“Gender-affirming surgeries are not common among those under age 18 and are usually limited to “‘top surgery,’ or a mastectomy. Breast reduction surgery is also one of the most common forms of plastic surgery in cisgender teenagers.”
I have no words. This is so disingenuous and absolutely NOT comparable.
Thank you, Jesse! Here is a relevant story to this regrettable chapter on the state of gender science in America today:
When the New York Times published the article "They Paused Puberty, but Is There a Cost?" (https://nyti.ms/42pM5ak) on Nov. 14, 2022, one of the letters they received was from Marc B. Garnick from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (https://bit.ly/3VHHtKn), and more importantly, one of three academic principal clinical investigators of studies that led to the initial F.D.A. approval of Lupron [the puberty blocker drug that gets used most often] for the treatment of metastatic prostate cancer. Yes, for metastatic prostate cancer. That letter (see https://nyti.ms/3nwblwJ), published two weeks later on Nov. 28, 2022, said this (and I will quote it in full for those who might not have access behind the paywall): "As one of three academic principal clinical investigators of studies that led to the initial F.D.A. approval of Lupron for the treatment of metastatic prostate cancer — and having studied this class of drugs, which includes puberty blockers, for more than four decades — I can say that physicians are still learning and continue to be concerned about the safety of these agents in adults. Woefully little safety data are available for the likely more vulnerable younger population. Bone loss in adult men who have been on these agents is significant [Jesse, you mentioned this topic in your article - that you were less familiar with - it turns out that the concerns you heard were true], and a leading cause of morbidity with long-term administration. Other safety issues include cognitive, metabolic and cardiovascular effects, still under intense investigation. The prudent and ethical use of such agents in the younger population should demand that every pubertal or pre-pubertal child be part of rigorous clinical research studies that evaluate both the short-term and longer-term effects of these agents to better define the true risks and benefits rather than relying on anecdotal information."
So opines the principal investigator of the drug. Need we say more?
The totality of your statement is like... it’s not just the doctors, or the medical orgs, or the activist orgs, but even trusted media as well.
I often think part of the reason many left leaning people are unwilling to grapple with this issue is because it involves a cascading distrust--of all those people I mentioned. It’s too much for most people.
Absolutely - and as a Canadian, I think a lot of liberals don't want to deal with the stress of grappling with the prospect that the media and the gov't might be staffed by activists with their own agendas who don't necessarily have 'We The People's' best interests at heart, so they just reject the possibility out of hand. If the government is censoring social media posts or freezing people's bank accounts without due process, then they must have a good reason and it must be for our own good.
Agreed. For so long, left leaning people could count on a few legacy media outposts to report accurately on situations, and then listen to what activists said and form their opinions based on that.
Between polarization and the--I hate to use this word but what else is there?--radicalization of media, both left and right, left leaning people don’t have a reliable media source and just don’t want right meaning people to win, on anything, because they reflexively assume it’s the anti-liberal stance.
I’m 38, and so many people of my older millennial, younger gen X generation grew up with some trusted institutions that...just don’t exist anymore. Especially on this issue.
The idea that they’re not even getting a fair summary of the issue freaks them out so hard, combined with the idea that a gay-rights-associated issue is not actually just a continuation of gay civil rights... They don’t know what to do.
There's this really obnoxious tendency in a certain type of non-expert to shout "why do you think you know better than the experts?" Even when the experts are obviously wrong and their arguments make no sense beyond "I'm an expert therefore my lack of logic is irrelevant".
We can’t all read the papers, the studies, the articles. This is the whole concept behind trusted sources. This issue in particular is such an egregious example of center or left leaning trusted media wholly misleading readers.
I have had that line thrown at me so many times: who are you to question [x]. And all I can say is, read the studies, or read this rebuttal by Singal. They won’t, and don’t. They haven’t even read the articles that claim to support what they support. They want it to be true too much to be interested in actually reading.
I think a lot of the problem comes from the "experts say" narrative. Experts have not gotten less reliable. We are poor at identifying, societally, who the experts are. As we have increased the number of educated, the median capability of the educated has decreased all while the results expected for status for an academic have not changed. This leads to people both cynically reproducing the trappings of expertise and also earnestly confusing the trappings with the substance. Those who seek power and status among the learned classes have identified the trust those classes place in expertise and they mine that trust by building narratives of expertise by offering the appearance of expertise rather than actual expertise. In other words, they have learned to *sound like experts* without needing to *be* experts.
I would disagree - experts have become less reliable. Wasn't it Karl Marx who said something about "Hitherto, intellectuals have sought to understand the world; the point, however, is to change it"
I think most academics have fully bought into Marx' view that there shouldn't even BE a distinction between scholarship and activism, much less that they should have to pick a swim lane. And that's how you get the CDC in 2020 saying anti-lockdown protests are bad because Covid, but BLM protests are good because something something racism is the real virus. They want us to trust them, but they also want to use their credentials as a springboard for pushing a political agenda.
Modern "experts" want all the credibility of previous generations of experts, but without any of the discipline when it comes to objectivity and nonpartisanship. In this particular case, SciAm wants to piss in our ear and tell us it's raining, but without losing our trust in the process.
Fair enough, but that's sort of what I mean: there are still experts out there, and I'm not convinced that those experts are any worse than they ever were, but we're not able to differentiate them from both the increasing number of largely unqualified scholars who need to publish *something* to be considered scholars and from the activists masquerading as experts because the activists have learned what an expert "smells like" culturally (the markers we developed to recognize expertise historically) and they mimic it.
Over the past few generations, we've developed heuristics to recognize experts, but those heuristics were developed when far fewer people graduated from college, even fewer were scholars, and most "experts" who were presented to the general public were chosen by a relatively small group of people. Overproduction of academics and "democratization" of information have wrecked those heuristics.
That doesn't really account for guys like Fauci though, who ticks every box for being a legitimate "expert", but was a partisan hack in terms of how he conducted himself.
Fauci is not a symptom of academic overproduction; he's a symptom of institutional wokeness. The problem isn't that we can't differentiate the Faucis from the Ibram Kendis; the problem is that the Fauci-style experts really aren't signficantly more credible than the Kendi-style experts.
Jesse, this is another great piece of careful critique, but I'm baffled that you continue to maintain this attitude of naïve optimism around SciAm's reporting as if they're just making a good faith effort to be impartial journalists, but are allowing themselves to make careless and sloppy mistakes in their coverage and editing (eg "Her editors were not careful." and "The good news is that since it’s very clear what has gone wrong, there’s no reason these outlets can’t do better").
