Thanks for all this, Jesse. One thing you neglected to mention is that what they’re doing is they’re trying to turn me into the next version of you. In your conclusion paragraph, what you’re saying is that they want me to join you in the penalty box. We serve as useful foils for them because we fit neatly into their Manichean world view, and by vilifying us, they amplify their message. As for my reporting about pediatricians' care for kids who identify as transgender, I'm getting ready to pitch it elsewhere.
Substack actually asked me to start a Substack last year. I declined. To quote Julia Child in Julia & Julia, "I am very traditional!" I'm more interested in publishing my work in major mainstream publications at this point in my life. Nothing against substack or substackers!
Substack has become the "major mainstream publication" for anyone who can actually think. Look at their subscriber growth. Sounds like, whether or not you publish elsewhere, you would find a good place at Substack. So keep it in the back of your mind...or even better, let it inch forward.
What about posting your article with Jesse or another open-minded Substack like The Free Press or Racket? Not sure if they can pay the same rate but maybe you could get a few other Substacks to post for free...more content for their subscribers!
That's entirely understandable. Does that mean you're still shopping around the article in question? If you are, great! If you aren't, I echo the above poster in saying that I'd love to read it (and adding that a substack would be a fine landing spot for articles that can't find a home in a major publication). I'd hate for it to stuffed in the circular file and forgotten.
And I think Singal has shown that this isn't and either/or choice. Publishing on Substack doesn't stop you from also getting major bylines.
Unfortunately the new paradigm is seen by many on the left as a refuge for conservatives who have fled the mainstream. In the eyes of those on The Right Side of History, a journalist on Substack has about as much credibility as one on Fox News. Or maybe that's changing? I hope so.
I hope you find an outlet to take it. I've learned so much from Jesse's reporting on this topic. I'm more skeptical than Jesse even on youth gender treatments, but I appreciate that he attempts to take a balanced approach. I don't agree with everything you write (I probably disagree with most, actually), but I follow you on Twitter because I know you are a good reporter and I know you attempt to report fairly. A rare commodity these days. Don't let the crazies get you down. If your reporting weren't good, they wouldn't give you the time of day. They can't come back at you with facts, so they attempt to bully and discredit you. Stay strong.
Steel sharpens steel. Without reasoned pushback on emerging issues, each case is weakened and the possible unintended consequences of policies made worse.
Thank you. For non-affirming parents of vulnerable kids — on the autism spectrum, bullied, with longstanding mental health issues, etc., and no history of gender concern, this has been an endless nightmare. The more daylight, the better.
The loud shouty people are always the most insecure and scared in my experience. Please keep on researching and writing your piece. Parents and kids need it now more than ever. So many of us can’t say anything because of life circumstances. :(
Thank you, Benjamin! Continue to go forward! We need your journalism. These people who you are up against know that they are on the wrong side of history.
Thanks for sticking to your principles on this. Trying to cover these kinds of stories and not knee-jerking to one side seems like a herculean task right now, but you've demonstrated your resolve so far, so hats off to you!
Child welfare must be prioritized over the desire of some to create an entirely new class of legal person classified by subjective notions, not even characteristics. I will not live in a country where my 5 year old child be sent to the bathroom by her swim instructor with a man who is staffed by the YMCA. His subjective reclassification does not make him a woman. Subjective classification is easily exploited by criminal minds. I never use pronouns that do not correspond with what I see, objectively
These typical, sordid episodes of leftist activism are the reason I’m now politically homeless and don’t trust the mainstream narrative on a lot of issues.
What left wing academics and journalists fail to realize is that their utter derangement and refusal to engage with critics and facts lead to them being as untrustworthy and vile as those on the right.
In an election between a MAGA Republican and a Woke progressive, I will not vote. I despise both equally.
This former liberal Democrat will vote for the MAGA Republican, because the MAGA Republicans are against the mutilation of children, and pass laws to stop it.
Like many of us here, you are politically homeless. One gives up on affiliation and looks for someone whose personality and stances on some issues that one holds dear appear best. Hell, that's why I voted for Joe Biden, plus the very fact he wasn't Donald Trump. And I was soon disappointed in /that/ vote. Where does one go? (Substack is good, but it isn't a political "home")
Yeah I sort of see this whole era politically as this bizarre tragedy where from 2000-2010 the left NYT/WaPo sort of looked at Faux News and the Bush Presidency and was like "that is some fucked up, baseless, politically monomaniacal, ethically repugnant way to run journalism/politics"...
And then due in part to social media, in part due to the collapse of traditional journalism, and in part due to game theory...they mostly decided "aw fuck it lets just jump down into the mud with them and take them on their own terms".
Sorry, this is utterly irresponsible. There -is- a moral difference between the side that has been 100 percent captured by a criminal, authoritarian asshole squad and the side that has -- not as its base but as its awful, "i don't want to sit next to him at Thanksgiving" cousin, a group of insane left IDpol people.
Not voting in that case means you view them as morally equivalent, which is just nuts.
The problem is the IDpol has captured universities and journalism, thereby pushing an ideology of racial essentialism and science denialism that is corrosive to society at large. Canceling people for saying biological men shouldn't compete in women's elite sports is also authoritarian as is insisting that only voices that come out of throats of the right skin color be heard. Both sides are authoritarian assholes.
I would say that the Democratic party now cares much, much more about governing according to the wishes of the IDpol cousin than the people you refer to as the "base".
The asshole squad, on the other hand, generally doesn't actually do anything that crazy once they're in office. They're just not big on losing elections and the whole peaceful transfer of power thing.
Which is why the hard-left IDPol Joe Biden won the Democratic primary?
The average Democratic voter is a 50 year old black woman public school teacher. These are not radicals; the Democratic base -- largely because it is more black and brown than the left wing -- is waaaay more centrist than these cartoonish voices think.
Sure Biden ran as a moderate, but as soon as he was in office, he shook the etch a sketch and started racially segregating government programs. He's now made DEI mandatory for every government department.
As Andrew Sullivan put it, "Many of us voted for Biden as a competent moderate. Turns out he's more like an incompetent extremist."
