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Benjamin Ryan

@benryanwriter

Nov 12

How An Inability to Clearly Define ‘Sex’ vs. ‘Gender’ Has Left Democrats In a Mess
🧵⬇️ I report: Language matters. By insisting there’s no difference between “sex” and “gender” and that sex is “assigned at birth,” progressives have alienated many from the transgender cause.

LINK: How An Inability to Clearly Define ‘Sex’ vs. ‘Gender’ Has Left Democrats In a Mess

benryan.substack.com/p/how-an-inabi…

In the wake of Kamala Harris’ devastating loss to Donald Trump, recriminations and finger pointing have seized the Democratic party. Given that Trump spent tens of millions of dollars on attack ads faulting Harris for her support of certain transgender-related policies, the party is undergoing an internal paroxysm over whether that support is an albatross worth shedding.

Two Democratic congressmen—@RepTomSuozzi of New York and Rep @SethMoulton @RepMoulton of Massachusetts—said immediately after the party lost the White House that they were uncomfortable with natal boys participating in girls’ sports. The left’s support for such inclusion, they suggested, had cost Dems dearly.
benryan.substack.com/p/how-an-inabi…

Read 19 tweets

Benjamin Ryan

@benryanwriter

Nov 9

Avatars of Dem Alienation: Liberal Parents Wary About Their Kids’ Trans Identities
🧵⬇️ I report: Almost all the distressed parents who tell me they think their kids’ trans identities are not authentic are liberals who find themselves drifting away from the Democratic party.

LINK: Avatars of Dem Alienation: Liberal Parents Wary About Their Kids’ Trans Identities
Almost all the distressed parents who tell me they think their kids’ trans identities are not authentic are disaffected liberals.
benryan.substack.com/p/avatars-of-d…

Even the liberal parents of children who identify as transgender often harbor profound reservations about the Democratic party’s positions on trans kids and medicalized gender transitions. benryan.substack.com/p/avatars-of-d…

Read 28 tweets

Benjamin Ryan

@benryanwriter

Nov 8

Psychology Today has corrected an article by @UCSF's Dr. @JackTurban

Dr. Turban falsely claimed in an article that a study found that policies restricting bathroom access by biological sex are tied to higher sexual assaults at school against 7th-12th graders who identify as trans.

In fact, the study was based on a survey that never asked kids where the sexual assaults they reported took place. So it could not inform us on whether these policies were tied to reported sexual assaults at school.

The highlighted sentence in the screenshot below is the edited, corrected version of what Dr. Turban wrote. The original version claimed that the study "found that policies that force trans youth to use the bathrooms of their sex assigned at birth were associated with elevated rates of sexual assault against transgender kids in schools." The editors took off the words "in schools."

There is no note on the article indicating that the editors made a correction. An editor told me that it is @PsychToday's policy not to run such editor's notes.

Child psychiatrist @Jack_Turban of @UCSF also misrepresented the study about the association between restrictive bathroom policies and reported sexual assaults in trans-identified youth in his recent book, Free to Be. Interestingly, he misrepresented the study findings differently in his book compared with how he characterized them in his @PsychToday article.

In his book, he didn't just falsely claim that this study specified the reported sexual assaults were at school. He suggested that the study said they actually occurred in bathrooms themselves. What's more, in the last sentence in the screenshot from his book, he falsely claimed the study found a causal link.

Here is the now-corrected @PsychToday article by @Jack_Turban. He shows what question the kids were asked, which says nothing about the location of assaults: "...did anyone force you to do sexual things that you did not want to do?"
psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/poli…

Read 6 tweets

Benjamin Ryan

@benryanwriter

Nov 7

After making a series of fiercely ideological and political statements on social media in the wake of Trump’s win and being pilloried for doing so, @SciAm editor in chief Laura Helmuth is now back pedaling. She claims she is committed to editorial objectivity.

https://twitter.com/benryanwriter/status/1854268624065691831

The backstory on Helmuth:

https://twitter.com/benryanwriter/status/1854268624065691831

The deleted posts from @SciAm editor in chief Laura Helmuth, which she is now apologizing profusely for and disavowing:

Read 9 tweets

Benjamin Ryan

@benryanwriter

Nov 5

Michael Hobbes Is Wrong About Whether Kids Are Being Rushed Onto Gender Transition Treatment

In this 🧵I'll juxtapose clips of debunking podcaster Michael Hobbes claiming that no one is rushing kids onto gender-transition treatment with proof that this is indeed happening.⬇️

On his @maintenancepod podcast with Aubrey Gordon @YrFatFriend, Hobbes @RottenInDenmark, insisted over the summer that researchers in pediatric gender medicine have always sought to make sure kids are “really trans” before starting them on gender-transition treatment.

