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  • “Re: Posie Parker,” letter to Andrew Giles MP, Minister for Immigration, 19 March 2023

    Mar 19th, 2023

    From: Isabelle Moreton
    To: Andrew Giles MP, Australian Minister for Immigration

    [This is a public copy of an enquiry sent to Minister Giles through the contact form on his departmental website. I have copied it to his parliamentary office to increase the chance that he receives it.]

    Dear Minister,

    You will no doubt be aware that Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, professionally known as Posie Parker, an anti-transgender activist from the United Kingdom, was recently permitted by your department to enter this country in order to conduct her Let Women Speak tour, a series of public speeches vilifying transgender people.

    You may also be aware that at her appearance yesterday 18 March in Melbourne, Victoria, Ms Keen-Minshull’s rally attracted support from members of the National Socialist Network, who unfurled a banner referring to transgender people as “PAEDO FREAKS” and engaged in violence against trans community advocates and allies who were counter-protesting (see Attachment 1, News Corp Australia). Anti-trans activists have since stated full alignment with their literal-actual-self-identified-Nazi co-belligerents on the matter of trans people’s existence, with one widely-quoted anti-trans protester writing that “Nazis and women want to get rid of paedo filth. Why don’t you?” (see Attachment 2, Angela Jones).

    There is recent precedent for this. Ms Keen-Minshull’s rallies have historically been attended by fascist violence (see Attachment 3, Tacoma News Tribune). At a recent rally in the United Kingdom, a speaker engaged by Ms Keen-Minshull quoted Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf in a positive light, invoking Hitler’s antisemitic conspiracy theory of the “big lie” to refer to the fact that trans women are women (see Attachment 4, Pink News). In January 2021, Ms Keen-Minshull herself publicly called for men with guns to be stationed in women’s toilets to use force, if necessary, to keep trans women out (see Attachment 5, Pink News). Vilification of transgender people and promotion of fascist violence are consistent features of Ms Keen-Minshull’s events; functionally speaking, they are the whole purpose of her sordid career.

    It was obvious that this would happen, and there can be no serious dispute that even before 18 March it was evident that Ms Keen-Minshull did not pass the Migration Act 1958 (Cth) character test, with particular regard to at least s 501(6)(b), s 501(6)(c)(ii), s 501(6)(d)(iii), s 501(6)(d)(iv), and s 501(6)(d)(v).

    Trans community advocates and allies, including your colleague the Member for Brisbane, petitioned you prior to Ms Keen-Minshull’s arrival to prevent this from happening by cancelling her visa (see Attachment 6, Star Observer), which — given her obvious and blatant inability to satisfy the character test — the Act s 501(2) and 501(3) gave you the ministerial discretion to do. You did nothing. To the best of my ability to determine, you did not acknowledge that you were contacted at all.

    1. Why did you not act?
    2. In 2018 and 2019, during the previous Government, one of your Liberal predecessors as immigration minister, Mr David Coleman, cancelled the visas of Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes and Holocaust denier David Icke (see Attachments 7, ABC News, and 8, ABC News). How ought Australians to understand the fact that despite your co-chairmanship of the Parliamentary Friends of Amnesty International and your previous tenure as convenor of the Labor Left, in practice your ministerial discretion is evidently somewhere to the right of the man who was Scott Morrison’s choice for your job?
    3. The purpose of a system is what it does. You and your Department are both components of the system. So far the system has been characterised by you needing to “carefully consider the complex and specific circumstances” of letting in the Nadesalingam family while Tharunicaa’s teeth were rotting out of her head, while rolling out the red carpet for Posie Parker. Do you think that the purpose this suggests for your Department is one with which Australians sympathise? Do you think we ought to?

    I expect you to respond at your earliest convenience.

    Yours,
    Isabelle Moreton

    Attachments

    [I sent these as PDFs. However, they are all online resources so I am linking them here.]

    1. Anderson, A. (2023, March 18). Shocking Nazi salutes during clashing demonstrations over anti-trans speaker Posie Parker. news.com.au. Retrieved 19 March 2023.
    2. Jones, A. [@angijones] (2023, March 18). Nazis and women want to get rid of paedo filth. Why don’t you? [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 19 March 2023.
    3. Sailor, C. (2022, October 28). Pepper spray, shouting as people clash at anti-transgender rally in Tacoma on Wednesday. The News Tribune. Retrieved 19 March 2023.
    4. Perry, S. (2023, January 16). Gender critical activist quotes Adolf Hitler in speech against trans rights at Posie Parker rally. Pink News. Retrieved 19 March 2023.
    5. Milton, S. (2021, January 30). ‘Gender critical feminist’ Posie Parker wants men with guns to start using women’s toilets. Pink News. Retrieved 19 March 2023.
    6. Thomas, S. (2023, January 20). Gay Brisbane MP asks Australian Government to cancel British anti-trans activist’s visa. Star Observer. Retrieved 19 March 2023.
    7. Doran, M. (2018, November 30). Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes denied visa to tour Australia with ‘The Deplorables’. ABC News. Retrieved 19 March 2023.
    8. Doran, M. (2019, February 20). Conspiracy theorist David Icke banned from entering Australia ahead of speaking tour. ABC News. Retrieved 19 March 2023.
  • Protection or cruelty?

    Feb 19th, 2023

    A dive into transmedicalism (among transfeminine people)

    by Andrea Fogel

    Contents

    • Editor’s note
    • Article
    • About the author
    • References

    Editor’s note

    I am grateful to Wester Hare for its contribution to my editing and pre-publication review of this article. —ICBM


    It is difficult to find a tendency that generates more infighting among the trans community than transmedicalism (whose adherents self-describe as both “transmedicalists” and “truscum,” although this document exclusively uses the term “transmedicalists”): an ideology whose adherents assert “that gender dysphoria is necessary for being trans and that being trans is essentially a medical condition defined by dysphoria and the desire for ‘opposite’ sexed bodily characteristics” (Williams, 2019, p. 129). In order for the propositions associated with transmedicalism to be accepted as true, one would need to disregard not just the history of trans people in the West, but the non-Western identities that fall under the trans umbrella as well. It is a fundamentally ignorant, if not malicious, ideology.

    Nonetheless, transmedicalism attracts a sizeable minority of the trans community by appearing to offer a straightforward approach in resolving trans people’s anguish surrounding the misidentification of our genders at birth (Dame, 2016, p. 24). Medical practitioners broadly regard dysphoria as a criterion that must be fulfilled for trans patients to access healthcare; therefore, these patients often “feel compelled” to misrepresent their dysphoria as being greater in intensity than it actually is in order to obtain said healthcare (Konnelly, 2021, p. 6). This process inherently homogenizes trans narratives by diminishing the differences in the intensity of dysphoria that said trans narratives reflect.

    The medical establishment’s homogenization of trans narratives can result in trans people internalizing the transphobic treatment they receive and hence adopting the ideology of transmedicalism. Said internalization is then externalized onto the trans community at large: transmedicalist trans people enforce their ideology onto other trans people. The subversivist tendency within the trans community—defined by Julia Serano as “the practice of extolling certain gender and sexual expressions and identities simply because [italics mine] they are unconventional or non-conforming” (Serano, 2016, p. 346)—then inadvertently strengthens the fundamentally conservative ideology that is transmedicalism. I consider transmedicalism to be conservative, as it emulates the outdated classifications of the model of transsexualism of Harry Benjamin (1966/1999, p. 11): a medical model of transness dependent on medical gatekeeping, i.e., determining who is and who is not a “true [italics mine] transsexual” (op. cit., p. 19).

    In order to better explain the problem of the subversivist tendency that has become mainstreamed within broad trans spaces over the past couple of decades, subversivism itself must be explained further. According to the subversivist framework, to choose to “blend in” is to choose to perform gender in a way that inherently uplifts cissexism, and therefore such gender expression is regarded negatively (Serano, 2016, p. 347).

    However, Serano challenges this subversivist position. Serano is known for formalizing the concept of oppositional sexism: “the belief that male and female are rigid, mutually exclusive categories, each possessing a unique and nonoverlapping set of attributes, aptitudes, and desires” (Serano, 2016, p. 13). Serano argues that the subversivist framework — “the original oppositional sexist binary flipped upside down,” as she terms it (Serano, 2016, p. 349) — ultimately only serves to “reinforce [said binary] further” (ibid.).

    Further, she notes that subversivism especially affects transfeminine people, stating:

    In our culture, the meanings of “bold,” “rebellious,” and “dangerous” — adjectives that often come to mind when considering subversiveness — are practically built into our understanding of masculinity. In contrast, femininity conjures up antonyms like “timid,” “conventional,” and “safe,” which seem entirely incompatible with subversion. [. . .] Subversivism creates the impression that trans masculinities are inherently “subversive” and “transgressive,” while their trans feminine counterparts are “lame” and “conservative” in comparison.

    Serano (2016), p. 348

    Of course, to transgress the oppositional gender binary is no more virtuous than non-transgression, despite what those who hold the subversivist mindset believe. To assimilate on a personal level can even be an attempt at self-protection. Certainly, the theory behind the trans liberation movement presents a more permanent solution to the struggles associated with the trans demographic (Schrock et al., 2004, p. 62). However, some might conceive that to fight for this cause requires a greater amount of emotional investment than to transition in a manner that results in “blending in,” at least in the modern-day economically-developed world. Therefore, it is unreasonable to fault individual trans people simply for embarking upon the latter pathway as opposed to the former.

    This is not to minimize the evident role that biopower — meaning power that deals “with living beings” and their bodies (Foucault, 1976/1990, p. 143) — plays in the medical system as it pertains to trans people, as gender is itself regulated by forces of biopower, “gendering practices” being “inextricably enmeshed with sexuality” (Stryker, 2014, p. 39). Transnormative constructs of what it means to be trans, i.e., those deeming “some trans people’s identifications as legitimate and prescriptive (e.g., those that adhere to a medical model) while others’ are marginalized, subordinated, or rendered invisible (e.g., those that do not adhere to a medical model),” are therefore rather prevalent, resulting in medical gatekeeping (Johnson, 2016, pp. 467–468). At the same time, trans people engaging, on a personal, individualized level, in modes of living that happen to be in accordance with the forms of being trans which outdated medical models have historically considered acceptable, is not, in and of itself, harmful.

    Interestingly, though, trans women and transfeminine people are often expect to display traits of both assimilationist and subversivist tendencies. We are expected to be conventionally attractive — e.g., thin, white, and appearing to be cisgender women — yet we are still expected to retain penises as a distinguishing marker. We are expected not to disturb our cisgender peers by challenging their cissexist notions — to conform to the expectation of being submissive and docile which is imposed on women in general — yet we are expected to demonstrate pride in who we are, for hiding who we are is considered deception. And we are expected to work in so-called “respectable” fields, yet we are frequently relegated to marginalized occupations such as sex work. These are only a few examples of the societal double-bind.

    Further, it is vital to note that a strongly assimilationist mindset has negative consequences of its own. To become an assimilationist — as it manifests in projecting one’s own medical relationship to being trans onto other trans people, coupled with policing of other trans people’s identities — is to become a conduit of biopower.

    Transmedicalism and this tendency of strong assimilationism as described are closely related. Transmedicalism requires separatism because — despite historical evidence showing that, as Serano wrote, “activism requires alliances” (Serano, 2011, paras. 6–7) — transmedicalism entails the belief that trans people without gender dysphoria are in some way harmful to the larger trans community. Because of this belief and its consequences, transmedicalism inherently compels those who are suited best by transgressing the oppositional gender binary into denying their selfhoods as trans people.

    The problem, ultimately, is not individual assimilation; the problem is assimilationism. Even so, I cannot say that assimilationism cannot be a compelling ideology. When one is severely dysphoric, it is not at all difficult, as a trans person, to look at other trans people — specifically those who experience no or minimal dysphoria, or alternatively do not experience it from being perceived as transgressing the binary — and wonder why one cannot be happy like they are. Grappling with gender dysphoria can be an extremely alienating experience, as no one chooses to experience it; it is difficult to imagine anyone wanting to feel such intense psychological anguish.

    Consequently, the increasing diversity in the trans community in this regard — coupled with the tendency toward subversivism, as well as the pervasive transmisogyny in broad trans spaces by which that tendency is not-always-but-often accompanied — causes some trans people’s ontological security to become fragile. Since, as sociologist Anthony Giddens (1991, p. 54) states, “a person’s identity […] must continually integrate events which occur in the external world,” some trans people internalize the gatekeeping in the pathologization of trans identity, and then project their insecurities onto other trans people.

    In doing so, they realize the adage: “hurt people hurt people.” When subjected to the immense amount of trauma that is, in some ways, inherent to being trans in a cissexist world, and to being a transfeminine person in a transmisogynistic world, it is not unrealistic for this to result in a disturbance in behaviors among trans people, especially transfeminine people. This creates a cycle, for, as philosopher Simone Weil wrote: “To put oneself in the place of someone whose soul is corroded by affliction, or in near danger of it, is to annihilate oneself. […] Therefore the afflicted are not listened to” (Weil, 1943/2005, p. 91).

    This does not make transmedicalism acceptable. It does raise a question: How can society be restructured in order to be less traumatic for trans people, especially transfeminine people? The answer to that question is beyond the scope of this article. However, Weil continued:

    Only by the supernatural working of grace can a soul pass through its own annihilation to the place where alone it can get the sort of attention which can attend to truth and to affliction. It is the same attention which listens to both of them. The name of this intense, pure, disinterested, gratuitous, generous attention is love.

    Weil (op. cit.), pp. 91–92

    About the author

    Andrea Fogel (she/her/hers) is “a disabled/neurodivergent transsexual author who writes to capture the obscure emotions of the gutter in which she lives in order to elevate the low-brow into the high-brow”. You can visit her at fogel.info.


    References

    Benjamin, H. (1999). The transsexual phenomenon (electronic ed.). Symposium Publishing. Retrieved 17 February 2023. (Original work published 1966.)

    Dame, A. (2016). Making a name for yourself: tagging as transgender ontological practice on Tumblr. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 33(1), 23–37. doi:10.1080/15295036.2015.1130846. Retrieved 17 February 2023.

    Foucault, M. (1990). The history of sexuality: An introduction (vol. 1). Vintage Books. (Original work published 1976.)

    Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Polity Press.

    Johnson, A.H. (2015). Transnormativity: A new concept and its validation through documentary film about transgender men. Sociological Inquiry, 86(4), 465–491. doi:10.1111/soin.12127. Retrieved 17 February 2023.

    Konnelly, L. (2021). Both, and: Transmedicalism and resistance in non-binary narratives of gender-affirming care. Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics, 43(1). doi:10.33137/twpl.v43i1.35968. Retrieved 17 February 2023.

    Schrock, D., Holden, D., & Reid, L. (2004). Creating emotional resonance: Interpersonal emotion work and motivational framing in a transgender community. Social Problems, 51(1), 61–81. doi:10.1525/sp.2004.51.1.61. Retrieved 17 February 2023.

    Serano, J.M. (2011, September 8). A “transsexual versus transgender” intervention. Whipping Girl. Retrieved 17 February 2023.

    Serano, J.M. (2016). Whipping girl: A transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity (2nd ed.). Seal Press.

    Stryker, S.O. (2014, May 1). Biopolitics. Transgender Studies Quarterly, 1(1–2), 38–42. doi:10.1215/23289252-2399542. Retrieved 17 February 2023.

    Weil, S.A. (2005). Human personality. In S. Miles (Ed.), Simone Weil: An anthology (pp. 69–98). Penguin Books. (Original work published 1943.)

    Williams, R.A. (2019). Transgressive: A trans woman on gender, feminism, and politics. Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

  • Several problems: “How ‘gender identity theory’ is harming children”

    Jan 16th, 2023

    On 16 January 2023, Green Ideas on Substack published an article, “How ‘gender identity theory’ is harming children: one party member’s research journey,” by Marian Smedley.

    The piece has several problems. Here are a few.


    Contents

    1. “outraged by … the use of social media …“
    2. “what I now know is called ‘gender identity theory’“
    3. “acknowledged by evolutionary biologists“
    4. “medicine and the law“
    5. “intersex … the numbers are tiny“
    6. “the existence of additional sexes“
    7. “other chromosomal variations … are not different sexes either“
    8. “GIT holds that babies are merely ‘assigned’ a biological sex“
    9. “if you feel uncomfortable with … stereotypes then you are in the wrong body“
    10. “lifelong dependence“
    11. “on high impact medication“
    12. “I have not yet seen“
    13. “humanities disciplines, not scientists“
    14. “When I was young, I too rebelled“
    15. “children are told by those who follow GIT“
    16. “children will … adopt a trans identity“
    17. “acceptance of this ideology“
    18. “leads to real world consequences which are harmful“
    19. “There are legitimate questions … this is a debate“
    20. “following a damning review” (emphasis mine)
    21. “the exploration of other psychological problems“
    22. “rare conditions such as precocious puberty“
    23. “or to chemically castrate sex offenders“
    24. “The Cass Review expressed concerns“
    25. “recent research (catalogued here)“
    26. “They may … lead to health problems“
    27. “countries noted for their progressive attitude“
    28. “research into whether there is any benefit“
    29. “the risks are becoming clearer“
    30. “Here in Australia, however“
    31. “These … may lead to infertility“
    32. “surgery … is largely irreversible“
    33. “referrals for gender treatment increased by 45 times“
    34. “over the 8 years to 2021“
    35. “Some … are now concerned … about … ‘social contagion’“
    36. “the precautionary principle should be followed“
    37. “over 1,000 … claims against … GIDS“
    38. “a detransitioner against her psychiatrist“
    39. “This is not the case“
    40. “those labelled ‘gender critical’” / “acceptance of … science”
    41. “anyone who criticises GIT is improperly grouped with them“
    42. “important that we hear voices from the left“
    43. “I fully support anyone who has transitioned“
    44. “trans activists“
    45. “is it transphobic to … ?“

    #1

    I was outraged by the public nature of these attacks and the use of social media to make them

    Smedley (2023)

    In a development which is paradoxically both shocking and completely unsurprising, Marian does not seem to be similarly concerned about Gale’s choice to publicly attack the Australian Greens Victoria in the pages of The Age concerning her short and not particularly legitimate service as the party’s convenor (Gale, 2022).

    #2

    These events launched me on a research journey about what I now know is called ‘gender identity theory’ (GIT), which is what party policy supports and promotes.

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    Interested to note that I cannot locate significant use of the term “gender identity theory” in modern academic literature. For example, Bentler (1976) uses “gender identity theory” to describe a form of what became better known as Ray Blanchard’s transsexualism typology, now long since discredited (Serano, 2010 & 2020; Bettcher, 2014).

    Where the term “gender identity theory” appears in trans-neutral literature, it is often disconnected from its use here. For instance, Vantieghem et al. (2014), writing in Social Psychology of Education, assert the existence of a “gender identity theory,” but use the term to collect a number of different sociological theories and concepts related to gender; what Marian means by “gender identity theory,” i.e. the existence of gender identity, they accept as established fact (ibid., p. 363).

    A place where I can find the term “gender identity theory” in abundance is modern trans-hostile popular writing, such as one letter writer to The Irish Times complaining that being transphobic (in her case, calling trans people’s genders “religious beliefs” on national radio) got her called transphobic (Colfer, 2022). I can think of at least two very good reasons for this distribution:

    1. “Gender identity theory,” not being an actual theory, is an empty signifier, a conceptual ghost: since it has no substance, it can’t be attacked. If an anti-trans activist sees an opportunity to combine concepts to open a line of attack on trans people, then, even if those concepts come from separate and mutually incompatible actual theories, “gender identity theory” can be used to link them together in the fashion of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia‘s famous wall. On the other hand, if a trans person quite correctly points out that the theories from which those concepts are drawn are mutually incompatible, the anti-trans attacker can simply loftily redefine “gender identity theory” as “having incorporated elements of both”.
    2. The name “gender identity theory” is a restatement of an old argument intimately familiar to anyone who’s had the misfortune to encounter creationists: “It’s just a theory!” This line of attack pivots on intentionally confusing the vernacular and scientific meanings of ‘theory’. In everyday speech, a theory is just a guess; in scientific usage, a theory is a scientific explanation for a broad range of observations which has been strongly supported by multiple lines of evidence and shown to have power to both explain observations that are available and to predict observations before they are made (Ghose, 2013; Understanding Science, 2022).

    “It’s just a theory!” has no value in illustrating the strength of the evidence for gender identity as a scientific concept. It does, however, have considerable value in illustrating who anti-trans activists choose to hang out with.

