It was the Dobbs decision for me. When that leaked, I realized that social media was going to be nothing but morons yelling moronic things at other morons for several days, and I decided to just stay away. After a couple days logged off, I realized just how much better I felt, and I never went back.
The only problem I have with this is that it teaches these people that this is effective, and I think would increase the likelihood of it happening again.
I would say, tough it out until he's controversy free for like a month (is that even possible?) then just stop.
You're very brave for continuing to interact with these people - the transactivists, the journalists (I use the term loosely), and everyone else in this garbage fire. Twitter itself is designed to encourage this type of engagement, which is one reason why I'd be pleased if Elon Musk destroyed it.
I am not sure this counts as brave. I fear it is 'failure to successfully disengage' and 'getting sucked back in' and 'I just want to say one more thing ...' or somesuch. Pigheaded, rather than courageous.
I am shocked! Shocked! at the wholly unexpected discovery that the "trans affirming" crowd includes an elevated number of truly despicable people.
One of them speculates how many "trans" kidz have killed themselves as a result of your writing; I confidently peg this number at zero. knowing how few of them can take a long enough break from "my pronouns" and "my gender identity" to read anything that isn't wholly "affirming" an' "inclusive" an' "supportive" an' stuff.
And their entire sense of righteousness is based on the "trans teen suicide" lie, yet they pile on you with advice to kill yourself.
If you lose a single wink of sleep over this kerfuffle, I'll be very disappointed.
I don't think the correct response to someone being falsely accused of holding morally repugnant anti-trans views and then being told to kill himself because he holds said morally repugnant views, is to say "No, those views are totally right. All those horrible things you're being falsely accused of believing are true and correct."
Obviously it's not acceptable to suicide-bait anyone, no matter how repugnant their views. However, I do think it compounds the injustice that Jesse is being lumped in with a lot of truly terrible people because he holds moderate pro-trans views.
Puberty is irreversible, so it's really important that people go through the puberty that's right for them. That means we need to avoid false positives and false negatives. Downplaying the frequency of either is extremely Irresponsible.
Isn't the puberty that is right for a person the puberty that the body naturally goes through?
Anything else will cause a lifetime need for medical interventions that come with very negative side effects such as brittle bones and sexual dysfunction.
I find it truly unfathomable that activists argue that trying to circumvent the body's natural and healthy function with synthetic hormones and surgery is a superior intervention to psychotherapy that aims to help the patient come to terms with his/her distress and work through it.
This quote from the article sums up the lunacy:
“Therapy is not a requirement in this approach because being trans is not a pathology.”
Anyone who believes that is actively deluding themselves.
In DSM4 it was called Gender Identity 𝐷𝑖𝑠𝑜𝑟𝑑𝑒𝑟. But that sounds so negative and judgmental!
OK we have a condition in which people are so uncomfortable in their healthy bodies that they're purportedly driven to take their own lives in large numbers.
No, the puberty that is right for a person is the puberty of the gender identity they have. Sometimes synthetic hormones and surgery really are better than what the body naturally does. Nature is pretty terrible a lot of the time, and it's the job of medical science to do better than it.
It's not delusional to understand that people have a mental image of what kind of body they have, and that they should be able to make their actual body more like their self image. If someone wants more muscles than they naturally have you tell them to lift weights, not to get therapy to accept their natural scrawniness!
Imagine that in the future some mad scientist invents a way to transplant brains, and then swaps the brains of a man and woman without their consent. Now imagine that there is a way to reverse the operation, but it's risky and could have some negative side effects. Both victims think the procedure is worth the risks. Would you really advise the mad scientist's victims that they should instead just accept their new bodies and come to terms with their "distress?" It's not that big of a leap to imagine that there might be some people who feel the same way about the body they were born with as the mad scientist's victims feel about their new bodies.
I'm sorry, but these comparisons are ridiculous. To the point I almost didn't want to even respond. Brilliantly Oblivious already touched on my first counter, but here we go.
If someone wants to lift weights to build muscle mass, then he/she should do so. Lean muscle is healthy, and it is not 'unnatural' as you suggest. If that same person wanted to start dosing with HGH, creatin, or other synthetic supplements to enhance his image beyond what his body could do on its own from just weight training, then I would say that it is a very bad idea.
A person who desires *excessive* quantities of cosmetic surgery to look like a Barbie doll or whatever should also be referred to a psychiatrist. In my opinion, it is unethical for surgeons to allow a person's mental distress to dictate invasive medical procedures. It is particularly at issue in the gender debate because it involves children who have underdeveloped brains and emotional regulation.
The activists want GID diagnosis at 18 months and hormones/surgery by age ten. And they don't care if ten year olds are ready for decisions like that; all they care about is expanding their audience.
There are certainly people for whom the distress of being in body of the opposite sex they see themselves as, is so overwhelming, that surgery and a life on drugs is still a better alternative than living in their existing body.
To allow young people to make that decision presupposes they really do understand their condition and the choice they are making.
Perhaps these kids are prescient. I do remember my teen-age years. I had no idea who I was (although I thought I knew everything). Even as an older adult, I still struggle with understanding myself.
It should not be surprising that people question transgender health care, especially when one expert says "“Therapy is not a requirement in this approach because being trans is not a pathology"
I'm sorry, this is just inaccurate, even if you believe that gender identity controls medical care. Gender dysphoric youth do not go through the puberty of their preferred "gender identity" they go through a hormone regimen completely different than their preferred identity that likely makes them infertile and often incapable of achieving orgasm. Your theoretical only shows how little we know about care of this population.
Thank you for further pointing that out. The idea that you can “choose a puberty” as if from a buffet of pills is just... beyond.
