Thread by @RIKKISCHLOTT

As a journalist who has covered the medicalization of transgender children, I feel the need to respond to John Oliver’s segment on transgender rights from this past week. 🧵

Oliver strawmans his opponents by painting them as a bunch of conservatives who joke their pronouns are U/S/A. But there are many concerned onlookers, myself included, who respect the rights of transgender adults to live as they choose but worry about certain troubling trends.

Many of Oliver's arguments hinge on the idea that “this barely happens, so it doesn’t really matter.” The contention that protecting women’s sports is a useless endeavor because few trans athletes compete today disregards the fact a precedent is being set when they do compete.

In the UK (where the best data is available) youth referrals for gender care skyrocketed 1627% between 2010 and 2020. That means we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg with trans athletes. The questions we’re grappling with at a small scale now will be much more pressing soon.

Oliver also goes on to attack @AbigailShrier’s warnings about Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria via social contagion as “total horseshit” but fails to engage with the most fundamental aspect of her argument: biologically female adolescents are unprecedentedly identifying as trans.

As social media use rose, so too did young girls identifying as boys--an indication that social contagion very well may be at play. The yellow portion of this chart shows adolescent females are behind the soaring number of trans youth in the UK:

He asks: “To the extent that some young people are just exploring their gender identity, how exactly is that a bad thing? Who the fuck are they hurting?” The answer, when medical transition is introduced into the equation, is that these kids very well may be harming themselves.

He says puberty blockers are a “reversible pause button.” But he clearly has not checked in back home in the UK, where the NHS is shuttering the Tavistock clinic after a report found “brain maturation may be disrupted by puberty blockers [impacting] complex risk-laden decisions”

The NHS is developing a “fundamentally different service model” for treating trans youth due to “gaps in the evidence base regarding all aspects of gender care for children and young people, from epidemiology through to assessment, diagnosis, support, counseling and treatment.”

He dodges the issue of top surgery by describing it as “pretty rare” without actually engaging with the fact that CHILDREN are removing their healthy breasts. @ChoooCole underwent that surgery at 15 years old. As she told me, “I was failed by the system. I literally lost organs.”

Oliver also dismisses detransitioners like Chloe as a “small subset of individuals" without acknowledging they are a growing subset. Still, that doesn’t invalidate their stories. As we refine the science of medical transition, their cautionary tales could not be more important.

As more detransitioners inevitably emerge, Oliver’s segment here will not age well. I share his desire to be sympathetic to the obvious struggles of transgender people. But conflating the medicalization of children with “transgender rights” is a fundamentally flawed argument.

You can question the medical transition of transgender children without challenging transgender rights as a whole, as do medical professionals like @eanderh. Every society, including our own, concedes that children do not have unlimited rights and need to be protected.

That’s why they can’t buy a pack of cigarettes, can’t crack open a bottle of beer, and can’t drive a car. We recognize that our youth must be protected and are incapable of making decisions with longterm implications—even getting a tattoo.

Oliver wraps up saying “I could keep reading you stats and studies. I do love doing that.” If that’s the case, I recommend the studies which caused the UK, France, and Sweden to overhaul their treatment of trans kids, starting with NHS’s damning report: cass.independent-review.uk/publications/i…