There's no way you don't understand that this article is part of a massive ideological agenda by gender ideologues that has nothing to do with careful adherence to the facts and maintenance of journalistic standards. A day before this article came out they also published a related piece explaining how biological sex isn't binary. I doubt you'd argue that that was due to an understandable failure to carefully read biological textbooks. These "errors" aren't failures of process. They are by design.
Your insistence on treating this as a sincere attempt at science journalism feels as foolish to me as if you had taken an article from the The Discovery Institute promoting intelligent design and treated it as a serious scientific paper deserving of thoughtful criticism. It might simply be an effort to be charitable to your opponents, but honestly, IMHO, not acknowledging what's really going on here only makes you look gullible and clueless.
ETA: I don't think you *are* clueless. But I feel this makes you *appear* so.
I think Singal is rightfully applying Hanlon's Razor here. More likely than not, the people who put forth what you call "gender ideology" are sincere, even if they're wrong, even if they reason sloppily.
There's no evil cabal trying to get us to believe nonsense about sex just so they can pollute our precious bodily fluids or some other nefariousness.
The consequences of being wrong for these advocates, doctors, and parents (let alone individuals) are so high, and the condition is so otherworldly for many people, that true skepticism seems to be unavailable to many of the people involved.
I would disagree. Yes, there are people making things up for nefarious purposes. For instance, QAnon. There is or was someone, or some people, putting out crazy shit probably at first for the lolz but now it's just nefarious. And this happens with every event, before the dust settles some crazy conspiracy is put out that is immediately glommed onto by at least 10% of the country. So you are right that the vast majority of "believers" may be acting on good faith, but the origin story is usually much darker.
I am the (lifelong liberal, I feel the need to point out) father of a 19 year old daughter who has believed she is a boy for the past 5 years. Your writing about the suicide myth, or what I think of as the "weaponization of suicide" by Trans Rights Activists, is extremely well researched and prescient. Thank you for that. Allow me a moment to make vivid how this affects families of trans-identified teens.
I believe that any suicidal ideation my daughter has had is iatrogenic, or caused by the suicide myth about "gender dysphoria." When vulnerable teen girls are seduced by the allure of the trans cult and told that they will feel suicidal if they don't become boys, it turns out they are more likely to feel suicidal. Helping our daughter to gain a more healthy (and reality-based) sense of herself, and preventing her from medicalizing her trans delusion, has become the all-consuming focus of my family.
She claimed that breast reduction is the leading plastic surgery among adolescents. It’s not it’s rhinoplasty, a.k.a. broken noses I think she just made this up this claim.
Jesse, I read pretty much every article of yours on the topic of gender medicine for minors. I hugely appreciate your work, but here's what I don't understand. You have been writing about this for years. You know all the evidence and lack thereof. There is no evidence to suggest that these medical interventions are helping gender dysphoric kids, but there is evidence to suggest that kids who are given time to go through their natural puberty are very likely to grow out of their gender dysphoria. There is no evidence to suggest that dysphoric kids who are not given blockers and cross-sex hormones will therefore commit suicide, but there is evidence to suggest that going on blockers and hormones will result in physical harm (bone density loss, vaginal atrophy, increased risk of stroke, etc.). There is almost zero evidence on how these kids are functioning as adults, and the evidence we have seems to point to less-than-great outcomes.
So why are you *not* in support of bans? How can you justify dispensing these drugs to kids? Or are you saying that we need to allow a very small number of kids access to these drugs in the context of medical trials with long-term followups? I just don't understand how a person with your knowledge of the situation can be in favor of blockers and hormones for minors, other than as part of a very solid, very long-term trial.
He is, as of this last year or so, more respected and vindicated and cited than he was for the last five. Methinks he will be even more so in the years to come; in part because he did not come out strongly on the side of the opposition--he stayed true to a journalist’s mission to provide the public with a better understanding of the state of the issue.
Take a look at the Helen Lewis article in the latest issue of the Atlantic. She provides an overview for the layperson. The ideologues will be quick to condemn her as a TERF - indeed, they did so in the mid-2010s just for not toeing the line. But here's how she described her strategy in her latest newsletter. I think the logic applies to Jesse's position, too:
"I wanted to make the case to the right that the bans (12 states so far and counting) are unduly punitive, counter-productive and might have unforeseen consequences—such as children with severe mental health needs not seeking treatment, or doctors afraid to give it to them.
"But I also wanted to make the case to the left that the U.S. is becoming more of an outlier in terms of the approach it favours (“affirmation”), the frequency with which it turns to medical solutions, and the ages at which doctors are allowed to perform surgeries."
Sorry, I guess I should have read your article against bans that you mentioned in the beginning, maybe you answer my question there. Will do this now, but it's from 2020. Since then we've only gotten more evidence about the negative or non-existent effects of gender medicine...
Edit: Reading the article now, it is in fact dated. We now know that:
- it is questionable at best to say that puberty blockers are reversible
- social transition is possibly (likely?) a big contributing factor to persistence of gender dysphoria, which then leads to medical treatment
- the fact that these kids also have a whole bunch of other mental health issues should be a reason to delay medical interventions, not speed them up
- not all youth care involves parental consent (see Jamie Reed's affadavit)
- most gender physicians do not do "individualized evaluations" with any reference to any protocols or guidelines (see Reuters' articles and a huge number of anecdotal parental evidence)
- professional societies (in North America) are NOT offering guidelines based upon the best available science, and they DO NOT revise them based upon emerging science and best practices
I am not even half-way through the article. I will finish reading it, but I am absolutely not convinced by it. Perhaps in 2020 we didn't really know better, but it's three years later and to me it is indisputably clear that doctors in North America cannot be trusted to treat gender dysphoric kids in ways that will improve their mental and physical health. When doctors can't be trusted, the only thing to do is to legislate.
Jesse's devotion to the Marquess of Queensbury rules when everyone else is fighting MMA style can be very annoying at times and when he says for the 1000th time things like "It’s baffling and frustrating that, in 2023, Scientific American’s editors are comfortable leaving so much. . .stuff out of a complicated story, opting instead for a breezy, oversimplified account," I want to scream, because this has been going on long enough to realize what we're dealing with (more or less the complete ideological takeover of our thinking classes by a Manichaean mania around "Justice" issues and the transformation of "the marginalized" into sacred fetish objects), but then I take a deep breath and see the method in his madness—he needs to maintain some liberal bona fides and be the opposite of an angry flamethrower, but instead simply a sane old-school journalist banging his head against the same wall over and over in the hope that it finally shatters (the wall being the mass psychosis of America's cultural and educational leaders and institutions).
