In a true sign that anything is possible in this crazy universe of ours, the hosts note that there were some errors in the previous episode and explain exactly what they were (to see them explained in written form, check out that episode's show notes). Then they discuss some mental-health-talk from Jesse that rubbed one reader the wrong way and continue on to the show's main event: a major court decision on youth gender dysphoria in England and an incredibly shoddy article in Foreign Policy about it.
(Corrections 10:10 pm 12/18/2020: In the course of correcting last week's episode, we managed to introduce not one but two new errors, and just uploaded a new version in which Jesse breaks in twice to explain them. First, Timnit Gebru's PhD is not in computer science, but rather in electrical engineering. This was just plain sloppiness on someone's part, possibly Jéssé's. Second, Gebru started at Google in 2018, not 2019. In this case, our excuse is that both The New York Times and Columbia Journalism Review wrote that she was hired "last year." This is false, and thank you to the Google employee who reached out to correct us and pointed us to a 2018 tweet in which Gebru talks about her early days at Google. Wired has this right.)
Show notes/Links:
Bell v Tavistock, the ruling at issue: https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Bell-v-Tavistock-Judgment.pdf
A High Court Decision in Britain Puts Trans People Everywhere at Risk: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/15/uk-transphobia-transgender-court-ruling-puberty-blockers/
Jesse's newsletter posts on key aspects of this controversy:
A Response To Foreign Policy's Deeply Misleading Article, "A High Court Decision in Britain Puts Trans People Everywhere at Risk": https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/a-response-to-foreign-policys-deeply
No, desistance hasn't been debunked, and no, there's no evidence it's all that rare:
Part: 1 https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/how-science-vs-made-two-gender-dysphoria
Part 2: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/how-science-vs-accidentally-invented
Did Jesse ever change his stance on puberty blockers? Based on just the info he provided in this episode, I fail to see how the use of puberty blockers could ever be justified. He said he feels like they should be reserved for kids who are “really dysphoric”? How does one measure the extent of a child’s dysphoria? In addition to the stats he provided, Kenneth Zucker actually went back through those older desistance studies using DSM V criteria, and the % of kids that desist was still 65-70%. Also, there is little to no evidence for the long term efficacy of the Dutch Protocol for the old population of gender dysphoric children, let alone the new population of kids (teenage girls with no history of dysphoria). I would wager that desistance rates are even higher among this population although, of course, the gender clinics do not track this. It’s unconscionable to not do so for such a vulnerable population of children, but that is the current state of transgender “healthcare”.
Why would a young girl be put on puberty blockers anyways? How would blocking their puberty possibly help them approximate the look of an adult male in the future? None of this makes any sense. It just comes across to me as really dark, unethical medical experimentation.