    #3

    This is a scientific fact acknowledged by evolutionary biologists (see here and here)

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    The first ‘here’ is a citation to a Substack piece by Colin Wright (2021), who is indeed an evolutionary biologist. His Google Scholar profile notes two pieces on gender to which he has contributed: an opinion article in The Wall Street Journal (Wright & Hilton, 2020) and a letter to the editor of the Irish Journal of Medical Science (Hilton et al., 2021); neither are peer-reviewed.

    Wright’s actual scientific output is concerned predominantly with the collective behaviour of insects (Wright et al., 2015; Wright et al., 2017; Wright et al., 2020; etc.), which I sincerely think is scientifically valuable, but the relevance of which in this context is not entirely clear. I suspect it’s probably more relevant that Wright is a contributing editor for Quillette (Quillette Pty Ltd, n.d.), a right-wing outlet best known for its consistent support of unambiguous scientific racism and eugenics (Minkowitz, 2019). In his capacity there, Wright has published a number of pieces sharing his colourful opinions on trans people (Wright, 2020a; Wright, 2020b; Wright, 2022). It’s not difficult to see how these could make him an attractive source if empirical truth and scientific rigour happened not to be a primary concern.

    The second ‘here’ is a citation to the Paradox Institute, which appears to functionally consist entirely of the author of the cited article, Zachary Elliott (2022). Elliott isn’t an evolutionary biologist; according to his own website (Elliott, n.d.), he’s an architect. He does not, in fact, assert any relevant qualifications besides “an interest in understanding the complexity of the human condition”. The cited article is Elliott’s five-dollar-word-backed speculation in a field in which he has no relevant expertise whatsoever.

    #4

    medicine and the law

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    [citation needed]

    #5

    There are indeed some people born as intersex, but the numbers are tiny (0.018%)

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    The number could be 1 and our existence would still be fatal to the insistence that sex is a strict binary.

    #6

    and in any event do not give rise to the existence of additional sexes

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    To my knowledge, no one is asserting that we do. The assertion isn’t that there is a specific number of discrete sexes and it is greater than two; the assertion is that sex is a continuous variable, not two wholly separate bins.

    #7

    (There are also a number of other chromosomal variations which can result in medical conditions but these are not different sexes either.)

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    This is another strawman. No one is asserting that people with unusual numbers of autosomes (non-sex chromosomes), such as monosomy 15 (Angelman syndrome, Prader–Willi syndrome) or trisomy 23 (Down syndrome), actually have different sexes. The chromosomes which are relevant to sex are the sex chromosomes, that’s why they’re called that. However, since Marian and her fellow travellers can’t rebut the arguments that scientists and trans people are actually making, they have to rebut this one instead.

    #8

    GIT holds that babies are merely ‘assigned’ a biological sex at birth by their doctor or parents based on what their ‘observed’ genitals are.

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    This is literally what happens and is not in any meaningful dispute (Reiner, 2002; Witchel, 2018). The reason it’s not in any meaningful dispute is because attempting to claim that birth sex assignment is an objective “observation” would quickly become absurd.

    For instance, one group of people with the intersex trait 5α-reductase deficiency are known to be assigned female at birth and to then start clinically visibly developing a penis and testes at around 12 years of age (Imperato-McGinley et al., 1974; Jong, 2003).

    If biological sex is “observed” at birth then presumably these people must be biologically female. If on the other hand these people having a penis and testes makes them male — a proposition with which the original formulation of the prominent TERF thought-terminating cliché the “Staniland question” seems to agree (Gellman, 2021) — then clearly biological sex cannot be “observed” at birth; a best guess is made, and it is, would you look at that, assigned.

    #9

    GIT states that if you feel uncomfortable with aspects of traditional gender stereotypes then you are in the wrong body and need to ‘align’ your body with how you feel.

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    This is, as often happens throughout this piece, a happy byproduct of the luxury of arguing against a “gender identity theory” that exists entirely within one’s own head. Even other transphobes don’t believe this; TERFs have suggested many reasons I should give up and detransition “back to being a cis man”, but the fact that I’m not overfond of skirts isn’t one of them. If they actually thought that being trans was about “traditional gender stereotypes” then it would logically follow that they would consider that argument to be a slam dunk.

    #10

    lifelong dependence

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    Funnily enough, I never see the argument that “lifelong dependence” is inherently bad applied to any of the other medication I take. Lifelong “dependence” on oestrogen and progesterone? Bad, apparently. Lifelong dependence on candesartan (for blood pressure), salbutamol (for asthma), in the near future probably also ivabradine (for postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome)? Apparently fine.

    Shit, I don’t even hear this argument this often about the prescription amphetamines I take, which at doses far above the level used in medicine do actually induce dependence you didn’t previously have (Nestler, 2022) — as opposed to oestrogen, progesterone, and all the other medications on this list, which you become “dependent” on only in the sense that they treat a health condition that, if they were withdrawn or never prescribed, you would continue to have.

    #11

    on high impact medication

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    Much like “gender identity theory,” as far as I can determine this is not actually a real thing, although I am less certain of this one and will therefore stand corrected if evidence is shown to me. Either way, it sure does sound scary, which is presumably the reason it’s used here.

    #12

    I have not yet seen any scientific evidence to support GIT,

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    If I were going to make a statement this load-bearing about a topic x, I would make sure I could put it in the form “the balance of scientific evidence seems to be against x“. I would do that because one way to have “not yet seen any scientific evidence to support” x is to deliberately avoided it. What I should infer from Marian’s use of this wording here, I can only speculate.

    #13

    which has been developed by academics from the humanities disciplines, not scientists.

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    This argument doesn’t hold water even from the STEMbro perspective which is inherent to making it. Now, the linked article (Morgenroth & Ryan, 2018) doesn’t engage with “gender identity theory,” because that isn’t actually a real thing. It engages primarily with queer theory, which is.

    The article specifically engages with Butler’s work in philosophy (which is one of the humanities — a humanity?) in the context of applying it to social psychology. Social psychology is a social science (Biswas-Diener, 2023). Social science is science — the proof is in the name. It’s also in the pudding, given the immense amount of social-scientific work — anthropology, communication science, linguistics, political science — which certainly went into devising and precisely formulating the trans-hostile canards that Marian now simply repeats.

    N.B. STEM supremacy is a pretty sizeable, big, large fucking call coming from someone whose most advanced qualification is, to my knowledge, a Bachelor of Business in Management — which as a former undergraduate student in business I can confirm is, of all academic disciplines, objectively the least real.

    #14

    There is no problem with anyone expressing how they feel and behaving in ways that do not fit gender stereotypes. When I was young, I too rebelled against gender stereotypes.

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    Oh yeah, the old “they would have transed me too” line in its implicit form. Who’d you pick that up from, your mate Jo (Wakefield, 2020)?

    #15

    These days, I have discovered, many gender non-conforming children are told by those who follow GIT that they may not be the sex they were ‘assigned’ and that any distress they feel about their bodies may be explained by a trans identity.

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    “Those who follow GIT,” leading your three-year-olds into a life of unbiblical sin, depravity, and back-alley horse-needle hormone injections. Not any specific, identifiable people, of course, even though we want to avoid this sort of thing and even though naming the people being referred to would help us avoid it. But they’re definitely real. For sure.

    Tangentially, I copped a version of this argument at 25, when I was told I’d been peer-pressured into transitioning — by the 15-to-18-year-old students I was teaching. That was wild. If nothing else, I will always remember it for the comedy value.

    #16

    In some cases, these children will indeed adopt a trans identity …

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    How are they going to “adopt a trans identity” when to the best of our knowledge, gender identity is fixed by age 3 (Bukatko & Daehler, 2004, p. 495) and “there do not seem to be external forces that genuinely cause individuals to change gender identity” (Endocrine Society & Pediatric Endocrine Society, 2020)?

    #17

    acceptance of this ideology

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    Are you critiquing a scientific theory or railing against a political ideology? You’ll need to make your mind up, Marian, you’re starting to sound a bit Catholic (Graff, 2016).

    #18

    leads to real world consequences which are harmful

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    Such as?

    #19

    There are legitimate questions around single-sex spaces for biological women being infringed upon and there is a debate to be had around this.

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    The usual — when people are focusing on claiming that “there are legitimate questions” or “there is a debate” rather than asking them or having it, it’s because they know there are no actual grounds to do so.

    #20

    A recent development is that the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has decided to close the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (Tavistock GIDS) in London following a damning review of its practices by a leading paediatrician.

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    Post hoc ergo propter hoc, an old friend (Moreton, 2022a). As I have repeatedly had to point out in the past, “after” does not mean “because of”. To be blunt and crude, the Tavistock was shut down because it was, so to speak, “transing” fewer kids than needed it, not, as implied here, too many. This is not seriously disputed even at that crown jewel of British transphobia (Strudwick, 2020), The Guardian (Brooks, 2022).

    #21

    The affirmation model assumes the individual has ‘discovered their true gender identity’ and too often excludes the exploration of other psychological problems or factors that may have contributed to the child’s distress.

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    Ah yeah, so basically you want to do “gender exploratory therapy” (Ashley, 2022)? You know, that thing which commentators much more accomplished than me have pointed out is obvious conversion therapy, without even any extra bits stuck on (Reed, 2023)?

    #22

    These powerful drugs were previously only used to treat rare conditions such as precocious puberty

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    You’re telling me puberty blockers were used to prevent unwanted puberty? And they’re now being used to prevent unwanted puberty again? Personally I am shocked.

    #23

    or to chemically castrate sex offenders

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    Ah well, by the logic used here, I can show that managing your child’s precocious puberty will turn them into a sex offender. Also if you have bipolar disorder and take antipsychotics they’ll make you autistic (welcome to the club!). Pack it up, entire field of pharmacology, we’re done here.

    #24

    The Cass Review expressed concerns about the use of puberty blockers

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    By this point I assume whoever is reading this will be unsurprised to know that the Cass Review did not do that and indeed specifically refrained from doing it (Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People, 2022, p. 15). Amusingly, this is the most damning outcome that could be secured by a UK government so bent on eliminating trans people that, at date, it may just have destroyed the Union for it (Parker, 2023).

    #25

    recent research (catalogued here) indicates that they are not reversible

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    That’s not a catalogue of research, it’s a New York Times opinion piece (Twohey & Jewett, 2022). Easy mistake, I know, they look so alike.

    Again, unsurprisingly, The New York Times does not — and, surprisingly, does not even claim to — show anything of the sort. It does contain several anecdotes, which I have no specific objection to but which apart from one parent’s vaguely similar passing remark also don’t even claim to show anything of the sort (even if they had: as we’ve just now seen, the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”).

    #26

    They may disrupt brain development and bone density growth, and lead to health problems like osteoporosis.

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    Yeah, that’ll happen when you keep kids on medications that block all hormones for way longer than recommended or safe because you don’t want to give them hormones.

    #27

    This treatment has now been suspended or paused in many countries — including Sweden and Finland, countries noted for their progressive attitude towards transgender people

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    Noted by who? Whom? Whomst?

    #28

    pending further research into whether there is any benefit to taking them.

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    The answer to that question is unambiguously yes (Rew et al., 2020; Turban et al., 2020), including in works published by NHS GIDS itself (Carmichael et al., 2021). Repeatedly re-asking the question won’t actually change that.

    #29

    Meanwhile, the risks are becoming clearer.

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    This cites Bernard Lane (2022), (lately?) of The Australian. Since Marian is a Greens member I would expect that she is fully apprised of the level of journalistic integrity which can be expected from The Oz — you really can’t miss it (Taylor & Collins, 2012; Simons, 2014; Buckell, 2015).

    I get it, though: when you could be doing something fun like shitting on trans people with all your friends, little things like principles and existing knowledge have to be put aside.

    #30

    The NHS … is pausing the use of puberty blockers and recommending psychological assessment and care instead. … Here in Australia, however, puberty blockers are still being used by gender clinics like the Royal Children’s Hospital Gender Service

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    I see, so because our old best friend has released a draft proposal to jump off a cliff that means we are obliged to do so as well and at once. What was the Statute of Westminster Adoption Act 1942 (Cth) even for?

    #31

    These can also have lasting health effects and may lead to infertility.

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    The source cited relates specifically to the infertility claim and hey, guess what, yeah, some medical treatments cause infertility, most notably antipsychotics and chemotherapy (NHS England, 2020). In most such cases, we are able to acknowledge that it’s preferable to the alternative. When we have to service transphobes’ obsessive collective interest in whether kids can get pregnant, however, apparently our critical thinking goes out the window.

    #32

    The last stage is surgery which is largely irreversible.

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    Yeah that’ll be why the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s Standards of care for the health of transgender and gender diverse people (WPATH SOC; Coleman et al., 2022) refer to it as irreversible 17 times. Sorry, was this supposed to be something the trannies were maliciously conspiring not to tell you about?

    #33

    In the UK, over the decade to 2018, referrals for gender treatment increased by 45 times for girls and 12.5 times for boys.

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    As the WPATH SOC (Coleman et al., op. cit., p. 26) patiently explains, the significant rise is accounted for by “sociopolitical advances … increased access to health care and to medical information, less pronounced cultural stigma, and other changes that have a differential impact across generations”. As John Oliver points out, we saw the same effect, for the same reasons, when society finally backed off a bit on punishing people for being left-handed (Last Week Tonight, 2022).

    Meanwhile, the (assigned) gender differential is, as bioethicist Florence Ashley has exhaustively explained, less likely to reflect “a real change in ratios in the overall trans youth population” and more likely to reflect “sociocultural factors impacting referral patterns” (Ashley, 2019).

    #34

    In Australia, over the 8 years to 2021, children being treated in public adolescent gender clinics increased by 9.8 times.

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    Oh you mean since 2013? Yeah, that’ll probably be because “there were virtually no treatment facilities for children with gender dysphoria in Australia prior to 2014,” which, as you can see from the quote marks, are not my words — what they are is an admission by prominent Australian anti-trans activist Dianna Kenny (2019). Come on! Get your ducks in a row!

    If anyone’s wondering why 2013, it’s because that was the year the Full Court of the Family Court of Australia decided Re Jamie [2013] FamCAFC 110, in which they established the binding precedent that court authorisation is not required for “stage one treatment” (puberty blockers). Before Re Jamie, there was no way for kids to access medical transition without going to court, and anyone who had the money to go to court had the money to go to a decent private endocrinologist, so they didn’t need a clinic.

    #35

    Some of those treating children wishing to transition are now concerned about the influence of social media and ‘social contagion’.

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    I imagine they are. I personally am very concerned that trans children are being put in the care of people who are able to maintain such concerns despite the overwhelming scientific consensus that they have no basis (see, e.g., Bauer et al., 2021; Turban et al., 2022; etc.).

    #36

    In my view, the precautionary principle should be followed.

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    The precautionary principle asks us “to pause and to review before leaping headling into innovations that might prove disastrous” (Read & O’Riordan, 2017). The current approach to trans kids is based on literally decades of evidence. Marian and her fellow travellers are demanding we leap into new innovations on the strength of no evidence at all, and ignore the considerable evidence against.

    I guess what we’ve learned here is before you cite the precautionary principle, you should really take the time to know what it is, otherwise it’s really obvious you’re just repeating something you heard from a more confident friend.

    #37

    In the UK, there is speculation that there may be over 1,000 medical negligence claims against the Tavistock GIDS.

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    This claim is traceable back to Hayward (2022), a single-source story run by The Times as stealth advertising for a law firm who want to lead the case. As noted by a statement from GIDS reported by Duggan & Wood (2022), only about 1,000 patients have been referred to paediatric endocrine services — the first stage of any medical intervention at all — over the last decade.

    For a class of 1,000 patients, literally everyone who went on puberty blockers over the last decade would have had to have regretted it. Even assuming GIDS had referred approximately the same number of patients to endocrinology in each of the two previous decades of its operation — which it very certainly didn’t; nowhere near (Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, 2019) — that would require a regret rate of greater than 30%.

    In reality, the highest regret rate figure which has yet been generated came from the exceptionally conservative VUmc team in Amsterdam. Of the 4 co-authors of that study, Peggy Cohen-Kettenis and Tom Steensma later co-authored another study (Steensma et al., 2013) of trans kids’ rate of “desistance” (i.e., rate of allegedly ceasing to be trans) which in reporting the rate fairly overtly put its thumb on the scale to maximise it (Brooks, 2018). Meanwhile, Annelou de Vries has since written a commentary for Pediatrics (de Vries, 2020) in which she suggested kids who hadn’t been exceptionally vocal about being trans in childhood shouldn’t be allowed to transition.

    The highest rate of regret this team of bold, fearless, heterodox, maverick, champions of unfettered science could generate was … 2% (de Vries et al., 2011). Not 100%, not 33%. 2%. Really makes you think.

    #38

    In Australia, a court case has been launched by a detransitioner against her psychiatrist alleging negligence in not assessing her case properly and rushing her into cross-sex hormones and surgery including a double mastectomy and the removal of her ovaries, fallopian tubes and uterus. She is now unable to have children.

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    I’ve already taken apart the Jay Langadinos narrative elsewhere (Moreton, 2022b) and I have now been writing this piece for close to six consecutive hours (and these parentheses were added on my second pass, nine hours in) so with the consent of members present I’m just going to move right along.

    #39

    At present, any attempts to have such discussion are immediately shut down with cries of ‘transphobia’ or ‘bigotry’, and the plea that it is too upsetting for transgender members who feel their existence is being denied. This is not the case.

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    This is grammatically ambiguous. Is Marian asserting that it’s “not the case” that it’s “too upsetting for transgender members”? She is cis, and therefore not qualified to decide that.

    On the other hand, is Marian asserting that the existence of trans members isn’t being denied? She’s spent this whole piece trying to deny it — implying trans kids’ medically necessary care is malpractice (which could not be the case if they are in fact trans), treating trans kids’ genders as something imposed on them by others, and even referring to gender identity, whose relation to assigned sex is what makes trans people a group distinct from cis people, as a “theory”.

    It’s pretty clear that any assertion by Marian that trans members’ existence isn’t being denied is founded more in self-interest than actual fact.

    #40

    Language always matters, and it is important to understand that those labelled ‘gender critical’ and called transphobic and anti-trans are primarily stating their acceptance of the dimorphic nature of biological sex as supported by science.

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    Those “labelled” gender-critical? Are you serious? It’s literally a label you gave yourselves (Lawford-Smith, 2021; Rowling, 2022; Siddique, 2022), specifically because you had to start pretending you thought TERF was a slur (Compton, 2019), something you also don’t believe given that one of Australian TERFs’ attempts to make something that people are interested in is a YouTube series called TERF Talk Down Under.

    Anyway, despite Marian’s remarkably inexpert attempt at sleight of hand here (clearly a beginner’s effort — sorry Maz, you’ll have to get a bit of practice!), it is obviously incorrect to state that transphobes are “primarily stating” any view on “biological sex” (this whole screed was about “gender identity theory”!), much less that science supports the views on sex they actually have.

    #41

    One of the most unfortunate aspects of this debate has been that most people reported as opposing GIT publicly have been from the right-wing or conservative side of politics. Some of those critics do use harmful and abusive language, and indeed some are bigots. But now anyone who criticises GIT is improperly grouped with them.

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    Here’s an analogy. I’m doubtful about broad access to assisted dying, because I think the world leader in that area, Canada, is using it to eliminate those of us who are in the “surplus population” and then blame us for it (Alexiou, 2022; Hopper, 2022). The Catholic Church is also famously doubtful about broad access to assisted dying because it considers euthanasia to be a “violation of the divine law, an offense against the dignity of the human person, a crime against life, and an attack on humanity” (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 1980).

    I think this is the first time I’ve had to bring this up in at least a year of being vocal about my doubts online, because despite the fact that both I and the Church believe throwing access to assistance in dying completely open is not a good idea — positions even more materially identical than those purportedly held by “left-wing” TERFs and those held by their more honest openly fascist peers — people have not confused us.

    This is because we have clearly different beliefs and arguments — unlike the Church, I actually think people should not be subjected to prolonged suffering, and I think that the use of assisted dying for institutional murder is a factor of material conditions which can be changed. Another factor is that, in contrast to TERFs’ complaints about trans people, if something like Canada’s MAiD program were implemented here, I can actually name and substantiate a material harm I would experience as a result.

    The reason TERFs are being grouped with people who are actually willing to admit being fascists is because not only do you want the same material end, you want it for the same reasons. You barely change the words. If you want to not be called a right-winger, you can just stop being one.

    #42

    it is even more important that we hear voices from the left … who are prepared to raise the scientific facts around biological sex as a starting point to discussion

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    You’re already hearing those. Oh wait, those weren’t the facts you wanted? Sorry, regardless of what you might have been told, there’s not actually any such thing as alternative facts.