I think this is a wise strategy as much as it makes my blood boil, and it will pay off greatly down the road. We should all be preparing (Jesse first and foremost) and maybe pooling some funds if poss, think of all the trials he will be called to testify at sometime down the road, when this massive medical tort becomes a class-action feeding frenzy.
I absolutely admire Jesse's devotion to old-school journalism, but I think there is definitely a way to state one's evidence-based beliefs without being an angry flamethrower. Lisa Selin Davis, another very careful and reasonable voice speaking about this issue, recently said that she believes all medicalization of gender dysphoric children (and social transitioning, and even teaching gender ideology!) should discontinue until people understand the real-life consequences of this - i.e. detransitioners: https://lisaselindavis.substack.com/p/no-one-practicing-teaching-about
There are some things we ban, especially for minors. If it is clear from the evidence that "gender affirming medical care" for minors is likely causing lots of them harm, it should be ok to say this.
P.S. Also, as J Chicago said, banning medical procedures is not the same as banning treatment. Unfortunately, because of "conversion therapy" *bans*, there are very few therapists who can do honest, in-depth work with gender dysphoric kids. How ironic.
Dan, it may be useful for debate in general to have lots of different positions. Like if we're talking about the pros and cons of electric cars, or even with regards to something like CRT which is a much more heated debate with greater consequences. But we're talking about children's lives and bodies here. It's about integrity - if at some point you see enough indisputable evidence that a certain course of action is physically and/or mentally harming large numbers of children, you have an obligation as a human being to speak against it. I believe Jesse to be an honest human being with lots of integrity - that much is clear. That's why I'd like to know what his reason is - at this point in time, in mid-2023 - to be against bans.
Those who don't want the bans could first present the long term outcomes of all those medicalized so far (these people need hormones continually for the rest of their lives, so it isn't like they are completely untrackable). And surely those who think these bans are a bad idea can encourage these studies to happen and do the studies?
What are the long term outcomes? This all got going in the US in 2007, 16 years ago...there are a lot of people who have been started on them.
(knowing what you do now, would you do it again?) It's known how to make an unbiased survey, this should be done, with cliician interviews, etc.
This: let's do our assessments, we've been doing them a while---but where does anyone show that those who pass the assessments are doing well? And how do you know they wouldn't have done better (and not become lifelong patients on hormones which are never going to match those their bodies were producing beforehand) without these treatments?
I still don't understand how these interventions became widespread without answers to these questions. How they even became available without serious experimental interventions oversight.
yes, as someone with endometriosis who was offered Lupron (described to me by a surgical oncologist ten years ago as the "gold standard" treatment for endo), i tried to research the drug a bit and came upon discussions of its seemingly many, and significant, side effects, and decided against taking it. it's wild to me that this drug is in the mix as a salve for children with gender dysphoria (and/or other psychological issues), and frustrating that very few outlets discuss its use - and complications - in the context of endometriosis.
I don’t think the editors of the magazine realize the damage this does. In their minds I bet they think that by printing those statements they make them true somehow. But all they do is make me less likely to believe them about anything else.
About this " I’m not sure it’s accurate to say that there is a “consensus among the scientific and medical community based on the latest research” I agree. You discuss WPATH consensus...but there is no way that WPATH represents the expert community on its own, it seems to be an organization dedicated to medical intervention for gender dysphoria. So it leaves out entire treatment pathways. There is a great article on the lack of consensus more broadly and what is wrong with the WPATH recommendations by Block: https://www.bmj.com/content/380/bmj.p382 . Peer reviewed investigative article.
As far as kids regretting, going on to hormones from puberty blockers is not the same as who stops treatment or not, for hormones, one study that acutally did try to follow-up in the US found about 30% stopped taking them within 4 years (there is a Dutch study with a different finding, it's all unclear). The ~30% is Roberts et al., 2022, the same cohort that found psychotropic drug use increased.
The other thing is that Abbruzzese et al., 2023 ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36593754/ ) report on some preliminary findings of long term outcomes from the Dutch Model carefully chosen kids and it seems some are not doing that great, having problems:
"Nearly a quarter of the participants have felt that their bodies were still too masculine, and over half have experienced shame for the “operated vagina” and fearful their partner will find out their post-surgical status—despite registering low “gender dysphoria” UGDS scores (Steensma et al., 2022).[...] the reported relationship difficulties reported by Asseler, with over 60% of individuals in their early to mid-30’s still single, also deserve serious consideration. The apparent sexual difficulties reported by male-to-female transitioners by van der Meulen (around 70% have problems with libido, have pain during sex, or have problems with achieving orgasm), combined with reproductive challenges, may be contributing to this outcome."
"the rate of cross-sex identification was not as stable as originally expected, with a sizable percentage reporting one or more instances of identity changes after treatment completion, especially among the individuals on the autistic spectrum (Steensma et al., 2022)."
I just want to point out that media aimed at the general public presenting poor-quality data as high-quality and definitive is bad for science overall. It doesn't take a degree in a scientific subject, or for that matter, a degree at all, to recognize some of the flaws in these studies. When the public is told by respected journalists that clearly flawed science is good science and anyone who is skeptical of that flawed science is a science-denier, members of the general public will start to distrust science. That's part of why this whole tendency to proclaim that "the science is settled" when it's an open question among scientists in the field is so dangerous for public confidence in science.
As an aside, I have never had someone call me stupid for saying "we don't know" and then explaining why something is unsettled in the world of science. If anything, people seem to think I'm smarter because I usually explain why we don't know and how we'd figure it out and that's an opportunity to bring up all sorts of things that make me seem smart.
That's a good question. I think at least some times people want it to be true and figure that if they say it's "settled science" then that will shut down discussion and further investigation. In other cases, I suspect that people look at the evidence and they really do think that it's compelling and that the objections people have are just nit-picking. Usually that's because things like statistics tell you that the things you believe may not be true.
Sometimes I break it down into two segments. For the original doctors (A) , there was a sense that this was such a novel and tiny and desperate population, they just started throwing spaghetti at the wall and figured, there’s no other treatment, and patients are so desperate, what’s the harm? So that’s the Dutch clinic, in the before times.