And yet UCSF’s @Jack_Turban recently published a paper in which he said the opposite: that @WPATH-recommended assessments of gender dysphoric are not meant to determined whether a child is “actually transgender.” Lurie Children’s pediatrician Robert Garofalo has said the same.

Here’s what Hobbes said on his podcast:

“We want to make sure that we're establishing that kids are really trans and really sort of settled in this identity before they get any kind of irreversible medical procedures. That's something that strikes most people as fairly reasonable, right?

“But the reason why I wanted to include this is it shows that from literally the first study on this, the doctors know this too. The idea that this extremely obvious thing is not also obvious to the doctors who are practicing this kind of medicine is like fairly implausible. And it shows up in the studies. They're like, ‘Hey, look, we know this is the time when kids are experimenting and that might include some, like, gender expression experimentation. And so we want to make sure in this field that we're talking to the kids, we’re getting some kind of holistic assessment.’

“This is something that the field has been aware of since literally day one.”

And yet, @BostonChildrens refers kids to gender-transition treatment after a single 2-hour assessment with a psychologist. 🧵

We learned this recently from a civil trial in which former Boston Children’s pediatric-gender-clinic psychologist Amy Tishelman testified that between 2013 and 2018, the time allotted for her to conduct these assessments and write her report dropped from 20 hours, to 10 hours, to two-and-a-half hours. She said this was “reckless.”

Dr. Tishelman said:

“Some of the evaluations could take 10 to 20 hours. They’re supposed to take 10 hours. When I started, they were 20 hours. And now they were asking me to do them in two and a half hours. And that wasn’t, I didn't feel like that was doable at all. I feel it was reckless and not okay to only get two-and-a-half hours to see patients who were considering these medications if they needed more.”

And yet, debunking podcaster Michael Hobbes insists there is no evidence that minors are being rushed onto gender-transition treatment and surgeries. 🧵⬇️

In his @MaintenancePod episode with his cohost, Aubrey Gordon @YrFatFriend, Hobbes @RottenInDenmark insisted the following:

Aubrey Gordon:

“This is the other thing about the like sort of this idea of like rushed care. If you know anything about the f—ing standards of care for trans people, you know that it's almost impossible to quote-unquote rush care.”

Michael Hobbes:

“Yeah, it's really funny to read like the popular press that's just constantly raising the specter of like kids being pushed into these surgeries versus the academic press that is all about like the barriers. There's cost barriers. There's logistical barriers. Not everybody lives near a clinic.

“I mean, it's, like, it's actually in reality really hard to get this care. And yet we're like constantly being told by these magazine articles that it's too easy or that we should be worried that it's too easy. There's a debate over whether it's too easy. And it's like, it's a fairly easily answerable question, even in the text of these articles, right? They can't come up with any examples of it happening.

“It actually reminds me a lot of the razor blades in apples on Halloween myth. There's no example of this ever happening. Can I prove that it hasn't happened? No. But like, surely at some point, if we're supposed to be afraid of something, we should have like a decent number of like clear cut examples of it taking place.

“And the fact that, you know, this is 2018 when this article is published, but we're now in 2024, and, like, there's a couple things that maybe get close, although a lot of those haven't really been confirmed, but we're still getting in these articles these stories of, you know, people transitioning at 25, and, you know, people with, like, years-long transition periods.

“Like, the person who sued the UK gender clinic had a five-year process and admits that she saw psychologists more than 10 times in that process. If that's rushed, then all medical care in the US and the UK is rushed. It's not happening at a breakneck pace.”

Read 8 tweets

Benjamin Ryan

@benryanwriter

Nov 4

New Figures on Kids Seeking Gender-Transition Care:
🧵A new study analyzing insurance-claims data found that in 2023, there were at least 42,136 minors who were "seeking gender-affirming care."

This does not necessarily mean these children were all receiving puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, but that insurance codes indicated they had a “cross-gender identification” and thus were seeking some form of gender-transition treatment (I suppose it's possible some such claims could be for mental-health treatment only and not for blockers and hormones), or a “personal history of sex reassignment.”

A separate, recent analysis found:
At Least 14,000 U.S. Minors Have Received Gender-Transition Treatment or Surgeries In 5 Years, With Docs Billing $120 million
This is a conservative estimate from a new, comprehensive analysis of insurance-claims data by the advocacy nonprofit Do No Harm, which opposes such treatment for minors. benryan.substack.com/p/at-least-140…

New Evidence Challenges Institutionalized Belief That Transgender Teens Become Transgender Adults, Undermining Core Defense of Medical Gender Transitions for Minors
A pair of analyses of insurance-claims data each found that the majority of youths diagnosed with gender-related distress saw that diagnosis vanish from their medical chart within six years.
nysun.com/article/new-ev…

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