Alberta’s anti-trans bills have dropped. A few observations. 🧵

The first thing I notice, and which is cause for hope, is that the bills do not invoke the notwithstanding clause. They can thus be challenged in Court, and struck down as unconstitutional. The healthcare ban is worse than they announced, at least in its present form.

They ban all gender-affirming surgeries until 18, as expected. They also ban puberty blockers and hormones for minors. So far, the same as we expected.

I was asked why the moral panic around Algerian boxer Imane Khelif was so centred on trans people when there’s no evidence that she’s trans. I thought I’d share my thoughts with everyone.

The reason is that, in many ways, transphobia isn’t about trans people. 🧵 Rather, it’s about what trans people mean to ideologies of race and gender. The controversy about the Olympic boxers is linked to rising anxieties about the line between men and women becoming increasingly blurred in contemporary society.

People are claiming that sending police after @UAlberta students is okay because the University grounds are private property and the students were thus trespassing.

As a law professor, let me state that this is a gross mischaracterization of the law. University grounds are essentially considered public property for the purposes of student protests.

The Alberta Court of Appeal has ruled that the regulation of student expression on campus property is governmental in nature and subject to the Canadian Charter (2020 ABCA 1).

With the Alberta government announcing a ban on gender-affirming care until 16 years old, let’s take a minute to correct some misinformation.

A thread.🧵 “High quality evidence doesn’t support gender-affirming care.”

‘High quality evidence’ is a technical term that essentially just means ’no randomized controlled trials.’ RCTs are not scientifically feasible for trans youth care and would be unethical:

tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

🚨This is not a drill!🚨 After years in the making, my paper on GI is finally out in MIND, one of the most prestigious philosophy journals in the world, of all places.

⬇️Why this is the most important paper on gender you’ll read this week, a thread:🧵

academic.oup.com/mind/advance-a… First things first, here’s where you can read it for free:

And here’s where you can listen to an audio version: https://t.co/CccAe5iPXrflorenceashley.com/uploads/1/2/4/…
podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/flore…

The level of evidence that someone requires to justify a medical practice is strongly if not directly correlated with how they intuitively feel about it. If they dislike it or are skeptical it, the threshold is higher. If they like it, the threshold is lower. That’s why so many people criticize the evidence base for gender-affirming care but not other things. They think it unnatural, icky, or evil so they require higher quality evidence that is difficult if not impossible to muster.

I’d add a small but important nuance. GRADE would classify it as low quality evidence but low does not equate unproven or unsupported.

For one, GRADE doesn’t recognize “proof,” it only recognizes degrees of evidence. For two, it’s “low” quality evidence not “insufficient.”

https://twitter.com/ghawinriver/status/1668830469813841920

It’s an important distinction. If GRADE meant to suggest that nothing should be done without moderate or high quality evidence, there would be no point distinguishing low and very low quality evidence.

Richard Green, one of the people that gay rights groups allied with to remove homosexuality from the DSM, openly promoted conversion therapy for trans people all the way until his death in 2019. He used the collaboration to deflect criticisms of his transphobia.

https://twitter.com/thetaskforce/status/1668272047619801090

His deeply homophobic “Sissy Boy Project” helped legitimate decades upon decades of conversion therapy on trans & cis gay kids. Sure he claimed conversion therapy was to prevent kids from growing up trans, but it was still being broadly applied to gender non-conforming kids.

You’d think Designated Survivor’s plot lines are a bit far fetched until you realize they’re inspired from real events. 😫 The True Believers plot line seems to be based on CSA, a far-right white supremacist group that plotted to overthrow the federal government back in the late 80s.

My hot take of the day is that the birth of applied trans studies is the best thing to have happened to trans cultural studies – for lack of a better term, which is to say the trans studies that finds itself most at home in TSQ – since its own emergence. Ian Khara Ellasante in “Dear Trans Studies, Can You Do Love?” and Kadji Amin in “Whither Trans Studies?” both astutely noted just how devoid of trans life much of trans cultural studies has become.