And so then there was a protocol of sorts, and there were curious or enterprising doctors elsewhere who also were looking at a tiny, novel population, and they were like, Oh excellent, now there’s some research and some novel treatment. Maybe it’s just like the gay civil rights movement but with medicine. I’ll look into it. And that’s cohort B.
But now. Now there’s Jack Turban (call him C) *and* Erica Anderson (Call her D).
And those are two new sides. Turban seems hell bent on misreading studies and misrepresenting his own, and I try to imagine why. Is he someone in cohort B who, upon evidence he might be wrong, is too terrified to think about the consequences? Or is he some other cohort who just...doesn’t care. Some kind of borderline sociopath with a god complex who became a doctor and saw a novel career path and will bulldoze anything in his path?
And adjacent or opposite him is Dr Erica Anderson, a trans woman who herself has benefited from this new medicine and technology, is a practitioner of it, who nonetheless has developed strong reservations about the current widespread practices. She remains a strong supporter of the idea of these interventions, while developing strong reservations about how they’re deployed currently. I imagine she feels quite conflicted at the moment, especially as so little quality data comes out to support these interventions for minors, while also feeling helped and grateful for the interventions she received as an adult.
It is sad and lamentable that trans activists play the suicide card without evidence. It is even sadder and more lamentable when science journalists do so. When I began reading Scientific American in high school, it was a highly credible publication. It is certainly not that any longer.
Those activists and some science journalists claim that children are endangered if the transitioning process is slowed down. They asseverate that they care about children. But children can be at risk if their transition is fast-tracked, such as those who wind up detransitioning, or those who are harmed by puberty blockers.
These folk don't care about children, they care about advancing their ideology. It is very worrisome when science journalism - and science itself - is cannibalized by ideology. The scientific process should proceed with considerable skepticism, from all angles.
Instead, we are getting starry-eyed credulity. But it is not that science journalists lack skepticism, they are more than happy to take down studies that do not align with their ideologies. But do they exhibit skepticism towards trans activists' claims? Oh hell no, sooner would they cheer on Ron DeSantis and attend a talk by James Dobson and hail him.
Intellectual honesty is nigh on dead among the professional managerial class. RIP.
When I was a kid, I also read SA and learned a lot. In 1970, SA published an article titled "The Economic Growth of Japan". It was my first introduction to the rise of Asia. In 1963, I read an article written by Glenn T. Seaborg ("The Synthetic Elements: III"). SA has changed since then and not for the better.
(It's been long enough since I first read the magazine that issues I read when they were recent are now in the "50 Years Ago" column. The 100 and 150 years ago segment is still before my time, though.)
Thanks for reaching me the word "asseverate". (It seems like a portmanteau of assert and perseverate, which, even if it is appearance only, and not etymology/a real portmanteau, I find delicious.)
Scientific American used to be great. You felt you could trust it because of it’s claimed grounding in foundational science and integrity.
No more. It has become another activist magazine with an agenda. Cancelled my subscription two years ago after getting tired of preachy and sloppy articles. After reading Jesse’s review, I see I made the right decision.
Sciam is unreadable and it is a terrible thing for science. Understanding how the real natural world works is a key aspect of science. We are seeing the continual rise of pseudoscience and anti science coming from both sides of the political divide. A true scientific magazine cannot indulge in activism favoring one political perspective without sacrificing scientific objectivity. Science should be the one place where political considerations are put aside so as to pursue verifiable knowledge. If politics is not put aside then the door swings open for anti science and pre scientific superstition.
I wish somebody would buy them out and relaunch the magazine... that happened once before, in the late 1940s, when the (then nearly 100 years old) publication had become a stodgy trade publication for civil engineers and the like; the new owners did a complete revamping as a magazine for intelligent laymen.
If Elon bought Sciam it would have nothing but articles on his wonderful rockets that explode after launching and how AI is going to kill everyone. No thanks. Bring back those old stodgy people who deep down wanted to do science and tell people about it.
Regarding Jesse’s footnote, I think most observers would agree that activist pressure to remove so-called gatekeeping is absolutely why WPATH’s SoC8 removed age guidelines.
But I would add that it also seems fair to interpret the removal as an effort by WPATH to remove liability from clinicians who are, again, practicing experimental medicine.
WPATH is a *professional* organization advising *practitioners*--not a medical organization advising or protecting patients.
Removing the age guidelines protects clinicians as much as it “allows patients to get the interventions they need” or however they phrased it. If there is no age guideline, then no practitioner can be sued for violating the guidelines.
“If you want a combination of an author and a venue guaranteed to produce ideologically-motivated nonsense, it’s Agustin Fuentes writing at Scientific American. The combination of a badly misguided author, distorting biology for political reasons, with a magazine devoted to promulgating “authoritarian progressive” ideology disguised as science, gives me the same feeling I’d have if my mother called me to dinner and announced that we’d be having liver and Brussels sprouts.”
Of course, it get worse. Scientific American actually published an article title “Visualizing Sex as a Spectrum”. The “evidence” was (well-known) chromosome anomalies that are rare disorders and quite discrete (as in no spectrum). Of course, chromosome disorders (for example, 47,XXY) don’t produce any sexual ambiguity and are not “new sexes”.
Of course, it gets worse, Scientific American actually published a column opposing scientific research. You can’t make this up. Scientific American published a column opposing scientific research back in 2013.
The rag should be renamed, I suggest ‘Religious American – Where faith smashes facts and doesn’t apologize’.
“Gender-affirming surgeries are not common among those under age 18 and are usually limited to “‘top surgery,’ or a mastectomy. Breast reduction surgery is also one of the most common forms of plastic surgery in cisgender teenagers.”
I have no words. This is so disingenuous and absolutely NOT comparable.
Thank you, Jesse! Here is a relevant story to this regrettable chapter on the state of gender science in America today:
When the New York Times published the article "They Paused Puberty, but Is There a Cost?" (https://nyti.ms/42pM5ak) on Nov. 14, 2022, one of the letters they received was from Marc B. Garnick from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (https://bit.ly/3VHHtKn), and more importantly, one of three academic principal clinical investigators of studies that led to the initial F.D.A. approval of Lupron [the puberty blocker drug that gets used most often] for the treatment of metastatic prostate cancer. Yes, for metastatic prostate cancer. That letter (see https://nyti.ms/3nwblwJ), published two weeks later on Nov. 28, 2022, said this (and I will quote it in full for those who might not have access behind the paywall): "As one of three academic principal clinical investigators of studies that led to the initial F.D.A. approval of Lupron for the treatment of metastatic prostate cancer — and having studied this class of drugs, which includes puberty blockers, for more than four decades — I can say that physicians are still learning and continue to be concerned about the safety of these agents in adults. Woefully little safety data are available for the likely more vulnerable younger population. Bone loss in adult men who have been on these agents is significant [Jesse, you mentioned this topic in your article - that you were less familiar with - it turns out that the concerns you heard were true], and a leading cause of morbidity with long-term administration. Other safety issues include cognitive, metabolic and cardiovascular effects, still under intense investigation. The prudent and ethical use of such agents in the younger population should demand that every pubertal or pre-pubertal child be part of rigorous clinical research studies that evaluate both the short-term and longer-term effects of these agents to better define the true risks and benefits rather than relying on anecdotal information."
