Prevalence of Gender Ideology and the Placebo Effect

Is the nearly vertical upward spike in reported cases of gender transition due, in part, to the placebo effect? Leor Sapir Reports at City Journal,  "The Placebo Is the Point: A new paper highlights the fundamental bias in the world of “gender-affirming” research."

A paper published last month in the Archives of Sexual Behavior makes an important point about the environment in which “gender-affirming” drugs and surgeries are offered to minors. Positive outcomes from hormonal interventions, argues psychiatrist Alison Clayton, the article’s author, may be attributable to placebo effects generated by clinical encounters and the social context in which they take place, rather than to the underlying psychotropic effects of the drugs themselves.

Clayton’s basic intuition makes sense. If you take a teenager in emotional distress and tell her that drug X will solve her problems, while treatment Y will make them worse, and then bring her to a clinical setting where medical professionals repeat that message, it should come as no surprise that the teenager experiences emotional relief when you give her X, or distress when you give her Y—regardless of the psychotropic effects of X. The patient may regard the giving of X symbolically as adults listening to her and empathizing with her inner turmoil. “The ‘Hawthorne effect,’” writes Clayton, “describes the phenomenon where clinical trial patients’ improvements may occur because they are being observed and given special attention. A patient who is part of a study, receiving special attention, and with motivated clinicians, who are invested in the benefits of the treatment under study, is likely to have higher expectations of therapeutic benefits.”

It is indeed the case that promoters of “gender-affirming care” have created what Clayton calls “a perfect storm for the placebo effect.” In the left-of-center media, puberty-blockers, cross-sex hormones and (less frequently) surgeries are hailed as “medically necessary” and suicide-preventing measures for teens in distress, supposedly over having been wrongly “assigned” their sex at birth. Skeptics of these interventions are denounced as cruel deniers of life-saving medicine to youth at high risk of suicide. Meantime, alternatives to drugs and surgeries (e.g., psychotherapy) are denigrated as harmful “conversion therapy,” setting the stage for a nocebo (harmful) effect on those who receive psychotherapy but not drugs.

From the viewpoint of those who have become intensely interested in treating dysphoria medically (rather than the "watch and see" method), many have uttered the phrase "Munchausen syndrome by proxy," which is "a mental illness and a form of child abuse. The caretaker of a child, most often a mother, either makes up fake symptoms or causes real symptoms to make it look like the child is sick."

 Biologist Colin Wright has been observing various parent groups. His observations give credence to that concern.

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Jonathan Haidt Joins FAIR’s Board of Directors

Below is Jon’s statement on why he signed up to join FAIR’s Board of Advisors:

The first 50 years of my life, from 1963 to 2013, were the greatest period of social progress and the extension of rights and inclusion in human history. Progressives should have been celebrating success and vowing to continue on toward the fulfillment of Martin Luther King's dream. Instead, because of changes to social media platforms in the early 2010s, new, terrible, and illiberal ideas flooded into universities, and from there to the rest of our institutions. I co-founded Heterodox Academy to push back against illiberalism in universities. I joined FAIR's advisory board because FAIR is pushing back everywhere else.

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Conscious Strategies to Shut Down the Center-Left and Center Right

Jonathan Chait, writing at N.Y. Mag: "Helping Trans Kids Means Admitting What We Don’t Know

There is a familiar pattern here in the way left-wing activists shut down internal criticism by treating any criticism of their position as either identical to, or complicit with, the far right. Extremists on the right, of course, use the same method to shut down their critics on the center-right. To the radical, the easiest way to win a debate is to insist that the only choice is between opposing poles. If you oppose any element of their argument, you have endorsed the enemy. If the criticism is tempered and credible, this only makes them regard it as more dangerous.

But this absolutist mind-set has had an especially pernicious effect on the issue of youth gender medicine. This is because the science is genuinely murky and embryonic, making the struggle to identify a humane and effective solution both difficult and necessary. The left has thrown itself behind a crusade to define such a position out of existence....

Progressive activists have not just embraced the gender-affirming care model; they have begun treating any disagreement with it as hateful denial that trans people exist. Indeed, they have frequently denied that any debate exists within the medical community at all.

The purpose of their rhetorical strategy is to conflate advocates of more cautious treatment of trans children with conservatives who oppose any treatment for trans children. This campaign has met with a great deal of success. Much of the coverage in mainstream and liberal media has followed this template — ignoring or denying the existence of the medical debate, and presenting anti-trans Republican politicians as the only alternative to gender-affirming care. This has been the theme not only of progressive infotainment like Jon Stewart and John Oliver, but also mainstream organs like Politico and CNN, where coverage of the issue often treats progressive activists as unbiased authorities and dismisses all questions about youth gender treatment as hate-driven denial of the medical consensus.

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Our Coopted Fourth Estate

Mike Solana, writing at Pirate Wires, describes "The Fifth Estate":

Dangerous alliance. In 1787, Edmund Burke said there were “Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there [sits] a Fourth Estate more important than they all." The notion of some vital power beyond our government was imported to the New World, and today constitutes a core belief of the American liberal: there is no free people, we’re often told, without a free press independent of congress, the courts, and our president. But throughout the 20th Century thousands of media outlets gradually consolidated, and by the dawn of our internet era only a few giants remained. These giants largely shared a single perspective, and in rough agreement with the ruling class the Fourth Estate naturally came to serve, rather than critique, power. This relationship metastasized into something very close to authoritarianism during the Covid-19 pandemic, when a single state narrative was written by the press, and ruthlessly enforced by a fifth and final fount of power in the newly-dominant technology industry.

It was a dark alliance of estates, accurate descriptions of which were for years derided as delusional, paranoid, even dangerous. But today, on account of a single shitposting billionaire, the existence of the One Party’s decentralized censorship apparatus is now beyond doubt.

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The Case for Investigating Anthony Fauci

Elon's Musk has announced that his "pronouns" are "Prosecute/Fauci." This is over the top for me, yet Musk has the right to say this and I have the right to criticize Musk that it's over the top. That's how free speech works. We don't yet know enough to prosecute Fauci. Maybe we never will. Maybe Fauci is completely innocent of the things Musk wants to "prosecute."

I don't know all the facts about Fauci, but I know enough of them to be suspicious. There are a LOT of suspicious facts. I want very much to get to the bottom of this because COVID disrupted the lives of billions of people and hurt or killed millions of them. Since when do we ignore calamitous situations just because someone calls them a conspiracy theory, someone like David Frum (who doesn't understand the import of major media coordinating with the U.S. spy state to squelch the story of Hunter Biden's laptop)? Stevemur wrote an excellent response to Frum:

In invite you to walk through stevemur's thread, step by step, then ask yourself whether you too are suspicious.  Note stevemur's conclusions:

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