Is it me or is Twitter randomly opening up random articles on how bad pornography is when clicking on pictures? This is some absurd propaganda shit. Am I the only one getting those? To add to the ridiculousness, there isn’t any pornography on my timeline because I want to be able to scroll in public transit.

Not this front desk dude insisting that there’s “absolutely” such thing as a legal name like I’m not a law professor who has written multiple times on civil status and who has friends who recently published a law review article about it. I get the “lol yes there is” response when I said “well, there’s not really such thing as a legal name,” because that sounds a bit Freedmen on the Land-y. But when I’m like “no like really, I’m a law prof,” surely you don’t go “totally is but I’m not gonna debate you.”

Poverty kills people through neglect. It kills people through suicide. And now we are seeing MAiD becoming a new avenue through which poverty kills—as Liberals expand MAiD without doing jack shit about the dearth of healthcare and social support for disabled people.

https://twitter.com/addypottle/status/1663326754512179200

And the fucked up thing is that no party is proposing anything better. If you think the Liberals are bad, just wait until you see what the Conservatives, the poster children to neoliberal privatization and anti-welfarism, have in store.

If Peter Pan wasn’t like, so damn old, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s an anti-puberty blockers story. 😂 Peter Pan, a boy who doesn’t want to grow up and is played by women, gives Wendy magical fairy dust so she can come to a land where she won’t grow up after Wendy is confronted with fears of her growing up into a woman?

How can I disable the incredibly annoying new default “Block macros from running in Office files from the Internet”? I can’t overemphasize how annoying it is. There isn’t even an “enable macros” button, even if you’re on an administrator account. And the macros aren’t even from the file! They’re custom macros I made, and which are saved in a macro file I made myself.

You know how Klaus Fiedler played victim when he was ousted from Perspectives on Psychological Science?

Let me add my perspective as someone who had… experiences with his editorship style. 🧵 Perspectives on Psychological Science is a journal I find exciting and published in a few times. My submissions had been treated rigorously and fairly, and my publications made an impact on the field. So I submitted again under Fiedler’s editorship.

If you’re going to oppose gender-affirming care on the pretext that it’s based on “low quality evidence,” I’m going to need you to be consistent and oppose the interminable list of other medical practices that are based on “low quality evidence.” Over 55% of interventions in systematic reviews are backed by low or very low quality evidence.

jclinepi.com/article/S0895-…

Justice Côté in Hansman v. Neufeld is again showing herself to be the weakest thinker on the Supreme Court of Canada. She called for a very technical application of dignity in Ward, only to now turn around and vaguely refer to it as reason to place great weight on reputation regardless of evidence going to dignity.

Nebraska passing a criminal ban on gender-affirming care at the same time as further sweeping restrictions on abortion sure does bring to mind the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion. There are just so many parallels. Anti-trans claims of following basic biological truth, reminiscent of Rudolf Hess’ claim that Nazism is “applied biology.” Or Heinrich Himmler’s “A people of good race which has too few children has a one-way ticket to the grave.”

If you think pop music chord progressions are repetitive, wait until slightly original 4 chords progressions and all close variants become copyright infringement. 😩

https://twitter.com/komaniecki_r/status/1652327207413399558

I can see an argument being made for longer progressions but four chords?!? That aren’t even the same?!? There are only so many chord progressions that sound good for pop…

Always was. Parental rights are, ultimately, the parent’s right over the child.

That’s why, in many countries, there is no such thing. Now, kids have rights that parents can exercise in their name, but that’s different because parents must act in child’s best interest.

https://twitter.com/avery_everhart/status/1643383076813250561

There’s a lot of semantic nuances but the broad idea is that parents don’t get to approach parenting as a way of fulfilling their personal desires or interest. And that means you don’t have a right to raise your child in bigoted ways. Because that’s not in kids’ best interests.