So opines the principal investigator of the drug. Need we say more?
And then people wonder why "trust in the experts" is at historic lows....
The totality of your statement is like... it’s not just the doctors, or the medical orgs, or the activist orgs, but even trusted media as well.
I often think part of the reason many left leaning people are unwilling to grapple with this issue is because it involves a cascading distrust--of all those people I mentioned. It’s too much for most people.
Absolutely - and as a Canadian, I think a lot of liberals don't want to deal with the stress of grappling with the prospect that the media and the gov't might be staffed by activists with their own agendas who don't necessarily have 'We The People's' best interests at heart, so they just reject the possibility out of hand. If the government is censoring social media posts or freezing people's bank accounts without due process, then they must have a good reason and it must be for our own good.
Agreed. For so long, left leaning people could count on a few legacy media outposts to report accurately on situations, and then listen to what activists said and form their opinions based on that.
Between polarization and the--I hate to use this word but what else is there?--radicalization of media, both left and right, left leaning people don’t have a reliable media source and just don’t want right meaning people to win, on anything, because they reflexively assume it’s the anti-liberal stance.
I’m 38, and so many people of my older millennial, younger gen X generation grew up with some trusted institutions that...just don’t exist anymore. Especially on this issue.
The idea that they’re not even getting a fair summary of the issue freaks them out so hard, combined with the idea that a gay-rights-associated issue is not actually just a continuation of gay civil rights... They don’t know what to do.
There's this really obnoxious tendency in a certain type of non-expert to shout "why do you think you know better than the experts?" Even when the experts are obviously wrong and their arguments make no sense beyond "I'm an expert therefore my lack of logic is irrelevant".
We can’t all read the papers, the studies, the articles. This is the whole concept behind trusted sources. This issue in particular is such an egregious example of center or left leaning trusted media wholly misleading readers.
I have had that line thrown at me so many times: who are you to question [x]. And all I can say is, read the studies, or read this rebuttal by Singal. They won’t, and don’t. They haven’t even read the articles that claim to support what they support. They want it to be true too much to be interested in actually reading.
I think a lot of the problem comes from the "experts say" narrative. Experts have not gotten less reliable. We are poor at identifying, societally, who the experts are. As we have increased the number of educated, the median capability of the educated has decreased all while the results expected for status for an academic have not changed. This leads to people both cynically reproducing the trappings of expertise and also earnestly confusing the trappings with the substance. Those who seek power and status among the learned classes have identified the trust those classes place in expertise and they mine that trust by building narratives of expertise by offering the appearance of expertise rather than actual expertise. In other words, they have learned to *sound like experts* without needing to *be* experts.
I would disagree - experts have become less reliable. Wasn't it Karl Marx who said something about "Hitherto, intellectuals have sought to understand the world; the point, however, is to change it"
I think most academics have fully bought into Marx' view that there shouldn't even BE a distinction between scholarship and activism, much less that they should have to pick a swim lane. And that's how you get the CDC in 2020 saying anti-lockdown protests are bad because Covid, but BLM protests are good because something something racism is the real virus. They want us to trust them, but they also want to use their credentials as a springboard for pushing a political agenda.
Modern "experts" want all the credibility of previous generations of experts, but without any of the discipline when it comes to objectivity and nonpartisanship. In this particular case, SciAm wants to piss in our ear and tell us it's raining, but without losing our trust in the process.
Fair enough, but that's sort of what I mean: there are still experts out there, and I'm not convinced that those experts are any worse than they ever were, but we're not able to differentiate them from both the increasing number of largely unqualified scholars who need to publish *something* to be considered scholars and from the activists masquerading as experts because the activists have learned what an expert "smells like" culturally (the markers we developed to recognize expertise historically) and they mimic it.
Over the past few generations, we've developed heuristics to recognize experts, but those heuristics were developed when far fewer people graduated from college, even fewer were scholars, and most "experts" who were presented to the general public were chosen by a relatively small group of people. Overproduction of academics and "democratization" of information have wrecked those heuristics.
That doesn't really account for guys like Fauci though, who ticks every box for being a legitimate "expert", but was a partisan hack in terms of how he conducted himself.
Fauci is not a symptom of academic overproduction; he's a symptom of institutional wokeness. The problem isn't that we can't differentiate the Faucis from the Ibram Kendis; the problem is that the Fauci-style experts really aren't signficantly more credible than the Kendi-style experts.
Fauci is also a political bureaucrat who has been around in politics through various administrations for ages, but I take your point.
Jesse, this is another great piece of careful critique, but I'm baffled that you continue to maintain this attitude of naïve optimism around SciAm's reporting as if they're just making a good faith effort to be impartial journalists, but are allowing themselves to make careless and sloppy mistakes in their coverage and editing (eg "Her editors were not careful." and "The good news is that since it’s very clear what has gone wrong, there’s no reason these outlets can’t do better").
There's no way you don't understand that this article is part of a massive ideological agenda by gender ideologues that has nothing to do with careful adherence to the facts and maintenance of journalistic standards. A day before this article came out they also published a related piece explaining how biological sex isn't binary. I doubt you'd argue that that was due to an understandable failure to carefully read biological textbooks. These "errors" aren't failures of process. They are by design.
Your insistence on treating this as a sincere attempt at science journalism feels as foolish to me as if you had taken an article from the The Discovery Institute promoting intelligent design and treated it as a serious scientific paper deserving of thoughtful criticism. It might simply be an effort to be charitable to your opponents, but honestly, IMHO, not acknowledging what's really going on here only makes you look gullible and clueless.
ETA: I don't think you *are* clueless. But I feel this makes you *appear* so.
I think Singal is rightfully applying Hanlon's Razor here. More likely than not, the people who put forth what you call "gender ideology" are sincere, even if they're wrong, even if they reason sloppily.
