Your December Questions, Answered (1 of 2)
All kindsa stuff
I got a lot of good questions! So I’m going to make this a two-parter. Don’t worry, I’ll stick some more standard, regular fare between Parts 1 and 2.
Two questions I’m going to address separately:
Ryan asks, “What are your thoughts as a journalist on the Bari Weiss/60 Minutes kerfuffle over the delayed segment on the El Salvadoran prison?” I started to write a response to this and I realized that even though I’m a bit late to this, it should be a full post. So a full post it shall be, and soon.
Dollarsandsense asks, “What state is your book manuscript in? Are you close to finishing? Curious about what has been difficult to sort out or nail down.” I’d actually been wanting to experiment with video hangouts just for Singal-Minded premium subscribers, so if you’re one of them, here you go. I talked a bit about some of the challenges of this project. I hope I’m relatively close to done, but we’ll see! I’m turning in the latest edits imminently.
Okay, on to my actual answers:
How often in life do you think we’re right about something because we genuinely thought it through and came to a correct conclusion through sound deduction, and how often are we right because real-life events happened to coincide with all our preexisting biases and beliefs? I think of this lately b/c I’ve been so depressed at how many “heterodox” thinkers (with some honorable exceptions like yourself) revealed themselves to be either conspiracy theorist loons, Trump supporters or apologists, or “both sides are equally bad” types—basically, they revealed themselves to be what many progressives accused them of being from the jump. So how often are we right for reasons we should be proud of ourselves for, and how often are we right b/c we got lucky? Happy Holidays! —Bertie Wooster
This is a very good question that might warrant a more thorough treatment at some point. I think the only honest answer is that when we are right, it’s almost always by accident. I don’t see how we can possibly conclude otherwise.
Each of us knows very little. That means we defer to more informed people on almost every subject. Even when we think we are carefully reasoning through something, evaluating the evidence, and so on, we’re almost always subjected to serious limitations, meaning we have to resort to picking which bundle of experts and their claims to defer to.
A small chunk of the physical world has been figured out. If you ask me why the sky is blue rather than other colors, I can refresh my memory on Wikipedia in 30 seconds and give you the right answer. Or maybe Google will bring me to a NASA site for children, which will remind me: “Sunlight reaches Earth’s atmosphere and is scattered in all directions by all the gases and particles in the air. Blue light is scattered more than the other colors because it travels as shorter, smaller waves. This is why we see a blue sky most of the time.” Oh, right — ROYGBIV. I remember! (Kinda.)
I’m really just deferring to NASA and to a bunch of physicists and old scientific findings. Should I? Yes, I should. Because they happen to be right. But the only account I can give as to why I am correct to defer in this manner goes something like: “On certain basic science questions, there’s no longer any real debate about how the real world works, and mainstream science organizations are very likely to give you the correct answer.” But this makes me a tiny bit queasy because, again, there’s so much deference. Even if I got obsessed with this question, allowed it to eat up several days (imagine the apologetic email to my book editor), bought some sort of kids’ science set, and reproduced a rainbow against my wall or whatever, I’d still be deferring to experts when it came to how to interpret that experiment.
“Why is the sky blue?” is, by 2025 standards, an extremely simple question. If we have to defer this much even on extremely simple questions, what does this tell us about more complicated ones? About ones involving human brains, which are frequently cited as the most complex objects in the known universe? About groups of hundreds of thousands or millions of human brains and how they interact and what structures they will or will not form?
Plus, there’s the whole history thing. Not an original observation, but we know that at every point in human history, people have believed things very strongly that are later looked on as ridiculous. Yes, we live in a time of rapidly increasing human knowledge, but I don’t think there’s any reason to believe we’ve escaped that trap, especially how often we see reversals: People believe X very strongly in 2012, it gets written up as an exciting new truth, and then in 2015 it’s either debunked or people just sort of awkwardly stop talking about it.
Anyway, surely it’s clear where I stand on this by now. I don’t think we deserve much credit for being right, if and when we’re right. I think we should have a massive amount of humility.
Question about “most trans kids just need to get through puberty”:
What is the current state of the evidence that some/many/most under-18s who are unhappy with their sex, if they were to ride through puberty (and perhaps also get appropriate therapy while riding through puberty?) would come out the other side of puberty accepting their sex (and perhaps identifying as lesbian/gay, and/or becoming creative with sex roles)?
Also, I’d appreciate any links to data or stories about this that I could share with others.
Thanks! —Mark Nazimova
Am not Jesse, obviously, but do have answers.
The statement about getting through puberty (to mature adulthood, not just a switch flips or doesn’t when puberty hits) applied to the majority of kids who were opposite sex-identified before puberty, if they didn’t receive medical intervention or social transition, in studies. See e.g. Singh, Bradley, Zucker, 2021.
There was a popular claim that if you identified as trans as an adolescent that it would be stable, originally made for these prepubertal kids but then extended to those with later onset. Byrne traced the source of that (not supported by the evidence) claim in “another myth of persistence” (2024), peer reviewed. For adolescent-onset even less is known, he discusses some there, also the HHS report has discussion and more references. [Links added by me.] —for the kids
Yeah, I think for the kids is correct. The biggest and more important desistance studies involved kids who overwhelmingly had childhood-onset gender dysphoria and who didn’t socially transition, because social transition was unusual at the time. The Dutch researchers who invented youth gender medicine wrote that they thought experiencing the first bit of puberty could help to clarify things.
Setting aside the fact that you can’t assume any given kid will follow any given trajectory just because zoomed-out research says so, I don’t think any of this research can be safely applied to an American setting, especially in cases of later-onset GD. We continue to have no research on the trajectories of kids who come out suddenly as adolescents. Many established activist-clinicians have (in my opinion) impeded our knowledge of this subject by loudly proclaiming that these kids were always trans, their parents just didn’t notice, and so on. They have basically denied that this is actually a new type of gender-dysphoric young people. Other clinicians, including the Dutch, have acknowledged that this appears to be a new presentation.
I think it’s definitely a new presentation — I find it wild anyone could deny this — and because we know nothing about this group, we can’t say anything for sure. Anecdotally, some parents of these kids report that their trans identities come during periods in which they have been cycling through a lot of identities more generally. I do think it’s okay to sometimes invoke common sense when we don’t have hard data.
Like, imagine this exchange:
A: I think a 12-year-old female with an eating disorder who announced she was pansexual, then asexual, then gray-asexual, and then trans is less likely to identify as trans in the long run than a kid who has a long history of childhood GD.
B: Where’s your peer-reviewed research arguing this?
This is a bit silly. A is engaged in some reasonable reasoning: A kid who is experiencing some degree of turmoil and rapidly cycling through identities is likely to. . . continue cycling through identities. Or more likely than a kid who has been stably saying the same thing about their gender identity, at least.
All of this is to say that if a kid has come out as trans suddenly and/or has other mental health stuff going on, a large degree of caution is warranted because there’s more reason to suspect that the trans identity is tied up with/caused by other factors, relative to a situation where a kid has felt the same way for many years. I don’t think this necessarily translates to “If they ride out puberty they will accept their sex,” but these situations are more complex, in general.
It’s exceptionally unfortunate that so many activists and actual, real-life doctors have spread the meme that kids will kill themselves if they don’t get treatment. I continue to be shocked by this, because based on what we know about suicide it could be a self-fulfilling prophecy. There really is no solid evidence to support such a simple causal relationship, even if puberty can be more distressing for kids with dysphoria than for those without it.
What was that legal situation that you said is now over?—Caleb