A girl can never actually go through male puberty because she’s female! At best she will develop excess acne, body and facial hair, and sweat a lot. She will not develop denser bones (quite the opposite in fact), she will not develop male lung capacity and blood flow, her hips will not narrow to match a male physique. She will, however, probably end up with vaginal atrophy and osteoarthritis by her late 20s, never achieve an orgasm, and experience thinning hair on her scalp.
And her immune system will be so weakened she will be frequently hospitalized for infections that other people could fight off, and she will likely be dead before 50.
The "trans" activists like to point out that both sexes have some measure of both estrogen and testosterone, so administering the stuff isn't consequential. Except that the evidence that is *is* consequential is overwhelming. Female bodies are not prepared for elevated levels of testosterone and while, yes, their bodies react to it in ways the women with GID find pleasing (beards, musculature, etc.), these are superficialities compared to the harm.
Nature did a pretty poor job with the appendix, tonsils, and religion.
Not so bad in the transgender department, where only one in 65,000 actually have GID.
That is not a typo; one in 65.000. That's 0.0015% of the population.
And guess what: the real ones find the "trans" cult embarrassing.
Oh, I lift weights. And eat healthy and don't smoke or drink EtOH. I have this funny conviction about people being able to manage their own lives. Not get poisoned and sliced to get extra attention.
This post is objectionable on so many levels. You speak of the congruent and the transgender as some sort of symmetry, the same totally-wrong grasp of numbers that leads some especially dim people to use "cis" for the 99.9985% whose "body image" matches their sex.
There is no symmetry.
Gender Identity Disorder is not a simple variation like homosexuality or lefthandedness, it is a developmental defect whose afflicted need significant counseling and for whom surgeries to match "body image" (I must say, that sounds as stupid as "fat shaming") should be an absolute last resort.
I remind you that actual GID is extremely rare, one in 30,000 male births and 100,000 female births (2017); the current "trans" thing is almost certainly without any GID foundation. Stop talking as though the world is half GID.
A madness has seized the American left. Most people I know are leftish, and they simply refuse to acknowledge how acute the problem is. I've lived through the rise and fall of the religious right in the '80s, paleo-political correctness (late '80s-early '90s), the neo-con lunacy that led us into Iraq... I've never seen such abject insanity in a major American political faction as we see now on the left.
Accepting the patent irrationality of (trans)gender ideology is already a level of irrationality I could never have predicted. Sure, a fringe might accept such madness...but ten years ago I'd have bet almost any amount of money that no major American faction could adopt such a view as *orthodoxy*. But on top of believing outright contradictions like *Some women are male*, progressivism is now all-in on child sexual mutilation. Furthermore, they accept these positions with such dogmatic fervor that they commonly believe that appropriate punishment for disbelief is rabid attacks by online Reaver mobs. Their aim [is] to destroy careers and lives--something they relish. We now see them edging toward the belief that infidels who deny their superstitions deserve death.
You deserve praise for standing up to this, JS. I hope that you have it firmly in mind that these people are insane. Some aren't ordinarily so--they've been infected by a kind of mind virus that emulates insanity. Others are just plain crazy and have been brought out of the woodwork opportunistically, b[y] the ascendance of political madness. But insane they are. Don't let any corner of your mind think that you owe *them* an explanation. [And by 'them' I'm referring to the propagators and defenders of the madness, not the kids (and adults) afflicted by gender ideology, who are themselves generally victims.]
Finally: funny that voicing any opposition to gender ideology--no matter how sober and well-reasoned, is alleged to be impermissible on that grounds that it will lead the "gender"-confused to suicide. But outright encouraging suicide is apparently lauded by their side... Madness.
Hmm. I am taking a lot of heat for what anyone not so determined to put on airs would recognize as a flippant remark; admittedly in bad taste but not be taken as serious. And which, incidentally, I deleted long ago.
But I will answer. I long ago got over the idea that every human life has value, if only you have half your life to find it. People like Donald Trump and Queer Kari begin and end with their malice and, no, I will not forbear from saying that I would not lose a wink of sleep if both of them went under a bus. I've had enough experience with jerks. It was one of those fucking "activists" who got me banned from Medium for stating an indisputable scientific truth that was at odds with its "trans" delusions. And I am not going to put on a pretense of understanding or equanimity. In a word, fuck these people.
Suppose you had to kill someone to save your own life, or the life of someone dear to you. The choice was not yours at all but the act was unavoidable or you, your wife, your child, your cat ... would be dead by the hand of someone whose only contribution to the world was excrement. Would you agonize over what you had to do? Would you wring your hands over, oh, I ended a ℎ𝑢𝑚𝑎𝑛 𝑙𝑖𝑓𝑒?
Because I wouldn't.
I'd have no qualms other than my legal peril, and the fact that my assailant made his choice would be as clear in my mind as an unmuddied lake.
A lot of trans kids are just miserable people; their parents are always fighting, they didn't make the cheerleading squad, their favorite boy band broke up. They seek escape and here is this supremely idiotic fad they can join and feel special. They're too young and stupid to know better.
But the activists who urge them to the clinics to grow their Like counts are inexcusably irresponsible and malicious and if my words led to one of them removing itself (which would require a reflective impulse none of them will ever have, so it's not even hypothetical) then I would not exactly agonize over it.
If all this makes me a horrible person in your eyes then feel free to say so, but I prefer "misanthrope." I've been called "kind" by too many who knew me to lose a lot of sleep over the opinion of an Internet stranger.
Absolutely fucking disgusting how these supposed journalists, experts, and public figures are acting. It's just insane to see how they're all 100% in lockstep. This whole movement is totally mind blowing, every single day I can't understand how it's transformed so many people into this.
Or maybe this is just how people have always been?
A lot of it is fear. Beyond Twitter and signaling, there isn't any kind of central committee or anything. The lockstep-ness is social contagion, and a very real fear that they, themselves, will be in Jesse's position tomorrow (or worse!) if they don't toe the line. Some people are more cognizant of it than others, but if you corner half of these people in a small room, they'd voice at least a little dissent.
