jesus christ the latest Atlantic editorial on, ahem (huge scare quotes) "the trans issue" is fucking miserable and pathetic, just the most absolute bottom-of-the-barrel dogshit journalism, and it fucking sucks to see it blasted across the internet and also directly to my phone's notifications. i know this isn't remotely surprising to most folks here, and i imagine a lot of y'all would rather not read about this (in which case, by all means, keep scrolling! i think this is ultimately unimportant and i am not out to ruin anyone's day!) but personally i'm mad and i want to write about it. so to illustrate just a couple of examples of what i mean:
i hate to drive traffic but i do think it's useful to cite the source material, so... link to the article here (ugh).
#1. The author, Helen Lewis, wants to argue that gender transition doesn't prevent suicide among minors, because (she states) suicide isn't that big of a phenomenon among trans youth. But check out her evidence, and pay close attention to the sources she's cherrypicking:
However, the evidence that adolescent medical transition prevents suicide turns out to be thin. As early as 2018, the Gender Identity Development Service—Britain’s leading child gender clinic, staffed by doctors involved with transition-related care—criticized a television drama called Butterfly that showed a gender-nonconforming 11-year-old attempting suicide. “It is not helpful to suggest that suicidality is an inevitable part of this condition,” the clinic declared in a statement. “It would be very unusual for younger children referred to the service to make suicidal attempts.” Last month, a Finnish study concluded that suicide was rare among minors seeking help at gender clinics, and when deaths occurred, they reflected overall mental-health challenges rather than being specifically linked to gender dysphoria.
...so both of these sources are only saying that suicide is rare among minors already receiving treatment(!), a detail which Lewis brazenly glosses past in an effort to convince you of her thesis. (BTW, what is that thesis? Well, Lewis is basically arguing in this whole article that we shouldn't be allowing certain minors to access gender-affirming treatment; in particular, she's trying to push back on activist Andrea Long Chu's recent work stating that kids— and anyone, really— should be allowed to change their gender or sex for any reason, up to and including simply just... wanting to change.)
But Lewis isn't recognizing the counterfactual here: what about the kids who aren't receiving treatment? How low is their risk of suicide? Body dysphoria remains linked to way higher-than-average suicidality rates overall, and it's rather telling that she can't find any evidence to directly refute this. If clinics are telling us that the kids who are receiving treatment aren't trying to kill themselves as much, that's a damn good thing. That means the treatment is working, and if anything, we should be doing MORE of it, not less. Overall this is just an extremely poor logical fallacy and it's shameful that it's been published here at all.
#2. Check out this particularly frustrating passage:
For Chu, the primacy of rights means that evidence is irrelevant to medical decisions—even when children are involved. This view has two logical implications: The first is that, if we are now just letting kids do whatever they want with their bodies, why not let them get married at 12, or drink alcohol at 13, or consent to sex at 14 with an adult partner? “Toddlers have the right to get tattoos” might be the worst political slogan I have ever heard.
The alternative argument is that gender—however you define it—is so unique and important that it alone justifies total bodily autonomy for minors.
Emphasis is mine. But like, seriously, Helen Lewis, you are THIS CLOSE to getting it!!! Yes, gender IS so unique and so important that it DOES justify bodily autonomy in a way that other things do not!! Obviously nobody is wanting kids to get married early or be drinking young or be having sex with adults, and she's just building this up here as a complete strawman to make the other side look bad. Ms. Lewis, have you ever heard of a little thing called nuance? Sometimes things are different from other things in complex but important ways! Yes— sex, alcohol, and the constructions of marriage are certainly difficult for any child or teen to fully grasp. But the experience of gender is so universal, so all-encompassing and central to our identities that nearly everyone, from very early ages, has an innate sense of how gender perception affects them, whether conscious or not.
#3. It's so clear that Lewis doesn't think of Chu as a "real" woman, from calling into question Chu's own reasons for identifying as trans to implying that Chu doesn't understand what it means to be feminine, and it's fucking exhausting. Lewis runs a good old-fashioned beat of neoliberal feminism, and she openly admits it:
...Chu is willing to grant us membership in a third category. We are TARLs, or trans-agnostic reactionary liberals... 'The TARL’s primary concern... lies in protecting free speech and civil society from the illiberal forces of the woke left,' [Chu] writes. 'On trans people themselves, the TARL claims to take no position other than to voice his general empathy for anyone suffering from psychological distress or civil-rights violations.' Again, guilty as charged.
It's just... so tired. Lewis writes, "The project of feminism, from Mary Wollstonecraft onwards, has been to decouple the material reality of being born female from notions of passivity and femininity." But then, all that is left of a woman is only "XX chromosomes and the body type evolved to produce large gametes." And if that's feminism's definition of a woman, then the project has utterly failed us.
Anyway, there's more to pick apart in this article (read: everything else i did not mention here), but i'll leave it at this for now. Bad journalism is all around us, and in particular in the op-eds section! While it's always distressing to read this kinda stuff, i do think there's a certain defense that comes with being able to take these arguments and dissect them critically, beyond just "i don't like this headline."
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