Let's tackle some myths abt binding.

Few trans men bind to pass for male. They do it to reduce chest dysphoria.

Most trans men with chest dysphoria don't remove their binder when home alone. Most who pass can pass equally well with a sports bra.

https://twitter.com/thepeacepoet99/status/1843036649179292098

This is well known, as demonstrated by the frequent warnings not to bind for more than 8 hours, or sleep with a binder.

One reason chest surgery is typically considered medically necessary is that long term binding isn't great for lung capacity.

Ironically, well-functioning gender-affirming care for youth is very similar to what the anti-trans side pretends to want:

It starts with a child questioning their gender. With little or no wait, they get supportive, nonjudgmental therapy with no particular outcome in mind. 1/9 At the same time, their family is also supported. Nonjudgmental professionals answer questions and respond to fears. They guide the family to providing the child with unconditional love and acceptance that isn't premised on them being either trans or cis. 2/9

Since we've been talking about things that are weird and creepy, here's something really weird and creepy:

Telling a 15-year-old that their homework is to masturbate and come back and tell you about it.

But in Finland, that's what treatment for trans youth is like. Finland has assumed an outsized role in the conversation about treatment for trans youth, with one of the architects of their country's program, Dr. Rittakerttu Kaltiala, travelling the world to support bans on puberty blockers and other mainstream treatments for trans youth.

A study in JAMA Pediatrics provides further support for a highly consistent finding in the literature about transgender youth: Supportive families are a protective factor that mitigates the risk of suicidal feelings and thoughts in transgender young people. The paper used the USTS data and looked at reported ages of milestones in a trans person's coming out. These milestones were associated with higher risk of suicidal thoughts... except not if the trans person experienced family support.

jamanetwork.com/journals/jamap…

BREAKING: A doctor who leaked private medical records of trans kids has been indicted, and is facing four felony counts.

Eithan Haim has claimed to be a victim of political persecution, maintaining that the records he leaked did not contain personally identifying information. However, @CarmelShachar of Harvard Law School pointed out that the records include the precise date and time of patient appointments. Dates relating to an individual patient are among 18 identifiers the HHS requires be redacted to ensure compliance with HIPAA.

NO! It is not "basic publishing ethics" that a person has to approve the publication of remarks they made in a q&a.

Nor is it "disinformation" for an organization write down what someone says in answer to their qs. There is certainly a lot of misinformation/disinformation circulating surrounding the Cass Review, though. I agree on that much!

This was a portion that stuck with me as particularly embarrassing for the Cass Review. It's just asserting one proposed explanation for the facts can't be correct based on vibes.

https://twitter.com/oolon/status/1784536826339827736

I don't know what to call this, but it wasn't science.

As with many terms that used to name the dangers of our political moment, the word misinformation has been appropriated by people with a political agenda who misuse it to push their opinion as fact.

Most recently, the word has been misapplied to trans critics of the Cass Review. For Assigned Media yesterday, I looked at the misinformation surrounding the Report by @Hilary_Cass. I found rampant misinformation in the right-wing press, defined narrowly and precisely as clear falsehoods about what the Review found.

The Cass Report, which took 4 years to examine treatment for gender dysphoria in youth, wound up making very few conclusions.

They particularly failed to find evidence that detransition is anything but extremely rare.

https://twitter.com/stephenwhittle/status/1778370351157678377

This has resulted in speculation (frankly verging on the level of religious certainty) that if the adult gender clinics had only shared private patient data with Cass the Report would have found the imagined detransitioners or other evidence of harm/scandal.

It's not a medical scandal.

Gender-affirming care for youth, I mean. It's just not, and I can prove it. A medical scandal would have abundant, clear stories of patients who were harmed.

It would have class action suits on behalf of those patients.

It would have families speaking out about the harm done to their children.

Ask yourself: Why doesn't this story have that?

This piece by @sashabaker98 is one of the best I've read so far on the what the Cass Review left out- not talking about all the studies that were discarded, but the way it left out anything that would protect the best interests of trans patients. The one thing I would add would be to the very end, where this discusses the way that clinicians are being asked to predict whether regret is likely.