    #43

    I fully support anyone who has transitioned or any adult who wishes to do so.

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    I see (!)

    #44

    We can no longer accept statements from trans activists and certain members who hold public office that this issue is ‘not up for debate’, and that anyone who does not completely agree with them is a hateful, transphobic bigot.

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    Ah yes, “trans activists,” the thing TERFs call any trans person who does silly things like posting online or speaking out loud while being trans.

    Look, the reason that people who “[do] not completely agree with” trans people and allies are often described as “hateful, transphobic bigots” is because trans people and allies are extremely used to being disagreed with and consequently have an extremely numbed perception of what constitutes disagreement.

    For your lack of “complete[…] agree[ment]” to even register with trans people in general, you have to be really far off the beaten track of civil, evidence-based debate — far enough, in fact, that the “hateful, transphobic bigot” characterisation is invariably accurate beyond a reasonable doubt.

    #45

    First, is it transphobic to accept the scientific basis for two biological sexes? Secondly, is it transphobic to raise concerns about the medical care provided to children? I think that the answers are clearly ‘no’ and ‘no’.

    Smedley (op. cit.)

    No! But then neither of those things are what you did.


    As usual, if you got any use out of this article, please consider helping me eat by donating to my Ko-fi or joining my Patreon. Either are good, in the sense that they keep me alive, which is conventionally considered good.


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    Taylor, T., & Collins, S. (2012, December 1). The politics are personal: The Australian vs the Australian curriculum in history. The Curriculum Journal, 23(4), 531–552. doi:10.1080/09585176.2012.731015. Retrieved 16 January 2023.

    Turban, J.L., King, D., Carswell, J.M., & Keuroghlian, A.S. (2020, February 1). Pubertal suppression for transgender youth and risk of suicidal ideation. Pediatrics, 145(2), e20191725. doi:10.1542/peds.2019-1725. Retrieved 16 January 2023.

    Turban, J.L., Dolotina, B., King, D., Keuroghlian, A.S. (2022, August 3). Sex assigned at birth ratio among transgender and gender diverse adolescents in the United States. Pediatrics, 150(3), e2022056567. Retrieved 16 January 2023.

    Twohey, M., & Jewett, C. (2022, November 14). They paused puberty, but is there a cost?. The New York Times (via Wayback Machine). Retrieved 16 January 2023.

    Understanding Science (2022, September 9). Science at multiple levels. University of California, Berkeley. Retrieved 16 January 2023.

    Vantieghem, W., Vermeersch, H., & Van Houtte, M. (2014, May 7). Why “gender” disappeared from the gender gap: (Re-)introducing gender identity theory to educational gender gap research. Social Psychology of Education, 17, 357–381. doi:10.1007/s11218-014-9248-8. Retrieved 16 January 2023.

    Wakefield, L. (2020, June 10). JK Rowling suggests she ‘might have transitioned’ if given the option when younger, wrongly linking gender identity with mental health. PinkNews. Retrieved 16 January 2023.

    Witchel, S.F. (2018, April). Disorders of sex development. Best Practice & Research: Clinical Obstetrics & Gynaecology, 48, 90–102. doi:10.1016/j.bpobgyn.2017.11.005. Retrieved 16 January 2023.

    Wright, C. (2020a, June 7). JK Rowling is right—sex is real and it is not a “spectrum”. Quillette (via Wayback Machine). Retrieved 16 January 2023.

    Wright, C. (2020b, December 23). On sex and gender, the New England Journal of Medicine has abandoned its scientific mission. Quillette (via Wayback Machine). Retrieved 16 January 2023.

    Wright, C. (2021, February 2). Sex is not a spectrum. Reality’s Last Stand (Substack via Wayback Machine). Retrieved 16 January 2023.

    Wright, C. (2022, June 23). I got thrown off Etsy and PayPal for expressing my belief in biological reality. Quillette (via Wayback Machine). Retrieved 16 January 2023.

    Wright, C.M., & Hilton, E.N. (2020, February 13). The dangerous denial of sex. The Wall Street Journal (via Archive Today). Retrieved 16 January 2023.

    Wright, C.M., Keiser, C.N., & Pruitt, J.N. (2015, July). Personality and morphology shape task participation, collective foraging and escape behaviour in the social spider Stegodyphus dumicola. Animal Behaviour, 105, 47–54. doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2015.04.001. Retrieved 16 January 2023.

    Wright, C.M., Lichtenstein, J.L.L., Montgomery, G.A., Luscuskie, L.P., Pinter-Wollman, N., & Pruitt, J.N. (2017, July 25). Exposure to predators reduces collective foraging aggressiveness and eliminates its relationship with colony personality composition. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 71, 126. doi:10.1007/s00265-017-2356-7. Retrieved 16 January 2023.

    Wright, C.M., Lichtenstein, J.L.L., Luscuskie, L.P., Montgomery, G.A., Geary, S., … & Keiser, C.N. (2020, December 19). Spatial proximity and prey vibratory cues influence collective hunting in social spiders. Israel Journal of Ecology and Evolution, 66(1–2), 26–31. doi:10.1163/22244662-20191062. Retrieved 16 January 2023.

  • Letter: “Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Bill 2022 (Qld),” to my state MP, 9 December 2022

    Dec 9th, 2022

    This is the redacted text of an email I sent to my Queensland state MP on 9 December 2022 concerning the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Bill (Qld).

    No alterations have been made to the substance of the text. In the original text, the cited sources were embedded as hyperlinks; here, I’ve pulled them out and made them APA 7 style citations to combat link rot.


    Dear — and staff,

    I hope you are well.

    As a constituent, I am writing to you to respectfully urge you to support the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Bill 2022 (Qld), both on the Legislative Assembly floor and in the party room.

    As I assume you know, the Bill, if passed, will enable Queenslanders to change the gender on their birth certificate without first undergoing sex reassignment surgery (SRS), abolishing the existing system established by the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act 2003 (Qld), under which SRS is a precondition for change of legal gender. The passage of this Bill is of vital importance for a number of reasons.

    • Owing to a relative lack of Medicare coverage (Healthdirect Australia, 2022) and the less-than-ideal socioeconomic conditions in which transgender Australians often find themselves (Bretherton et al., 2020), SRS is out of reach even for many trans Australians who desire it and for whom it is medically necessary (World Professional Association for Transgender Health, 2016). This means trans Queenslanders are liable to be denied accurate legal gender recognition on the entirely irrelevant basis that they are not sufficiently rich.
    • Employers across multiple sectors can require employees to provide them with birth certificate copies for their records, for instance to check work rights. When this requirement forces transgender people to out themselves to their employers, it facilitates anti-transgender workplace discrimination, notwithstanding that such discrimination may be unlawful (Australian Human Rights Commission, n.d.). Allowing trans Queenslanders to accurately register their own gender limits opportunities for unlawful conduct by eliminating a process step which allows it to arise.
    • Residential tenancy applications can require applicants to provide birth certificate copies as part of the application process. This can facilitate discrimination in housing in much the same way as described above. This is an increasingly urgent matter in the current economic conditions, in which the rental market is becoming increasingly brutal and unaffordable for tenants (Heagney, 2022) while pressures that are being relayed by market actors onto workers accentuate the marked socioeconomic disadvantage that transgender workers across the Anglosphere already face (Nath, 2018; Wareham, 2021).
    • Of Australia’s eight State and Territory jurisdictions, Queensland along with New South Wales are the only two where SRS continues to be a precondition for a legal change of gender (Pullos Lawyers, n.d.). It is obvious that having been born in Queensland does not make a person any more or less their gender than if they had been born in, for example, Victoria, yet Queensland law in its present state effectively suggests that it does. After twenty years of the present status quo, it is time the law was updated to reflect reality.

    Moreover, when considering amendments to the Bill, I implore you to take the following stances with respect to any amendments proposed:

    • Support the flexibility of the language around sex descriptors in the current draft. Flexible sex descriptors are essential for the genders of nonbinary people to be recognised, and for intersex people to have documentation which accurately describes their physical characteristics.
    • Support making it optional for assigned sex to be recorded on birth certificates. This means that parents of intersex children will not be forced to commit to saddling them with a potentially inaccurate sex assignment, and trans children will have a better chance of not having to contend with an inaccurate assertion by the state about their gender.
    • Oppose the imposition of barriers to altering the record of sex other than the existing language in ss 39(2) & 39(3) of the Bill requiring a statutory declaration from a person 18 or over who has known the applicant for at least 12 months. Further barriers would encumber the Government with a duty which is not a good use of its resources and which it is constitutionally not well-equipped to execute.

    I am asking you to take these positions because gender and the expression thereof are inherently specific to and determined by the individual. As it currently stands, State law recognises this — but as a “threat,” of sorts, that requires monitoring and checking. Queensland law in its current form effectively stipulates that gender is so volatile and dangerous that only certain kinds of people can be trusted with the right to determine it.

    In actual fact, accurate gender recognition does not materially affect anyone except people who cannot access it, whom it affects a great deal. [Your party] has an ethical obligation to facilitate trans Queenslanders’ access to accurate gender recognition so that they can enjoy the same freedoms and access the same opportunities to which all Australians have the right.

    Should you find yourself unconvinced of the necessity, utility, or desirability of the actions detailed above, I would welcome the opportunity to meet with you at your convenience to discuss it further.

    Sincerely yours,
    Isabelle Moreton
    [123 Main Street]
    [Anytown], Queensland 4xxx
    Phone: 04xx xxx xxx


    References

    Australian Human Rights Commission (n.d.). Quick guide: Transgender. Retrieved 9 December 2022.

    Bretherton, I., Thrower, E., Zwickl, S., Wong, A., Chetcuti, D., … & Cheung, A.S. (2020, December 9). The health and well-being of transgender Australians: A national community survey. LGBT Health, 8(1), 42–49. doi:10.1089/lgbt.2020.0178. Retrieved 9 December 2022.

    Fentiman, S. (2022, October 2). New Bill modernises birth certificates [Media statement]. Queensland Government Department of the Premier and Cabinet. Retrieved 9 December 2022.

    Heagney, M. (2022, November 4). ‘It’s going to get worse’: Larger rental crisis looms as vacancies hit record lows. The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 9 December 2022.

    Healthdirect Australia (2022, June). Gender affirming surgery. Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care. Retrieved 9 December 2022.

    Nath, I. (2018, February 8). For transgender women, the pay equity gap is even wider. Maclean’s. Retrieved 9 December 2022.

    Pullos Lawyers (n.d.). How do transgender rights in Australia differ from other countries?. Retrieved 9 December 2022.

    Queensland Government (2022, July 20). Documents for rental applications. Retrieved 9 December 2022.

    Wareham, J. (2021, November 17). Transgender pay gap revealed: Cisgender people paid 32% more. Forbes. Retrieved 9 December 2022.

    World Professional Association for Transgender Health (2016, December 21). Position statement on medical necessity of treatment, sex reassignment, and insurance coverage in the U.S.A. Retrieved 9 December 2022.

  • Several problems: “Aussie doc: ‘I see 300 trans patients a year’”

    Nov 29th, 2022

    On 27 November 2022, The Sunday Mail, the Sunday edition of The Courier-Mail, published an article, “Aussie doc: ‘I see 300 trans patients a year’,” by Julie Cross (2022).

    The article has several problems. Here are a few.


    Table of contents

    • Headnotes
    1. “… make them look more like the opposite sex …“
    2. “open to prescribing … quickly“
    3. “prescribed ‘gender affirming’ drugs“
    4. “… being shared on government platforms“
    5. “News Corp is not suggesting …“
    6. “The government’s own website … states that it is wrong …“
    7. “… other countries around the world …“
    8. “TransHub … promotes the informed consent model as best practice“
    9. “… just two or three appointments“
    10. “… no mental health professional needs to be involved“
    11. “For trans children …“
    12. “… psychologist Dr Roberto D’Angelo said …“
    13. “His own assessment of the evidence …“
    14. “… almost all … have autism or … ADHD“
    15. “‘wise’ rather than ‘irreversible decisions‘”
    16. “transition as an adult female to a male“
    17. “‘If you don’t feel comfortable … then don’t’“
    18. “months or years of therapy“
    19. “transitioning can sometimes seem like the explanation“
    20. “‘regret can take up to 10 years’“
    21. “… one identified as male …“
    22. “… adults and children wishing to change their gender …“
    23. “… the vast majority … have little understanding in this space“
    24. “… happy to prescribe … in just two sessions“
    25. “… new national guidelines … carefully exploring …“
    26. “… almost all of his patients … are neurodivergent“
    27. “a group of health professionals working with trans people“
    28. “it’s a grey area … should be able to consent“
    29. “the rates of people regretting … is ‘almost zero’“
    30. “He warned … it could result in people taking their own lives“
    • Closing
    • Postscript
    • Footnotes
    • References

    Headnotes

    Up to now, the standard format for this series included publishing in the first instance as a Twitter thread. Since I no longer have the constraints (or advantages) of Twitter shaping my work, the format might unintentionally slightly shift. Please let me know if it’s changed for the worse.

    If you click on a footnote or inline citation, you’ll jump to the footnote or reference list entry to which it points; simply click the ‘Back’ button in your browser to go back to where you were.


    #1

    Trans patients are swapping tips online on where to find ‘friendly’ doctors who are willing to prescribe hormones to make them look more like the opposite sex.

    Cross (op. cit.)

    First of all, may I say how delightful it is to see Cross taking part in News Corp’s long corporate tradition of suggesting that hormones are simply a skin-deep intervention which allow perverted, predatory, subhuman transgenderists to deceive their well-meaning, normal, fully human cisgender peers.

    Now, the word “friendly” implies bias, like having a “friendly” judge. It might be possible to superficially get away with the use of the word “friendly” here if it were a direct quote with this meaning in context. However, the only online source which we know Cross actually consulted is a single reddit thread in which the word ‘friendly’ is not used in the OP1 (u/camxeli, 2022), and is only used in one comment, which describes a Brisbane-based trans health provider as having a “very comforting and friendly manner” (u/CafeCodeBunny, 2022).

    The construction of the paragraph suggests that it’s decisive proof of bias to prescribe gender-affirming hormones at all. In fact, where they’re clinically justified, to not prescribe them would be medical negligence — because it would fall short of the relevant standard of care (Armstrong Legal, n.d.).

    #2

    Reddit is one go to site where the trans community shares information on which doctors are open to prescribing cross sex hormones quickly.

    Cross (op. cit.)

    In the one reddit thread we know Cross actually consulted (u/camxeli, op. cit.), the OP was asking where to find informed consent model (ICM) care, because the first appointment he could secure at the Brisbane Gender Clinic was 11 months away.

    Note that this would have been a particularly time-sensitive and urgent matter because the first appointment would have been the OP’s first opportunity to receive any gender-affirming medical care at all. He doesn’t say this; what he does say is that he’s 15. Forcing him through 11 more months of the wrong puberty could do significant damage which would be permanently impossible to reverse.

    Cross is trying to make timely care look shady by asserting trans people are trying to get “friendly” doctors who will prescribe hormones “quickly”. “Less than 11 months for medical intervention on a matter of life-altering urgency whose time sensitivity is immediate,” however, is an objectively reasonable expectation by any metric.

    #3

    One person [u/JamieRoseCleverly, 2022 — Ed.] wrote on Reddit how they were prescribed ‘gender affirming’ drugs at a walk-in clinic in Queensland, after waiting about “’30 minutes for the informed consent and prescription, and another 15-20 minutes for the pharmacy next door to fill it”.

    Cross (op. cit.)

    “Gender affirming” appears in quote marks, as if there were some debate about the wording. In the literature, gender-affirming therapies are referred to as such even by their most ardent opponents (e.g., D’Angelo, 2018; Malone & Roman, 2020; Clayton, 2022; etc.). “Gender-affirming” is standard terminology; News Corp is putting it in quote marks to convey a suggestion that it doesn’t have either the authority or the guts to make out loud.

    While we’re on the topic of conveying suggestions, while the word “drugs” is perfectly clinically accurate here and often used in the technical literature, that’s not why News Corp uses it; it’s used because compared to “hormones” or “medication” it is much scarier, and therefore, for News Corp’s purposes, ideal.

    It also ties into a common anti-trans narrative theme: namely, projecting artificiality onto trans people, portraying them as somehow unnatural and fake. Calling hormones “hormones” runs the risk of someone pointing out that hey the human body produces those too.2 Even “hormone blockers” sounds too close to something natural and real. “Drugs”? Now those could be anything. That’s the ticket.

    Honestly the weirdest part of this paragraph is how Cross leaves in “and another 15-20 minutes for the pharmacy next door to fill it,” as if it were suggestive of something nasty. My pharmacy takes about 2 minutes to fill my prescription for estrogen; 5 on a slow day. Should they artificially take longer because I’m trans? What’s the objective here?

    #4

    There are lists of “gender affirming” doctors, who all approach patient care differently, being shared on government platforms.

    Cross (op. cit.)

    The use of the word “platforms” here is slightly confusing, because it feels like it’s suggesting Australian governments are running public Mastodon instances or something (are they? I haven’t heard), but actually I think this is referring to, at least, the “gender incongruence” page on the Australian Government’s Healthdirect service (mentioned by Cross shortly afterward), which says:

    You can find a list of gender affirming clinicians at TransHub [“Gender affirming doctor list,” n.d. —Ed] and AusPATH [“Providers,” n.d. —Ed].

    Healthdirect Australia (2022); links in source

    This seems like another version of the narrative also favoured by the ABC’s Media Watch (Moreton, 2022),3 to the effect that “it’s wrong for government to cite or consult external experts in any way”. I personally have only ever seen journalists try that one when attacking trans people, and I expect other marginalised groups, because in any context other than discrediting authorities who defend marginalised people, it would be correctly recognised as blatantly absurd.

    #5

    News Corp is not suggesting doctors on these lists are doing anything wrong.

    Cross (op. cit.)

    News Corp is in fact doing precisely that. Simply saying that they’re not doesn’t actually change it.

    #6

    The government’s own website HealthDirect promotes ‘gender affirming care’ and states that it is wrong for any health professional to try to change someone’s gender or identity.

    Cross (op. cit.)

    Healthdirect does indeed “promote[…] ‘gender affirming care’,” for example by saying:

    People with gender dysphoria need to get gender affirming care.

    Healthdirect Australia (op. cit.)

    It seems pretty obvious and straightforward to say PEOPLE_WITH_CONDITION need to get TREATMENT_FOR_CONDITION. Not seeing a lot of objections to “People with muscle aches need to get Nurofen.”

    Healthdirect does indeed also state that

    It is wrong for any health professional to try to change your gender or identity in any way.

    (ibid.)

    This is also very obviously unassailably true. Part of the impetus for banning conversion therapy was the strength of the argument that trying to change someone’s identity is wrong even without considering direct observable material harm, because people have other human rights like autonomy and freedom of conscience, of which they would be deprived by an attempt to forcibly psychologically modify them, even if they weren’t otherwise harmed.

    However, conversion therapy does do harm; it consistently leaves its subjects with lifelong psychological trauma (Blosnich et al., 2020; Forsythe et al., 2022). Then again, many other therapies which are widely accepted in clinical practice also inflict harms, which are accepted because the benefits outweigh them; anyone who’s been through chemo, or knows someone who’s been through it, has witnessed this principle in action.

    If we accept for some dickhead reason that changing someone else’s gender is actually a clinically beneficial thing to do, then are the harms of conversion therapy worth it to achieve that end? No, because conversion therapy doesn’t actually do that. It has no demonstrated effectiveness (Higbee et al., 2020). Even in the terms in which its advocates claim to believe, conversion therapy can’t be justified because it doesn’t work.

    News Corp’s careful framing implies that Healthdirect calling conversion therapy “wrong” is emotive and debatable. In reality, not only does conversion therapy have shitty ends, it can’t achieve them; Healthdirect calling it “wrong” is as close to objectively correct as any statement about science can get.

    #7

    However, it comes as a growing body of mental health professionals believe the government’s current advice is out of step with other countries around the world that have started taking a more cautious approach to medical and surgical intervention.

    Cross (op. cit.)

    Oooh, which countries? I assume one of the usual suspects, so is it Britain (Moore et al., 2022)? Is it Sweden (Jaeger, 2022)? Please, go on, tell me more, I’m enthralled.

    #8

    TransHub, which provides resources for trans people and health professionals, promotes the informed consent model as best practice for GPs — which is when the doctor takes the patient’s lead and accepts their new gender identity.

    Cross (op. cit.)