When people get up on the ledge, there are (and always have been) ghouls who shout "Jump." (However, the people who start these suicide memes are even more despicable.)
This whole "kill yourself" phenomenon on Twitter is one of the saddest examples of our society's discourse sinking to new lows. There is just no excuse for that kind of talk. Is it possible that people can debate ideas and to disagree respectfully? Is that too much to ask?
Yes. but not on twitter. The people who value this sort respectfulness left a long time ago. Now we are left with a predominance of people who want respect through fear.
Been reading you for awhile Jesse and this one really got me. Thanks for fighting the good fight - normal people are listening to and appreciating you!
For some reason, this post reminds me of this interview of a guy who had the shit beaten out of him in DC. https://twitter.com/thesierrafox/status/1673560453279105024 "In fairness to him [the attacker who beat the shit out of him], I was distracted" -- Jesse saying he shouldn't have tweeted is exactly what these psychos want -- to shut down discourse, shut down questioning, just affirm whatever they want to believe and don't you dare ask for evidence or point out the 180 degree pivot in viewpoints by so many formerly reputable organizations. Jesse SHOULD have tweeted. They NEED to be held accountable but they're so awful (see all these people egging on suicide) from their insecurity over needing to have the "correct" opinion that they just cow most of us into not getting into it. Bravo, Jesse. And I'm glad you're fine.
I disagree. Never Wrestle with a Pig. You Both Get Dirty and the Pig Likes It. For the history of this quote -- no, it is not Twain, nor Heinlein -- see https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/07/08/pig/
In real life, pigs are almost as fastidiously clean as cats. They don't like being filthy. that comes from being penned so their hooves turn soil to mud.
But they do love a good mud wallow. https://www.livescience.com/13953-pigs-evolved-mud-wallowing.html Wild boars have made a wallow in the nature preserve near my house. There may be all sorts of measurable benefits to wallowing, but people looking for 'reasons why animals do x' generally leave out 'because it is fun'.
I'm a doctor. "Primum non nocere" is one of our mottos (above all else do no harm). 10 minutes for a life altering decision? Our medical societies have gone off the cliff and some over busy practitioners are following like lemmings. Thanks for injecting some common sense and data Jesse. Don't waste any more time or emotion on the rantings of 7,000 idiots. Doctors advice.
Of course there's no shortage of prior examples of mass medical malfeasance. The over-prescription of painkillers is just on relatively recent example.
Nothing changes the fact that a ten-minute screening isn't even perfunctory.
The part that galls me most that I think you should expound on more here is that 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟-𝐫𝐞𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐬 𝐨𝐟 "𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬" is absolutely outrageous, especially considering the clear role played by "social contagion" and Smile. "A lot of my friends are trans! Me too!!" That is the worst thing about the DSM5 redefinition. Teen girls are intensely conformist and impressionable and no self-report that opens the gate to such catastrophic intervention should be given any weight whatsoever.
I read about one classroom where seven of 28 girls claimed to be "trans." The odds are that many GID-afflicted girls are lower than the chances of firing a gun in outer space and hitting a dime sixty light years away.
If it were up to child-me, I would've stayed up until midnight and eaten ice cream all day. The entire point of parents is to provide the structure and boundaries that kids are unable to, by definition, provide for themselves. I didn't stop making bad choices until I was at least 26 (and even then...). Moody tweens deserve love and attention, too, but the answer to every single one of their problems can't be "well, they know better!", especially when the solutions to problems are all life-altering drugs and surgery.
The problem with the "tweens make bad choices" argument is that it's symmetrical. You could just as easily argue that tweens who accept their gender identity without questioning it are making a bad choice without thinking it through. Accepting the status quo without thinking about it is sometimes just as bad and life-altering a choice as impulsively changing it. "Tweens make bad choices" is a fully general counterargument that allows you to dismiss any choice a tween makes that you dislike, regardless of what it is.
Since you can't dismiss people's choices with "tweens are dumb " you have to do what Jesse did and actually look at the evidence of what impact choices have long term. What he found, that gender-affirming care is often beneficial, but needs to be considered carefully and with much thought, is far more thoughtful and nuanced.
Jesus. I can’t believe these needs to be said, but yes tweens “accepting their gender identity,” assuming this means not taking exogenous hormones for the rest of their lives, is absolutely the best outcome, and it’s ludicrous to suggest otherwise.
The outcomes are not symmetric - one of them leaves the child sexually and reproductively disabled, dependent on a lifetime of medical and psychological treatment, and one of them does not.
It’s one thing to say “some children may have gender dysphoria that is so persistent and severe that transition is the best option for their well-being”. It’s quite another to say that having and not having gender dysphoria are equally desirable outcomes.
"You could just as easily argue that tweens who accept their gender identity without questioning it are making a bad choice without thinking it through. Accepting the status quo without thinking about it is sometimes just as bad and life-altering a choice as impulsively changing it."
This first sentence makes no sense and has *literally* no basis in science or observed reality and does not in any way prove your point. It also doesn't connect to the the second sentence at all. In general [CITATION NEEDED].
Glad you’re okay but many would not be, like the educator in Canada Those people are depraved. The fact that they call themselves “journalists” is why i mistrust mainstream outlets. Stay off Twitter!
Jesse, I think I finally understand what's going on. This is _exactly_ what Orwell described in 1984 with Emmanuel Goldstein and the Two Minutes Hate. They've created a fictional Jesse Singal, and are bonding with each other & ideologically virtue-signalling by vying to be the person who can be the most hateful and vile towards this imagined enemy. The truth of what you did or didn't do (whether this time or with any of your previous writings), what kind of person you are, etc, is utterly irrelevant.