I think Andrew Sullivan -- and a lot of the IDW/heterodox world -- lose the forest for the trees. If people are actually thinking about voting for Trump because of a few dumb IDpol initiatives from minor bureaucrats or the VP loves to drop pronouns all over, they weren’t that far from voting Trump to begin with.
Joe Biden is the most ordinary blue-collar, old school white union-style democrat since Lyndon Johnson. Donald Trump is a venal, selfish, aggressively incurious, sadistic monster. There is simply no moral equivalence.
I have never voted for a Republican for president in more than 40 years and I loathe Trump with a passion. That doesn't mean I'm happy being stuck with an obviously too old president who listens to the progressive wing of the party way too much.
The national Democratic Party has lost its way as have the universities and mainstream journalism. If Biden leans into progressive ideology, I won't vote for the top of the ticket. Both right and left have their own versions of authoritarianism. At this point, the left is a hair's breath from losing me.
Very few people vote for Trump because they like his personality or his social media presence. People tolerate Trump largely because they prefer his policies to those of Biden or McConnell.
So when Biden makes pandering to the woke crowd a key policy priority, that makes Trump look like the better man for the job even if he's a shitbag on a personal level.
Luckily, if you live in a region where the MAGA Republican is an electable candidate, you almost certainly live in a region where the Democratic candidates are reasonably sane, even downright boring, simply because they have to be that way to get the votes of moderates and centrists.
"If you want an update on the effect of their immigration policy, check in on blue mayor Eric Adams from New York."
To put it bluntly, that's dishonest. The recent influx of migrants, especially asylum seekers, that Adams has had to deal with has little to do with an immigration policy that's barely budged across administrations due to gridlock in Congress.
"there are material differences between Trump and Biden.... Illegal immigration surged to the highest level in a quarter century when Biden came to office."
That surge is part of a trend that started during the Trump administration, which was a lot more openly hostile to immigration. Remember the to-do about the migrant caravan in 2018?
"the Democratic narrative that illegal immigrants are a net positive and not a huge burden on local government ..."
That's less a "narrative" and more an observation of how immigrants have typically affected this country. Of course, most of those have come over from the southern border in a relatively diffuse manner, as compared to the recent more concentrated influx into a particular coastal city. Different circumstances, different impact.
"I think his messaging around no more deportations played a big role."
It's rather telling that you neglect to mention that the moratorium on deportations was temporary.
"Republicans have been called racist for saying that supporting mass waves of illegal immigration is very costly."
No, they've been called racist because a lot of the demagoguery over illegal immigration has been focused on people considered to be of a particular race (namely "Latino"), and treating them as far more dangerous than they were. By contrast, Eric Adams has focused more on straight-up logistics; there's an unusually high influx of people that his city isn't currently able to handle. There's no indication that he's misportrayed them as some scary other. You've engaged in a false equivalence here.
But then, I don't expect any better from a pro-MAGA guy.
You are using "ad hominem" wrong. Of the following statements, only the first is an ad hominem fallacy:
1) You are wrong because you are an idiot.
2) You are wrong, and you're an idiot.
3) You are probably wrong because you're an idiot.
Statement 2 is usually dickish and may be incorrect for reasons other than the ad hominem fallacy. Statement 3 is a heuristic derived from the tendency of idiots to say false things. Like all heuristics, it can fail, and it is also why the ad hominem fallacy can be convincing. Note that my statement "I don't expect any better from a pro-MAGA guy" is a statement more along the lines of statement 2; I'm not using you being pro-MAGA as a reason why you are wrong, just saying that it's why I'd expect you to be.
"My point was that the Democrats are clearly wrong on the top issues Californians care about: crime, homelessness, cost of housing, immigration, the economy, and race relations."
And it's a point that you not only failed to substantiate, but when I pressed on your claims about immigration in particular, I found them to be argued sloppily. I have no reason to expect you to be any less sloppy on crime, homelessness, etc., and heuristically speaking, it probably isn't worth my time arguing about them.
I am kind of surprised you guys don't talk more about how this type of online behavior is in some essence extremely similar to what trolls and 4chan adolescent hatred courters do. But it is even more pernicious because the people practicing it get social credit instead of opprobrium.
But it is in large part the same kind of low effort hateful trolling that all sorts of communities have cultivated over the years. Just with the ability to claim you are "on the right side of history" as an added bonus, so you don't even need to feel bad about being a disgusting human being.
On BarPod Jessie and Katie have been explicit that these people are exactly the same as what they claim about Kiwifarms. I personally think they're worse, KF is more self aware as a community that they shouldn't take their trolling or mockery off site. Their use of doxxing isn't to cause harassment (it's a side effect), but people like Caraballo are looking to cause harassment and ruin people's lives.
It's really telling to see the depths these people will go to keep people quiet about this issue. If Ryan really was a bad journalist who was going to make easily refutable claims in his article, they wouldn't care. But, we all know that's not the case. Instead of presenting factual counter arguments supporting youth gender treatments, their only option is to smear and destroy anyone who dares to question it. The part that really baffles me is how people on the left see this nonsense and go along with it.
And this is why I strongly support the total bans on transgender surgical and pharmaceutical care for minors. It's not that the activists are completely lacking in any capacity for reason and communication. It's that these activists continue to be protected by major institutions. Institutions which are supposed to oversee, and ultimately uphold, the highest standards of medical care. Simply put, US institutions CANNOT BE TRUSTED. They have been completely captured by gender ideology, and as these activists show on an hourly basis, expecting to reason our way past this is a fool's errand.
I completely agree. There is NO DIAGNOSTIC (including psychological evaluation in any form) that can reliably predict whether a gender dysphoric child is one of the ~85% whose dysphoria will abate, vs the ~15% whose dysphoria will persist into adulthood.
In this situation, the principle of FIRST DO NO HARM must apply.
Sadly, the US medical community has abandoned that principle, and so it is up to our democratic representative government to restore it.