    I was unable to verify this claim. The summary of the informed consent model (ICM) is close enough that I’m not gonna argue with it here. However, the strongest assertions I could find by TransHub about the ICM, which are in its guidance for clinicians on the ICM (TransHub, “Clinicians: Informed consent,” n.d.), are subjectively very positive but don’t actually appear to amount to an endorsement as a single best practice (i.e., superior to other alternatives), simply a discussion of one option among many.

    The strongest assertion I could find by TransHub that was relevant to the ICM was in the guidance for clinicians regarding diagnoses (TransHub, “Clinicians: Diagnoses,” n.d.), which asserted that “the requirement of diagnosis [of gender dysphoria] is no longer considered best practice”. This doesn’t actually enthrone the ICM instead, however. It simply — and correctly — places the traditionalist “gatekept” model which it discusses as one option among many.

    #9

    In some cases a prescription for cross sex hormones can be handed over in just two or three appointments.

    Cross (op. cit.)

    This is pretty clearly trying to tap into the unspoken and inarticulable feeling that many cis people have that there’s some minimum number of appointments it should take. In reality, like anyone else, trans people are entitled to have medical care no later than they need it.

    #10

    In many cases, no mental health professional needs to be involved.

    Cross (op. cit.)

    The suggestion here is that it’s somehow weird or even dangerous that the ICM doesn’t ordinarily require medical transition to receive signoff from a mental health professional (MHP).

    Of course, what News Corp is relying on here is cis people’s, again, unspoken and perhaps inarticulable assumption (cis assumption) (cissumption?) that being trans inherently means you’re fucked in the head — or more specifically that you’re fucked in the head such that you can’t give informed consent (shuster, 2019). In reality, no aspect of transness impairs competence to consent in any way.

    #11

    For trans children, the parents need to agree to any medical intervention before drugs are prescribed and they need to be assessed by mental health specialists in what can be a significantly longer process.

    Cross (op. cit.)

    The movement from the previous paragraph to this one gives this the effect of suggesting that trans kids can also be sloppily and quickly ‘rushed’ into ICM care.

    In reality, the fact that parents and MHPs have to be involved means the kids are by definition not receiving ICM care, so even if ICM care were reckless and negligent the way News Corp needs it to be, the implication would still be a lie.

    #12

    However, psychologist Dr Roberto D’Angelo said some kids are still only having up to half a dozen sessions before being prescribed drugs.

    Cross (op. cit.)

    News Corp somehow forgot to mention that Roberto D’Angelo is a clinical advisor to the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine (SEGM), a pseudoscientific anti-trans pressure group (Stahl, 2021; Kuper et al., 2022; Ring, 2022) which pretends to be supported by crowdfunding while actually being supported by large donations of opaque origin (Moore, 2021).

    News Corp knew this, of course, but even if they hadn’t, D’Angelo isn’t exactly subtle about his views. His interaction with the public discourse is primarily through contributions to academic journals; on his profile on the academic social network ResearchGate (D’Angelo, n.d.), on the list of publications which he authored or co-authored, every publication since May 2018 (Clayton et al., 2021; Clayton et al., 2022; d’Abrera et al., 2020; D’Angelo, 2018, 2020a, 2020b, & 2020c; D’Angelo et al., 2020; D’Angelo et al., 2022; Malone et al., 2021) has been open advocacy for trans-hostile views. That’s 10 of his 13 listed publications, incidentally; talk about Riley’s law!4

    #13

    [D’Angelo’s] own assessment of the evidence for the benefits and harms of puberty blockers is that it is too weak and inconclusive for him to support prescribing them to children, even though ‘in some cases they can have positive effects’.

    Cross (op. cit.)

    It’s unclear in what way D’Angelo’s opinion of “the evidence for the benefits and harms of puberty blockers” would be at all relevant even if he weren’t being paid to hold it. The nature of the alleged harms is such that the specialists qualified to professionally evaluate them are endocrinologists, neurologists, and rheumatologists. D’Angelo doesn’t appear to be qualified in any of those areas, nor does it appear he’s talked to anyone who is. His judgement is no more relevant than mine.

    #14

    [Charlotte Hespe] said that a lot of the kids are “troubled” and almost all of the ones she has seen have autism or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and so “it’s tricky to navigate safely”.

    Cross (op. cit.)

    In the first place, the current global standard for trans healthcare — the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s Standards of care, version 8 (SoC 8) have something to say on this topic and they’re pretty clear about it:

    There is no evidence to suggest a benefit of withholding GAMSTs[5] from TGD[6] people who have gender incongruence simply on the basis that they have a mental health or neurodevelopmental condition.

    Coleman et al. (2022), Statement 5.3.c, pp. S36–S37

    In the second place, how the hell were “almost all” of Hespe’s patients either autistic or ADHD? It’s certainly been observed that trans people seem to have higher rates of autism and ADHD — respectively 3–6× (Warrier et al., 2020; Warrier & Baron-Cohen, 2020) and 3–7× (Becerra-Culqui et al., 2018) more common. However, the population prevalences of autism and ADHD are 1–1.5% (Warrier & Baron-Cohen, op. cit.) and ~4.1% respectively (Deloitte Access Economics, 2019), so in trans people they should be, at most, 9% and 28.7%.

    Even if those populations were completely separate — which they’re not, lmao (Rusting, 2018) — they should make up fewer than 4 patients in 10. Does Glebe Family Medical Practice only accept referrals from the local fidget spinner and model train emporium?7 What’s the story?

    #15

    [Hespe] said she tries to make sure her patients make “wise” rather than “irreversible decisions”.

    Cross (op. cit.)

    The location of the quotation marks here strongly suggests this statement has been creatively chopped and screwed a bit. Whoever’s responsible for it, though, the intention is clearly to suggest that in this area, irreversible decisions and wise ones are mutually exclusive.

    The reasons why this is a bad take and the reasons why someone would advance it anyway are both clear enough at this point that I don’t feel like I need to waste my breath further.

    #16

    Out of more than 100 patients [Hespe] has seen in 22 years, she said only one person, who wanted to transition as an adult female to a male, regretted the effects of being on testosterone and surgery. They now identify as gender neutral.

    “She had three lots of surgery,” Dr Hespe said. “Had breasts off, had breasts put back on, had breasts taken off again.”

    Cross (op. cit.)

    In the first place, are this person’s pronouns “they,” or “she,” or both?

    In the second place, I’m wondering whether this is a permissible disclosure by Dr Hespe. This seems like it would make it exceptionally easy to identify the individual described, which seems — note that I am not a lawyer — as if it might be questionable under the medical privacy provisions of the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth).

    In the third place, I think it’s significant that News Corp has chosen to report this part. Previously they’ve largely focused on the suggestion that trans kids are too young to decide to transition (or to stop puberty) and that they’ll regret it later. This seems to mark a further advancement along the narrative line established by e.g. Robinson (2022) — beginning to suggest that “they’ll regret it later, so they have to be stopped,” applies not only to kids, but adults, too.

    This is a logical advancement to push for. After all, if you can bring yourself to levy immense suffering, permanent damage and possible death on kids simply because they were unlucky enough to exist around you while being trans, doing it to adults should be a piece of cake.

    #17

    Dr Hespe said the doctors need to make sure they “cross every single ‘t’ and dot every single ‘i’.” “If you don’t feel comfortable prescribing then don’t.”

    Cross (op. cit.)

    This seems self-contradictory. You should “cross every single ‘t’ and dot every single ‘i’” — a saying which typically means being meticulous in your fulfilment of an established requirement, such as a standard of care — but also you can make a vibes-based choice not to?

    I feel like there has to be an implied conditional statement here — if you want to prescribe, you need to make sure you cross every single t and dot every single i, but if you don’t, simply not “feel[ing] comfortable” is more than enough.

    #18

    Meanwhile, Dr D’Angelo believes it can take months or years of therapy for some people to work through all their problems. He said many kids questioning their gender are also struggling with social anxiety, making friends or there’s family dysfunction, and think changing their identity will help.

    Cross (op. cit.)

    I mean even if this wasn’t Roberto D’Angelo, wow, no way, a therapist thinks people might need “months to years of therapy”? Colour me absolutely shocked. Seriously though, this is such a blatant attempt to deprive trans people of capacity. “Months to years”? That’s “indefinitely”. That’s “never”.

    Moreover, “changing their identity” is, as I’m sure D’Angelo knows very well, a blatantly malicious misrepresentation of what it’s describing. There’s a reason it’s called “gender-affirming” and not “gender-changing” — it simply supports and upholds what’s already there.

    #19

    “Everyone now looks online when they are not feeling good about themselves,” Dr D’Angelo said. “Many of these young people feel desperate and are looking for a way to feel better. There’s a huge amount of material online which encourages transition which vulnerable, struggling and troubled teenagers may feel offers them a way out of their difficulties. Gender dysphoria and transitioning can sometimes seem like the explanation for their problems.”

    Cross (op. cit.)

    Have we considered that “these young people feel desperate and are looking for a way to feel better” because they’re experiencing dysphoria, the condition literally defined as a clinically significant degree of feeling bad?

    Have we considered that “vulnerable, struggling and troubled teenagers may feel” that “material online which encourages transition” “offers them a way out of their difficulties” because it actually does?

    Have we considered that “gender dysphoria and transitioning can sometimes seem like the explanation for their problems” because they actually are?

    #20

    He said he’s worked with several people who have transitioned when they were young but regretted it, saying “regret can take up to 10 years”.

    Cross (op. cit.)

    Convenient. I don’t know if I’ve ever met a single person who was confident enough to say they knew exactly where their life would lead them in ten years’ time. If any possible regret is waiting so far into the tall grasses of the future that you can’t possibly see it when you’re standing out on the fringe, the only rational decision is not to venture in at all. In fact, the decision to go anyway might very well be considered insane …

    Anyway, isn’t probability fun? Two other doctors quoted in this article report having patient populations in which the rate of autism and ADHD is near 100%, when all the other data we have suggests that the most impossibly high upper bound conceivable should be less than 4 in 10. D’Angelo, a single therapist in private practice — in fact a psychoanalyst, not a specialty known for treating gender-diverse people with acceptance and kindness (Evzonas, 2020; Saketopoulou, 2022; etc.) — seems well on his way to including among his clients not only every detransitioner but every detransitioner-to-be on the east coast. I wonder how he fares with Scratch-its.

    #21

    He said one identified as male and had a mastectomy, a hysterectomy and ovaries removed. “When she came to see me she was identifying as male and very depressed,” Dr D’Angelo said. “She could not understand why as she had done everything she thought that could help (surgery), but she felt worse. It took two years to try and understand her history.

    “She came to the conclusion she was not a man and that other things had led her to take these steps. It was eye opening. It was alarming. She only had a handful of appointments with a psychiatrist before transitioning. There were other more complicated issues that had not been adequately diagnosed and had never been addressed. She is now identifying as a woman. She is happy with her gender now but is dealing with enormous grief and is struggling to rebuild her life.”

    Cross (op. cit.)

    While she’s not named, this has to be about Jay Langadinos — it’s a very specific backstory and the probability that D’Angelo has two patients who share it is realistically zero.

    In that case, it seems apropos to introduce the facts that D’Angelo is leaving out; as Langadinos filed suit against her psychiatrist, Dr Patrick Toohey, and The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald reported on it (Szego, 2022), we’re lucky enough to have those facts on hand.

    In short, the only “complicated issue” which Langadinos has alleged was unaddressed was social phobia, better known as social anxiety disorder (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). SAD

    • is not a contraindication to transition
    • does not impair capacity to give informed consent (Cundill, 2020),
    • is — like everything else — not known to generate an illusory or transient sense of gender incongruence, and
    • is known to be relieved by transition (Butler et al., 2019).

    Moreover, Toohey urged Langadinos to seek treatment for it and she refused. By Langadinos’ own account filed with the New South Wales Supreme Court, which Szego (op. cit.) cites, not only was her phobia clearly and concretely diagnosed, but the reason it wasn’t addressed was because she didn’t want it to be.

    D’Angelo is clearly trying to suggest that Langadinos was failed by the system, but Langadinos made her own choices. No one had even the hint of a justification to intervene to stop her.

    #22

    A GP who prescribes cross sex hormones and puberty blockers to adults and children wishing to change their gender said they have to search for doctors like him that accept “patients are the experts in their own body”.

    Cross (op. cit.)

    Once again, News Corp presents this as a matter of people “changing their gender,” rather than matching their bodies to the gender they have. At this point, it’s pretty safe to say it’s not accidental.

    #23

    [Matt Barber] said the vast majority of GPs in Australia have little understanding in this space, which is why people seek out “gender affirming” doctors.

    Cross (op. cit.)

    This seems like it’s supposed to at least allow the interpretation that Barber is an arrogant egotist, but it’s actually just uncontroversially true. While actual useful data regarding practitioner competence in trans care is thinner on the ground than I would like, the little that exists isn’t promising.

    By way of example,

    • Davidge-Pitts et al. (2017) found that in a sample of 411 United States practitioners who were members of the Endocrine Society, the proportion who said they’d never received training in trans healthcare was c. 81%.
    • Christopherson et al. (2022) found that of a sample of 188 GPs and nurse practitioners working with trans patients in Saskatchewan, Canada, in 2019, the proportion who felt comfortable providing transition-related medical care was 30%.
    • Irwig (2016) found that among endocrinologists attending an American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists conference, the fraction able to answer a fairly basic knowledge question about trans endocrine care was an eye-watering 5% (!!). You’ve got to hope things have improved.

    #24

    He said in straightforward cases he is happy to prescribe hormones in just two sessions.

    Cross (op. cit.)

    … I mean I already know the answer but is this supposed to be in some way wrong or bad?

    #25

    In Australia “doctors are free to operate under their own opinions and beliefs”, Dr Barber said.

    In the UK doctors have to follow new national guidelines for children with gender dysphoria, including carefully exploring any mental ill health issues.

    Cross (op. cit.)

    In the first place, this framing makes it sound like it’s complete open slather in Australia, which is not the case at all. As the article later admits, in an extremely minimising fashion and with clear reluctance, there are set standards of care and doctors risk legal action by violating them. Given that doctors’ chain of command usually ends with their clinic, however, practitioners across Australia have broadly varying levels of independence in interpreting and implementing those standards as they see fit, depending on what their employer permits.

    This is not the case in the United Kingdom. The status quo — which is currently in the process of changing, but toward an unclear end — is that there is only one paediatric gender clinic in the whole of the United Kingdom, the NHS Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS). “National guidelines” sound rather less impressive when you realise that they currently apply to a total of one clinic, which also contributes most of the data that underpin them, and which, in large part, directly writes them.

    In the second place, UK doctors don’t yet “have to follow” any “new national guidelines” at all. The guidelines in question, which are the NHS Interim service specification for specialist gender dysphoria services for children and young people, are still in consultation and will be until 4 December (NHS England Specialised Commissioning, 2022). They have also been the subject of absolutely blistering criticism from every peak body that has at least one keyboard and internet connection (e.g., World Professional Association for Transgender Health et al., 2022).

    The intention here is clearly that UK paediatric trans health practices should be understood as disciplined and careful, when they’re nothing of the sort — they’re an act of gleeful sadism motivated by the barely concealed inadequacy and resentment of an increasingly ailing UK government and increasingly openly reactionary British state.

    #26

    [Barber] said almost all of his patients, both adults and children, are neurodivergent — meaning they have autism or ADHD.

    Cross (op. cit.)

    In the first place, “neurodivergent” doesn’t just mean “has autism or ADHD,” as much as I and other autistics and people with ADHD sometimes act as if it did.

    In the second place, this claim is no less improbable coming from Barber than it was from Hespe. Then again — Barber’s home clinic Stonewall is only 500 metres from Windsor traino.

    #27

    [Barber] said he follows Australian guidelines promoted by AusPath — a group of health professionals working with trans people — that says gender affirming care is evidence-based and saves lives.

    Cross (op. cit.)

    What an absolutely delightful paragraph. For relatively few words, there is so much going on.

    AusPATH are the Australian Professional Association for Transgender Health, the Australian affiliate of WPATH, and the peak body for trans health in Australia. AusPATH are “a group of health professionals working with trans people” in much the same way that the Australian Army are “a group of people in green clothes who like guns”.

    Being the peak body, AusPATH don’t “promote” guidelines; they set them. Nor is their setting of guidelines simply a matter of ineffectually wringing their hands and saying “well, doctors should do this, pretty please”. As noted above, civil action for medical malpractice rests largely on whether the defendant provided the standard of care which would be reasonably expected from a medical practitioner of that kind acting under those circumstances (Armstrong Legal, op. cit.). Those standards of care are precisely what AusPATH (and WPATH) define.

    AusPATH can literally “promote” guidelines in the alternative common meaning to the one used here, i.e., raising them up: endorsing a protocol used by an individual clinic or in a small area, and distributing it under AusPATH’s aegis. That just effectively makes it another standard they set, though, not some other thing they’re shilling for.

    Finally, the fact that gender-affirming care is evidence-based and saves lives isn’t a matter of what either Barber or AusPATH “says”. It’s simply true (Huckins, 2022; Matouk & Wald, 2022; Oliver, 2022; etc.).

    #28

    [Barber] said for kids aged 14 to 16 years it’s a grey area, as they need parental consent while those aged 16 to 18 should be able to consent.

    Cross (op. cit.)

    This also isn’t a matter of Barber’s opinion. “He said … those aged 16 to 18 should be able to consent” makes it sound like he’s winging it: “Oh well, they should be able to consent, it’s fine, she’ll be right”. That framing suggests his practice is endangering children left and right.

    In reality, he’s simply accurately, and perhaps even slightly conservatively, summarising Australian and Queensland law. People under 16 have to either get parental consent, or actively prove they’re Gillick competent.8 People over 16 are assumed competent by default (Legal Aid Queensland, 2022).

    #29

    But he said the rates of people regretting going on gender affirming drugs is ‘almost zero’ and those taking it see an upswing in their mental health.

    Cross (op. cit.)

    Again, this is not simply something Barber “said”. Not only is it true that regret rates are close to zero, they have remained stable or dropped over time.

    • Smith et al. (2004) found that in a sample of 162 trans adults at 2 gender clinics in the Netherlands, the number who “expressed regrets” was 2 (1.4%).
    • Davies et al. (2019) found that of 3,398 British trans adults, the number who experienced transition-related regret was 16 (0.47%) or fewer.9
    • Turban et al. (2021) found that, among respondents to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, of the 2,242 who reported a history of detransition, 54 (2.4%) endorsed “uncertainty or doubt around gender” as a factor.

    The usual argument at this point is “oh but even one is too much!” which is obviously bullshit both on principle and in practice. For instance, Wilson et al. (2017), reviewing patient decisional regret around surgery — all surgery, of any kind — found that in the studies reviewed, the “average prevalence” of “self-reported patient regret,” which they described as “relatively uncommon,” was 14.4%.

    Moreover, the fact that “gender affirming drugs” cause “an upswing in [trans people’s] mental health” is not realistically in any doubt.

    • St Amand et al. (2011) found “clear evidence that HRT is associated with improved mental health outcomes”.
    • Colizzi et al. (2014) found that “psychiatric distress and functional impairment were present” in a significantly lower percentage of subjects after 12 months of HRT.
    • Bouman et al. (2016) found that “the use of cross-sex hormones … appears to be associated with psychological benefits”.

    I have about 40 more studies here on this topic and I could go on but 3 is enough because we all already know this. Only News Corp is pretending it’s news — I can’t imagine this is the first time someone’s said that sentence.

    #30

    [Barber] warned that if Australia followed the UK route and more barriers were put in the way of people seeking to transition it could result in people taking their own lives.

    Cross (op. cit.)

    Yet again, this is clearly supposed to be at least open to being interpreted as an activist doctor intentionally overselling the politically correct narrative, and again, it’s simply objectively true.

    As noted in the withering WPATH-led joint statement in response which was published 25 November (World Professional Association for Transgender Health et al., op. cit.), virtually every change made by the NHS draft service specification (NHS England Specialised Commissioning, op. cit.) is in a direction comprehensively demonstrated to increase the risk of suicide.10 Among the more significant such changes are:

    • “discourag[ing] social transition in pre-pubertal children” (WPATH et al., op. cit., s 6), even though denial of social transition is known to increase suicidal ideation (Pariseau et al., 2019);
    • “severely limit[ing] access to puberty suppression” (WPATH et al., op. cit., s 7), even though denial of access to puberty suppression is known to increase suicidal ideation (Rew et al., 2020; Turban et al., 2020);
    • refusing to “describe any process for provision of estrogen or testosterone therapies for older adolescents” (WPATH et al., op. cit., s 7), even though denial of access to HRT in adolescence is known to increase suicidal ideation over the remainder of the patient’s life (Turban et al., 2022);
    • a “‘psychotherapeutic’ approach, which was used for decades before being superseded by evidence-based gender-affirming care, [and] has not been shown to be effective” (WPATH et al., op. cit., s 9), even though the approach “is tantamount to ‘conversion’ or ‘reparative’ therapy” (ibid.), a form of torture (International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims, 2020) which is known to be linked to increased incidence of suicidal ideation and suicide attempt (Turban et al., 2019; Green et al., 2020).