Not to be presumptuous, but I will join the chorus of folks encouraging you to just log off the-site- formerly-known-as-Twitter once and for all, and be done with it. Even if it survives in some form, it is a shadow of what it once was - and a dark and deranged shadow at that. As you yourself have noted, the people who have remained, who can tolerate what the site has become, are disproportionately the more damaged and sociopathic users. You don't need this.
If you still must use a microblogging platform, imho Threads may be the least-bad option, especially once the app adds the promised chronological feed. For all the many problems with Meta, Threads does have by orders of magnitude the biggest user base of any of the Twitterlike alternatives, and they're predominantly normies, rather than the internet-poisoned hall monitors common on Bluesky or many Mastodon instances.
You are a good person. That's why they come for you. The key to using Twitter is to ignore the replies. Just pretend they do not exist. Then you never know the terrible things they say. My good friend David Carr who is no longer with us, sadly, told me never to get in Twitter fights. "Just leave them shouting down a hole." It was great advice. I like your presence on Twitter, just like Katie. Fighting the good fight. Thank you for that.
Unless Queer Kari is an ethicist with a really good argument for pre-emptive murder I can't imagine it making a difference. You're mistaken if you think my objection is rooted in sympathy for 'activists' and their positions.
All behavior has causes. I'm sure the people telling Jesse to khs felt similarly justified by their beliefs and experiences.
I'm obviously not the comment section police but the more comments of that tenor pop up the fewer people with intelligent, meaningful contributions will bother to post them here. It also makes other people who have grounded concerns about GAC look deranged by association. These just a couple most-relevant-to-me reasons I think others should corral their homicidal fantasies within the privacy of their own brains.
The surgeons are providing people with surgery because they truly believe that surgery is best for those people. Most of the time their belief is justified and correct. The activists are also quite sincere in their beliefs.
I find it truly annoying how anti-trans people are so sure of themselves that they literally cannot imagine that their opponents hold different beliefs than they do. They assume their opponents must have some kind of ulterior motive, because they literally cannot comprehend the possibility that someone could believe what they say they do.
You need to differentiate between those who do not believe people can be trans and those who believe that that diagnosis needs carefully and prolonged assessment (especially for kids who first manifest after age 5).
The long term effects of trans treatment, both hormonal and surgical, are significant and have not been sufficiently studied. If these thoughts are labeled as anti-trans, then then trans community needs to rethink its view of anti-trans.
"The surgeons are providing people with surgery because they truly believe that surgery is best for those people."
This is a joke, isn't it? Tell me this is a joke. The surgeon who spent half a year repairing the face of a badly burned Afghani boy did it for free. I donated $250 to St. Judes for their work. The 'plasty sculptors are taking $70K per, and that was a few years ago. Yeah, best for those people.
I've known a number of transgender men who were friends I cared about.
The "trans" are not transgender. GID has a childhood onset (average age = 4.5 years); "trans" late-onset is too clearly correlated with social media and contagion. If you believe in it, you need to get a lot better informed.
Employers are discarding résumés with pronouns. Go ahead, say they're all "transphobic."
I agree about ulterior motives and agree that most people providing GAC are good people. Those who question GAC,--simply questioning it ---are vilified by the activists. "The activists are also quite sincere in their beliefs." So sincere it seems they justify encouraging suicide for someone who merely advocates for robust assessment before shepherding a child into life long medical care. Medical intervention might be the right call for some children, but for most kids gender dysphoria is simply one of the stages involved in recognizing their homosexuality. How is one to know the difference between a truly trans kid and one working through their sexuality other than "watch and wait?" Jesse is simply advocating for robust assessment. That is all. That is rational. That is good treatment.
Those who respond with rage at even a suggestion of prudent caution are so engaged with this cult that they’ve lost all critical perspective. They are fanatics.
"The surgeons are providing people with surgery because they truly believe that surgery is best for those people." That's mind reading--there are other posssibilities.
We’re gonna have to stage an intervention, aren’t we, Jesse? Stop going to Twitter.
What finally got me off: The seemingly obvious (in retrospect) realization that every time I logged off Twitter I felt worse than when I logged on.
It was the Dobbs decision for me. When that leaked, I realized that social media was going to be nothing but morons yelling moronic things at other morons for several days, and I decided to just stay away. After a couple days logged off, I realized just how much better I felt, and I never went back.
Especially since the Litterer of the Future took over.
The only problem I have with this is that it teaches these people that this is effective, and I think would increase the likelihood of it happening again.
I would say, tough it out until he's controversy free for like a month (is that even possible?) then just stop.
It’s possible you’re right, but my gut tells me that Twitter assholes will continue to be assholes no matter the results
You're very brave for continuing to interact with these people - the transactivists, the journalists (I use the term loosely), and everyone else in this garbage fire. Twitter itself is designed to encourage this type of engagement, which is one reason why I'd be pleased if Elon Musk destroyed it.
I am not sure this counts as brave. I fear it is 'failure to successfully disengage' and 'getting sucked back in' and 'I just want to say one more thing ...' or somesuch. Pigheaded, rather than courageous.
Who hasn't found themselves sucked in further when it would be better to drop it? You are too critical.
The rename will accelerate that a lot.
I once thought "X" was cool in a science fictiony ("Planet X") kind of way, but I was eight years old.
But I loved calling the people on twitter 'twits'. What can we call them now?
Exes, obviously
TwiXs
Certainly not Xperts.
Fux
Xer?
Musk was asked what tweets would now be called. "Xs," he replied.
What about retweets?
He hadn't even thought about that. The man isn't just stupid, he's defective.
Unknowns?
Yes at this point it's almost like Jesse is trying to argue for buffet line civility on the Titanic.
Please don't kill yourself. Also, please stay off twitter.
I am shocked! Shocked! at the wholly unexpected discovery that the "trans affirming" crowd includes an elevated number of truly despicable people.