There's no evil cabal trying to get us to believe nonsense about sex just so they can pollute our precious bodily fluids or some other nefariousness.
The consequences of being wrong for these advocates, doctors, and parents (let alone individuals) are so high, and the condition is so otherworldly for many people, that true skepticism seems to be unavailable to many of the people involved.
I would disagree. Yes, there are people making things up for nefarious purposes. For instance, QAnon. There is or was someone, or some people, putting out crazy shit probably at first for the lolz but now it's just nefarious. And this happens with every event, before the dust settles some crazy conspiracy is put out that is immediately glommed onto by at least 10% of the country. So you are right that the vast majority of "believers" may be acting on good faith, but the origin story is usually much darker.
I am the (lifelong liberal, I feel the need to point out) father of a 19 year old daughter who has believed she is a boy for the past 5 years. Your writing about the suicide myth, or what I think of as the "weaponization of suicide" by Trans Rights Activists, is extremely well researched and prescient. Thank you for that. Allow me a moment to make vivid how this affects families of trans-identified teens.
I believe that any suicidal ideation my daughter has had is iatrogenic, or caused by the suicide myth about "gender dysphoria." When vulnerable teen girls are seduced by the allure of the trans cult and told that they will feel suicidal if they don't become boys, it turns out they are more likely to feel suicidal. Helping our daughter to gain a more healthy (and reality-based) sense of herself, and preventing her from medicalizing her trans delusion, has become the all-consuming focus of my family.
It has mostly wrecked us.
I am so sorry for what you are going through and hope your family can come through this. It must be so hard.
I'm so sorry you're dealing with this! Praying for you and your daughter.
My deepest sympathies.
She claimed that breast reduction is the leading plastic surgery among adolescents. It’s not it’s rhinoplasty, a.k.a. broken noses I think she just made this up this claim.
Jesse, I read pretty much every article of yours on the topic of gender medicine for minors. I hugely appreciate your work, but here's what I don't understand. You have been writing about this for years. You know all the evidence and lack thereof. There is no evidence to suggest that these medical interventions are helping gender dysphoric kids, but there is evidence to suggest that kids who are given time to go through their natural puberty are very likely to grow out of their gender dysphoria. There is no evidence to suggest that dysphoric kids who are not given blockers and cross-sex hormones will therefore commit suicide, but there is evidence to suggest that going on blockers and hormones will result in physical harm (bone density loss, vaginal atrophy, increased risk of stroke, etc.). There is almost zero evidence on how these kids are functioning as adults, and the evidence we have seems to point to less-than-great outcomes.
So why are you *not* in support of bans? How can you justify dispensing these drugs to kids? Or are you saying that we need to allow a very small number of kids access to these drugs in the context of medical trials with long-term followups? I just don't understand how a person with your knowledge of the situation can be in favor of blockers and hormones for minors, other than as part of a very solid, very long-term trial.
in my opinion, its better if the author doesnt travel the last mile. if he did critics would then minimize his research as agenda based.
His critics already do, they don't actually care what he writes at this point, they will bash him mercilessly anyway.
He is, as of this last year or so, more respected and vindicated and cited than he was for the last five. Methinks he will be even more so in the years to come; in part because he did not come out strongly on the side of the opposition--he stayed true to a journalist’s mission to provide the public with a better understanding of the state of the issue.
Take a look at the Helen Lewis article in the latest issue of the Atlantic. She provides an overview for the layperson. The ideologues will be quick to condemn her as a TERF - indeed, they did so in the mid-2010s just for not toeing the line. But here's how she described her strategy in her latest newsletter. I think the logic applies to Jesse's position, too:
"I wanted to make the case to the right that the bans (12 states so far and counting) are unduly punitive, counter-productive and might have unforeseen consequences—such as children with severe mental health needs not seeking treatment, or doctors afraid to give it to them.
"But I also wanted to make the case to the left that the U.S. is becoming more of an outlier in terms of the approach it favours (“affirmation”), the frequency with which it turns to medical solutions, and the ages at which doctors are allowed to perform surgeries."
There is the point that not giving medical intervention is not at all like not giving treatment.
Sorry, I guess I should have read your article against bans that you mentioned in the beginning, maybe you answer my question there. Will do this now, but it's from 2020. Since then we've only gotten more evidence about the negative or non-existent effects of gender medicine...
Edit: Reading the article now, it is in fact dated. We now know that:
- it is questionable at best to say that puberty blockers are reversible
- social transition is possibly (likely?) a big contributing factor to persistence of gender dysphoria, which then leads to medical treatment
- the fact that these kids also have a whole bunch of other mental health issues should be a reason to delay medical interventions, not speed them up
- not all youth care involves parental consent (see Jamie Reed's affadavit)
- most gender physicians do not do "individualized evaluations" with any reference to any protocols or guidelines (see Reuters' articles and a huge number of anecdotal parental evidence)
- professional societies (in North America) are NOT offering guidelines based upon the best available science, and they DO NOT revise them based upon emerging science and best practices
I am not even half-way through the article. I will finish reading it, but I am absolutely not convinced by it. Perhaps in 2020 we didn't really know better, but it's three years later and to me it is indisputably clear that doctors in North America cannot be trusted to treat gender dysphoric kids in ways that will improve their mental and physical health. When doctors can't be trusted, the only thing to do is to legislate.
Jesse's devotion to the Marquess of Queensbury rules when everyone else is fighting MMA style can be very annoying at times and when he says for the 1000th time things like "It’s baffling and frustrating that, in 2023, Scientific American’s editors are comfortable leaving so much. . .stuff out of a complicated story, opting instead for a breezy, oversimplified account," I want to scream, because this has been going on long enough to realize what we're dealing with (more or less the complete ideological takeover of our thinking classes by a Manichaean mania around "Justice" issues and the transformation of "the marginalized" into sacred fetish objects), but then I take a deep breath and see the method in his madness—he needs to maintain some liberal bona fides and be the opposite of an angry flamethrower, but instead simply a sane old-school journalist banging his head against the same wall over and over in the hope that it finally shatters (the wall being the mass psychosis of America's cultural and educational leaders and institutions).
I think this is a wise strategy as much as it makes my blood boil, and it will pay off greatly down the road. We should all be preparing (Jesse first and foremost) and maybe pooling some funds if poss, think of all the trials he will be called to testify at sometime down the road, when this massive medical tort becomes a class-action feeding frenzy.