    Once again, Barber’s statement is not a matter of opinion — scientific investigation has repeatedly and exhaustively shown it to be thoroughly factual in every way. News Corp’s decision to present it as simply a personal warning from one source spun heavily as dubious does not reflect a commitment to informing readers of the truth — but then again, that won’t be news to anyone.

    Closing

    I usually don’t bother wasting the effort required for a Several Problems on any News Corp outlet; “Never wrestle with a pig,” etc. (Quote Investigator, 2017). There’s basically no overlap between people who read my work and people who think News Corp is credible. This particular masthead is so well known for being toilet paper that there’s a local proverb (e.g., Page, 2016) and multiple songs about it: “Is it true, or did you read it in The Courier-Mail?” (e.g., Future Primitive, 2020; The Mangroves, 2022).

    However, I think it’s occasionally useful to check in on them and see how everything is going over there on the other side – see what shape the hate campaign is taking today. News Corp is suggesting trans people are fake, artificial, predatory, a danger to kids, backed by a doctors’ plot and a captured state. It’s not good news, nor is it surprising., but keeping track of the tropes can be useful in determining where fires are being set, why, how — and, ideally, for whom.

    Postscript

    If you thought this article was good or in any way useful — I’m honoured! I hope you will consider supporting my work via Ko-fi, Patreon, or PayPal so I can continue to sustain the absolutely obscene and unremitting expenses of remaining alive.

    If you thought this article was bad, please feel free to contact me at either of my two email addresses or any of my four million social media and messaging accounts. Annihilate me so that it will finally be over and I can finally rest.

    (You can also contact me if you thought it was good, or if you’d like to say hi.)


    Footnotes

    1 — “Original poster,” or “original post,” depending on context (e.g., the OP said in the OP …).

    2 — It really does! All exogenous hormones (i.e., hormones from outside the body — “hormone drugs,” if you will) currently standardised and widely used in gender-affirming care are bioidentical (i.e., exactly chemically identical to those produced by the body).

    3 — Self cite lmao, cringe

    4 — The maxim that “once you post transphobia you will never post normally again,” popularised by Alice Caldwell-Kelly (2020) of Trashfuture, who may have been quoting or summarising a remark by Trashfuture colleague Riley Quinn.

    5 — Gender-affirming medical or surgical treatments.

    6 — Transgender and gender-diverse.

    7 — I have both of these conditions and am therefore allowed to make this joke.

    8 — Competent according to the test stipulated in the UK House of Lords case Gillick v West Norfolk and Wisbech Area Health Authority [1986] AC 112, which was adopted into Australian law by Secretary, Department of Health and Community Services v JWB and SMB (1992) 175 CLR 2018 (“Marion’s case”).

    9 — 16 subjects “expressed transition-related regret or detransitioned,” which are, while intuitively clearly associated, not mutually inclusive.

    10 — Trans-eliminationists often claim that the data means nothing because it’s based on proxy parameters, typically suicide attempt and/or suicidal ideation. In doing so they’re seemingly relying on their audience not to realise that they’re saying “data about suicide doesn’t count unless you get it by interviewing people who are dead”.


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  • Several problems: “Contending views”

    Nov 24th, 2022

    Originally published 17 July 2022; migrated to website 24 November 2022.

    On or around 30 January 2019, in the Australian Greens Victoria, a paper titled Response to the paper circulated for the Workshop on Trans-Exclusionary Rhetoric (Gale & Vallins, 2019), was circulated by two members of the AGV State Council, Nina Vallins and Linda Gale. The paper is now typically referred to by a shorter title, Contending Views, of unknown provenance (that phrase never appears in the text).

    Contending Views has several problems. Here are a few.


    Content warning

    This article includes two direct quotations from allegations of sexual assault.


    Prologue

    Contending Views was a response to discussion and proposals surrounding a motion (“Proposal,” n.d.) which was moved at the AGV State Council that month, which called for a firmer stance against transphobia within the AGV.

    The core flaw of Contending Views — not particularly surprisingly, in hindsight — is that while it pays lip service to trans inclusion, at one point saying “women (including trans women),” it makes several assertions which are incomprehensible in that context.

    In particular, Contending Views‘ philosophical framework requires that:

    1. trans women are not women;
    2. trans women are men, or are, at the very least, not presumed innocent of — so to speak — the sins of men.

    I will highlight this in instances where it is clear and relevant.


    #1

    … the paper raises these issues [concerning trans-exclusionary rhetoric —Ed.] in a way which will inevitably provoke a vigorous internal debate which might be better addressed after the next1 Federal Election.

    Gale & Vallins (op. cit.)

    Off to a running start with this one.

    Contending Views does very pointedly make a show of objecting on the grounds of trans-agnostic issues like electoral tactics, State Council protocol, etc. However, most of its content is, in fact, engaging in the very debate that the authors claim to want to have not now, but later.

    Consequently, it reads less as, “I am concerned that this debate might genuinely impair the performance of the party at the election,” and more “let’s end this debate— which we’ll do by us having the last word,” and then responding to any objections with “No I WIN! I WIN! I WIN! I WIN—“

    #2

    If ‘woman’ is a category predicated entirely on a person’s subjective self-identification rather than on an objective, identifiable fact such as biology, what are the policy and practical implications for these hard-won sex-segregated spaces or sex-specific affirmative actions?

    Gale & Vallins (op. cit.)

    The issue here seems pretty obvious: “woman” (and for that matter, “man”) is already a “category predicated entirely on” subjective identification — just generally by others, not the self. For all practical social intents and purposes, biology does not come into it.

    Sure, a man might want to know whether the woman he wants to sleep with has a penis or a vagina. Nowadays, though, society generall and quite rightlyy avoids the thinking that Is she the right kind of woman for me to desire? and Is she the right kind of woman to be a woman? are the same question.

    A woman can use gendered amenities, like a women’s toilet, because she says she is a woman and no one disagrees. If her gender is contested, the most invasive verification which is widely considered permitted is asking her to produce ID — which itself is a statement by the government saying they consider her to be a woman.

    More invasive means of sex verification — such as groping someone, a violation to which both cis men and cis women regularly subject trans people — would be rightly considered sick and wrong if done to a cis person. It is telling that they only emerge where transphobia exists.

    Even in modern history, the fact that your gender is what you say it is has been, verifiably, broadly uncontroversial. “Chicks with dicks” was never a polite, respectful, or — for lack of a better word — politically correct term, but it conceptualised the people it described as chicks, dicks notwithstanding.

    This is also the paper’s first instance of “trans women aren’t women”. After all, if the authors believe trans women are women then they should have no problem admitting them to facilities which are for women; it wouldn’t be considered right to deny such admission to a cis woman. As the authors quickly make apparent, they are quite willing to fall down at that first hurdle.

    #3

    It raises serious practical social policy questions if any person who asserts ‘I am a woman’ is then without question to be granted access to women’s domestic violence shelters, women’s scholarships, and women’s change rooms.

    Gale & Vallins (op. cit.)

    Well, it might, if anyone were proposing that. Even cis women aren’t let into domestic violence (DV) shelters “without question” based on gender alone — not least because, while it isn’t known to happen anywhere near as often as cis men’s DV against cis women, it’s still entirely possible for a cis woman’s DV assailant to be a cis woman (DVConnect, n.d.).

    Admission to DV shelters has always been a matter of judgement by whoever controls admission. The proposition is that since women generally are admitted, women who are trans, being women, should be admitted under the same circumstances under which a cis woman would be admitted.

    Scholarships are comparable in that

    • they are also access-controlled by an authority with the ability to assess and determine good faith, and that
    • trans women, being women, should be able to access them under the same conditions as other women — not “without question”.

    The mention of change rooms is a different matter — not factually, but rhetorically. The reference to change rooms conventionally implies physical presence, nudity, and sexual vulnerability — but, of course, cis women are already vulnerable to sexual violence by other cis women in such places. For instance, relevant allegations have been levelled against vocal trans-exterminationist Lily Cade:

    Lily Cade assaulted me at my very first Xbiz awards in a bathroom stall directly after assaulting another girl in another bathroom stall.

    Summers (2017)

    [Cade] assaulted me on a party bus in front of a bunch of porn people. I went along with it so it would stop sooner and be less embarrassing. But she ruined my first exxxotica and i cringe every time i see her

    Hill (2017)

    It cannot “raise serious practical social policy questions” to admit women to a space for women. If the authors believe that admitting trans women raises such questions then the authors cannot believe that trans women are women. The question is what they believe them to be.

    The choice to invoke sexual vulnerability makes the answer pretty clear. Current dominant culture promotes an instinctive understanding that sexual violence is characteristic of men. By implying that allowing trans women in a space puts cis women at risk of sexual violence, the authors imply that trans women are men.

    Incidentally, while the other venues mentioned here haven’t been studied, there is no evidence that acknowledging that trans people can use the correct amenities for their gender makes anyone less safe (Barnett et al., 2018). There is, however, plenty of evidence that not acknowledging trans people’s right to use the correct amenities subjects them to more harassment and, indeed, sexual violence (e.g., National Center for Transgender Equality, 2015); this predates Contending Views but I can only assume it didn’t reach the authors.

    #4

    What does it mean for evidence-based policy if we record acts of violence committed by trans women as violence perpetrated by a female person?

    Gale & Vallins (op. cit.)

    It means our policy can be based on more accurate evidence, because we acknowledge violence by women as violence by women.

    I admittedly find it a bit ironic that I’m reviewing this one, as the daughter of an entirely cis woman with a propensity for domestic battery, violent home invasion, and attempted murder. Women, cis and trans, are morally and often physically equally able to do harm.

    This is incidentally obviously another case of “trans women are men”. Violence generally, like sexual violence, is the subject of a (not inaccurate!) dominant-culture understanding that it is usually male. Trans women could only affect “evidence-based policy” by contaminating women’s “evidence base” with a residual male propensity to do harm.

    As with the other implications here, I am not aware of any evidence that trans women are more violent than cis women — but I am aware that they are vastly more likely to be made victims (UCLA Williams Institute, 2021).

    #5

    Should a man who has been convicted and incarcerated for sexual crimes against women be able, by asserting that they are now a woman, to therefore be housed in a female prison?

    Gale & Vallins (op. cit.)

    This is obviously another case of “trans women are men,” which the use of singular “they” does nothing to blunt — “they” is a word which cis people of all stripes are liable to abruptly discover if the alternative is calling a trans woman “she”.

    In this case, the “trans women are men” isn’t entirely in the choice to invoke the (again, for this purpose, characteristically male) “sexual crimes” — it’s also in the deliberate construction of the hypothetical trans woman as simply “a man … asserting that they are now a woman,” reducing her womanhood to nothing more than a series of words.

    The answer to the underlying question is, of course — accepting for the sake of argument, and wrongly, that prisons should exist — that prisons that confine women confine cis women even if they committed “sexual crimes”; trans women being women, they should confine them too.

    There is incidentally an inline citation in the document at this point to a “prison review” by UK trans-eliminationist group Fair Play for Women (FPFW). The review (Fair Play For Women, 2018) is, to put not too fine a point on it, bullshit, and it doesn’t make any particularly careful attempt to appear not to be.

    The short version is that the review asserts trans women are much more violent, and to make its claim, it exploits a quirk in British Ministry of Justice (MoJ) administration meaning that the only trans women whose genders are recorded are those convicted of particularly severe crimes (Harris, 2016).

    To be crudely reductive: it’s much as if the MoJ had limited the registration of trans womanhood to prisoners convicted of murder and rape, and then FPFW had claimed 100% of all transfem prisoners were murderers or rapists. What the MoJ actually did, and what FPFW actually claimed, are only slightly diluted versions of this.

    #6

    Is it OK for lesbian women to prefer that their sexual partners have female anatomy, or is this transphobic and should they be encouraged to welcome sexual relationships with people with penises who identify as women?

    Gale & Vallins (op. cit.)

    Hoo boy.

    Now, to start with, this rather unkindly assumes that cis women can’t get phalloplasty. Personally I think they should be able to if they want.

    More seriously, what’s actually going on here is an intentional misrepresentation of the concept of the cotton ceiling. The core of the cotton ceiling concept is: If you find someone romantically and sexually attractive, but then you immediately stop finding them attractive because you found out they were trans, then there may be a degree of prejudice there that you need to examine.

    The assertion has never been “… so therefore cis women are obliged to sleep with trans women”. You can’t litigate someone into having to fuck you, and if anyone genuinely thinks you can, then that person is not a safe person in any place, at any time.

    Moreover, the fact that the core proposition of the “cotton ceiling” concept is true is immediately clear. For example, I might refuse to sleep with neurodivergent (ND) people on the grounds that they’re all speds2 who can’t consent (I’m ND and have been called a sped for it, hence why I picked this example).

    If I were this bizarrely ableist person, then nobody would be entitled to force me to sleep with an ND person. However, even if I treated ND people with perfect civility in other ways, my position on romance and sexuality would still clearly be bizarrely ableist. “Cotton ceiling” means no more and no less than this.

    Tangentially, TERFs like to claim “cotton” refers to cis women’s panties that trans women are unable to break into. The truth is, as usual with TERFs, the opposite — “cotton” refers to trans women’s panties and the fact that what’s stereotypically in them causes trans women to be defined in ways they are unable to break out of. This becomes really obvious when you consider that the “x ceiling” snowclone describes something which people unsuccessfully try to break through from beneath it, i.e., inside it — compare “service ceiling,” the highest altitude at which a given aircraft is usable. Nobody is trying to get to the glass ceiling from the emergency door on the roof.

    The framing here also neatly erases the fact that plenty of lesbian cis women do have sexual and romantic relationships with trans women, who, as women, fall within the normal scope of their attractions. Much as with the few (the proud?) cis women who are violent assailants, the authors require the nonexistence of: those cis lesbians; their relationships; the girlness of their girlfriends.

    And, of course, there’s another round of “trans women are not women” — this paragraph describes them as simply “people with penises who identify as women,” which in this case is not just reducing them to words but (that old TERF favourite) reducing them to reproductive organs. Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think (Morissette, 1996)?

    #7

    Should a beautician be able to specify that she serves a female clientele only, and then be forced to wax the testicles of a person who now identifies as a woman [GenderTrender, 2018]?

    Gale & Vallins (op. cit.); citation in source

    As the inline citation makes clear, this is a reference to Canadian woman Jessica Yaniv.

    Through 2018 and 2019 — relatively recent at the time of Contending Views — Yaniv filed 15 complaints of anti-trans discrimination with the Human Rights Tribunal of the Canadian province of British Columbia, naming various beauty practitioners who, or whose staff, were not trained to wax her testicles, and accordingly refused (Larsen, 2019).

    The issue is, of course, that Yaniv cannot be legitimately treated as representative for one very simple reason: she didn’t actually want her genitals waxed. The tribunal found — in my opinion credibly — that Yaniv was looking for an excuse to litigate, for cruel amusement and financial gain (Little, 2019; Macnab, 2019; Stueck, 2019).

    Moreover, Yaniv, as well as a manipulative sadist, was a racist and arguably a fascist; her targets were all of Indian origin. This appears to be because she agreed with a variant form of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory; while the Anglophone classical form of Great Replacement theory blames Jews (Jones D., 2022), Yaniv appeared to blame Indian people as well, or instead (Wakefield, 2019).

    Beyond all of our laws and conventions, society unavoidably operates on a degree of good faith. There is no way to construct a hard-and-fast rule such that someone who wanted to abuse it could never find a way to do so. Yaniv wanted to do so.

    We are going to eventually need to hammer out a solid logic allowing trans women with penises to get genital waxing services under the same circumstances where it is allowable for other women (e.g., cis women, and trans women with vaginas) and other people with penises (e.g., cis men and some nonbinary people). It’s not priority 1 on the trans agenda, but it’s in there.

    In the meantime, however, if a sadistic racist trans women decides to harm racialised people, the problem is not that she’s a trans woman, it’s that she’s a sadistic racist. Fair enough though — the curse of being a TERF is, as many have observed (Clifton, 2021; Lavin, 2021; Doyle, 2022; etc.), you’re not allowed to condemn sadistic racists because they make up too many of your core constituents.

    #8

    Should doctors refrain from inquiring as to a person’s sex, even though we know that people experience some diseases differently depending on their biological sex, and respond differently to some pharmaceuticals?

    Gale & Vallins (op. cit.)

    This is my wheelhouse, so I’m gonna help myself to the wheel.

    “Biological sex” insofar as it is relevant to disease experiences and drug response is not a monolith. For instance, an archetypal trans woman has an endocrine system in which the dominant sex hormone(s) are estrogen and possibly progesterone with minimal testosterone (e.g., Hembree et al., 2017; Cheung et al., 2019), one result of which is that she likely has relatively prominent breasts. For all but an infinitesimal proportion of cis men (Shulman et al., 2008; Shozu et al., 2014), these things are not both (or all) true.

    For these reasons, trans women broadly have a lifetime risk of breast cancer which is closer to that of cis women than cis men — for every 10 cis women who develop breast cancer, about 4 trans women will develop it, but for every 1 cis man who develops breast cancer, about 46 trans women will develop it (de Blok et al., 2019). Indeed, this specific fact is currently used as an excuse to deny trans women progesterone (Prior, 2019), and has historically been used as an excuse to deny them any hormones at all — for a broader discussion of this kind of thinking and its impact, see Nelson (2019).

    On the other hand, a trans woman has a prostate and therefore has a vanishingly small (but non-zero!) chance of developing cancer in it (Ingham et al., 2018). This would seem to be a slam-dunk in favour of the Trans Women as Essentially Men thesis … except that cis women also have prostates — historically euphemistically referred to as the Skene’s gland — and are fully capable of developing cancer in them (Dodson et al., 1994).

    Similarly, there are many congenital disorders which have a much higher clinically visible prevalence (i.e., are much more often severe enough for you to know they’re there) in one assigned-sex group (typically, they are much more often clinically observable in cis women than cis men).

    The thing is that trans people switch over as they transition. For example, sex hormones including estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone are known to influence the symptomatic severity of Ehlers–Danlos syndrome/s (EDS), by causing changes in ligament laxity, chance of and healing of muscle injuries, etc. (Gensemer et al., 2021).

    The nature of the influence is such that people with estrogen/progesterone-dominant endocrine systems seemingly tend to have worse EDS, and, accordingly, among cis people, cis women are more frequently diagnosed with it at a ratio of about 4 cis women to every 1 cis man (Castori et al., 2010; Hermanns-Lê et al., 2016; etc.).

    One small case series (Boris et al., 2019) and a mountain of community-sourced anecdotal evidence indicates that HRT does indeed worsen or improve EDS and related complex chronic illnesses, depending on which HRT is taken; the evidence (ibid.) and community reports suggest that masculinising HRT makes it better, and community reports suggest that feminising HRT makes it worse.

    Along the same lines, migraine is sex-linked; thus, as Jones Z. (2021) notes, as the “sex-determining” characteristics of trans women’s bodies change — in effect, as their sex changes — they develop a correspondingly greater propensity to migraine.

    I can personally verify that both of these things are true because the hypothetical overly flexible transmigraineuse of the previous two paragraphs is me, which is why I picked those conditions to examine here. I’m definitely not the only one; at least one study (n = 1,363) suggests that the prevalence of EDS among trans people is more than 100× (!!!) that in the general population (Najafian et al., 2022). In the end, the reality is obviously that:

    1. doctors do need to know about a trans person’s traditionally “sexed” characteristics;
    2. the trans person is going to tell them that because it’s necessary to do so in order to get well, and suffering fucking sucks;
    3. this has zero impact on whether that trans person is the man, woman, etc., that they in fact are.

    #9

    It is essential that we support trans women to have safe spaces which address the violence they experience while still allowing women to have their own safe spaces.

    Gale & Vallins (op. cit.)

    Which trans women will also be allowed into, right, because the authors recognise that trans women are women, right? … What’s that chirping noise?

    This is separate-but-equal rhetoric, which, as hegemonic white supremacy made clear at Black people’s expense throughout the first half of the 20th century, is nothing more than a way to force marginalised people into facilities which are nowhere near equal, if they exist at all.

