Andrew Sullivan, a gay man who was attacked by both the political right and left when he promoted the idea of gay marriage in a 1989 article in the New Republic, "Here Comes the Groom."
The Thread continued:
Stanford University has launched an initiative to protect us from harmful language. This language is so incredibly harmful that after the link to the website started getting passed around, Stanford shut down public access. Now only Stanford students will get to know the language that purportedly harms all of us.
Heather Heying had been poking around at the Stanford website that was designed to protect her (and me and you and everyone else) from certain terrible words and phrases, but before she could finish reviewing the website, Stanford closed off public access. Here's some of the information that Heather can report at her website, Natural Selections:
Finally, I grabbed a single screenshot of one of the recommendations on the site before access was restricted4. Here it is:
[More . . . ]I've followed Camille Paglia for many year, always finding her opinions deeply explored, courageous and clearly stated. An excerpt from CPYU:
Although I describe myself as transgender (I was donning flamboyant male costumes from early childhood on), I am highly skeptical about the current transgender wave, which I think has been produced by far more complicated psychological and sociological factors than current gender discourse allows. Furthermore, I condemn the escalating prescription of puberty blockers (whose long-term effects are unknown) for children. I regard this practice as a criminal violation of human rights.
It is certainly ironic how liberals who posture as defenders of science when it comes to global warming (a sentimental myth unsupported by evidence) flee all reference to biology when it comes to gender. Biology has been programmatically excluded from women’s studies and gender studies programs for almost 50 years now. Thus very few current gender studies professors and theorists, here and abroad, are intellectually or scientifically prepared to teach their subjects.
The cold biological truth is that sex changes are impossible. Every single cell of the human body remains coded with one’s birth gender for life. Intersex ambiguities can occur, but they are developmental anomalies that represent a tiny proportion of all human births.
In a democracy, everyone, no matter how nonconformist or eccentric, should be free from harassment and abuse. But at the same time, no one deserves special rights, protections, or privileges on the basis of their eccentricity. The categories “trans-man” and “trans-woman” are highly accurate and deserving of respect. But like Germaine Greer and Sheila Jeffreys, I reject state-sponsored coercion to call someone a “woman” or a “man” simply on the basis of his or her subjective feeling about it. We may well take the path of good will and defer to courtesy on such occasions, but it is our choice alone.
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.
In these videos, seven concerned parents and a former student step up to the microphone to express their concerns about gender ideology at Davis Joint Unified School District in California. In the past couple weeks, I have viewed similar parent/school-board videos from about five other public school districts. My prediction is that in 2023 we will be seeing dozens of lawsuits filed by parents against schools based on gender ideology.
I have first-hand knowledge of two concerned parents indicating that their kids' schools tell students that they might have been born in the wrong body, and where teachers and counselors hide from parents that children are being called a new name at school unbeknownst to parents and hidden from the official school records. I don't know how often this kind of thing is going on, but it is happening in more than a few districts. I share the parents' outrage that a school would engage in this behavior and/or hide this type of information from parents. Note that the first speaker at this link, Erin Friday, identifies herself as a democrat and a licensed attorney. There are enormous numbers of people who consider themselves liberal (I am one of them) who are aghast at what some of these schools are doing to students and parents.