I will never use pronouns that do not comport with what I see. The reason I am unwavering I'm this regard is that if we give legal status to subjective notions, criminal minds will and (where this happens, they do) exploit children and women. Women with criminally violent tendencies still do not pose the statistically high threat posed by males with criminally violent tendencies. Changing pronouns based on subjective notions will also change statistical understanding of crime prevalence by objective sex. No person exists who is more important than the ethics of truth in child welfare and criminal statistical understanding.
I agree, like how most people implicitly operate, I hold the "traditional" definition that pronouns refer to sex, but I'm not going out of my way to be an asshole to trans people or make Jesse look bad..
Sex linked traits are generated by innate phisiology. Acting, en masse, by many people, should not create a separate legal class. Such a legal class is easily exploited by criminal minds because it is subjectively classified and malleable. Child safety must be prioritized over any type of adults preference, notion of courtesy, etc.
I do justice to reality for children's sake. It has gotten increasingly difficult to defend children from drug addicts and those who exploit the policies created by naive pronoun police to abuse children and women. Reality matters more than the feelings of people who don't respected children and call for judges to be accosted.
"She" is used for women. To ask me to do otherwise is to ask me to lie. You will not get me to lie, no matter how many times you say "pls" and "kindly."
Reading this, I was once again plummeted into fantasies about the “day they’ll all get theirs and rightfully take their places on the (official) wrong side of history”. When or if that time ever comes, I can’t thank you enough for what you do, Jesse. I take solace in knowing that at least there ARE still some sane people out there writing.
Thank you, Jesse, for what you do! The thing is, activists like this Carballo can spew all the hate and vitriol that they like - the truth is that they are wrong and eventually that will be quite apparent.
Can the outrage be “performative” but the underlying rage real?
This is Thrasher, the professor of journalism at Northwestern:
“It is always mediocre, know nothing white dudes (Singal, Chait, Ryan) who NY mag and the NYT are like ‘Yes, YES, that’s the person! That’s the voice we NEED! No MD? No MPH? No PhD? Hated by and not a part of the community he’s writing about? But he’s white? Commission HIM!!!’” -- Steve Thrasher
That doesn’t seem performative. That seems like real anger and racial animosity.
Thrasher, it's worth pointing out, has a PhD in American studies and a BFA from Tisch. He's hardly the example of what he holds up as the credentialed expert in science.
Thrasher’s emotions, of course, precede & determine his sloppy rationalizations.
We have a social justice campaign publicly championed by activists whose constant brazen dishonesty and energetic viciousness would seem to indicate real pathologies of the kind, I believe, are now labeled type-B personality disorders.
They, in turn, are part of a much larger movement in which people who enjoy great professional, academic and/or personal privileges are encouraged to pretend that none of that is happening and that contemporary society is arranged against them. Should they indulge this fantasy, their indignation, however inappropriate for the actual circumstances, is often rewarded and always indulged.
It’s ludicrous and ugly. Everyone is demeaned. It’s literally impossible to explicitly point out what’s happening and not risk soiling your reputation, endangering your career prospects or seeming like a bigot to people (including friends) who aren’t following these things closely.
It’s also hysterical because Chait is probably the wittiest center-left political writer of his generation and the obvious heir to Michael Kinsley. If he checked off off any identity boxes (even token conservative) he’d be a columnist for the NYT or Wash Post.
The only reason Chait isn’t is because he‘s a liberal white dude and liberal white dudes must now defer & make way for women and “people of color” as the voices of liberalism, the Democratic Party and center-left institutions.
‘Scientific American’ these days has a bad reputation. ‘Woke Anti-American’ would be more like it. Sciam actually published an embarrassing piece titled “Visualizing Sex as a Spectrum”. Arguably worse, Sciam has actually published articles opposing scientific research (if it is not sufficiently PC).
I DON"T WANT TO TALK ABOUT COVID STUFF, but here's a comment about Covid stuff. (the pandemic is over, i don't give a shit, but i know people who give a shit so I get sucked back in some times)
A) I feel, deep down, that your coverage of youth gender medicine informs my feelings on trying to navigate both liberal mask-aficionado circles and anti-vaxx death cults during the pandemic. It feels like everyone is an idiot, listening to idiots, who are mud wrestling with idiots, while doxxing and destroying anyone who isn't an idiot who tries to lighten the mood or calm things down.
B) I was talking about some stupid DeSantis/Florida/mRNA bullshit that came out this week and just wanted to say "yes, I see what you're talking about and I agree with you. Here's a treatise on what things the left lies about, in the same shape that you're currently pissed off about in this case. If your enemy is Making Shapes That Look Like Triangles, and your allies start waving their arms in a Triangular-y way, maybe you should question your allies"
C) We're just computation platforms for meme viruses propagated by Twitter. The only solution is to build a very strong bullshit immune system, question everyone, trust no one... before GPT5 gets plugged directly in to Twitter
D) Thanks for making this entertaining. The only possible human coping mechanism is derision or laughter. Maybe GPT5 will make us better people.
"It is always mediocre, know nothing white dudes (Singal, Chait, Ryan)[.] [...] No MD? No MPH? No PhD? Hated by and not a part of the community he’s writing about? But he’s white?"
This is beyond bad faith. No one can tell me that Thrasher doesn't know Erica Anderson. Seriously, how fully gone do you have to be as a *professor* to write such nonsense - not even as some anonymous troll but under your own fucking name, as if it's something you're proud of (which he undoubtedly is)?
... and a guy who posts under the name "DRthrasher" to credentialize himself on sciencey topics, and criticise others for lacking an MD, when he's a Doctor of American Studies. Not Medicine. Not Journalism! Do you even have to take science classes at all for a BFA from Tisch?
Good on him for managing to rack up a couple degrees without reading "Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" at least once, I guess?
'LISTEN. STUDY. And as you see patterns, let the story find you.'
He must be a shit journalist, if he thinks the surface of things, the 'patterns', the narrative *shaping* you are *meant* to see (rather than the truth behind the veneer) are all you're meant to report. He must be the kind of craven shit purveyor of rewritten PR puff releases who deserves contempt. (I'm saying this as a former reporter & investigative hack, with 'credentials' (yes, Thrasher apparently likes credentials).
He is the sort of writer who recycles what is popular instead of thinking at all.
Also, what an absolute car crash of a human being.