    Being trans is not comparable to being Black. However, similarly-motivated and similarly-structured anti-minoritarian thinking, from many of the same authorities, underpins the authors’ rhetoric. It also underpins actions like the FINA, British Triathlon, etc., “open” category push which was current at the initial publication of this article (Evans, 2022; Ingle, 2022; George, 2022): it’s a way to force trans people to fuck off out of public life, while finding a convenient pretext to avoid accepting any blame for having forced that.

    #10

    Both trans women and women deserve to be safe; but in a world in which women’s concerns have been designated inferior to men’s for many centuries, we should not easily give up sex-specific spaces and opportunities for women.

    Gale & Vallins (op. cit.)

    And as the authors recognise that trans women are women, they shouldn’t have to give up sex-specific spaces and opportunities for women either, right?

    Of course, in appealing implicitly to the scarcity of “sex-specific spaces and opportunities,” the authors also conveniently elide the fact that trans men exist, and about as many of them in absolute terms want to transition as do trans women (Leinung & Joseph, 2020), which should neatly balance out any transfem-related addition to demand.

    There’s no really viable argument here that trans women being able to access these facilities somehow makes cis women less able to do so. However much digging one does, the only throughline here that one can dig up is that trans women have a “male essence” that means they deserve those opportunities less.

    #11

    If women are now no longer able to publicly acknowledge that an adult human male is a man, …

    Yardley (2018), quoted in Gale & Vallins (op. cit.)

    Oh well, so much for “women (including trans women),” mask predictably all the way off,4 yada yada (I don’t have enough energy right now to feign surprise).

    #12

    … this takes away from women the ability to describe their own lived lives:

    Yardley (op. cit.), quoted in Gale & Vallins (op. cit.)

    It’s not clear how a cis woman is less able to describe her own life if she is expected to acknowledge that another woman is a woman.

    #13

    … they can no longer use meaningful language to describe their interactions with members of the dominant sex class:

    Yardley (op. cit.), quoted in Gale & Vallins (op. cit.)

    This is interesting. Obviously the argument here is that:

    • “man” and “woman” are “sex classes” (we’ll go with it);
    • “man” is the dominant sex class;
    • trans women are men;
    • thus, including trans women in the class “woman” prevents that class from being rigorously defined and makes it meaningless.

    We do know men are given dominance in society, but the question here is why. Is it their physiology? Is it their testosterone, their muscle mass? If so, it’s difficult to see how trans women can inherit that dominance when they generally have the same amount of testosterone as cis women (Hembree et al., op. cit.), and cis-female-range proportions of lean and fat mass and muscle when controlling for height (Nokoff et al., 2019).

    The other obvious possibility is that it’s socioeconomic dominance, but it’s difficult to see how. Cis women are famously paid almost 20% less than cis men (Vandenbroek, 2020) — but trans people are paid even less than that, with trans women paid least of all (Wareham, 2021).

    Cis women are discriminated against in employment. Statistically they appear to be less discriminated against than trans people, and there are laws against discriminating against women — there was a whole movie about this! — whose applicability to cis women has never been contested since their enactment.

    Meanwhile, trans people can often legally be fired specifically for being trans; as Gillespie (2022) notes, the Anti-Discrimination Act 1991 (Qld) s 28(1)(b) explicitly allows employment discrimination against trans people engaged in “the care or instruction of minors” because the “physical, psychological or emotional wellbeing of [those] minors” might be endangered by the mere fact that the person is trans.

    The only way this societal “dominance” can somehow attach to trans women is by making a magical, metaphysical claim about their essence. Sure, they might be socioeconomically subordinate in every respect that cis women are, and some extra ones for the road, but they have an indelibly dominant inborn magical sex spirit, so dominant they must be.

    #14

    Women lose the language and ability to describe themselves even as women;

    Yardley (op. cit.), quoted in Gale & Vallins (op. cit.)

    This would be slightly more effective in context if Gale & Vallins, who included this quote, hadn’t described themselves as women in literally the paragraph prior to the beginning of the quote. After all, you can only give up something you have possession of, and:

    … we should not easily give up sex-specific spaces and opportunities for women.

    Gale & Vallins (op. cit.)

    It seems pretty clear that there is no case here to answer.

    #15

    Women lose the language, right and ability to describe the perpetrators and acts of sexual violence;

    Yardley (op. cit), quoted in Gale & Vallins (op. cit.)

    It’s unclear how having to describe a sexually violent trans woman as a woman takes away the ability to describe her — unless you believe that being a woman and being sexually violent are fundamentally incompatible, i.e., you believe that women cannot commit sexual violence.

    While sexual violence by cis women, as a category of acts, happens nowhere near as often and is nowhere near as systematic as the patriarchal sexual violence enacted by cis men, it demonstrably does happen (Stemple & Meyer, 2017). This line of argument needs it to be existentially impossible: to have never happened, not once, ever. This is clearly untrue and therefore unviable.

    #16

    Women lose the right to challenge the sexual enslavement and exploitation of members of their own sex class.

    Yardley (op. cit.), quoted in Gale & Vallins (op. cit.)

    Oh, cool, trans exclusion and vaguely coded sex worker exclusion in the same strike. Spinifex Press would be proud.

    Sex work is work, and continues to exist despite millennia of attempts to squash it. It’s criminalised and therefore marginalised work, but all that that actually achieves is denying safeguards, options, and justice to those engaged in it (Global Network of Sex Work Projects, 2017). Sex work can become enslavement and exploitation because its being pushed to the margins means society can pretend not to see it, and therefore pretend they don’t notice what happens to those engaged in it (Vanwesenbeeck, 2017).

    The fact is that regardless of their own views on the morality of the abstract concept of sex work, or of how it exists in reality, many people end up having to do sex work anyway. Due to their economic marginalisation, trans people — very much including trans women (Mock, 2014; Logie et al., 2017; Fisher et al., 2021)! — are among those people. If, by quoting Yardley, the authors are indicating they won’t advocate for sex workers because the ranks of sex workers include trans women … well, that’s on them.

    #17

    We are in a world of proscribed truth and compelled thought. Whatever your political stance, this should strike you cold with terror.

    Yardley (op. cit.), quoted in Gale & Vallins (op. cit.)

    This is transparently not even vaguely true. Trans advocacy doesn’t make claims on “truth” or “thought”; it seeks material action. The fact that trans men are men and trans women are men, which has been validated by every test science has applied, justifies trans advocacy. However, the point of that advocacy isn’t to impose belief in that fact; it’s to get you to stop being a horrible little bastard to trans people.

    This was, however, 2019, and this argument was new in this country back then so I suppose I can’t fault the authors for being fashion forward. Before them, the most recent people to argue it were Katter’s Australian Party (Hirst, 2018), who very obviously got it from Jordan Peterson (Beauchamp, 2018). Nominal eco-liberals and social-democrats borrowing from the open Christofascists of the KAP — does this prove horseshoe theory correct at last … ?

    #18

    Further, it is a central tenet of much feminist theory that the very concept of gender is harmful and should be rejected in its entirety.

    Gale & Vallins (op. cit.)

    This is a neat little bit of sleight-of-hand designed to slip past the theoretical knowledge of the informed feminist reader.

    The “feminist theory” to which the authors refer is the mainline second-wave radical feminism of which TERFism is a mutation, in which gender is what the authors call “assumptions about … gender characteristics attributed to [one’s] … sex”.

    The authors, however — and the TERF tendency in general — perform a magic trick by pretending that this is the same thing that trans people mean when they discuss gender, when what trans people mean is approximately “the state of being a man, a woman, or of another gender”.

    In short, the authors are pretending that when a trans woman says she’s a woman, she’s actually expressing the view that all women are housewives or supermodels or what have you, and asserting that she’s one of those — when she is in fact just pointing out that she’s a woman. Trans readers may very well be particularly nettled by this, since they know that when a trans woman isn’t a supermodel housewife, these same TERFs use precisely that to pretend she’s not a woman.

    #19

    In this context, we should be able to challenge the choices of many women (including trans women) to present themselves in highly ‘feminised’ (gendered) ways.

    Gale & Vallins (op. cit.)

    In the first place, this is blatantly just leveraging stereotypes about trans women, namely that they’re all unconvincing patriarchal caricatures of traditionalist hyperfemininity — think Emily Howard from Little Britain (Plowman & Moore, 2003–2006): “I’m a lady!”.

    In reality, trans women just present themselves like other women. There is, however, a kernel of truth here, albeit a distorted and mirrored one: trans women are subjected to an enforced expectation of hyperfemininity, but the people enforcing that expectation are those who ideologically agree with the authors of this letter.

    In the second place, this is directly antithetical to the bodily autonomy which is an essential underpinning of feminist and leftist politics (Perry, 2017; Letzing, 2022). Why should Gale & Vallins be able to “challenge the choices of” any woman “to present [herself]” in any way? It’s not their fucking body.

    #20

    If the purpose of this workshop is to develop a proposal for a Sate Council decree that statements such as ‘There are two sexes,’ ‘The science is not conclusive,’ ‘This is an active debate in feminism,’ ‘Shutting down debate is censorship,’ or ‘Trans women aren’t the same as biological women,’ are banned within the Greens and would constitute behaviour worthy of censure, suspension or expulsion, this is totally contrary to a Greens ethos which encourages robust debate and the development of policy based on real evidence.

    Gale & Vallins (op. cit.)

    “There are two sexes” is not “based on real evidence”. Sex is a bimodal distribution; it has two peaks that it slopes up to. The fact that most people fit on the slopes of one of those peaks isn’t contested. This doesn’t mean — as the proposition “there are two sexes” requires — that every other contour on the map is flattened out (Novella, 2022).

    Even if trans people didn’t exist, if you think that sex is a clean binary, and that intersex people are deviations from that binary, then you can’t adequately serve intersex people who know themselves to be complete and not deviating from anything at all; you can’t respect them for who they actually are (McDonough, 2022).

    There’s no good reason to say “the science is not conclusive,” because good science can never be completely, eternally, invincibly conclusive; it always has to be open to change. The function of saying “the science is not conclusive” is to say that action can’t be taken because a specific point does not have literal 100% agreement, knowing full well that it is bound to never rise above 99.999…%.

    In reality, action is justified if a consensus exists that it should be taken. Given that the authors were AGV State Councillors at the time, I — a former Queensland Greens State Council delegate myself — suspect they were very familiar with that principle indeed; Greens decision-making is extremely heavily consensus-based.

    Despite attempts to rig it, such as Lisa Littman’s 2018 paper which spuriously proposed a “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” that was essentially “transgender because it’s cool” (Littman, 2018) — later shown at length to be complete bullshit (Bauer et al., 2021; Turban et al., 2022) — consensus exists on the proper treatment and accommodation of trans people to a degree which almost no other topic enjoys, with 93% of primary research publications between 1991 and June 2017 finding that transition improves well-being, and 0% finding that it causes harm (What We Know Project, 2018). The scientific consensus on human-caused climate change, which is a couple of points ahead at >99% (Lynas et al., 2021), is the only other well-known field of scientific endeavour whose core question has been so firmly answered.

    In asserting that it’s valuable to say “the science is not conclusive” and it should not be a forbidden thing to say, here is what the authors are communicating: you must defer action which is supported by all of the evidence, because at some point in the future, an additional piece of evidence might be added that would cause the sum of human knowledge to pull a 180°. This is clearly ludicrous and not worth bothering with.

    “This is an active debate in feminism”? Objectively it is not. TERFism is a residue of the second wave of feminism. Modern third- and fourth-wave feminism have consistently considered trans liberation to be integral to the feminist movement (Grady, 2018).

    There could not be a more telling sign of this than that the very same “feminists” who represent the authors’ views have opted to cling onto existence by selling any legitimacy to groups like the Australian Christian Lobby (“Radical feminists … ?”, 2017) and the Heritage Foundation (Fitzsimons, 2019), which make absolutely no bones about considering the whole feminist movement their enemy (Shields, 2014; Whitehall, 2018; Iles, 2020; Hafera, 2021).

    “Shutting down debate is censorship” is an old chestnut, the only purpose of which is to make it okay to incessantly and in bad faith invite someone to engage in debate and make free inferences if they refuse. It’s designed to normalise bombarding people, talking over them, and wearing them down; it’s not designed to make it any easier to seek the truth.

    “Trans women aren’t the same as biological women” … well, trans women are biological women, so jot that down. Trans women aren’t the same as cis women, though, and nobody’s ever asserted that they are; simply that they are women, which they are.

    This, more than anything else, illustrates that the authors both have no genuine commitment to debate and are fully aware that they don’t. This is noticeable because it’s a response to an element in the original motion: “Trans women aren’t the same as cis women”. We’ll come back to this in a sec.

    When discussing legitimate debate, insofar as that’s a thing, we talk about “the terms of the debate,” like “the terms of an agreement,” because any actual debate has to be conducted on a common set of terms. Any debate not conducted in that way is posturing followed eventually by random noise.

    The term “cis women” acknowledges cis women and trans women on an equal footing, and thus equally entitled to negotiate the terms on which debate should take place. This enables the debate to be a dialectic: a dialogue with the objective of finding truth.

    The term “biological woman” is an appeal to a subset of essentialism known as biologism. Essentialism asserts that entities, usually people, are different from each other because of a difference in what they fundamentally, metaphysically, essentially are — a difference in their essences. Gender essentialism is the assertion of such a difference between, typically, (all) men and (all) women (Abrams, 2020).

    Historically, while belief in a physically existing soul remained widespread — up to and even after the development of the modern scientific method in its basic form — scientists and other professionals charged with truth-seeking tried to find the physical soul, e.g., by looking for changes in body mass on death (MacDougall, 1907). They also tried to find its seat, the physical place in the body where it resided; for instance, Leonardo da Vinci hypothesised, quite sensibly given what was known, that it was in the optic chiasm, the junction of the optic nerves (Santoro et al., 2009).

    One school of essentialist claims amounts to “finding the seat of the soul,” but for “soul” substitute the “essence” of whatever difference is at issue. Biologism is the faction of that school which locates the essence in the “biology” (typically not more specifically defined, at least not in any rigorous way). Gender-essentialist biologism asserts that cis women have the Female Biology, they carry the Female Essence, and that makes them the Real Women (Grosz, 1989). It establishes a hierarchy of womanhood legitimacy, with trans women all the way at the bottom.

    This makes it impossible to have a debate which seeks truth, because Alice can’t advance or refine her position through “legitimate debate” with Bob when Bob believes that the mere fact that Alice holds that position means that Alice by definition does not have a legitimate right to debate.

    A second ago we noted that the authors were responding to a line in the original motion. However, they also changed it, deleting the original “cis women” and substituting “biological women”. Their belief that their opponents had no legitimate standing to debate them was so strong that they felt free to literally reword a direct quote — they considered themselves legitimately able to define what their opponents’ position was, to the point of overriding those opponents themselves.

    There is no reason to believe that truth-seeking debate would ever have been possible here — and none to believe that Gale or Vallins wanted it.

    Closing

    This article took me hours to write as a Twitter thread, and a couple of days to redraft as a WordPress post. It was one of the longer pieces I’d written, because it was one of the more conceptually dense works I’d had to analyse. Conceptual density is fine here — the authors were writing in the context of party internal politics, meaning they knew that baseline knowledge and acceptance of certain concepts was a given and that their audience spoke or at least understood their language.

    The conceptual density and specialised language gives the impression, however, that this is somehow intellectually, discursively, of a better or higher quality than any of the News Corp or Ninefax op-eds which even at that time had already reared their ugly heads. It didn’t. It made it more of a pain in the arse to pull apart, but it didn’t make it any closer to being right.


    Footnotes

    1. The 2019 federal election, the date of which hadn’t been confirmed when Contending Views was written (see Fernando & Palin, 2019).
    2. An insulting term for neurodivergent people, a portmanteau of “special education”.
    3. “An excuse” because it’s spurious — “limited epidemiologic data generally do not show an association of circulating progesterone levels with risk” (Trabert et al., 2019).
    4. This was early 2019 so, on further reflection, it may not be fair to criticise their less-than-ideal mask discipline.

    If this article was in any way useful to you, please consider supporting me on Ko-fi, on Patreon, or by PayPal.


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  • Twitterdämmerung: “That’s not how this works”

    Nov 14th, 2022

    The following text was written by Riana Pfefferkorn as a Twitter thread on her account @Riana_Crypto and was originally published on 10 November 2022, 16:13–16:32 UTC.


    SCOOP from @alexeheath: Twitter’s chief privacy officer, chief compliance officer, and chief information security officer have all quit. Internal note warns that violating FTC privacy settlement could destroy the company but Elon doesn’t seem to care.

    Nilay Patel (2022), citation pending

    That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.

    (Disclosure: I used to be Twitter’s outside counsel, and I spent some time on loan from my firm to the in-house legal team in 2014. But I have little personal knowledge and no privileged info about their security controls.)

    As this story shows, the world’s richest man “does not experience human concerns,” per @edzitron1,2 (cf. @greatdismal:3 “The exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”4) Consequences, like taxes, are for the little people. (h/t @bhpascal5)

    Normal companies have security & privacy controls and care about legal compliance. But this is not normal — that’s what has people worried. The Chief Twit’s track record shows “but that’s illegal” isn’t usually a persuasive argument. So too here.

    In 2011, Twitter agreed to a 20-year FTC consent order over its data security practices. In May, FTC fined Twitter $150MM for violating the 2011 orders & issued a modified order.6 If Twitter so much as sneezes, it has to do a privacy review beforehand.

    There are periodic outside audits, and the FTC can monitor compliance.

    Per the order, a small team of senior execs is on the hook for making privacy & security decisions, which are legally binding on the company. And a senior officer has to certify compliance with the order annually to the FTC. This “everyone must self-certify” thing is nonsense.

    Designation of a senior officer, or senior level team composed of no more than five (5) persons, to be responsible for any decision to collect, maintain, use, disclose, or provide access to the Covered Information; […]

    Citation pending

    Dollars to donuts, that small team mandated by the FTC order = all the people who just quit.

    Respondent must submit a compliance notice, sworn under penalty of perjury, within fourteen (14) days of any change in the following: (1) any designated point of contact; (2) the structure of Respondent or any entity that Respondent has any ownership interest in or controls directly or indirectly that may affect compliance obligations arising under this Order, including: creation, merger, sale, or dissolution of the entity or any subsidiary, parent, or affiliate that engages in any acts or practices subject to this Order; (3) the filing of any bankruptcy petition, insolvency proceeding, or similar proceeding by or against Respondent.

    Citation pending

    Under the May order, the FTC can demand additional compliance reports, documents, & info from Twitter, and can interview employees if they agree to an interview. Hiding information from the FTC is a federal crime: just ask Joe Sullivan.

    There’s already been one Twitter whistleblower. I bet there’ll be more, if people are quitting/getting fired because they’re being asked to do illegal stuff. Maybe they’ll whistle-blow even before he can bring in people from his other companies to do what they wouldn’t.

    Here’s the thing: Why would anyone take the fall for him?! This isn’t the mob. Some executives would definitely face personal liability for illegal acts. I don’t know about lower-level employees (maybe @Popehat7 knows). After Joe Sullivan, I bet folks won’t feel like finding out.

    I totally believe he doesn’t care about any FTC order, and wouldn’t hesitate to violate it even if it bound him personally (like the FTC Drizly order8). He’s shown he’s not afraid of the SEC. But regular mortals do worry about jail and lawsuits.

    And he needs regular mortals. Technical, legal and (perhaps most important) human layers add friction and make it harder — not impossible, harder — for Twitter to do 10 illegal things before breakfast. At least not without the FTC & maybe Congress finding out.

    He’s the boss, but he’s not a god. His whims are not self-executing. Nobody in their right mind will be like “yeah, sure, I’ll self-certify to FTC compliance, I’ll FAFO9 whether I’ll get investigated for perjury.” Even in a tech recession with jobs scarce: He just ain’t worth it.


    Footnotes

    1. Ed Zitron, writer and public relations consultant.
    2. Zitron (2022).
    3. William Gibson (b. 1948), essayist and science fiction writer.
    4. Gibson (1986).
    5. Brian H. Pascal, non-residential fellow at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.
    6. In re Twitter, Inc. (2022).
    7. Popehat, a law-oriented blog; in this case, its primary contributor, Ken White, a criminal justice and First Amendment attorney based in Los Angeles, California.
    8. In re Drizly, LLC (2022).
    9. Fuck around and find out.

    References

    Gibson, W.F. (1986). Count zero. Victor Gollancz Ltd.

    In re Drizly, LLC (FTC, 24 October 2022).

