Reading the Polls Regarding Transgender Ideology

Are you trying to interpret polls regarding transgender ideology? At City Journal, Leor Sapir warns us about the terminology and the numbers:

Last April, a Marist poll commissioned by the organization Do No Harm asked 1,377 Americans about their views on the infiltration of “social justice” ideology into medicine. One question asked whether “minors who identify as transgender and want to undergo hormone treatment or gender transition surgery” should be able to do so “without parental consent,” “only with parental consent,” or not until adulthood (regardless of parental consent). Only 10 percent of all adults surveyed said that minors should be able to access these interventions without parental consent. Twenty-five percent said that parental consent should be required, and 60 percent said minors should never be subject to hormonal or surgical interventions in this context (5 percent were unsure). These findings more or less track with those from a recent New York Times/Siena Poll on (among other things) teaching “sexual orientation and gender identity” content in elementary schools, and it is reasonable to assume that the same people who believe it’s unacceptable for teachers to introduce first-graders to, say, the concept of “non-binary” also think that 12-year-old children should not be given puberty blockers for feeling like they were “born in the wrong body.”

It’s useful to compare the Marist poll with yet another recent poll, this one by Pew, which deals with gender-identity issues, as a way to illustrate the importance of how questions are phrased. The Pew poll asked whether it should be “illegal for health care professionals to provide someone younger than 18 with medical care for a gender transition.” Note how this phrasing avoids specifying the procedures (hormones and surgeries), uses terms like “professionals” and “medical care,” and shifts the focus from the procedures themselves to the issue of state involvement in the doctor-patient relationship. Unsurprisingly, public opinion was more evenly divided in the Pew poll, though a plurality still favored restrictions: 46 percent said they support making it illegal for providers to administer medical intervention, 30 percent opposed it, and 22 percent were undecided.

Sapir also warns us about the euphemisms. He lists these in particular:

“Hormone replacement therapy.” A person administered cross-sex hormones (testosterone or estrogen), usually through periodic injections, is not having his or her hormones “replaced;” rather, hormones are introduced to counter the effects of the body’s natural hormone production.

“Gender dysphoria.” For those going through or after puberty, the relevant experience here is usually a strong aversion to one’s body parts (such as breasts) or to the body’s natural processes (for example, menstruation).

“Cisgender.” Activists define this as “identifying with the sex one was assigned at birth,” but what this word really means in practice is the lack of debilitating distress associated with one’s sexed body. To be “cisgender” means to feel comfortable, or comfortable enough, with your body and its natural processes such that you don’t seek to make it appear like that of the other sex.

“Children know their gender identity.” This language obscures the key question of whether even sincere and stable cross-gender feelings—or indeed any feelings—in fact amount to “knowledge.”

“LGBTQIA+.” The sole purpose of this acronym is to enable activists making radical claims about human nature and society to piggyback off the far more broadly accepted claims of gay rights.

Continue ReadingReading the Polls Regarding Transgender Ideology

If You Really Cared About Trans Lives . . .

Excellent point:

If you actually cared about trans lives... You'd DEMAND indubitable evidence for the medical treatment they receive. Especially when it involves an incredibly invasive/novel approach. Trans youth deserve better care than experimentation. Those are human beings, not lab rats. . . . Or have incredibly small sample sizes, poor control for confounding factors, & have virtually absent follow up greater than 5 years (where the most IMPORTANT data is lingering). I have a lot of bones to pick with today's "trans research."

Continue ReadingIf You Really Cared About Trans Lives . . .

About So-Called Gender Identities . . .

Andrew Sullivan, pulling back the curtain to expose massive educational/governmental/health-care dysfunction that is encouraging exponentially increasing numbers of our children to seek irreversible surgery and a lifetime of powerful cross-sex hormones for their physically healthy bodies:

"What is gender identity? Since this very new term is now cemented in law, corporate practice, and now medicine as well, it’s a good question. Here is an official description from HRC, the biggest “queer” lobby:

"One’s innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both or neither – how individuals perceive themselves and what they call themselves."

The key word, it seems to me, is neither. It means that your gender may not have anything to do with being male or female or on any kind of masculine/feminine spectrum. Your gender identity can be a tree, a fish, a Nazi, a puddle, or an earthworm — and these innermost identities must always be affirmed and be protected in law.

Like most decent people, I am more than fine with accepting that some people really do deeply feel that they are one sex and yet biologically are the opposite one. It’s rare, but very real, and I have long supported care and protection for this tiny minority of marginalized people we now call transgender. Mercifully, they are now covered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And Americans are on board: in a new poll, support for protecting transgender people from discrimination has 64 percent support and only 10 percent opposition.

But what on earth does it mean to identify as no human gender, neither male nor female nor a mix, but as, say, a tree — and use “tree” as a pronoun? You think I’m kidding, don’t you? Just making shit up to make it sound insane. But wait:

"Students are introduced to gender pronouns through the children’s book, “They, She, He: Easy as ABC.” The somewhat familiar pronoun ze is introduced, as are more bespoke possibilities. On one page, “Diego drums and dances. Tree has all the sounds” (tree is Diego’s preferred pronoun). For a character named Sky, all of the pronouns are right."

This is in a first-grade curriculum in Evanston/Skokie School District 65, a public-school system in the Chicago suburbs, as reported by Conor Friedersdorf. The pronoun “tree” has already been deployed by some as legitimate. I noted recently how, in another HRC-recommended book for kids, a baby “can’t decide what to be. Boy or girl? Bird or fish?” Yes: fish. The idea that children can identify as other species has now been approved in the education world. It’s being taught to your kids as truth. It is the Biden administration’s and “LGBTQ+” lobby’s view of what “gender identity” is.

It is anything you want it to be. And must always be affirmed by others."

Sullivan concludes:

[T]he term “gender identity” is so nebulous, so completely subjective, that it can be used to describe literally anything, any perversion, any mental illness, any deranged fantasy — like South Park’s Gerald Broflovski’s compulsion to become a dolphin. And it’s being used as a construct to tell first-graders that they can identify as a tree and a fish now. In public schools. With the full backing of the president and the Democratic Party.

I’m not nut-picking. I’m using the official description of “gender identity” to show that the term itself is nut-enabling. There are no limiting principles in a truly nebulous product of postmodernism now worming its way into our legal system.

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Continue ReadingAbout So-Called Gender Identities . . .