The Left is Turning on Trans (The Atlantic Goes Ape on Trans Arguments)

In this episode, we dive deep into the shifting landscape regarding youth gender medicine. The conversation follows a thread of controversial developments and court rulings affecting the trans movement, including emerging critiques from left-leaning publications like The New York Times and The Atlantic. The discussion highlights statistics and studies that reveal the lack of evidence supporting the efficacy and safety of puberty blockers and hormone treatments for minors. It also touches on the persistent misinformation surrounding the topic and the implications it has on the broader societal and political discourse. Join us as we explore the revelations and the future of gender-affirming care amidst increasing scrutiny.

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Something really shocking happened because we often discuss sort of the ebbs and flows of the trans movement.

And we have talked for a while that it is insignificant retrograde at the moment, whether it's the Supreme Court case or the case ruling in the uk. But now we are seeing even mainstream leftist newspapers. The New York Times did a number of trans critical stuff, but the Atlantic, and if people are like, well, is the Atlantic really a leftist newspaper?

So I decided to ask an ai, just be like, what does AI think? Left or right, political leaning.

So it says The Atlantic leans left politically, its coverage often emphasizes progressive issues like social justice, climate change, and critiques of conservative politicians.

Okay. So very left-leaning publication. Okay. So they had a piece titled The Liberal Misinformation Bubble about Use Gender Medicine, how the Left Ended Up Disbelieving the Science by Helen Lewis. And so mainstream leftist publication allows this piece to be published. And this happens immediately after. Now, normally when the trans movement historically had suffered major defeats, the leftists would all come around to rally around it.

Mm. Yeah. So, you know, you had this with recently the, the court ruled that Tennessee's law, which prohibits hormone therapies and puberty blockers for transgender minors with gender dysphoria, does not violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. And in fighting this, very interestingly, because a lot of papers were unveiled and sort of the best trans.

Arguers, like the people who are protran got against the best anti-trans arguers in a, a very recorded stage where all evidence had to be counted and you couldn't just make stuff up.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. They

Malcolm Collins: basically had to concede that they had made up a bunch of the arguments that people had accepted as fact.

And you might be surprised by some of the arguments that even the top tier of the trans community now admits are just fictional. And this also comes downstream of not just the cast report, but the UK in law now making it so that if you are a company in the UK now, and you let a trans woman use a woman's bathroom, you can be sued by your female staff.

Simone Collins: Really? Yes. The, oh,

Malcolm Collins: okay. So this is some serious stuff. So this is significant in terms of how things are changing. Yeah. But I wanna dive into the article here.

Allow children to transition or they will kill themselves for more than a decade. This has been the strongest argument in favor of youth gender medicine, a scenario so awful that it stifled any doubts or questions about puberty, blockers and cross sex hormones. We often ask parents, and this is a quote here, would you rather have a dead son than a live daughter?

Joanna Olson Kennedy of Children's Hospital Los Angeles once explained to a BC News. So this is somebody who is working at a children's hospital in a major city. Says, we at the hospital often go to parents and say, , would you rather have a dead son or a live daughter? Variations on this phrase crop up in innumerate media articles and public statements by influencers, activists in LGBT groups, the same idea that the choice is transition or death appeared in the arguments made by Elizabeth Pel Prager, the Biden Administration's solicitor General before the Supreme Court last year.

Tennessee's law prohibiting the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat minors with gender dysphoria. Would she said, quote, increase the risk of unli. Quote. But there is a huge problem with this emotive format. It isn't true. When Justice Samuel Alito challenged the A CLL lawyer, chase Drago on such claims during oral arguments, Drago made a startling commit.

Commit admission. He conceded that there was no evidence to support the idea that medical transition reduced adolescent unloving rates. And this is a really, really big deal because this is in, if, if you're looking at like media, when these people go on media, nobody can with any sort of legal justification say.

Hey, does the evidence actually say this? Like, they're not actually forced to tell the truth, and this is why this case has been so damaging to the movement because it forced their top advocates who have more knowledge of all of their arguments and all of the research than anyone else to tell the truth on issues that we just didn't have a public forum to pin them down on before.

And the truth is, there is not evidence. And, and there's even more evidence now because the UK banned this. And now we have studies that have looked at the unliving rates post ban versus the unliving rates pre-and which we'll get into later here, and there's no difference. Oh. So we now know that this is fictional.

Wow. Okay. And potentially that things like puberty blockers actually increased unliving rates, and we'll get into evidence of that as well. But the, the, it's not from this paper, it's from other evidence that she doesn't appear to be aware of. At first, strateg ego dodged the question saying that the research shows that blockers and hormones reduce, quote, unquote, depression, anxiety, and unloving.

That is unloving thoughts. Even that is debatable according to reviews of literature literature research. So, here are the two reviews that she cites are pediatric gender medicine. Longitudinal studies have not consistently shown improvement in depression or unliving rates, hormone therapy, mental health, and quality of life among transgender people.

A systematic review. But when Alito referenced systematic review conducted in the CAS report in England, Stratego concede at the point quote, there isn't,

Simone Collins: are you, are you talking about chase, strang,

Malcolm Collins: strang, whatever you wanna call him, Strang. Strato strang. It can be called whatever.

Simone Collins: Most people say str

Malcolm Collins: strang.

Okay? There is no evidence. Some in, in the studies that this treatment reduces completing unliving rates, he said, and the reason for that is, is that completing unli, thankfully and admittedly, is rare, and we're talking about a very small population of individuals, which the studies that don't necessarily have completed rates was in them.

So note, he's, he's, he's, but the actual rates, are they higher? He was forced to say, no, they're not higher. Wow.

Simone Collins: And note

Malcolm Collins: here that he, because this is something that would show up, like there's big studies on this. These aren't like small studies. He's forced to admit that this is just not in the evidence.

And, and it's not just the studies that she's noting here that showed that he was lying when he said that you have higher rates of for example, self-harm. Because, for example, we know from the TRA stock clinic, whi