One of them speculates how many "trans" kidz have killed themselves as a result of your writing; I confidently peg this number at zero. knowing how few of them can take a long enough break from "my pronouns" and "my gender identity" to read anything that isn't wholly "affirming" an' "inclusive" an' "supportive" an' stuff.
And their entire sense of righteousness is based on the "trans teen suicide" lie, yet they pile on you with advice to kill yourself.
If you lose a single wink of sleep over this kerfuffle, I'll be very disappointed.
I don't think the correct response to someone being falsely accused of holding morally repugnant anti-trans views and then being told to kill himself because he holds said morally repugnant views, is to say "No, those views are totally right. All those horrible things you're being falsely accused of believing are true and correct."
Obviously it's not acceptable to suicide-bait anyone, no matter how repugnant their views. However, I do think it compounds the injustice that Jesse is being lumped in with a lot of truly terrible people because he holds moderate pro-trans views.
Puberty is irreversible, so it's really important that people go through the puberty that's right for them. That means we need to avoid false positives and false negatives. Downplaying the frequency of either is extremely Irresponsible.
Isn't the puberty that is right for a person the puberty that the body naturally goes through?
Anything else will cause a lifetime need for medical interventions that come with very negative side effects such as brittle bones and sexual dysfunction.
I find it truly unfathomable that activists argue that trying to circumvent the body's natural and healthy function with synthetic hormones and surgery is a superior intervention to psychotherapy that aims to help the patient come to terms with his/her distress and work through it.
This quote from the article sums up the lunacy:
“Therapy is not a requirement in this approach because being trans is not a pathology.”
Anyone who believes that is actively deluding themselves.
In DSM4 it was called Gender Identity 𝐷𝑖𝑠𝑜𝑟𝑑𝑒𝑟. But that sounds so negative and judgmental!
OK we have a condition in which people are so uncomfortable in their healthy bodies that they're purportedly driven to take their own lives in large numbers.
But we mustn't call it a "disorder."
That would be ℎ𝑢𝑟𝑡𝑓𝑢𝑙.
No, the puberty that is right for a person is the puberty of the gender identity they have. Sometimes synthetic hormones and surgery really are better than what the body naturally does. Nature is pretty terrible a lot of the time, and it's the job of medical science to do better than it.
It's not delusional to understand that people have a mental image of what kind of body they have, and that they should be able to make their actual body more like their self image. If someone wants more muscles than they naturally have you tell them to lift weights, not to get therapy to accept their natural scrawniness!
Imagine that in the future some mad scientist invents a way to transplant brains, and then swaps the brains of a man and woman without their consent. Now imagine that there is a way to reverse the operation, but it's risky and could have some negative side effects. Both victims think the procedure is worth the risks. Would you really advise the mad scientist's victims that they should instead just accept their new bodies and come to terms with their "distress?" It's not that big of a leap to imagine that there might be some people who feel the same way about the body they were born with as the mad scientist's victims feel about their new bodies.
I'm sorry, but these comparisons are ridiculous. To the point I almost didn't want to even respond. Brilliantly Oblivious already touched on my first counter, but here we go.
If someone wants to lift weights to build muscle mass, then he/she should do so. Lean muscle is healthy, and it is not 'unnatural' as you suggest. If that same person wanted to start dosing with HGH, creatin, or other synthetic supplements to enhance his image beyond what his body could do on its own from just weight training, then I would say that it is a very bad idea.
A person who desires *excessive* quantities of cosmetic surgery to look like a Barbie doll or whatever should also be referred to a psychiatrist. In my opinion, it is unethical for surgeons to allow a person's mental distress to dictate invasive medical procedures. It is particularly at issue in the gender debate because it involves children who have underdeveloped brains and emotional regulation.
As for the mad scientist thing- just.... what??
The activists want GID diagnosis at 18 months and hormones/surgery by age ten. And they don't care if ten year olds are ready for decisions like that; all they care about is expanding their audience.
There are certainly people for whom the distress of being in body of the opposite sex they see themselves as, is so overwhelming, that surgery and a life on drugs is still a better alternative than living in their existing body.
To allow young people to make that decision presupposes they really do understand their condition and the choice they are making.
Perhaps these kids are prescient. I do remember my teen-age years. I had no idea who I was (although I thought I knew everything). Even as an older adult, I still struggle with understanding myself.
It should not be surprising that people question transgender health care, especially when one expert says "“Therapy is not a requirement in this approach because being trans is not a pathology"
“Gender identity” is a bullshit neologism. It’s as scientific as “soul” and you should stop saying it and thinking it. Same goes for “gender.”
There are two sexes, and if there are such things as genders, there are eight billion of them.
I'm sorry, this is just inaccurate, even if you believe that gender identity controls medical care. Gender dysphoric youth do not go through the puberty of their preferred "gender identity" they go through a hormone regimen completely different than their preferred identity that likely makes them infertile and often incapable of achieving orgasm. Your theoretical only shows how little we know about care of this population.
Thank you for further pointing that out. The idea that you can “choose a puberty” as if from a buffet of pills is just... beyond.
A girl can never actually go through male puberty because she’s female! At best she will develop excess acne, body and facial hair, and sweat a lot. She will not develop denser bones (quite the opposite in fact), she will not develop male lung capacity and blood flow, her hips will not narrow to match a male physique. She will, however, probably end up with vaginal atrophy and osteoarthritis by her late 20s, never achieve an orgasm, and experience thinning hair on her scalp.
And her immune system will be so weakened she will be frequently hospitalized for infections that other people could fight off, and she will likely be dead before 50.
The "trans" activists like to point out that both sexes have some measure of both estrogen and testosterone, so administering the stuff isn't consequential. Except that the evidence that is *is* consequential is overwhelming. Female bodies are not prepared for elevated levels of testosterone and while, yes, their bodies react to it in ways the women with GID find pleasing (beards, musculature, etc.), these are superficialities compared to the harm.