He deserves our contempt. Or a plane ticket to Europe, where he can grace the more enlightened medical profession with his opinions on how EVIL they are.
Thrasher also only, as far as I can tell, writes opinion pieces. He was a journalist for a number of years but stopped sometime in the mid to late 2010s. So I find it bizarre that he's trying to school me on being a journalist, because only one of the two of us actually practices the craft.
When I was a reporter on newspapers, I was being a journalist. When I was an investigative researcher & producer at the BBC, I was being a journalist. Now that I write about what I think, I'm being a writer.
Thrasher is a writer trying to stop you from being a journalist then.
I thought the same thing a few weeks ago when Jamelle Bouie, who is 36 years old, wrote in his NYT newsletter that young journalists need to not aspire to opinion writing but good old fashioned journalism at local media outlets.
Physician heal thyself, dude. He didn’t do that - he worked at Slate and the Daily Beast. Freakin NYT is his FIRST newspaper job, as far as I can tell.
"Thrasher is somewhat misrepresenting the “Emergency Rule” in question, which does impose onerous and unecessary restrictions on adult trans healthcare in Missouri but which doesn’t ban it."
That's a distinction without a difference here. In reality, the Emergency Rule *does* ban adult trans healthcare, because the restrictions it imposes are impossible to comply with.
It requires health care providers to prove the absence of something for which no standard of proof actually exists: "ensure (at least annually) that the patient is not experiencing social contagion with respect to the patient’s gender identity". Whatever you might think of the social contagion theory, the fact is that no one can tell you with any degree of accuracy whether or not an individual is "experiencing social contagion". The concept of social contagion isn't defined in such a way that makes it possible to determine on an individual level.
It's the same tactic conservative states used to implement de-facto bans on abortion, back when Roe v. Wade prevented them from banning it outright: imposing requirements on providers and clinics that no provider or clinic actually met or would be able to meet in the foreseeable future.
That provision would not apply to continuing prescription/provisions that has already begun (and only applies to puberty blockers, hormones or surgery) so saying the emergency rule bans adult trans health care is still an overstatement.
That said, it does seem to effectively ban adult trans health care (in a recommended form) for new adult patients - a big infringement on personal freedom.
It exempts care thas has already begun "so long as the person or health organization promptly seeks to initiate the treatments and assessments called for by these subparagraphs." So it seems that the care could be discontinued if one of those criteria isn't met, but I imagine that most clinicians will just check boxes saying the patient meets the criteria and will continue providing the care.
Since the Emergency Rule is aimed at providers performing what it describes as "an unfair, deceptive, fraudulent, or otherwise unlawful practice", I imagine the Attorney General's office will be investigating any providers who check those boxes and asking to see proof that they've done the impossible.
"That provision would not apply to continuing prescription/provisions that has already begun"
I believe it would. Section (1)(C) of the Emergency Rule exempts continued treatment but only "so long as the person or health organization promptly seeks to initiate the treatments and assessments called for by these subparagraphs".
Since it isn't possible to assess whether an individual is "experiencing social contagion with respect to the patient's gender identity", it isn't possible to promptly seek to initiate that assessment, and the exemption won't apply.
"and only applies to puberty blockers, hormones or surgery"
That's what trans health care generally involves, yes.
I am no expert in Missouri law (and am certainly not giving legal advice) but I read subparagraph 1(C) slightly differently - the provider only needs to seek to initiate a social contagion assessment under subparagraph 2(H) not even that it has to perform such an assessment or the patient has to 'pass' such an assessment (as you note, it's difficult to see conceptually how this would occur). Contrast this with an assessment as to whether the patient continues to have gender dysphoria under subparagraph 2(A) - which the patient does need to 'pass' for treatment to continue. Based on the interpretive maxim of expressio unius (again, I am no expert in Missouri law and do not even know if this is a maxim down there) a 'pass' on a social contagion assessment wouldn't be required.
However, I would agree that even the uncertainty is troubling and might cause providers to stop providing existing care.
I appreciate and agree that hormones and surgery are a vital part of adult trans healthcare and that these are "generally involve[d]" in adult trans healthcare - that's why I said that these rules would "effectively ban adult trans health care (in a recommended form)" but my point is that the statement was that there was a total ban on adult trans healthcare and that are some aspects of adult trans healthcare which would not be impacted.
Thanks for all this, Jesse. One thing you neglected to mention is that what they’re doing is they’re trying to turn me into the next version of you. In your conclusion paragraph, what you’re saying is that they want me to join you in the penalty box. We serve as useful foils for them because we fit neatly into their Manichean world view, and by vilifying us, they amplify their message. As for my reporting about pediatricians' care for kids who identify as transgender, I'm getting ready to pitch it elsewhere.
Good luck!
I would like to read your article.
start a substack Start A Substack START A SUBSTACK
It is inevitable. Do not resist. Embrace the new paradigm.
Substack actually asked me to start a Substack last year. I declined. To quote Julia Child in Julia & Julia, "I am very traditional!" I'm more interested in publishing my work in major mainstream publications at this point in my life. Nothing against substack or substackers!
Substack has become the "major mainstream publication" for anyone who can actually think. Look at their subscriber growth. Sounds like, whether or not you publish elsewhere, you would find a good place at Substack. So keep it in the back of your mind...or even better, let it inch forward.
Yeah, but the readership of any one article is typically small. I'd rather have a larger readership. Maybe I'll do substack someday, but not now.
If you got offered WSJ or Fox (or even Daily Wire), would you take them up on it, or would you want left-leaning outlets only?
What about posting your article with Jesse or another open-minded Substack like The Free Press or Racket? Not sure if they can pay the same rate but maybe you could get a few other Substacks to post for free...more content for their subscribers!
Update: I posted an essay that a publication killed from last fall on my substack just so I'd have something on there.
That's entirely understandable. Does that mean you're still shopping around the article in question? If you are, great! If you aren't, I echo the above poster in saying that I'd love to read it (and adding that a substack would be a fine landing spot for articles that can't find a home in a major publication). I'd hate for it to stuffed in the circular file and forgotten.