I absolutely admire Jesse's devotion to old-school journalism, but I think there is definitely a way to state one's evidence-based beliefs without being an angry flamethrower. Lisa Selin Davis, another very careful and reasonable voice speaking about this issue, recently said that she believes all medicalization of gender dysphoric children (and social transitioning, and even teaching gender ideology!) should discontinue until people understand the real-life consequences of this - i.e. detransitioners: https://lisaselindavis.substack.com/p/no-one-practicing-teaching-about
There are some things we ban, especially for minors. If it is clear from the evidence that "gender affirming medical care" for minors is likely causing lots of them harm, it should be ok to say this.
P.S. Also, as J Chicago said, banning medical procedures is not the same as banning treatment. Unfortunately, because of "conversion therapy" *bans*, there are very few therapists who can do honest, in-depth work with gender dysphoric kids. How ironic.
It's useful to the debate to have lots of different positions around, not just dogmatic ideologues on either side.
Dan, it may be useful for debate in general to have lots of different positions. Like if we're talking about the pros and cons of electric cars, or even with regards to something like CRT which is a much more heated debate with greater consequences. But we're talking about children's lives and bodies here. It's about integrity - if at some point you see enough indisputable evidence that a certain course of action is physically and/or mentally harming large numbers of children, you have an obligation as a human being to speak against it. I believe Jesse to be an honest human being with lots of integrity - that much is clear. That's why I'd like to know what his reason is - at this point in time, in mid-2023 - to be against bans.
I think these bans make it harder to do those trials. Both by blocking the usage of these interventions and by raising the temperature of the debate.
Those who don't want the bans could first present the long term outcomes of all those medicalized so far (these people need hormones continually for the rest of their lives, so it isn't like they are completely untrackable). And surely those who think these bans are a bad idea can encourage these studies to happen and do the studies?
What are the long term outcomes? This all got going in the US in 2007, 16 years ago...there are a lot of people who have been started on them.
(knowing what you do now, would you do it again?) It's known how to make an unbiased survey, this should be done, with cliician interviews, etc.
This: let's do our assessments, we've been doing them a while---but where does anyone show that those who pass the assessments are doing well? And how do you know they wouldn't have done better (and not become lifelong patients on hormones which are never going to match those their bodies were producing beforehand) without these treatments?
I still don't understand how these interventions became widespread without answers to these questions. How they even became available without serious experimental interventions oversight.
The issues with side effects from Lupron are legendary: https://www.statnews.com/2017/02/02/lupron-puberty-children-health-problems/ and https://lawanswer.org/what-you-should-know-about-lupron-class-action-lawsuit/ for two examples. It reminds me of the push to claim "opiates are not addictive" by the Sacklers, who made billions on Oxycontinwhile causing countless deaths. These myths push a harmful agenda while claiming to be "science" , causing immeasurable harms and making tons of cash for the companies involved. This scandal has yet to blow, but thank you for your careful voice of reason.
yes, as someone with endometriosis who was offered Lupron (described to me by a surgical oncologist ten years ago as the "gold standard" treatment for endo), i tried to research the drug a bit and came upon discussions of its seemingly many, and significant, side effects, and decided against taking it. it's wild to me that this drug is in the mix as a salve for children with gender dysphoria (and/or other psychological issues), and frustrating that very few outlets discuss its use - and complications - in the context of endometriosis.
I don’t think the editors of the magazine realize the damage this does. In their minds I bet they think that by printing those statements they make them true somehow. But all they do is make me less likely to believe them about anything else.
Thank you for another excellent analysis!
About this " I’m not sure it’s accurate to say that there is a “consensus among the scientific and medical community based on the latest research” I agree. You discuss WPATH consensus...but there is no way that WPATH represents the expert community on its own, it seems to be an organization dedicated to medical intervention for gender dysphoria. So it leaves out entire treatment pathways. There is a great article on the lack of consensus more broadly and what is wrong with the WPATH recommendations by Block: https://www.bmj.com/content/380/bmj.p382 . Peer reviewed investigative article.
As far as kids regretting, going on to hormones from puberty blockers is not the same as who stops treatment or not, for hormones, one study that acutally did try to follow-up in the US found about 30% stopped taking them within 4 years (there is a Dutch study with a different finding, it's all unclear). The ~30% is Roberts et al., 2022, the same cohort that found psychotropic drug use increased.
The other thing is that Abbruzzese et al., 2023 ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36593754/ ) report on some preliminary findings of long term outcomes from the Dutch Model carefully chosen kids and it seems some are not doing that great, having problems:
"Nearly a quarter of the participants have felt that their bodies were still too masculine, and over half have experienced shame for the “operated vagina” and fearful their partner will find out their post-surgical status—despite registering low “gender dysphoria” UGDS scores (Steensma et al., 2022).[...] the reported relationship difficulties reported by Asseler, with over 60% of individuals in their early to mid-30’s still single, also deserve serious consideration. The apparent sexual difficulties reported by male-to-female transitioners by van der Meulen (around 70% have problems with libido, have pain during sex, or have problems with achieving orgasm), combined with reproductive challenges, may be contributing to this outcome."
"the rate of cross-sex identification was not as stable as originally expected, with a sizable percentage reporting one or more instances of identity changes after treatment completion, especially among the individuals on the autistic spectrum (Steensma et al., 2022)."
Thank you for reporting on all this!!
I just want to point out that media aimed at the general public presenting poor-quality data as high-quality and definitive is bad for science overall. It doesn't take a degree in a scientific subject, or for that matter, a degree at all, to recognize some of the flaws in these studies. When the public is told by respected journalists that clearly flawed science is good science and anyone who is skeptical of that flawed science is a science-denier, members of the general public will start to distrust science. That's part of why this whole tendency to proclaim that "the science is settled" when it's an open question among scientists in the field is so dangerous for public confidence in science.
As an aside, I have never had someone call me stupid for saying "we don't know" and then explaining why something is unsettled in the world of science. If anything, people seem to think I'm smarter because I usually explain why we don't know and how we'd figure it out and that's an opportunity to bring up all sorts of things that make me seem smart.
Myrna, I feel like we come at this from a similar perspective. What do you think motivates people who say it’s “settled science”?
That's a good question. I think at least some times people want it to be true and figure that if they say it's "settled science" then that will shut down discussion and further investigation. In other cases, I suspect that people look at the evidence and they really do think that it's compelling and that the objections people have are just nit-picking. Usually that's because things like statistics tell you that the things you believe may not be true.