And, what I'd add, is that there is no evidence to suggest clinicians can predict that.

I've had a lot of interviewers ask me about receiving harassment as a trans person. I just looked over some of the replies to my bigger posts on Twitter and came to the conclusion I unintentionally gave folks misleading info about this. I always say I don't get the same harassment as other people, and I'm sure I do get less than many... However, now I started actually looking, it comes in more regularly than I realize.

I think I just don't register it.

Analogy time!

Imagine if, whenever a person noticed a weird mole, they went on a multi-year waiting list with everyone who's noticed moles.

https://twitter.com/assignedmedia/status/1767602876623495479

While on the melanoma waiting list no doctor would take any steps to diagnose or treat melanoma in any patient whose complain was "weird mole."

There are families I speak with regularly who have either moved away from everyone they know and love or are facing incredibly difficult choices about how to continue treatments that transformed their children's lives for the better under care bans.

https://twitter.com/assignedmedia/status/1740424878942302657

There are a lot of moderates in the current "debate" over gender affirming care who "oppose" these bans... in the sense that they'll say they disagree with them if you ask... but not in the sense that they're doing the tiniest concrete thing to help these families and these kids.

We've seen how proponents have backed off from a rapid onset characterizing "ROGD" transmasc adolescents as an indicator they've moved into pseudoscience (removing testable elements from a hypothesis to make it unfalsifiable).

This is actually the 2nd time they've done so. The first testable prediction to be quietly removed from the hypothesis when data didn't seem to show the effect they predicted was that this new, false form of gender dysphoria would lead to a sharp increase in transition regret and detransition.

A large hospital, one associated with the oldest medical school in the South, quietly folded to political pressure and ceased offering medical treatments for gender dysphoria to adolescent patients.

Quietly... meaning they did not tell the patients and their families about this. Some important new reporting by @propublica goes behind the scenes of a decision to sacrifice patients to political considerations by the Medical University of South Carolina.

propublica.org/article/musc-m…

Researchers from York University looked at detransition experiences. The results are out in two new papers, published today and yesterday.

It's a familiar picture to me, having spoken to detransitioners and written about them, and NOTHING like the right wing talking points. I wrote about this research for @Slate, particularly highlighting the suggestions detransitioned people have for improving gender-affirming care.

They don't want gatekeeping, much less bans. They want better informed consent and individualized pathways.

slate.com/technology/202…

I'm noticing a lot of variation in how members of the trans/LGBTQ+ community are talking about the small town mayor who was hounded into suicide by a far right news outlet.

I wrote about the story last night on Assigned, and I figure I'll walk through my thinking. Here's the story I wrote, for reference. In the headline I called Copeland "our sibling" referencing the feeling of family members of the LGBTQ+ community have for one another.

assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/…

I don't know if any detransitioners follow me, or if they're capable of hearing the truth, but fwiw:

I was a gender dysphoric AFAB teen in the mental health system before gender affirming care.

They don't have better treatments. Your regret has you believing in a fantasy.

https://twitter.com/assignedmedia/status/1718962140969615756

Multiple hospitalization, drugs that didn't work and changed my metabolism permanently (making me overweight), hours and hours of my life in individual and group therapy that didn't help.

We knew this was coming. Conservative media is beginning the push to restrict transition for adults.

In the Washington Free Beacon, a story about an adult who sought cross-sex hormones against her parents wishes is being presented as a scandal of some kind. The story blends falsehoods about the effects of cross sex hormones with a willingness to call an adult a "special needs kid." The goal is to sell an unprecedented assault on adult freedoms to their base, and the public at large.

assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/…

IF YOU MISSED IT, you should not have: Azeen Ghorayshi of the New York Times wouldn't take no for an answer when the family of a trans girl wanted to pull out of her story. The NYT reporter followed the parents to their car, insisting they keep cooperating in her story, a story which would whitewash the allegations of Jamie Reed, who falsely claimed the family had been furious with the gender clinic after an adverse reaction to a med.