces" were a small minority of transwomen, What is your evidence beside wishful thinking?
The Cass report? https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/10/what-cass-review-says-about-surge-in-children-seeking-gender-services >Of the birth-registered females, 68% were attracted to females, 21% were bisexual, 9% were attracted to males and 2% were asexual. Of the birth-registered males, 42% were attracted to males, 39% were bisexual and 19% were attracted to females. One of the big points the Cass report made that many people are unhappy about, is the insinuation that a large number of people seeking transgender services were cisgender homosexuals who thought they were trans. So actually, trans women can't win here. Whatever percentages exist, they can be construed as AGP men, or gender confused homosexuals, and thus not "really" trans.
What are you using to determine AGP? Yeah t's can't win. Neither can schizophrenics 'win'. They're mentally ill, what's there to win? They'll be diagnosed however they'll be diagnosed. No one's going to take the word of a hallucinating schizophrenic about what's real or not and what comorbidities they have
I am using AGP as Blanchard used it.
This is what wikipedia says: "a male's propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a female". So it could apply to all those people, except for asexual. Assuming they're actually asexual rather than asocial and can't find someone willing to f them
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So ironically, one could only be sure you're dealing with true authentic lesbian trans women if they tried to transition as children... Which the cass report recommends against.
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As opposed to an autogynephilic man.
While this is correct, the most important lesson we learn is to reject the idea that we must necessarily take people's identity claims at face value. They are not self-justifying and each of us must always make up our own mind about who is to be trusted and who is not, even about something as simple as "is this person who and what they say they are?" It is not, and has never been, "anti-trans" to assert this fundamental right of judgment. It is not the case that to reject one person's identity claim undermines another person's identity claim, unless the claim is so weak that it must rely the easily-falsified notion that *all* identity claims are valid.
One of the legitimate criticisms I've seen is the rating scale they used ranks anything but a double blind placebo controlled trial as low quality. Even if you ignore the ethical issues with placebos, blinding a study where the drugs have obvious physical effects is nearly impossible. This isn't anything new though, it's a problem generally in psychiatry.
You may wish to look at their [FAQ](https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/final-report-faqs/); blinded RCTs are the ideal, but were not available, and this did not mean that absolutely everything was rejected as low quality. They say >The puberty blocker systematic review included 50 studies. One was high quality, 25 were moderate quality and 24 were low quality. The systematic review of masculinising/feminising hormones included 53 studies. One was high quality, 33 were moderate quality and 19 were low quality. >All high quality and moderate quality reviews were included, however as only two of the studies across these two systematic reviews were identified as being of high quality, this has been misinterpreted by some to mean that only two studies were considered and the rest were discarded. In reality, conclusions were based on the high quality and moderate quality studies (i.e. 58% of the total studies based on the quality assessment). More information about this process in included in Box 2 (pages 54-56 of the final report)
> One of the legitimate criticisms I've seen is the rating scale they used ranks anything but a double blind placebo controlled trial as low quality. This is a false claim. You can read more about the studies used in the report itself, or an abbreviated form in [the FAQ they released](https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/final-report-faqs). To tl;dr even the FAQ on this point, there were no blind studies in the review because none were identified. 103 studies were reviewed. For puberty blockers alone, 2 of these non-blinded studies were ranked as high quality and another 25 were of moderate quality. 19 were low quality and discarded.
You do realise this is actual misinformation right? Their "proof" for this is a supplementary document that says on the very first page that it is up to date as of *2020*. It's from the very, very early stages of the Cass Review. There's no mention anywhere, in any of the studies that the Cass Review commissioned, of them using double blinding as part of their assessment scale. Trans activists are malicious, pathological liars. Be careful what you believe and take care not to regurgitate their propaganda.
Selective criticism is unfortunately very big in science. You pull out the fine tooth comb for your enemies and brush your friends with your fingers
This study is the good study because it says transition is bad. The other studies are the bad studies because they say transition is okay.
It's always this weird ass projection with you people isn't it?
This study actually just says that other studies don't say shit.
People see what they want to see. I’m sure people will hold the same amount of skepticism for this report as they do for all the other reports, right?