Sometimes I break it down into two segments. For the original doctors (A) , there was a sense that this was such a novel and tiny and desperate population, they just started throwing spaghetti at the wall and figured, there’s no other treatment, and patients are so desperate, what’s the harm? So that’s the Dutch clinic, in the before times.
And so then there was a protocol of sorts, and there were curious or enterprising doctors elsewhere who also were looking at a tiny, novel population, and they were like, Oh excellent, now there’s some research and some novel treatment. Maybe it’s just like the gay civil rights movement but with medicine. I’ll look into it. And that’s cohort B.
But now. Now there’s Jack Turban (call him C) *and* Erica Anderson (Call her D).
And those are two new sides. Turban seems hell bent on misreading studies and misrepresenting his own, and I try to imagine why. Is he someone in cohort B who, upon evidence he might be wrong, is too terrified to think about the consequences? Or is he some other cohort who just...doesn’t care. Some kind of borderline sociopath with a god complex who became a doctor and saw a novel career path and will bulldoze anything in his path?
And adjacent or opposite him is Dr Erica Anderson, a trans woman who herself has benefited from this new medicine and technology, is a practitioner of it, who nonetheless has developed strong reservations about the current widespread practices. She remains a strong supporter of the idea of these interventions, while developing strong reservations about how they’re deployed currently. I imagine she feels quite conflicted at the moment, especially as so little quality data comes out to support these interventions for minors, while also feeling helped and grateful for the interventions she received as an adult.
It is sad and lamentable that trans activists play the suicide card without evidence. It is even sadder and more lamentable when science journalists do so. When I began reading Scientific American in high school, it was a highly credible publication. It is certainly not that any longer.
Those activists and some science journalists claim that children are endangered if the transitioning process is slowed down. They asseverate that they care about children. But children can be at risk if their transition is fast-tracked, such as those who wind up detransitioning, or those who are harmed by puberty blockers.
These folk don't care about children, they care about advancing their ideology. It is very worrisome when science journalism - and science itself - is cannibalized by ideology. The scientific process should proceed with considerable skepticism, from all angles.
Instead, we are getting starry-eyed credulity. But it is not that science journalists lack skepticism, they are more than happy to take down studies that do not align with their ideologies. But do they exhibit skepticism towards trans activists' claims? Oh hell no, sooner would they cheer on Ron DeSantis and attend a talk by James Dobson and hail him.
Intellectual honesty is nigh on dead among the professional managerial class. RIP.
When I was a kid, I also read SA and learned a lot. In 1970, SA published an article titled "The Economic Growth of Japan". It was my first introduction to the rise of Asia. In 1963, I read an article written by Glenn T. Seaborg ("The Synthetic Elements: III"). SA has changed since then and not for the better.
I liked the magazine when it had Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games column... I guess that dates me.
(It's been long enough since I first read the magazine that issues I read when they were recent are now in the "50 Years Ago" column. The 100 and 150 years ago segment is still before my time, though.)
Thanks for reaching me the word "asseverate". (It seems like a portmanteau of assert and perseverate, which, even if it is appearance only, and not etymology/a real portmanteau, I find delicious.)
Scientific American used to be great. You felt you could trust it because of it’s claimed grounding in foundational science and integrity.
No more. It has become another activist magazine with an agenda. Cancelled my subscription two years ago after getting tired of preachy and sloppy articles. After reading Jesse’s review, I see I made the right decision.
Scientific American has become unreadable. This stuff is cosmically embarrassing.
Sciam is unreadable and it is a terrible thing for science. Understanding how the real natural world works is a key aspect of science. We are seeing the continual rise of pseudoscience and anti science coming from both sides of the political divide. A true scientific magazine cannot indulge in activism favoring one political perspective without sacrificing scientific objectivity. Science should be the one place where political considerations are put aside so as to pursue verifiable knowledge. If politics is not put aside then the door swings open for anti science and pre scientific superstition.
Well said. It is a continual struggle.
I wish somebody would buy them out and relaunch the magazine... that happened once before, in the late 1940s, when the (then nearly 100 years old) publication had become a stodgy trade publication for civil engineers and the like; the new owners did a complete revamping as a magazine for intelligent laymen.
I’m sure Elon has some spare cash.
If Elon bought Sciam it would have nothing but articles on his wonderful rockets that explode after launching and how AI is going to kill everyone. No thanks. Bring back those old stodgy people who deep down wanted to do science and tell people about it.
Regarding Jesse’s footnote, I think most observers would agree that activist pressure to remove so-called gatekeeping is absolutely why WPATH’s SoC8 removed age guidelines.
But I would add that it also seems fair to interpret the removal as an effort by WPATH to remove liability from clinicians who are, again, practicing experimental medicine.
WPATH is a *professional* organization advising *practitioners*--not a medical organization advising or protecting patients.
Removing the age guidelines protects clinicians as much as it “allows patients to get the interventions they need” or however they phrased it. If there is no age guideline, then no practitioner can be sued for violating the guidelines.
Under its current editor (Laura Helmuth), Scientific American has trashed its own reputation. What used to be a serious science publication, has gone totally ‘woke’. See “Agustín Fuentes grossly misrepresents the sex binary in (guess where?) Scientific American; argues that those who accept a binary do so out of bigotry, transphobia, and racism” (https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/05/02/agustin-fuentes-grossly-misrepresents-the-sex-binary-in-guess-where-scientific-american-argues-that-those-who-accept-a-binary-do-so-out-of-bigotry-transphobia-and-racism/). Quote
“If you want a combination of an author and a venue guaranteed to produce ideologically-motivated nonsense, it’s Agustin Fuentes writing at Scientific American. The combination of a badly misguided author, distorting biology for political reasons, with a magazine devoted to promulgating “authoritarian progressive” ideology disguised as science, gives me the same feeling I’d have if my mother called me to dinner and announced that we’d be having liver and Brussels sprouts.”
Of course, it get worse. Scientific American actually published an article title “Visualizing Sex as a Spectrum”. The “evidence” was (well-known) chromosome anomalies that are rare disorders and quite discrete (as in no spectrum). Of course, chromosome disorders (for example, 47,XXY) don’t produce any sexual ambiguity and are not “new sexes”.
Of course, it gets worse, Scientific American actually published a column opposing scientific research. You can’t make this up. Scientific American published a column opposing scientific research back in 2013.
The rag should be renamed, I suggest ‘Religious American – Where faith smashes facts and doesn’t apologize’.