Assigned is a news site covering anti-trans propaganda daily, from Evan Urquhart.
BSky@assigned.bsky.social
Masto @e_urq@journa.host
transspyglass@gmail.com
Apr 28 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
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.
I don't know what to call this, but it wasn't science.
Apr 28 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
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.
Apr 14 • 20 tweets • 4 min read
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.
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.
Apr 12 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
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?
Apr 11 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
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.
Apr 6 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
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.
Mar 12 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
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.
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."
Dec 28, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
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.
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.
Dec 27, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
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.
Dec 6, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oct 5, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
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.
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.
Sep 3, 2023 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Parents of trans youth spent hours pouring their hearts out to an NYT reporter. They thought she empathized with them, and trusted her with their stories.
But as publication approached, one mom began to grow suspicious of the reporter's warm interactions with Jamie Reed, the very same anti-trans activist she'd proven to the NYT's Azeen Ghorayshi had misrepresented her daughter's medical history in a sworn affidavit.
Aug 27, 2023 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
When people talk about making friends with people who have different politics, my first impulse is usually to try and humanize myself, as a trans person, and try to explain what they're asking- that I make friends with people who have a psychopathic indifference to my wellbeing.
But, when I reflect, I know that they aren't asking *me* a trans person to be friends with people who want me incarcerated or institutionalized.
It's more insidious than that. I'm not who's being asked. I'm already an unperson in this conversation.
Aug 25, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
OK. I promised it and now it's done. I looked at EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. of Jamie Reed's claims, from her affidavit, to demonstrate that the New York Times misrepresented itself as having corroborated any substantial portion of these claims.
I found 69 statements that could be considered "claims" in Reed's affidavit. My article has a view-only link to the spreadsheet I used to code every single last claim.
Something I didn't specifically say in my piece this morning, on Azeen Ghorayshi's deeply flawed reporting on Jamie Reed, is that by not specifically talking about Reed's allegations, her story presents the impression that things in the story corroborated some of what Reed said.
You have to be deeply read in on Reed to catch this. Ghorayshi found the clinic was struggling to deal with an increase in referrals.
That's a big part of the narrative on Tavistock, in Britain. Not something Reed said about St. Louis.
Aug 23, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I'm going to link to my story criticizing the most recent New York Times article on gender-affirming care for youth by reporter Azeen Ghorayshi. But first, if you'll indulge me, I wanted to talk about what I believe journalism should be.
The core goal, as I see it, of every single thing a reporter puts their name to, should be to leave the audience more informed than they were when they went in.
That's the one principle. That's the deepest value. That's the thing we do, when we do the thing.
Aug 23, 2023 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
Just saw there's a new Azeen Ghorayshi story in the NYT with a big picture of Jamie Reed up top.
So, that's how my day is going to go I guess.
This is a BIZARRE way to introduce huge factual question marks around Jamie Reed's allegations. I am only just starting to read, but unless the NYT's reporting substantiates those allegations with some kind of new info I do not see how this description could be called unbiased.