    In re Twitter, Inc., C-4316 (FTC, 26 May 2022).

    Pfefferkorn, R. [@Riana_Crypto]. (2022, November 11). That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works. [Quote Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Pfefferkorn, R. [@Riana_Crypto]. (2022, November 11). Disclosure: I used to be Twitter’s outside counsel, and I spent some time on loan from my firm to the … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Pfefferkorn, R. [@Riana_Crypto]. (2022, November 11). As this story shows, the world’s richest man “does not experience human concerns,” per @edzitron (cf @greatdismal: “The exceedingly rich … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Pfefferkorn, R. [@Riana_Crypto]. (2022, November 11). Normal companies have security & privacy controls and care about legal compliance. But this is not normal — that’s what has … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Pfefferkorn, R. [@Riana_Crypto] (2022, November 11). In 2011, Twitter agreed to a 20-year FTC consent order over its data security practices. In May, FTC fined … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Pfefferkorn, R. [@Riana_Crypto] (2022, November 11). There are periodic outside audits, and the FTC can monitor compliance. ftc.gov/system/files/f… [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Pfefferkorn, R. [@Riana_Crypto] (2022, November 11). Per the order, a small team of senior execs is on the hook for making privacy & security decisions, which … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Pfefferkorn, R. [@Riana_Crypto] (2022, November 11). Dollars to donuts, that small team mandated by the FTC order = all the people who just quit. [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Pfefferkorn, R. [@Riana_Crypto] (2022, November 11). So, here we are, they’re violating the FTC order already. Twitter has a compliance notice due to the FTC *TODAY* … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Pfefferkorn, R. [@Riana_Crypto] (2022, November 11). Under the May order, the FTC can demand additional compliance reports, documents, & info from Twitter, and can interview employees … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Pfefferkorn, R. [@Riana_Crypto] (2022, November 11). There’s already been one Twitter whistleblower. I bet there’ll be more, if people are quitting/getting fired because they’re being … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Pfefferkorn, R. [@Riana_Crypto] (2022, November 11). Here’s the thing: Why would anyone take the fall for him?! This isn’t the mob. Some execs would def face … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Pfefferkorn, R. [@Riana_Crypto] (2022, November 11). I totally believe he doesn’t care about any FTC order, and wouldn’t hesitate to violate it even if it bound … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Pfefferkorn, R. [@Riana_Crypto] (2022, November 11). And he needs regular mortals. Technical, legal, and (perhaps most important) human layers add friction and make it harder – not … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Pfefferkorn, R. [@Riana_Crypto] (2022, November 11). He’s the boss, but he’s not a god. His whims are not self-executing. Nobody in their right mind will be … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Zitron, E. (2022, November 5). Billionaire brain damage. Where’s Your Ed At (via Substack). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

  • Twitterdämmerung: “Twitter is already slowly breaking”

    Nov 14th, 2022

    The following text was written by Hector Martin as a Twitter thread on his account @marcan42 and was originally published on 13 November 2022, 07:16–07:25 UTC.

    With Mr Martin’s permission, I have reproduced it here as a single blog entry, for easier reading and more durable citation. Incidentally, he has both a GitHub Sponsors page and a Patreon.

    Superscript numbers are footnotes. Subscript letters are Martin’s Tweet boundaries; subscript a points to the reference list entry which would usually be cited as (Martin, 2022a), for instance.


    Scoop from within Twitter: small things are breaking, not enough engineers to fix them.

    Noticed that notification counts are not showing? The BE1 service powering it is down since Thursday. A bug was filed, but the team that would fix it is full on with verification work.

    Gergely Orosz, 2022, citation pending

    Twitter is already slowly breaking, and it’s only going to get worse.

    He says that Twitter was built to be resilient, and that means the core features will continue working even with a reduced workforce.

    As a former SRE,2 I disagree with that conclusion.a

    All large services and platforms are “built to be resilient”. But they are also extremely complicated, with countless internal interactions between microservices, configuration systems, load balancing and directing subsystems, networking fabrics, and more.b

    These systems are built to be reliable in the face of things like machine failures, or entire optional microservices going down. That’s not what will take Twitter down. Twitter will crash and burn when a complex interaction between systems goes wrong and causes a cascade failure.c

    Cascade failures are caused when a small failure within a system has secondary effects on other systems, and the systems in charge of keeping everything up end up taking everything down instead.d

    There are many ways this can happen. For example, you can have a “packet of death” — some data that causes a system to crash. If the data is being delivered repeatedly, or stored persistently, it can cause anything that tries to process it to crash or hang.e

    This doesn’t have to be an exploit or externally malicious data. It can just be a circumstance that the design never accounted for. Or simply random corruption. Or any number of things.f

    I once had one of those at Google. A pipeline from a downstream team kept crashing because it was trying to process bad data that had come in via a system my team was in charge of. The data had the right format but the wrong shape.g

    After digging through forensic logs I figured out what had happened was that a machine had kernel panicked, which had left unwritten filesystem blocks in a log file (Google ran without local data FS journaling at the time), and those stale blocks happened to contain valid datah from another file with the same container format, but different contents. That was dutifully processed and forwarded on, and ended up crashing every worker that processed it.

    One kernel panic took down an entire processing pipeline because of a freak coincidence.i

    In that case the machine that was the root cause wasn’t even my responsibility, so I just reported my findings and left it at that. The team doing the processing put in some workaround to skip the bad data. All this can be done in a timely fashion if you have the people.j

    “The system processing the data should’ve been built to blocklist bad data that causes crashes!”

    Yeah, yeah, there is always something that “could’ve been done to avoid the failure”.

    It is impossible to identify and preemptively defend against all such freak circumstances.k

    This is why you have engineers on call who know their systems inside out. So that when things do go wrong — and they will — they can be fixed quickly, before things escalate into a widespread failure.

    I have many such stories from my short 2.5 years at Google SRE.l

    There’s also the dumb human/machine interaction errors. Google Docs smart quotes once took down a whole cluster, because fooctl ‘very-important-username’ is a very different bash command from fooctl 'very-important-username'. m

    Guess what: if you have fresh people from the wrong teams copying and pasting instructions, fixing one of these is going to take much longer than it should.

    Team-team interactions are also critical. Often one team can quickly help mitigate an issue with another team’s systems.n

    But if you have 1/4th the workforce scrambling to learn new systems while they also focus their efforts on Musk’s stupid idea of the day first, none of that is going to go well.o

    So yes, Twitter will coast along, until a freak incident causes a whole core service to fail and there’s nobody to fix it quickly. Until an engineer new to a system makes a typo and brings it all down and there is nobody left who knows how to bring it back up.p

    Until a critical system becomes overloaded because nobody was on the pager or nobody could react in time, and a traffic management cascade failure causes a bunch of upstream/downstream stuff to become overloaded and fail.q

    You know what’s also notoriously hard with big distributed systems like this?

    Bringing stuff back up when it all goes down.

    What if the system your engineers use to log in to production systems is down?r

    What if DNS or a similar global service underpinning everything goes down, and you can’t even find the IPs of the machines you are trying to reach?

    What if there is a circular dependency between systems, such that you can’t bring one up if the other is down, and they both are?s

    What if that circular dependence involves 8 different subsystems across multiple production clusters and nobody even realized it was there until now?

    And then there’s thundering herd/stampede issues. When bringing back a whole subsystem, you need to do it gradually.t

    Do all your internal systems have built-in traffic management that can do that and slowly open up the faucet to allow caches to prime themselves and things to recover gracefully? Has that all been tested? How long will it take until caches are hot and ready?u

    In the end, it is very possible that Twitter will go down completely at some point in the next few weeks, and the remaining engineers will have no clue how to bring it back up, due to issues such as these. If the wrong combination of failures happened, it could take weeks.v

    People think of servers as things you can just reboot and be fine. That’s not how this works. If you rebooted every single $FAANG3 server simultaneously right now, all of $FAANG would be down for probably months. Or worse. And that’s with functional teams. This stuff is hard.w

    None of this is unique to any particular company. I’ve seen the Google war stories myself and been part of some. I’ve heard Amazon war stories. Twitter won’t be quite as bad because they aren’t as big as those two, but they’re big enough to run into the same kinds of issues.x

    Here’s one more: I once removed every machine from a production cluster at Google due to a typo. That means they would be automatically wiped and formatted.

    I happened to know the system in charge of doing this was deliberately throttled and there was a big red “PAUSE” button.y

    I pushed the button, put the machines back into the database, unpushed it, and went on with my day.

    Now imagine that scenario, except I have no idea and no training on that system and how to stop it, and everyone who did has been fired.z

    On Twitter’s (and everyone else’s) cold boot problem[:]aa

    1. Cascading data center problems: In or around the spring of 2021, Twitter’s primary data center began to experience problems from a runaway engineering process, requiring the company to move operations to other systems outside of this datacenter. But, the other systems could not handle these rapid changes and also began experiencing problems. Engineers flagged the catastrophic danger that all the data centers might go offline simultaneously. A couple months earlier in February, Mudge had flagged this precise risk to the Board because Twitter data centers were fragile, and Twitter lacked plans and processes to “cold boot.” That meant that if all the centers went offline simultaneously, even briefly, Twitter was unsure if they could bring the service back up.
    2. “Black Swan” existential threat: In fact, in or about Spring of 2021, just such an event was underway, and shutdown looked imminent. Hundreds of engineers nervously watched the data centers struggle to stay running. The senior executive who supervised the Head of Engineering, aware that the incident was on the verge of taking Twitter offline for weeks, months, or permanently, insisted the Board of Directors be informed of an impending catastrophic “Black Swan” event. Board Member [redacted] responded with words to the effect of “Isn’t this exactly what Mudge warned us about?” Mudge told [redacted] that he was correct. In the end, Twitter engineers working around the clock were narrowly able to stabilize the problem before the whole platform shut down.
    Mudge (2022), pp. 33–34, quoted in Green (2022) & Martin (2022aa–ab)

    […] Twitter was this close to badly crashing just last year. With all staff on board, they narrowly avoided it.

    Next time this happens in Musk’s Twitter, it’s gone.ab

    Footnotes

    1. Back end.
    2. Site reliability engineer.
    3. “Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google,” five prominent American technology companies known for being “totally dominant in their markets” (Fernando, 2022).

    References

    Fernando, J. (2022, June 29). FAANG stocks: Definition and companies involved (M.J. Boyle & P. Rathburn, Eds.). Investopedia. Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Green, M.D. [@matthew_d_green] (2022, November 13). Pour one out for Twitter’s cold boot plans. [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Martin, H. [@marcan42] (2022a, November 13). Twitter is already slowly breaking, and it’s only going to get worse. He says that Twitter was built to be … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Martin, H. [@marcan42] (2022b, November 13). All large services and platforms are “built to be resilient”. But they are also extremely complicated, with countless internal interactions … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Martin, H. [@marcan42] (2022c, November 13). These systems are built to be reliable in the face of things like machine failures, or entire optional microservices going … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Martin, H. [@marcan42] (2022d, November 13). Cascade failures are caused when a small failure within a system has secondary effects on other systems, and the systems … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Martin, H. [@marcan42] (2022e, November 13). There are many ways this can happen. For example, you can have a “packet of death” — some data that causes … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Martin, H. [@marcan42] (2022f, November 13). This doesn’t have to be an exploit or externally malicious data. It can just be a circumstance that the design … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Martin, H. [@marcan42] (2022g, November 13). I once had one of those at Google. A pipeline from a downstream team kept crashing because it was trying … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Martin, H. [@marcan42] (2022h, November 13). After digging through forensic logs I figured out what had happened was that a machine had kernel panicked, which had left … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Martin, H. [@marcan42] (2022i, November 13). … from another file with the same container format, but different contents. That was dutifully processed and forwarded on, and ended … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Martin, H. [@marcan42] (2022j, November 13). In that case the machine that was the root cause wasn’t even my responsibility, so I just reported my findings … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Martin, H. [@marcan42] (2022k, November 13). “The system processing the data should’ve been built to blocklist bad data that causes crashes!” Yeah, yeah, there is always … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Martin, H. [@marcan42] (2022l, November 13). *This* is why you have engineers on call who know their systems inside out. So that when things do go … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Martin, H. [@marcan42] (2022m, November 13). There’s also the dumb human/machine interaction errors. Google Docs smart quotes once took down a whole cluster, because `fooctl … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Martin, H. [@marcan42] (2022n, November 13). Guess what: if you have fresh people from the wrong teams copying and pasting instructions, fixing one of those is … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Martin, H. [@marcan42] (2022o, November 13). But if you have 1/4th the workforce scrambling to learn new systems while they also focus their efforts on Musk’s … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Martin, H. [@marcan42] (2022p, November 13). So yes, Twitter will coast along, until a freak incident causes a whole core service to fail and there’s nobody … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Martin, H. [@marcan42] (2022q, November 13). Until a critical system becomes overloaded because nobody was on the pager or nobody could react in time, and a … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Martin, H. [@marcan42] (2022r, November 13). You know what’s also notoriously hard with big distributed systems like this? Bringing stuff back up when it *all* goes … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Martin, H. [@marcan42] (2022s, November 13). What if DNS or a similar global service underpinning everything goes down, and you can’t even find the IPs of … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Martin, H. [@marcan42] (2022t, November 13). What if that circular dependency involves 8 different subsystems across multiple production clusters and nobody even realized it was there … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Martin, H. [@marcan42] (2022u, November 13). Do *all* your internal systems have built-in traffic management that can do that and slowly open up the faucet to … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Martin, H. [@marcan42] (2022v, November 13). In the end, it is very possible that Twitter will go down *completely* at some point in the next few … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Martin, H. [@marcan42] (2022w, November 13). People think of servers as things you can just reboot and be fine. That’s not how this works. If you … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Martin, H. [@marcan42] (2022x, November 13). None of this is unique to any particular company. I’ve seen the Google war stories myself and been part of … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Martin, H. [@marcan42] (2022y, November 13). Here’s one more: I once removed every machine from a production cluster at Google due to a typo. That means … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Martin, H. [@marcan42] (2022z, November 13). I pushed the button, put the machines back into the database, unpushed it, and went on with my day. Now … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Martin, H. [@marcan42] (2022aa, November 13). On Twitter’s (and everyone else’s) cold boot problem (source: techpolicy.press/wp-content/upl…) [Quote Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Martin, H. [@marcan42] (2022ab, November 13). And from the same doc: Twitter was this close to badly crashing just last year. With all staff on board … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today). Retrieved 14 November 2022.

    Mudge (2022, July 6). Protected disclosures of Federal Trade Commission Act violations, material misrepresentations and omissions, and fraud by Twitter, Inc. (NASDAQ: TWTR) and CEO Parag Agrawal, SEC TCR# [disclosure to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, U.S. Federal Trade Commission, and U.S. Department of Justice]. Whistleblower Aid.

  • Transgender Awareness Week, 2022

    Nov 13th, 2022

    A version of this post is available on tumblr.

    This week, 13–19 November, is Transgender Awareness Week. Here is a précis of major international and Australian events since the last Transgender Awareness Week.


    On 10 February 2022, Senator Claire Chandler of Tasmania introduced the Sex Discrimination and Other Legislation Amendment (Save Women’s Sport) Bill 2022 (Cth), which would have barred trans women from participating in correctly gendered sports with other women, and forced them to compete against stronger and faster cis men instead.

    On 21 May, Australia had a federal election. Several candidates were openly anti-trans, with at least one prominent NSW Liberal candidate, Katherine Deves, being a career anti-trans activist (Wilson, 2022). Labor leader, now prime minister, Anthony Albanese, made some remarks in the media about trans issues which attracted criticism for being transphobic (Iqbal, 2022).

    On 16 June, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) — the international governing body for professional cycling — announced a new policy which significantly tightened restrictions on trans women’s participation in professional cycling (Leggett, 2022). The policy is perceived as having intentionally targeted a single British trans woman cyclist, Emily Bridges (BBC Sport, 2022).

    On 17 June, the Australian Greens Victoria (AGV) removed their new Convenor, Linda Gale, because she had been elected in an irregular and rule-breaking way that protected her (Baj, 2022b) from having AGV members find out she was a vocal anti-trans activist (Baj, 2022a).

    On 20 June, the International Swimming Federation (Fédération Internationale de Natation, FINA) announced a new policy which effectively excluded trans women from competing in professional swimming (“FINA votes to restrict,” 2022).

    The conditions under which the FINA Extraordinary Congress passed the policy have been scrutinised — apparently delegates were only allowed to see the 24-page policy 15 minutes before they were made to vote on it (Holmes, 2022). The policy is also perceived as having intentionally targeted a single trans woman swimmer, Lia Thomas (Newberry, 2022).

    On 24 June, the Supreme Court of the United States decided Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning Roe v. Wade, the legal precedent which guaranteed abortion access throughout the United States. As well as targeting cis women, the ruling also caused significant new problems and dangers for trans people who can give birth (Rummler, 2022).

    In a separate concurrence, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas — who is, incidentally, the subject of lingering and unresolved allegations of corruption (Barnes & Marimow, 2022; Pilkington, 2022; Tomasky, 2022) — proposed that the ruling in Dobbs also provided grounds to overturn several other precedents of the same “substantive due process” type, including:

    • Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 ruling making it federally legal for married people to use contraception;
    • Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 ruling making it federally legal to have private, consensual gay sex; and
    • Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 ruling striking down the section of the federal Defense of Marriage Act prohibiting same-sex marriage,

    all of which will have knock-on effects on trans people (for example, if their hormones are considered contraceptives, or if they can’t get legal gender recognition and therefore their straight relationships and marriages are considered gay under the law).

    On 19 July, the UK Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People (“Cass Review”) issued a recommendation (Cass, 2022) to NHS England that the UK’s single centralised paediatric trans healthcare service, the NHS Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) in London, be shut down and replaced by regionalised hubs to provide timelier and more appropriate care (Brooks, 2022).

    This was widely misrepresented in international media (e.g., Bannerman, 2022; Ely & Dollimore, 2022; McLoughlin, 2022), at the instigation of anti-trans pressure groups (“The U.K. turns its back,” 2022; Transgender Trend, 2022; Women’s Forum Australia, 2022, etc.) as GIDS being shut down based on (the vague claim of) it being a danger to children.

    On 5 August, an attempt was made to kill Canadian streamer Clara “keffals” Sorrenti, who is a trans woman, through “swatting” her (summoning armed police to her home) by calling in a false threat of mass murder in her name (Winslow, 2022). The harassment ultimately escalated to the point that Sorrenti was forced to flee to Europe (Wiggins, 2022).

    On 19 August, The Australian published an interview with Oliver “Ollie” Hassett (then Ollie Davies), a detransitioner and activist (Robinson, 2019). They failed to mention that Mr Hassett was affiliated with Genspect (Hassett, 2022), an international anti-trans hate group (Moore, 2022).

    On 30 August, the Report of the Inquiry into extremism in Victoria by the Victorian Legislative Council Legal and Social Issues Committee was tabled in the Parliament of Victoria. The report noted transphobia as a path to radicalisation for Australian political extremists (ibid., p. 1), and “public debate” over trans existence as a significant factor in giving those extremists legitimacy (ibid., pp. 45–46).

    On 5 October, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism released a report classifying two anti-trans groups active in Australia, Binary Australia and LGB Alliance Australia, as extremist hate groups (Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, 2022).

    On 6 September, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) published its Standards of care for the health of transgender and gender diverse people, version 8 (Coleman et al., 2022), or “SoC 8,” replacing version 7 (Coleman et al., 2012) after an interval of just over ten years.

    The SoC 8 attracted controversy at launch, and indeed well before it, during the lengthy period of stakeholder feedback and review. One reason was that it launched with well-sourced, well-evidenced age limits for paediatric medical transition, and then retracted them, restoring a higher age limit for which there was no evidence, under political pressure and the threat of violence (Eckert, 2022). Another reason was that it claimed unearned authority over intersex people (Carpenter, 2021).

    A third major reason was that it supported some of its claims with citations to publications (Littman, 2018; D’Angelo et al., 2020; Littman, 2021) which are methodologically unsound (Restar, 2019; Leveille, 2021) and from authors associated with anti-trans pressure groups, like the “Institute for Comprehensive Gender Dysphoria Research” (Jones, 2022) and the “Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine” (Moore, 2021).

    On 17 October, the ABC’s Media Watch broadcast an episode, “ACON & the ABC” (Adams, 2022) which attracted immediate controversy because it was factually inaccurate (Rogers, 2022; Salmon & Sobieralski, 2022) and because multiple anti-trans activists took credit for its content. Conversely, multiple commentators wrote evidence-based pieces responding to the episode, including Melbourne-based analyst Eleanor Evenstar1 and me (Moreton, 2022).