And I think Singal has shown that this isn't and either/or choice. Publishing on Substack doesn't stop you from also getting major bylines.
I'll start pitching it somewhere else next week. I would never write it for substack.
The Economist perhaps?
Unfortunately the new paradigm is seen by many on the left as a refuge for conservatives who have fled the mainstream. In the eyes of those on The Right Side of History, a journalist on Substack has about as much credibility as one on Fox News. Or maybe that's changing? I hope so.
Here: I posted something. https://benryan.substack.com/p/how-i-scored-gold-in-the-cancer-olympics
I hope you find an outlet to take it. I've learned so much from Jesse's reporting on this topic. I'm more skeptical than Jesse even on youth gender treatments, but I appreciate that he attempts to take a balanced approach. I don't agree with everything you write (I probably disagree with most, actually), but I follow you on Twitter because I know you are a good reporter and I know you attempt to report fairly. A rare commodity these days. Don't let the crazies get you down. If your reporting weren't good, they wouldn't give you the time of day. They can't come back at you with facts, so they attempt to bully and discredit you. Stay strong.
Steel sharpens steel. Without reasoned pushback on emerging issues, each case is weakened and the possible unintended consequences of policies made worse.
Keep fighting the good fight, Ben!
Thank you. For non-affirming parents of vulnerable kids — on the autism spectrum, bullied, with longstanding mental health issues, etc., and no history of gender concern, this has been an endless nightmare. The more daylight, the better.
The loud shouty people are always the most insecure and scared in my experience. Please keep on researching and writing your piece. Parents and kids need it now more than ever. So many of us can’t say anything because of life circumstances. :(
Ben - never stop doing what you do! There ARE still sane people in this world who appreciate it
You’re a good person and you should be proud of yourself that they don’t like you.
Thank you, Benjamin! Continue to go forward! We need your journalism. These people who you are up against know that they are on the wrong side of history.
Thanks for sticking to your principles on this. Trying to cover these kinds of stories and not knee-jerking to one side seems like a herculean task right now, but you've demonstrated your resolve so far, so hats off to you!
Do a Substack, mate. You'll get readers.
I posted an essay. https://benryan.substack.com/p/how-i-scored-gold-in-the-cancer-olympics
Child welfare must be prioritized over the desire of some to create an entirely new class of legal person classified by subjective notions, not even characteristics. I will not live in a country where my 5 year old child be sent to the bathroom by her swim instructor with a man who is staffed by the YMCA. His subjective reclassification does not make him a woman. Subjective classification is easily exploited by criminal minds. I never use pronouns that do not correspond with what I see, objectively
These typical, sordid episodes of leftist activism are the reason I’m now politically homeless and don’t trust the mainstream narrative on a lot of issues.
What left wing academics and journalists fail to realize is that their utter derangement and refusal to engage with critics and facts lead to them being as untrustworthy and vile as those on the right.
In an election between a MAGA Republican and a Woke progressive, I will not vote. I despise both equally.
Signed— a former liberal Democrat
This former liberal Democrat will vote for the MAGA Republican, because the MAGA Republicans are against the mutilation of children, and pass laws to stop it.
I'm almost there- but I cannot vote for Trump, full stop. Anyone else who is not crooked AF I will vote for.
Molly, you are my vote sister. Cannot vote Trump, cannot vote for crazies. But can't vote for incompetent self righteous idiots (too strong?)
In the voting booth, I too probably would not be able to vote for Trump.
Like many of us here, you are politically homeless. One gives up on affiliation and looks for someone whose personality and stances on some issues that one holds dear appear best. Hell, that's why I voted for Joe Biden, plus the very fact he wasn't Donald Trump. And I was soon disappointed in /that/ vote. Where does one go? (Substack is good, but it isn't a political "home")
Plus, Substack has gotten downright awful since Notes turned it into the Amazon Basics version of Twitter.
Same!
Please vote for anyone who is not Biden or Trump.
Yeah I sort of see this whole era politically as this bizarre tragedy where from 2000-2010 the left NYT/WaPo sort of looked at Faux News and the Bush Presidency and was like "that is some fucked up, baseless, politically monomaniacal, ethically repugnant way to run journalism/politics"...
And then due in part to social media, in part due to the collapse of traditional journalism, and in part due to game theory...they mostly decided "aw fuck it lets just jump down into the mud with them and take them on their own terms".
It has not been good for society.
This has been a trope since the 00s at least, and MSNBC was well on that way before 2016.
That is really unfair to pro wrestling, one of America's great vernacular performance art forms. :)
I now sign my emails as "politically, non binary"
I’ve gone with “free range conservative” for 7 years, but could also identify as centrist. My, how the goalposts have gotten further apart.
Sorry, this is utterly irresponsible. There -is- a moral difference between the side that has been 100 percent captured by a criminal, authoritarian asshole squad and the side that has -- not as its base but as its awful, "i don't want to sit next to him at Thanksgiving" cousin, a group of insane left IDpol people.
Not voting in that case means you view them as morally equivalent, which is just nuts.
The problem is the IDpol has captured universities and journalism, thereby pushing an ideology of racial essentialism and science denialism that is corrosive to society at large. Canceling people for saying biological men shouldn't compete in women's elite sports is also authoritarian as is insisting that only voices that come out of throats of the right skin color be heard. Both sides are authoritarian assholes.
I would say that the Democratic party now cares much, much more about governing according to the wishes of the IDpol cousin than the people you refer to as the "base".
The asshole squad, on the other hand, generally doesn't actually do anything that crazy once they're in office. They're just not big on losing elections and the whole peaceful transfer of power thing.
Which is why the hard-left IDPol Joe Biden won the Democratic primary?
The average Democratic voter is a 50 year old black woman public school teacher. These are not radicals; the Democratic base -- largely because it is more black and brown than the left wing -- is waaaay more centrist than these cartoonish voices think.
Sure Biden ran as a moderate, but as soon as he was in office, he shook the etch a sketch and started racially segregating government programs. He's now made DEI mandatory for every government department.
As Andrew Sullivan put it, "Many of us voted for Biden as a competent moderate. Turns out he's more like an incompetent extremist."
