One reason for the staying power of trans ideology is that it came with its own defense strategy. It helped that the capture of medicine and the educational system (just to name two of the many institutions that went all-in on trans) was undemocratic, with trans allies on the inside opening the back door to trans activists without ever letting those who would be affected by trans-affirming policies force activists to defend their agenda in fair and open forums.
But along with lies such as "trans women are women," trans allies were taught that anyone who questioned gender identity ideology was a transphobic hater. Every great cause needs an enemy, and sex realists were it. That also meant that liberals and progressives, who celebrated their critical thinking skills, turned off their intellectual curiosity when encountering information that conflicted with received trans truths. The more preposterous the ideology, the more morally corrupt its critics appear in the eyes of true believers. That's how J.K. Rowling came to be a monster and moderate skeptics turned into white Christian nationalists riding the MAGA wave. The result was those crack critical thinkers became victims of their own wilful ignorance.
There must be millions of good trans allies out there who still don't know that behind the gender critical movement are countless moderate gay men and lesbians who saw through the gender charade from day one, centrist parents who just want to save their children from the trans cult and women who might be apolitical were it not for the fact that men are crashing what are legitimately women-only spaces.
The radical trans/queer left will never stop calling Andrew Sullivan a quisling. What matters now is whether the sea change in the elite media's position on gender ideology will carry through to the views of the Democratic Party's rank-and-file. At the moment, they are probably still the most zealous defenders of so-called trans kids and other genderqueer myths. Ask The Bulwark's Tim Miller and he'll probably still be whining about how we're being mean to trans people, his favorite line. This is not the time for sex realists to rest on their laurels.
The resistance is strong, Ollie. I have a lefty friend who just raises an angry eyebrow when the gender clinic subject comes up but has never uttered a word about it, merely giving me non-verbal cues that I have committed a faux pas, even if it’s someone else in a group setting who has raised the topic. So there’s no opening to test what she knows or thinks she knows.
Gosh & wow. Of all these articles though, I think the AAP’s response is shocking. But I am grateful for it in a way. All these revered institutions that are cited & quoted over & over, yet are all in the game. What a battle.
This whole scandal is a fantastic (in all senses of the word) lesson in how easy it is to indoctrinate well-meaning, highly educated, liberal progressives into accepting a toxic lie and how quickly institutions can be captured and corrupted. Goebbels would be proud of the success of this propaganda campaign.
Much as was the case in Nazi Germany, medical professionals, and in particular psychiatrists, were among the first to capitulate (and were essential to every aspect of both the mass “euthanasia” campaigns and the Holocaust itself).
Similarly medical professionals in this era (and their professional bodies) must take the blame for embracing this atrocity—the sexual disfigurement and potential sterilisation of tens of thousands of kids. But will they ever be held to account?
I have read that in Nazi Germany, psychiatrists were performing mass involuntary euthanasia on useless eaters i.e. mental patients, which included political prisoners, well before the holocaust started. It was proposed even before Hitler gained power. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23511221/
I haven’t read that the idea predated Hitler. The whole history is very well told in the book Nazi Doctors by Robert Jay Lifton. The Holocaust emerged from the same philosophy of “medicalised killing” to heal the “body” of the nation as was used to justify the involuntary “euthanasia” programs, which targeted the mentally ill, disabled people, people deemed antisocial, criminals etc, starting with children and moving on to adults. They killed tens or hundreds of thousands of people (I’ll check the book for Lifton’s estimate). They even invented the gas chamber for that purpose, before the Holocaust began. It all had a medical justification and doctors took part for the most part willingly, conning themselves that what they were doing was right.
From the high road of national heroine credited with helping to ‘save hundreds, even thousands of children's lives without pulling out a single scalpel or tending to any life-threatening diseases’ to accusations of misleading evidence in the case of a gender-confused 12-year-old boy.
. . . Opinions count but ignoring the well-defined protocls in medicine can come at a very high price!
Vincent, to my mind the only two ways of understanding the drivers of medical intervention in minors can be either genuine ( albeit misplaced ) compassion or deliberate social activism. In regards to the first, at the risk of offending sexist sensibilities , perhaps pesky biology may be responsible?. When we look at the demographics of gender clinic clinicians, they present as a marked preponderance of young empathetic women, intolerant of challenge in claiming all working knowledge and experience . We can only ponder if such clinics were to have become established, at the onset, with clinical leadership by a different majority demographic, of ,say senior, clinically experienced male paediatricians , supported , and not lead by ,our social science colleagues , the outcome might have been different? If medically trained males had sought and achieved more clinical leadership, given the key role of providing the “ hands on” of medical intervention , the metastasis of gender identity may not have gained the same dominance?
The alternative explanation that it has been largely driven by deliberate social activism from within the medical profession is nothing less a wicked thought when the victims have always all been vulnerable children.
There will be a future PhD for a young psychology graduate, in producing an objective analysis of the shameful capture of Medicine by Social Science ideology
One reason for the staying power of trans ideology is that it came with its own defense strategy. It helped that the capture of medicine and the educational system (just to name two of the many institutions that went all-in on trans) was undemocratic, with trans allies on the inside opening the back door to trans activists without ever letting those who would be affected by trans-affirming policies force activists to defend their agenda in fair and open forums.