The magical thinking is insane.
Nature did a pretty poor job with the appendix, tonsils, and religion.
Not so bad in the transgender department, where only one in 65,000 actually have GID.
That is not a typo; one in 65.000. That's 0.0015% of the population.
And guess what: the real ones find the "trans" cult embarrassing.
Oh, I lift weights. And eat healthy and don't smoke or drink EtOH. I have this funny conviction about people being able to manage their own lives. Not get poisoned and sliced to get extra attention.
This post is objectionable on so many levels. You speak of the congruent and the transgender as some sort of symmetry, the same totally-wrong grasp of numbers that leads some especially dim people to use "cis" for the 99.9985% whose "body image" matches their sex.
There is no symmetry.
Gender Identity Disorder is not a simple variation like homosexuality or lefthandedness, it is a developmental defect whose afflicted need significant counseling and for whom surgeries to match "body image" (I must say, that sounds as stupid as "fat shaming") should be an absolute last resort.
I remind you that actual GID is extremely rare, one in 30,000 male births and 100,000 female births (2017); the current "trans" thing is almost certainly without any GID foundation. Stop talking as though the world is half GID.
Puberty is a natural and essential bodily function. Fucking around with the natural cascade of hormones is insanity.
“Go through the puberty that is right for them”?
Do these people ever actually listen to themselves?
When people get up on the ledge, there are (and always have been) ghouls who shout "Jump."
A madness has seized the American left. Most people I know are leftish, and they simply refuse to acknowledge how acute the problem is. I've lived through the rise and fall of the religious right in the '80s, paleo-political correctness (late '80s-early '90s), the neo-con lunacy that led us into Iraq... I've never seen such abject insanity in a major American political faction as we see now on the left.
Accepting the patent irrationality of (trans)gender ideology is already a level of irrationality I could never have predicted. Sure, a fringe might accept such madness...but ten years ago I'd have bet almost any amount of money that no major American faction could adopt such a view as *orthodoxy*. But on top of believing outright contradictions like *Some women are male*, progressivism is now all-in on child sexual mutilation. Furthermore, they accept these positions with such dogmatic fervor that they commonly believe that appropriate punishment for disbelief is rabid attacks by online Reaver mobs. Their aim [is] to destroy careers and lives--something they relish. We now see them edging toward the belief that infidels who deny their superstitions deserve death.
You deserve praise for standing up to this, JS. I hope that you have it firmly in mind that these people are insane. Some aren't ordinarily so--they've been infected by a kind of mind virus that emulates insanity. Others are just plain crazy and have been brought out of the woodwork opportunistically, b[y] the ascendance of political madness. But insane they are. Don't let any corner of your mind think that you owe *them* an explanation. [And by 'them' I'm referring to the propagators and defenders of the madness, not the kids (and adults) afflicted by gender ideology, who are themselves generally victims.]
Finally: funny that voicing any opposition to gender ideology--no matter how sober and well-reasoned, is alleged to be impermissible on that grounds that it will lead the "gender"-confused to suicide. But outright encouraging suicide is apparently lauded by their side... Madness.
The mythical "trans suicide plague" is justification for all kinds of violence and rage,
The tyranny is Soviet in its intensity. Please see my own SubStack so I can rest my fingers.
It's a threat.
Say what we tell you to say or, hey, one of us might kill xirself...
You don't want *that* on your conscience, now, do you?
"xirself?" Please tell me that's a typo.
Hmm. I am taking a lot of heat for what anyone not so determined to put on airs would recognize as a flippant remark; admittedly in bad taste but not be taken as serious. And which, incidentally, I deleted long ago.
But I will answer. I long ago got over the idea that every human life has value, if only you have half your life to find it. People like Donald Trump and Queer Kari begin and end with their malice and, no, I will not forbear from saying that I would not lose a wink of sleep if both of them went under a bus. I've had enough experience with jerks. It was one of those fucking "activists" who got me banned from Medium for stating an indisputable scientific truth that was at odds with its "trans" delusions. And I am not going to put on a pretense of understanding or equanimity. In a word, fuck these people.
Suppose you had to kill someone to save your own life, or the life of someone dear to you. The choice was not yours at all but the act was unavoidable or you, your wife, your child, your cat ... would be dead by the hand of someone whose only contribution to the world was excrement. Would you agonize over what you had to do? Would you wring your hands over, oh, I ended a ℎ𝑢𝑚𝑎𝑛 𝑙𝑖𝑓𝑒?
Because I wouldn't.
I'd have no qualms other than my legal peril, and the fact that my assailant made his choice would be as clear in my mind as an unmuddied lake.
A lot of trans kids are just miserable people; their parents are always fighting, they didn't make the cheerleading squad, their favorite boy band broke up. They seek escape and here is this supremely idiotic fad they can join and feel special. They're too young and stupid to know better.
But the activists who urge them to the clinics to grow their Like counts are inexcusably irresponsible and malicious and if my words led to one of them removing itself (which would require a reflective impulse none of them will ever have, so it's not even hypothetical) then I would not exactly agonize over it.
If all this makes me a horrible person in your eyes then feel free to say so, but I prefer "misanthrope." I've been called "kind" by too many who knew me to lose a lot of sleep over the opinion of an Internet stranger.
Jesse, stop going back to Twitter like it's an abusive ex.
The "cool kids" of journalism are assholes. You don't need their approval and nobody's mind is going to change, because nobody engages in good faith.
Absolutely fucking disgusting how these supposed journalists, experts, and public figures are acting. It's just insane to see how they're all 100% in lockstep. This whole movement is totally mind blowing, every single day I can't understand how it's transformed so many people into this.
Or maybe this is just how people have always been?
A lot of it is fear. Beyond Twitter and signaling, there isn't any kind of central committee or anything. The lockstep-ness is social contagion, and a very real fear that they, themselves, will be in Jesse's position tomorrow (or worse!) if they don't toe the line. Some people are more cognizant of it than others, but if you corner half of these people in a small room, they'd voice at least a little dissent.