I think Andrew Sullivan -- and a lot of the IDW/heterodox world -- lose the forest for the trees. If people are actually thinking about voting for Trump because of a few dumb IDpol initiatives from minor bureaucrats or the VP loves to drop pronouns all over, they weren’t that far from voting Trump to begin with.
Joe Biden is the most ordinary blue-collar, old school white union-style democrat since Lyndon Johnson. Donald Trump is a venal, selfish, aggressively incurious, sadistic monster. There is simply no moral equivalence.
I have never voted for a Republican for president in more than 40 years and I loathe Trump with a passion. That doesn't mean I'm happy being stuck with an obviously too old president who listens to the progressive wing of the party way too much.
The national Democratic Party has lost its way as have the universities and mainstream journalism. If Biden leans into progressive ideology, I won't vote for the top of the ticket. Both right and left have their own versions of authoritarianism. At this point, the left is a hair's breath from losing me.
Very few people vote for Trump because they like his personality or his social media presence. People tolerate Trump largely because they prefer his policies to those of Biden or McConnell.
So when Biden makes pandering to the woke crowd a key policy priority, that makes Trump look like the better man for the job even if he's a shitbag on a personal level.
Luckily, if you live in a region where the MAGA Republican is an electable candidate, you almost certainly live in a region where the Democratic candidates are reasonably sane, even downright boring, simply because they have to be that way to get the votes of moderates and centrists.
"If you want an update on the effect of their immigration policy, check in on blue mayor Eric Adams from New York."
To put it bluntly, that's dishonest. The recent influx of migrants, especially asylum seekers, that Adams has had to deal with has little to do with an immigration policy that's barely budged across administrations due to gridlock in Congress.
"there are material differences between Trump and Biden.... Illegal immigration surged to the highest level in a quarter century when Biden came to office."
That surge is part of a trend that started during the Trump administration, which was a lot more openly hostile to immigration. Remember the to-do about the migrant caravan in 2018?
"the Democratic narrative that illegal immigrants are a net positive and not a huge burden on local government ..."
That's less a "narrative" and more an observation of how immigrants have typically affected this country. Of course, most of those have come over from the southern border in a relatively diffuse manner, as compared to the recent more concentrated influx into a particular coastal city. Different circumstances, different impact.
"I think his messaging around no more deportations played a big role."
It's rather telling that you neglect to mention that the moratorium on deportations was temporary.
"Republicans have been called racist for saying that supporting mass waves of illegal immigration is very costly."
No, they've been called racist because a lot of the demagoguery over illegal immigration has been focused on people considered to be of a particular race (namely "Latino"), and treating them as far more dangerous than they were. By contrast, Eric Adams has focused more on straight-up logistics; there's an unusually high influx of people that his city isn't currently able to handle. There's no indication that he's misportrayed them as some scary other. You've engaged in a false equivalence here.
But then, I don't expect any better from a pro-MAGA guy.
Honestly, if a Republican said the same shit that Adams said about immigrants, they'd get called racist by CNN 10 times out of 10.
"Ignoring the little ad hominem at the end there"
You are using "ad hominem" wrong. Of the following statements, only the first is an ad hominem fallacy:
1) You are wrong because you are an idiot.
2) You are wrong, and you're an idiot.
3) You are probably wrong because you're an idiot.
Statement 2 is usually dickish and may be incorrect for reasons other than the ad hominem fallacy. Statement 3 is a heuristic derived from the tendency of idiots to say false things. Like all heuristics, it can fail, and it is also why the ad hominem fallacy can be convincing. Note that my statement "I don't expect any better from a pro-MAGA guy" is a statement more along the lines of statement 2; I'm not using you being pro-MAGA as a reason why you are wrong, just saying that it's why I'd expect you to be.
"My point was that the Democrats are clearly wrong on the top issues Californians care about: crime, homelessness, cost of housing, immigration, the economy, and race relations."
And it's a point that you not only failed to substantiate, but when I pressed on your claims about immigration in particular, I found them to be argued sloppily. I have no reason to expect you to be any less sloppy on crime, homelessness, etc., and heuristically speaking, it probably isn't worth my time arguing about them.
I am kind of surprised you guys don't talk more about how this type of online behavior is in some essence extremely similar to what trolls and 4chan adolescent hatred courters do. But it is even more pernicious because the people practicing it get social credit instead of opprobrium.
But it is in large part the same kind of low effort hateful trolling that all sorts of communities have cultivated over the years. Just with the ability to claim you are "on the right side of history" as an added bonus, so you don't even need to feel bad about being a disgusting human being.
On BarPod Jessie and Katie have been explicit that these people are exactly the same as what they claim about Kiwifarms. I personally think they're worse, KF is more self aware as a community that they shouldn't take their trolling or mockery off site. Their use of doxxing isn't to cause harassment (it's a side effect), but people like Caraballo are looking to cause harassment and ruin people's lives.
It's really telling to see the depths these people will go to keep people quiet about this issue. If Ryan really was a bad journalist who was going to make easily refutable claims in his article, they wouldn't care. But, we all know that's not the case. Instead of presenting factual counter arguments supporting youth gender treatments, their only option is to smear and destroy anyone who dares to question it. The part that really baffles me is how people on the left see this nonsense and go along with it.
And this is why I strongly support the total bans on transgender surgical and pharmaceutical care for minors. It's not that the activists are completely lacking in any capacity for reason and communication. It's that these activists continue to be protected by major institutions. Institutions which are supposed to oversee, and ultimately uphold, the highest standards of medical care. Simply put, US institutions CANNOT BE TRUSTED. They have been completely captured by gender ideology, and as these activists show on an hourly basis, expecting to reason our way past this is a fool's errand.
I completely agree. There is NO DIAGNOSTIC (including psychological evaluation in any form) that can reliably predict whether a gender dysphoric child is one of the ~85% whose dysphoria will abate, vs the ~15% whose dysphoria will persist into adulthood.
In this situation, the principle of FIRST DO NO HARM must apply.
Sadly, the US medical community has abandoned that principle, and so it is up to our democratic representative government to restore it.
These are dark days for journalism.