    On 29 October, UK media announced that new UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak intends to strip trans people of human rights protections under British law by amending the relevant parts of the Equality Act 2010 (Wakefield, 2022). Jo Maugham, director of the Good Law Project, a major trans-allied legal NGO, issued a public recommendation that trans people should leave England if they could (Maugham, 2022).

    On 2 November, Bloomberg reported that Twitter’s new owner and incoming chief executive officer, Elon Musk, had directed staff to review the sections of Twitter’s hateful conduct policy which protect transgender people on the 238-million-user social media platform, with an eye to rewriting those sections or deleting them entirely (Riedel, 2022). Musk has a record of vocal transphobia (see, e.g., McHale, 2022) which has been examined in the context that his partner Grimes left him for activist and whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who is trans (Di Placido, 2022), and that his daughter, Vivian Wilson, came out as trans and disowned him (Saunders, 2022).

    On 4 November, the State of Florida’s medical regulators voted to ban paediatric trans healthcare and forcibly terminate provision of care to any young trans people currently receiving it (Baisas, 2022). Significant concerns have been raised over the fact that the Florida state government, led by Governor Ron DeSantis, appears to have arranged the process from the word go to achieve a predetermined politically desirable conclusion (Luneau, 2022; Yurcaba, 2022a).

    On 8 November, the United States held midterm elections for the whole US House of Representatives, one-third of the US Senate, 39 governorships, and various state and local elections. Analysts predicted a red wave election (Geraghty, 2022; Siracusa, 2022; etc.) — that is, a substantial victory for the right-wing Republican Party — but in the event, one failed to materialise (Alexander, 2022; Milligan, 2022; Smith, 2022).

    The governing centrist Democratic Party will retain control of the Senate (“Democrats retain control of Senate,” 2022); the House of Representatives is likely to go Republican by a hair-thin margin, but may end up deadlocked (Bierman et al., 2022). Analysts have attributed Republicans’ underperformance, in part, to ignoring bread-and-butter issues in favour of constantly promoting anti-trans hate (e.g., Weigel, 2022). Meanwhile, several states elected their first transgender officeholders at county and/or state level (Childress, 2022; Duxter, 2022; Yurcaba, 2022b).

    Overall impression

    2021–2022 contained some bright spots for trans people, compared to the unremittingly horrible 2020–2021. However, the times that weren’t bright spots became even darker to compensate.


    Footnotes

    1. I’ve elected not to cite Ms Evenstar’s piece here not out of disrespect, but because it was published on Twitter, which is expected to experience considerable downtime in the near future. If or when the piece is published elsewhere, I will cite it here.

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  • Several problems: “I was a protester”

    Nov 7th, 2022

    Originally published 9 October 2022. Migrated to WordPress 6 November 2022.

    On 9 October 2022, The Sydney Morning Herald published an article, “I was a protester — now a protest has been directed at me,” by Jon Faine (2022).

    The article has several problems. Here are a few.

    Headnotes

    For context, the article is concerned primarily with matters pertaining to “Pride & prejudice in policy,” a panel discussion which took place at the University of Melbourne (UniMelb) on 4 October 2022. As the UniMelb event listing provides a lot of the material to which the original piece and this response refer, here’s an archive copy from the Wayback Machine (UniMelb School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, 2022).

    For additional context, the author, Jon Faine, has a bit of a history, including suggesting that all Australian National Broadband Network technicians are from Southeast Asia (Supportah, 2018) and other discursive contributions which have led him to be characterised as an “shock jock” (ibid.) — fairly surprising for the ABC (!)

    #1

    The forum [trans ally protesters] interrupted — and tried to stop completely — was at the periphery of transgender issues …

    Faine (op. cit.)

    This is a curious assertion. Here’s the blurb from the University’s own event listing, in full:

    On the face of it, a diversity and inclusion program and ranking index encouraging organizations to be more inclusive to gender and sexual minorities should not attract more attention or criticism than any other such initiatives (such as for race, or disability). Yet the UK’s Diversity Champions Programme and Workplace Equality Index, run by the LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall, has faced considerable scrutiny and censure, and many important public bodies have withdrawn from the initiatives.

    Critics argue that the initiatives embed contested facts and values into policies, compromise public bodies’ independence and impartiality, and facilitate backdoor political lobbying.

    Defenders counter that the program and index simply promote best practice in policy, and help employers to foster much-needed inclusion, support and understanding for LGBTQ+ employees. Some also see criticism of these initiatives as reflecting and reinforcing gender conservatism.

    With many of our own public institutions signed up to similar initiatives — ACON’s Pride in Diversity employer support program and the Australian Workplace Equality Index — the aim of this event is to open-up a timely and balanced national conversation about the benefits, risks and tensions of these initiatives for Australia’s public institutions, and their employees.

    UniMelb School of Historical and Philosophical Studies (op. cit.)

    Now, I’m just a simple dickgirl, but it seems to me that this “conversation” revolves around one question: Does free speech permit observing that institutions, social groups, or spaces are transphobic, or trans-allied, when they are in fact the thing in question?

    It doesn’t seem to me that that’s “at the periphery of transgender issues”. It seems to me, in fact, that it must be at the centre.

    #2

    It is a small example of a bigger problem. If you demand respect, then you have to give it.

    Faine (op. cit.), emphasis mine

    How delightful, this one is getting another outing:

    Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”

    and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person”

    tumblr user autisticabby (2015)

    Because really, that’s very clearly what this is. The kind of respect which trans people “demand” is being called by their correct names and being recognised as their correct genders, as opposed to society pretending names are inborn and everyone was cis before May 2014.

    Faine is suggesting here that it’s a fair exchange that to receive the respect they “demand,” trans people are also expected not to say boo when panels like the one at UniMelb discuss whether when they’re walking through a forest absolutely chock full of bear traps, they should be allowed to do so without a blindfold on.

    #3

    Until I started working at the ABC in 1989, I attended my share of protests. As a university student, I threw a few water bombs at the governor-general in the aftermath of the Dismissal (none of them got even remotely close), I raised my voice marching with many others over our national disgrace of race relations, and I joined in many other worthy and noble causes. I don’t mind a good protest — I consider it a signifier of a healthy democracy.

    It therefore came as something of a shock this week to find myself being aggressively accused of transphobia, of creating a risk to other people’s health and safety, simply for wanting to have a discussion.

    Faine (op. cit.), emphases mine

    This seems like a non sequitur on a couple of levels.

    Faine seems to be under the impression that because he protested at some point (the latest date he cites is 19 years before I was born) and he doesn’t mind when other people do it, it’s somehow more shocking or inappropriate that he might be protested himself? I don’t get it.

    I’m in at least two demographics currently demonstrating for their own continued existence. I show up to our and others’ protests whenever my health allows. That doesn’t mean I have like … enough allyship tokens that picketing me for being, say, racist, would somehow be unfair.

    #4

    simply for wanting to have a discussion

    Faine (op. cit.)

    At the price of flagrantly violating Godwin’s law I will point out that the Wannsee Conference was also a discussion. So was the Last Supper, of course. The point is that “discussions” are perfectly capable of having consequences.

    #5

    The forum was called “Pride and Prejudice in Policy” and was hosted by the School of History and Philosophy of Science within the Arts Faculty of the University of Melbourne. Hardly a hotbed of reactionary or conservative thinking — quite the contrary.

    Faine (op. cit.), emphasis mine

    [stifled mirth]

    The School of History and Philosophy of Science counts among its faculty Professor Cordelia Fine, who favoured us all with a particularly … er, piquant essay in The Monthly of October 2021 (Fine, 2021), about which I have bitched on this website before (Moreton, 2022c, s 2).

    UniMelb’s faculty also includes Dr Holly Lawford-Smith, associate professor of political philosophy, known (Weinberg, 2021) for No Conflict, They Said, an exercise in activism theatre consisting of the functionally unmoderated gathering of fictional anti-transfeminine smears on the pretext of documenting “the impacts on [cis] women of [trans women] using women-only spaces”.

    UniMelb includes among its student body Alison Clayton, a member of the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine (Clayton, 2022), the professional central committee of anti-trans mass organisation Genspect (Moore, 2021). Clayton has also been published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, conversion therapist Kenneth Zucker’s occasionally-peer-reviewed journal and bully pulpit (Carey, 2012; James, n.d.), spinning 100%-evidence-backed gender-affirming top surgery as “dangerous medicine” (Clayton, 2021).

    I don’t normally go “Oh, this institution has a problematic student, that reflects on the school as a whole, we’ve got them now, hohoho!”, except that, for whatever reason, Clayton seems to consider her activism to be something she does in her capacity at UniMelb. For instance, Clayton joined Fine and two others from UniMelb in signing a 2021 open letter in support of Kathleen Stock (herself discussed elsewhere in this piece) and did so specifically as an affiliate of the School (Kaufman, 2021/2022).

    Finally, the School’s honorary staff include Professor Sheila Jeffreys, well-known among the trans community for what we will politely call her outspoken views, which are well-summarised by the abstract of one of her papers:

    Feminist analysis of transsexualism … has seen it as a deeply conservative phenomenon in which surgical mutilation is employed to maintain the genders of male dominance and female subordination. Transsexualism has a new face … in “transgenderism” which employs queer and postmodern theory to render transsexualism progressive. … “transgenderism” is also deeply problematic from a feminist perspective and … transsexualism should be seen as a violation of human rights.

    Jeffreys (2008)

    Now, of course, if a veteran of Our ABC says that the University of Melbourne is not a hotbed of reactionary or conservative thinking then as a good citizen I really have no choice but to believe him, countervailing evidence be damned, but presumably one can see how a different understanding could have been arrived at.

    #6

    The forum was a discussion about how diversity benchmark programs work.

    Faine (op. cit.)

    And the Dismissal was a discussion between Malcolm Fraser, John Kerr, and Gough Whitlam about how the Australian Government worked, specifically about who would be prime minister of Australia. I can’t see how Faine could reasonably have objected to that.

    Seriously — anything done solely through the use of words by one or more parties can be characterised as a discussion. That doesn’t mean that such a characterisation is honest or fair.

    #7

    Nobody was questioning gender dysphoria itself.

    Faine (op. cit.)

    This is the publisher blurb for Material Girls by Kathleen Stock, one of the video presenters enlisted for the panel:

    Material Girls is a timely and trenchant critique of the influential theory that we all have an inner feeling about our sex, known as a gender identity, and that this feeling is more socially significant than our biological sex.

    Professor Kathleen Stock surveys the philosophical ideas that led to this point, and closely interrogates each one, from De Beauvoir’s statement that, ‘One is not born, but rather becomes a woman’ (an assertion she contends has been misinterpreted and repurposed), to Judith Butler’s claim that language creates biological reality, rather than describing it. She looks at biological sex in a range of important contexts, including women-only spaces and resources, healthcare, epidemiology, political organization and data collection.

    Hachette (n.d.)

    I suppose we’d better not let Stock know that “nobody was questioning gender dysphoria”. She’d be heartbroken.

    #8

    But apparently some trans activists believe that even discussing benchmarking is to be equated with being transphobic.

    Faine (op. cit.)

    Anti-trans pressure groups seem to believe so, which is why they keep trying to “discuss benchmarking” explicitly as a vehicle to be transphobic. For example, the UK’s misleadingly-named Safe Schools Alliance, an anti-trans pressure group, are known for being absolutely fixated on the claim that being part of LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall’s Diversity Champions programme definitively meant the Crown Prosecution Service was biased. They were so fixated on it, in fact, that they escalated all the way to HM High Court of Justice for England and Wales, where they got thrown out on the grounds that their claim blatantly could not stand up to any judicial examination whatsoever (Parsons, 2021).

    Of course, this is only one of multiple anti-trans legal actions which have targeted the Diversity Champions scheme for no clear reason beyond “it exists”. Around the same time, For Women Scotland, another anti-trans group of dubious provenance, started claiming that by pointing out that the Equality Act 2010 protects trans people, Stonewall was actually inciting people to violate it. We know this because their collaborators at The Sunday Times gleefully reported on it in autofellatingly extensive detail (Macaskill, 2021).

    Weirdly, despite the fact that the legal rationale behind these efforts is shaky enough that they can’t survive the British equivalent of a district court, HM Government’s Equality and Human Rights Commission used them as an excuse to do what it had been under pressure to do for some time and exit the Diversity Champions scheme (McManus, 2021). Getting the human rights watchdog to decide it’s not actually all that interested in human rights — “just discussing” indeed!

    #9

    Not one word undermining the lived experience of transgender and gender-diverse people was uttered at the forum — nor was ever going to be.

    Faine (op. cit.)

    Understandable mistake, though, given who was on the panel.

    Linda Gale is the former acting convenor of the Australian Greens Victoria, known for, uh … Well, let’s put it this way, at this point in the Twitter edition of this piece, I linked to a Junkee article headlined “The Victorian Greens have been hit with another transphobia scandal” (Baj, 2022). More about Linda in a second.

    Professor Alan Davison of the University of Technology Sydney, for his part is a fervent opponent of “postmodern critical theory” — an opposition which, in the case of Davison’s specific ideological strand (Sun, 2019), as in those of his fellow travelers (Wallace-Wells, 2021), is not a coherent and principled philosophical position, as such. Instead, it’s a byword for cloaking entirely vibes-based conservatism in complex technical vocabulary and an academic veneer.

    Naomi Cunningham, who contributed a video presentation, is the chair of Sex Matters, a British anti-trans pressure group. Sex Matters is best known because its more prominent executive director, Maya Forstater, believes conversion therapy should be legal as long as it’s anti-trans (Forstater & Joyce, 2021).

    Dr Kathleen Stock, late of the University of Sussex, was described by an open letter signed by over 600 of her colleagues in academic philosophy as

    best-known in recent years for her trans-exclusionary public and academic discourse on sex and gender, especially for opposition to [amendments to*] the UK Gender Recognition Act and the importance of self-identification to establish gender identity, and for advocating that trans women should be excluded from places like women’s locker rooms or shelters.

    Bettcher et al. (2021)

    Finally, the whole panel was organised, according to Times Higher Education, by the aforementioned Cordelia Fine (Ross, 2022). This might have led some people to believe there was a non-zero chance that at some point, at least one word undermining the lived experience of trans and gender-diverse people might be uttered.

    But no, our bad, clearly. That’s on us.

    #10

    “the three-person panel”

    Faine (op. cit.)

    Good point, Jon. Why was it a three-person panel? I’m sure when I originally heard about it, a fortnight before it took place, there were more people than that. Maybe it had something to do with someone securing the participation of Professor Sally Hines by not being entirely upfront with her about the facts:

    When I agreed to take part in this event, I was unaware that it was a ‘debate’ with, as [Dr Hannah McCann] says, extreme anti-trans activists, or that it had such a specific focus on trans inclusion in LGBT EDI [equality, diversity and inclusion] policy in HE [higher education]. I am no longer taking part.

    Hines (2022)

    As well as Hines, other withdrawals included Nicki Elkin from LGBTQ+ health promotion charity ACON, and the moderator, Paul Barclay, who was replaced by … you, Jon (Thomas, 2022). So you knew all of this already and didn’t mention it. Why was that, I wonder?

    #11

    To try to stop the forum from even being held, to yell at Peters that she is not allowed to discuss her lived experience — because doing so might be harmful to people who are not even there — is bordering on the absurd.

    Faine (op. cit.)

    lol.

    Interesting that Faine pushes a woman in front of him to serve as a meat shield by claiming all of the criticism was actually directed at her. Bit unchivalrous, innit.

    #12

    [Linda Gale] was this year removed … after trans lobbyists objected

    Faine (op. cit.)

    I’ve noted before that Ninefax opinion writers really love the flexibility of the word after, and what it allows them to do (Moreton, 2022b*).

    Given that what we know is actually when Linda Gale was removed, why was she able to be removed? — Oh yeah, it was because her election was mysteriously conducted in an irregular way which prevented anyone from finding out about her views:

    Earlier this week, I took action under the party’s rules to have our recent election for convenor set aside, as the rules for the election weren’t followed correctly. Specifically, candidates weren’t given the opportunity to communicate with members about their candidacy. […]

    Ratnam (2022)

    #13

    It’s hard to comprehend how a life-long feminist leftie … could be described as transphobic

    Faine (op. cit.)

    Oh, I don’t know, I think I have some idea (Moreton, 2022a*).

    #14

    But a respectful and sensitive discussion of issues that can be a major influence on our community must never be declared off limits.

    Faine (op. cit.), emphasis mine

    Damn right. When I want a respectful and sensitive discussion, I invite Linda Gale, Kathleen Stock, the Sex Matters lady, and Mr If-critical-theory-has-one-hater,-that-hater-is-me.

    Trans people make up maybe half a percent of the population. It’d be a lot cooler if there were more of us, but the reality is that there is precisely one way our issues come to the attention of the broader community. Namely, as García & Badge (2021) prove in both bleak and vivid detail, it happens because the media moguls who believe they own the community hate the shit out of us, and they want the people they think they own to hate us too. Data from Islan (2022a–q), of the United Kingdom, demonstrates how absurdly hostile it is only a few more steps down the road we’re already on.

    There certainly is a faction concerned with trans issues that wants more “influence over our community”. Naomi Cunningham, Cordelia Fine, Linda Gale, and Kathleen Stock are in that faction — and when it comes to getting that influence, they’ll climb over as many broken bodies as it takes.

    #15

    Attacking your friends does not help in the battle against real enemies.

    Faine (op. cit.)

    Which is why this article is not about Julie Peters, no matter how desperate Jon Faine is to use her as an ideological hostage.

    #16

    the champions of diversity must show they can embrace a diversity of opinion, too.

    Faine (op. cit.)

    Ah, the paradox of tolerance. It never gets old — which I suppose given how this decade has panned out so far is something it will have more and more in common with trans people.


    * Denotes a citation to a Twitter thread I hadn’t migrated when I wrote this piece. To be removed later.


    References

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    Baj, L. (2022, June 16). The Victorian Greens have been hit with another transphobia scandal. Junkee.

    Bettcher, T.M., Brennan, S., Bright, L.K., Clarke, R., Colburn, B., … Yap, A. (2021, January). Open letter concerning transphobia in philosophy. Google Sites.

    Carey, B. (2012, May 18). Psychiatry giant sorry for backing gay ‘cure’. The New York Times.

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    Islan, H. [@mimmymum] (2022b, October 8). At its highest point, 1,142 articles were published in the 30 days from 27/6/2022 [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today).

    Islan, H. [@mimmymum] (2022c, October 8). Note: The publications being captured are: The Times, Telegraph, Daily Mail, The Guardian, The Independent, Spiked, The I, BBC, Spectator, Breitbart, The Sun, Unheard, Daily … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today).

    Islan, H. [@mimmymum] (2022d, October 8). If we exclude Pink News — the only consistently trans-positive publication — there have been 15,939 trans-neutral or trans-hostile articles published by … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today).

    Islan, H. [@mimmymum] (2022e, October 8). At its highest point, in the 30 day period from the 27/6/2022 there were 1,004 trans-hostile/neutral articles … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today).

    Islan, H. [@mimmymum] (2022f, October 8). So who is publishing all of those articles on trans topics? It’s interesting to note that in previous years it … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today).

    Islan, H. [@mimmymum] (2022g, October 8). You can easily see the shift over time of coverage of mainstream UK media on trans topics when you track … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today).

    Islan, H. [@mimmymum] (2022h, October 8). From 2015 – 2020 the UK news media masively increased the number of articles published on trans topics to 5,581 … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today).

    Islan, H. [@mimmymum] (2022i, October 8). Since Jan 2020 there have been 10,101 articles published by the UK mainstream media on trans topics – that’s nearly TWICE … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today).

    Islan, H. [@mimmymum] (2022j, October 8). Over 38% of all (10,101) articles on trans topics in the UK media over the last 33 months have been … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today).

    Islan, H. [@mimmymum] (2022k, October 8). The Daily Mail, Times and Telegraph account for 3,902 articles published on trans topics over the last 33 months from … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today).

    Islan, H. [@mimmymum] (2022l, October 8). We can see that in the week of 11/7/2022 that The Daily Mail, Times and Telegraph published 123 … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today).

    Islan, H. [@mimmymum] (2022m, October 8). On the 15/7/2022, The Daily Mail, Times and Telegraph published 26 articles on trans topics – 11 of them … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today).

    Islan, H. [@mimmymum] (2022n, October 8). An additional interesting piece of data – there have been 224 articles on trans topics that have also mentioned JK Rowling, … [Tweet]. Twitter (via Archive Today).

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