Tbh I think they've always been like this; social media just baits them into doing it in public.
When people get up on the ledge, there are (and always have been) ghouls who shout "Jump." (However, the people who start these suicide memes are even more despicable.)
I am always asking myself if I’m the crazy one. Am I the one who doesn’t get it?
What brings me back to believing in my own sanity is the pictures of what greedy plastic surgeons do to sad kids.
This whole "kill yourself" phenomenon on Twitter is one of the saddest examples of our society's discourse sinking to new lows. There is just no excuse for that kind of talk. Is it possible that people can debate ideas and to disagree respectfully? Is that too much to ask?
Yes. but not on twitter. The people who value this sort respectfulness left a long time ago. Now we are left with a predominance of people who want respect through fear.
So true.
Been reading you for awhile Jesse and this one really got me. Thanks for fighting the good fight - normal people are listening to and appreciating you!
For some reason, this post reminds me of this interview of a guy who had the shit beaten out of him in DC. https://twitter.com/thesierrafox/status/1673560453279105024 "In fairness to him [the attacker who beat the shit out of him], I was distracted" -- Jesse saying he shouldn't have tweeted is exactly what these psychos want -- to shut down discourse, shut down questioning, just affirm whatever they want to believe and don't you dare ask for evidence or point out the 180 degree pivot in viewpoints by so many formerly reputable organizations. Jesse SHOULD have tweeted. They NEED to be held accountable but they're so awful (see all these people egging on suicide) from their insecurity over needing to have the "correct" opinion that they just cow most of us into not getting into it. Bravo, Jesse. And I'm glad you're fine.
I disagree. Never Wrestle with a Pig. You Both Get Dirty and the Pig Likes It. For the history of this quote -- no, it is not Twain, nor Heinlein -- see https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/07/08/pig/
In real life, pigs are almost as fastidiously clean as cats. They don't like being filthy. that comes from being penned so their hooves turn soil to mud.
But they do love a good mud wallow. https://www.livescience.com/13953-pigs-evolved-mud-wallowing.html Wild boars have made a wallow in the nature preserve near my house. There may be all sorts of measurable benefits to wallowing, but people looking for 'reasons why animals do x' generally leave out 'because it is fun'.
Yeah, it’s a discourse-version of “Well, Miss, what were you wearing?”
I'm a doctor. "Primum non nocere" is one of our mottos (above all else do no harm). 10 minutes for a life altering decision? Our medical societies have gone off the cliff and some over busy practitioners are following like lemmings. Thanks for injecting some common sense and data Jesse. Don't waste any more time or emotion on the rantings of 7,000 idiots. Doctors advice.
Of course there's no shortage of prior examples of mass medical malfeasance. The over-prescription of painkillers is just on relatively recent example.
...and arguably, the Covid response (I generally stay out of that discussion).
Nothing changes the fact that a ten-minute screening isn't even perfunctory.
The part that galls me most that I think you should expound on more here is that 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟-𝐫𝐞𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐬 𝐨𝐟 "𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬" is absolutely outrageous, especially considering the clear role played by "social contagion" and Smile. "A lot of my friends are trans! Me too!!" That is the worst thing about the DSM5 redefinition. Teen girls are intensely conformist and impressionable and no self-report that opens the gate to such catastrophic intervention should be given any weight whatsoever.
I read about one classroom where seven of 28 girls claimed to be "trans." The odds are that many GID-afflicted girls are lower than the chances of firing a gun in outer space and hitting a dime sixty light years away.
If it were up to child-me, I would've stayed up until midnight and eaten ice cream all day. The entire point of parents is to provide the structure and boundaries that kids are unable to, by definition, provide for themselves. I didn't stop making bad choices until I was at least 26 (and even then...). Moody tweens deserve love and attention, too, but the answer to every single one of their problems can't be "well, they know better!", especially when the solutions to problems are all life-altering drugs and surgery.
The problem with the "tweens make bad choices" argument is that it's symmetrical. You could just as easily argue that tweens who accept their gender identity without questioning it are making a bad choice without thinking it through. Accepting the status quo without thinking about it is sometimes just as bad and life-altering a choice as impulsively changing it. "Tweens make bad choices" is a fully general counterargument that allows you to dismiss any choice a tween makes that you dislike, regardless of what it is.
Since you can't dismiss people's choices with "tweens are dumb " you have to do what Jesse did and actually look at the evidence of what impact choices have long term. What he found, that gender-affirming care is often beneficial, but needs to be considered carefully and with much thought, is far more thoughtful and nuanced.
Jesus. I can’t believe these needs to be said, but yes tweens “accepting their gender identity,” assuming this means not taking exogenous hormones for the rest of their lives, is absolutely the best outcome, and it’s ludicrous to suggest otherwise.
The outcomes are not symmetric - one of them leaves the child sexually and reproductively disabled, dependent on a lifetime of medical and psychological treatment, and one of them does not.
It’s one thing to say “some children may have gender dysphoria that is so persistent and severe that transition is the best option for their well-being”. It’s quite another to say that having and not having gender dysphoria are equally desirable outcomes.
"You could just as easily argue that tweens who accept their gender identity without questioning it are making a bad choice without thinking it through. Accepting the status quo without thinking about it is sometimes just as bad and life-altering a choice as impulsively changing it."
This first sentence makes no sense and has *literally* no basis in science or observed reality and does not in any way prove your point. It also doesn't connect to the the second sentence at all. In general [CITATION NEEDED].
“ Since you can't dismiss people's choices with "tweens are dumb "
Why can’t we do EXACTY that?
You don’t seem to exactly have a stranglehold on reality here.