It takes a lot of courage to stand up against present day left-wing and right-wing mobs.
You and Benjamin are brave people. Blessings upon you both.
Obviously Alejandra Carballo is a scientific thinker and stoic logician. Anyone can see this. His rationale for every opinion is flawless-not.
You're not helping us or Jesse by purposefully misgendering, the other side loves taking comments like yours to paint Jesse as a bad faith actor
Carballo misgenders himself by falsely claiming to be a woman, which he is not and never will be.
Using the language of the anti-science, anti-human transification cult is NEVER the right move.
I will never use pronouns that do not comport with what I see. The reason I am unwavering I'm this regard is that if we give legal status to subjective notions, criminal minds will and (where this happens, they do) exploit children and women. Women with criminally violent tendencies still do not pose the statistically high threat posed by males with criminally violent tendencies. Changing pronouns based on subjective notions will also change statistical understanding of crime prevalence by objective sex. No person exists who is more important than the ethics of truth in child welfare and criminal statistical understanding.
You don't have to explain the arguments to me, but don't dump your views all over Jesse's sub stack. He doesn't agree.
I disagree.
Figments of people's minds are not a separate group of people. It endangers children to pretend otherwise
I think of pronouns and a courtesy, not a right - but in this case the courtesy is to Jesse for exactly the reason you give
I agree, like how most people implicitly operate, I hold the "traditional" definition that pronouns refer to sex, but I'm not going out of my way to be an asshole to trans people or make Jesse look bad..
Sex linked traits are generated by innate phisiology. Acting, en masse, by many people, should not create a separate legal class. Such a legal class is easily exploited by criminal minds because it is subjectively classified and malleable. Child safety must be prioritized over any type of adults preference, notion of courtesy, etc.
Physiology, oops
Who decides what is misgendering?
Kindly be respectful and use the pronouns that people request.
Pronouns aren't a hill I generally care to die on, but it's important to note the key word there is 'request'.
I could request you e-transfer me $5000; doesn't mean you're obligated to do it for the sake of kindness/respect.
Kindly be respectful and do not ask me or anyone to behave as if I believe something I do not believe.
I am respectful.
I do justice to reality for children's sake. It has gotten increasingly difficult to defend children from drug addicts and those who exploit the policies created by naive pronoun police to abuse children and women. Reality matters more than the feelings of people who don't respected children and call for judges to be accosted.
"She" is used for women. To ask me to do otherwise is to ask me to lie. You will not get me to lie, no matter how many times you say "pls" and "kindly."
Don't pretend that polite = Integrity
Reading this, I was once again plummeted into fantasies about the “day they’ll all get theirs and rightfully take their places on the (official) wrong side of history”. When or if that time ever comes, I can’t thank you enough for what you do, Jesse. I take solace in knowing that at least there ARE still some sane people out there writing.
Thank you, Jesse, for what you do! The thing is, activists like this Carballo can spew all the hate and vitriol that they like - the truth is that they are wrong and eventually that will be quite apparent.
Can the outrage be “performative” but the underlying rage real?
This is Thrasher, the professor of journalism at Northwestern:
“It is always mediocre, know nothing white dudes (Singal, Chait, Ryan) who NY mag and the NYT are like ‘Yes, YES, that’s the person! That’s the voice we NEED! No MD? No MPH? No PhD? Hated by and not a part of the community he’s writing about? But he’s white? Commission HIM!!!’” -- Steve Thrasher
That doesn’t seem performative. That seems like real anger and racial animosity.
Thrasher, it's worth pointing out, has a PhD in American studies and a BFA from Tisch. He's hardly the example of what he holds up as the credentialed expert in science.
Thrasher’s emotions, of course, precede & determine his sloppy rationalizations.
We have a social justice campaign publicly championed by activists whose constant brazen dishonesty and energetic viciousness would seem to indicate real pathologies of the kind, I believe, are now labeled type-B personality disorders.
They, in turn, are part of a much larger movement in which people who enjoy great professional, academic and/or personal privileges are encouraged to pretend that none of that is happening and that contemporary society is arranged against them. Should they indulge this fantasy, their indignation, however inappropriate for the actual circumstances, is often rewarded and always indulged.
It’s ludicrous and ugly. Everyone is demeaned. It’s literally impossible to explicitly point out what’s happening and not risk soiling your reputation, endangering your career prospects or seeming like a bigot to people (including friends) who aren’t following these things closely.
Yes if there is one thing modern society is know for it is for elevating white voices...
It’s also hysterical because Chait is probably the wittiest center-left political writer of his generation and the obvious heir to Michael Kinsley. If he checked off off any identity boxes (even token conservative) he’d be a columnist for the NYT or Wash Post.
The only reason Chait isn’t is because he‘s a liberal white dude and liberal white dudes must now defer & make way for women and “people of color” as the voices of liberalism, the Democratic Party and center-left institutions.
‘Scientific American’ these days has a bad reputation. ‘Woke Anti-American’ would be more like it. Sciam actually published an embarrassing piece titled “Visualizing Sex as a Spectrum”. Arguably worse, Sciam has actually published articles opposing scientific research (if it is not sufficiently PC).
I DON"T WANT TO TALK ABOUT COVID STUFF, but here's a comment about Covid stuff. (the pandemic is over, i don't give a shit, but i know people who give a shit so I get sucked back in some times)
A) I feel, deep down, that your coverage of youth gender medicine informs my feelings on trying to navigate both liberal mask-aficionado circles and anti-vaxx death cults during the pandemic. It feels like everyone is an idiot, listening to idiots, who are mud wrestling with idiots, while doxxing and destroying anyone who isn't an idiot who tries to lighten the mood or calm things down.
B) I was talking about some stupid DeSantis/Florida/mRNA bullshit that came out this week and just wanted to say "yes, I see what you're talking about and I agree with you. Here's a treatise on what things the left lies about, in the same shape that you're currently pissed off about in this case. If your enemy is Making Shapes That Look Like Triangles, and your allies start waving their arms in a Triangular-y way, maybe you should question your allies"
C) We're just computation platforms for meme viruses propagated by Twitter. The only solution is to build a very strong bullshit immune system, question everyone, trust no one... before GPT5 gets plugged directly in to Twitter
D) Thanks for making this entertaining. The only possible human coping mechanism is derision or laughter. Maybe GPT5 will make us better people.