But along with lies such as "trans women are women," trans allies were taught that anyone who questioned gender identity ideology was a transphobic hater. Every great cause needs an enemy, and sex realists were it. That also meant that liberals and progressives, who celebrated their critical thinking skills, turned off their intellectual curiosity when encountering information that conflicted with received trans truths. The more preposterous the ideology, the more morally corrupt its critics appear in the eyes of true believers. That's how J.K. Rowling came to be a monster and moderate skeptics turned into white Christian nationalists riding the MAGA wave. The result was those crack critical thinkers became victims of their own wilful ignorance.
There must be millions of good trans allies out there who still don't know that behind the gender critical movement are countless moderate gay men and lesbians who saw through the gender charade from day one, centrist parents who just want to save their children from the trans cult and women who might be apolitical were it not for the fact that men are crashing what are legitimately women-only spaces.
The radical trans/queer left will never stop calling Andrew Sullivan a quisling. What matters now is whether the sea change in the elite media's position on gender ideology will carry through to the views of the Democratic Party's rank-and-file. At the moment, they are probably still the most zealous defenders of so-called trans kids and other genderqueer myths. Ask The Bulwark's Tim Miller and he'll probably still be whining about how we're being mean to trans people, his favorite line. This is not the time for sex realists to rest on their laurels.
The resistance is strong, Ollie. I have a lefty friend who just raises an angry eyebrow when the gender clinic subject comes up but has never uttered a word about it, merely giving me non-verbal cues that I have committed a faux pas, even if it’s someone else in a group setting who has raised the topic. So there’s no opening to test what she knows or thinks she knows.
Gosh & wow. Of all these articles though, I think the AAP’s response is shocking. But I am grateful for it in a way. All these revered institutions that are cited & quoted over & over, yet are all in the game. What a battle.
This whole scandal is a fantastic (in all senses of the word) lesson in how easy it is to indoctrinate well-meaning, highly educated, liberal progressives into accepting a toxic lie and how quickly institutions can be captured and corrupted. Goebbels would be proud of the success of this propaganda campaign.
Much as was the case in Nazi Germany, medical professionals, and in particular psychiatrists, were among the first to capitulate (and were essential to every aspect of both the mass “euthanasia” campaigns and the Holocaust itself).
Similarly medical professionals in this era (and their professional bodies) must take the blame for embracing this atrocity—the sexual disfigurement and potential sterilisation of tens of thousands of kids. But will they ever be held to account?
I have read that in Nazi Germany, psychiatrists were performing mass involuntary euthanasia on useless eaters i.e. mental patients, which included political prisoners, well before the holocaust started. It was proposed even before Hitler gained power. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23511221/
I haven’t read that the idea predated Hitler. The whole history is very well told in the book Nazi Doctors by Robert Jay Lifton. The Holocaust emerged from the same philosophy of “medicalised killing” to heal the “body” of the nation as was used to justify the involuntary “euthanasia” programs, which targeted the mentally ill, disabled people, people deemed antisocial, criminals etc, starting with children and moving on to adults. They killed tens or hundreds of thousands of people (I’ll check the book for Lifton’s estimate). They even invented the gas chamber for that purpose, before the Holocaust began. It all had a medical justification and doctors took part for the most part willingly, conning themselves that what they were doing was right.
That’s true.
FEAR AND LOATHING AT THE RCH
How times have changed:
From the high road of national heroine credited with helping to ‘save hundreds, even thousands of children's lives without pulling out a single scalpel or tending to any life-threatening diseases’ to accusations of misleading evidence in the case of a gender-confused 12-year-old boy.
. . . Opinions count but ignoring the well-defined protocls in medicine can come at a very high price!
Vincent, to my mind the only two ways of understanding the drivers of medical intervention in minors can be either genuine ( albeit misplaced ) compassion or deliberate social activism. In regards to the first, at the risk of offending sexist sensibilities , perhaps pesky biology may be responsible?. When we look at the demographics of gender clinic clinicians, they present as a marked preponderance of young empathetic women, intolerant of challenge in claiming all working knowledge and experience . We can only ponder if such clinics were to have become established, at the onset, with clinical leadership by a different majority demographic, of ,say senior, clinically experienced male paediatricians , supported , and not lead by ,our social science colleagues , the outcome might have been different? If medically trained males had sought and achieved more clinical leadership, given the key role of providing the “ hands on” of medical intervention , the metastasis of gender identity may not have gained the same dominance?
The alternative explanation that it has been largely driven by deliberate social activism from within the medical profession is nothing less a wicked thought when the victims have always all been vulnerable children.
There will be a future PhD for a young psychology graduate, in producing an objective analysis of the shameful capture of Medicine by Social Science ideology
Excellent summary Andrew - it comes down to either the activist or the ignorant!
That is the nub of the issue.
Evidence based, conservative medicine and wait and see seems to be in little evidence today.