Glad you’re okay but many would not be, like the educator in Canada Those people are depraved. The fact that they call themselves “journalists” is why i mistrust mainstream outlets. Stay off Twitter!
Jesse, I think I finally understand what's going on. This is _exactly_ what Orwell described in 1984 with Emmanuel Goldstein and the Two Minutes Hate. They've created a fictional Jesse Singal, and are bonding with each other & ideologically virtue-signalling by vying to be the person who can be the most hateful and vile towards this imagined enemy. The truth of what you did or didn't do (whether this time or with any of your previous writings), what kind of person you are, etc, is utterly irrelevant.
Not to be presumptuous, but I will join the chorus of folks encouraging you to just log off the-site- formerly-known-as-Twitter once and for all, and be done with it. Even if it survives in some form, it is a shadow of what it once was - and a dark and deranged shadow at that. As you yourself have noted, the people who have remained, who can tolerate what the site has become, are disproportionately the more damaged and sociopathic users. You don't need this.
If you still must use a microblogging platform, imho Threads may be the least-bad option, especially once the app adds the promised chronological feed. For all the many problems with Meta, Threads does have by orders of magnitude the biggest user base of any of the Twitterlike alternatives, and they're predominantly normies, rather than the internet-poisoned hall monitors common on Bluesky or many Mastodon instances.
I was in Threads a few days. About half the posts I saw were cooing about Dylan Mulvaney. I’ll wait and see but I can’t stand that guy.
Twitter has an active LGB no T advocacy, that’s all I read.
You are a good person. That's why they come for you. The key to using Twitter is to ignore the replies. Just pretend they do not exist. Then you never know the terrible things they say. My good friend David Carr who is no longer with us, sadly, told me never to get in Twitter fights. "Just leave them shouting down a hole." It was great advice. I like your presence on Twitter, just like Katie. Fighting the good fight. Thank you for that.
The Night of the Gun is a masterpiece. I quote it all the time.
He gave me a part time job transcribing all of his interviews for that. I think I still have them somewhere. He was a great writer and a great guy.
"Again: I could have avoided all of this by tweeting less."
That's funny, but the truth is these people are deranged. Every single one of them deserves a block.
How many moral rungs above suicide baiting do you suppose this comment is?
I don't know which I hate more: calls for a rightwing Mad Max world or calls for a leftwing Mad Max world. So many options!
At least the surgeons are destroying lives for money.
The activists are destroying lives for clicks.
I'll let you count those rungs.
Edit: why don't you mosey over to Medium and read a few dozen articles by "Queer Kari" and then let's talk again, OK?
Unless Queer Kari is an ethicist with a really good argument for pre-emptive murder I can't imagine it making a difference. You're mistaken if you think my objection is rooted in sympathy for 'activists' and their positions.
I understand your objection. try to understand that my vehemence may have cause. Post-emptive.
All behavior has causes. I'm sure the people telling Jesse to khs felt similarly justified by their beliefs and experiences.
I'm obviously not the comment section police but the more comments of that tenor pop up the fewer people with intelligent, meaningful contributions will bother to post them here. It also makes other people who have grounded concerns about GAC look deranged by association. These just a couple most-relevant-to-me reasons I think others should corral their homicidal fantasies within the privacy of their own brains.
The surgeons are providing people with surgery because they truly believe that surgery is best for those people. Most of the time their belief is justified and correct. The activists are also quite sincere in their beliefs.
I find it truly annoying how anti-trans people are so sure of themselves that they literally cannot imagine that their opponents hold different beliefs than they do. They assume their opponents must have some kind of ulterior motive, because they literally cannot comprehend the possibility that someone could believe what they say they do.
You need to differentiate between those who do not believe people can be trans and those who believe that that diagnosis needs carefully and prolonged assessment (especially for kids who first manifest after age 5).
The long term effects of trans treatment, both hormonal and surgical, are significant and have not been sufficiently studied. If these thoughts are labeled as anti-trans, then then trans community needs to rethink its view of anti-trans.
Those studies are always shut down by deluges of mail and calls about "transphobia!" and the researchers fired.
Because they know full well that the findings will not be joyous.
There's a reason so many European McGender mills are shutting down.
"The surgeons are providing people with surgery because they truly believe that surgery is best for those people."
This is a joke, isn't it? Tell me this is a joke. The surgeon who spent half a year repairing the face of a badly burned Afghani boy did it for free. I donated $250 to St. Judes for their work. The 'plasty sculptors are taking $70K per, and that was a few years ago. Yeah, best for those people.
I've known a number of transgender men who were friends I cared about.
The "trans" are not transgender. GID has a childhood onset (average age = 4.5 years); "trans" late-onset is too clearly correlated with social media and contagion. If you believe in it, you need to get a lot better informed.
Employers are discarding résumés with pronouns. Go ahead, say they're all "transphobic."
"Opponents." Please.
I agree about ulterior motives and agree that most people providing GAC are good people. Those who question GAC,--simply questioning it ---are vilified by the activists. "The activists are also quite sincere in their beliefs." So sincere it seems they justify encouraging suicide for someone who merely advocates for robust assessment before shepherding a child into life long medical care. Medical intervention might be the right call for some children, but for most kids gender dysphoria is simply one of the stages involved in recognizing their homosexuality. How is one to know the difference between a truly trans kid and one working through their sexuality other than "watch and wait?" Jesse is simply advocating for robust assessment. That is all. That is rational. That is good treatment.
Those who respond with rage at even a suggestion of prudent caution are so engaged with this cult that they’ve lost all critical perspective. They are fanatics.
Thank you for articulating this so clearly. "Chill the F Out" indeed!
"The surgeons are providing people with surgery because they truly believe that surgery is best for those people." That's mind reading--there are other posssibilities.
In the words of Peter Clemenza, "Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHEG2i6PD38
Those prescribing "reversible" puberty blockers deserve a Luca Brasi Chair event.