"It is always mediocre, know nothing white dudes (Singal, Chait, Ryan)[.] [...] No MD? No MPH? No PhD? Hated by and not a part of the community he’s writing about? But he’s white?"
This is beyond bad faith. No one can tell me that Thrasher doesn't know Erica Anderson. Seriously, how fully gone do you have to be as a *professor* to write such nonsense - not even as some anonymous troll but under your own fucking name, as if it's something you're proud of (which he undoubtedly is)?
... and a guy who posts under the name "DRthrasher" to credentialize himself on sciencey topics, and criticise others for lacking an MD, when he's a Doctor of American Studies. Not Medicine. Not Journalism! Do you even have to take science classes at all for a BFA from Tisch?
Good on him for managing to rack up a couple degrees without reading "Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" at least once, I guess?
The line from Thrasher that jumps out, for me:
'LISTEN. STUDY. And as you see patterns, let the story find you.'
He must be a shit journalist, if he thinks the surface of things, the 'patterns', the narrative *shaping* you are *meant* to see (rather than the truth behind the veneer) are all you're meant to report. He must be the kind of craven shit purveyor of rewritten PR puff releases who deserves contempt. (I'm saying this as a former reporter & investigative hack, with 'credentials' (yes, Thrasher apparently likes credentials).
He is the sort of writer who recycles what is popular instead of thinking at all.
Also, what an absolute car crash of a human being.
He deserves our contempt. Or a plane ticket to Europe, where he can grace the more enlightened medical profession with his opinions on how EVIL they are.
Send him over. I'll gladly show him around.
Thrasher also only, as far as I can tell, writes opinion pieces. He was a journalist for a number of years but stopped sometime in the mid to late 2010s. So I find it bizarre that he's trying to school me on being a journalist, because only one of the two of us actually practices the craft.
When I was a reporter on newspapers, I was being a journalist. When I was an investigative researcher & producer at the BBC, I was being a journalist. Now that I write about what I think, I'm being a writer.
Thrasher is a writer trying to stop you from being a journalist then.
Bingo. I imagine it might have peeved him that my mpox coverage and opeds got more traction than his last summer.
Never underestimate base jealousy as a driver, eh
I thought the same thing a few weeks ago when Jamelle Bouie, who is 36 years old, wrote in his NYT newsletter that young journalists need to not aspire to opinion writing but good old fashioned journalism at local media outlets.
Physician heal thyself, dude. He didn’t do that - he worked at Slate and the Daily Beast. Freakin NYT is his FIRST newspaper job, as far as I can tell.
https://nyti.ms/3n7YJM4
"Thrasher is somewhat misrepresenting the “Emergency Rule” in question, which does impose onerous and unecessary restrictions on adult trans healthcare in Missouri but which doesn’t ban it."
That's a distinction without a difference here. In reality, the Emergency Rule *does* ban adult trans healthcare, because the restrictions it imposes are impossible to comply with.
It requires health care providers to prove the absence of something for which no standard of proof actually exists: "ensure (at least annually) that the patient is not experiencing social contagion with respect to the patient’s gender identity". Whatever you might think of the social contagion theory, the fact is that no one can tell you with any degree of accuracy whether or not an individual is "experiencing social contagion". The concept of social contagion isn't defined in such a way that makes it possible to determine on an individual level.
It's the same tactic conservative states used to implement de-facto bans on abortion, back when Roe v. Wade prevented them from banning it outright: imposing requirements on providers and clinics that no provider or clinic actually met or would be able to meet in the foreseeable future.
That provision would not apply to continuing prescription/provisions that has already begun (and only applies to puberty blockers, hormones or surgery) so saying the emergency rule bans adult trans health care is still an overstatement.
That said, it does seem to effectively ban adult trans health care (in a recommended form) for new adult patients - a big infringement on personal freedom.
It exempts care thas has already begun "so long as the person or health organization promptly seeks to initiate the treatments and assessments called for by these subparagraphs." So it seems that the care could be discontinued if one of those criteria isn't met, but I imagine that most clinicians will just check boxes saying the patient meets the criteria and will continue providing the care.
Since the Emergency Rule is aimed at providers performing what it describes as "an unfair, deceptive, fraudulent, or otherwise unlawful practice", I imagine the Attorney General's office will be investigating any providers who check those boxes and asking to see proof that they've done the impossible.
"That provision would not apply to continuing prescription/provisions that has already begun"
I believe it would. Section (1)(C) of the Emergency Rule exempts continued treatment but only "so long as the person or health organization promptly seeks to initiate the treatments and assessments called for by these subparagraphs".
Since it isn't possible to assess whether an individual is "experiencing social contagion with respect to the patient's gender identity", it isn't possible to promptly seek to initiate that assessment, and the exemption won't apply.
"and only applies to puberty blockers, hormones or surgery"
That's what trans health care generally involves, yes.
I am no expert in Missouri law (and am certainly not giving legal advice) but I read subparagraph 1(C) slightly differently - the provider only needs to seek to initiate a social contagion assessment under subparagraph 2(H) not even that it has to perform such an assessment or the patient has to 'pass' such an assessment (as you note, it's difficult to see conceptually how this would occur). Contrast this with an assessment as to whether the patient continues to have gender dysphoria under subparagraph 2(A) - which the patient does need to 'pass' for treatment to continue. Based on the interpretive maxim of expressio unius (again, I am no expert in Missouri law and do not even know if this is a maxim down there) a 'pass' on a social contagion assessment wouldn't be required.
However, I would agree that even the uncertainty is troubling and might cause providers to stop providing existing care.
I appreciate and agree that hormones and surgery are a vital part of adult trans healthcare and that these are "generally involve[d]" in adult trans healthcare - that's why I said that these rules would "effectively ban adult trans health care (in a recommended form)" but my point is that the statement was that there was a total ban on adult trans healthcare and that are some aspects of adult trans healthcare which would not be impacted.