I interviewed a number of the first monkeypox (mpox) cases in 2022. They were largely affluent gay men who enjoyed traveling around the world and going to sex parties. I am not certain how stigma is connected to such a pastime.

During the outbreak, the CDC downplayed how central sex between men was to driving the outbreak. Dr. Daskalakis in particular invariably led with the exceptions to the rule of who was at risk, such as by uttering the misleading slogan, “Anybody can get monkeypox.” I once challenged him on this fact during a press call in August 2022 and asked why he wasn’t instead being direct and clear that gay men were overwhelmingly the ones at risk. He responded by saying he thought he and the CDC were doing a fantastic job.

Meanwhile, I was constantly getting DMs from parents who were scared to send their kids back to school or to daycare, despite the fact that their children were literally at greater risk of being struck by lightning than getting mpox.

Many people were angry that summer that some of the same people who insisted on masking children or keeping everyone at home during Covid were now insisting that gay men should not be asked to take a break from sex with multiple partners. It is evident that this contradiction eroded trust in public health, as you can see here from what @steveguest is saying: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/…

Nearly 40 percent of students at Brown University identify as something other than straight. The growth has been largely among students identifying as bisexual or as queer, pansexual, asexual or questioning. There has been little growth in gay identity. browndailyherald.com/article/2023/0…

Mother Jones is re-upping this article from January. The study in question found that, among minors with private health insurance, by age 17, about 1 in 1,000 were on cross-sex hormones during 2018 to 2023. The rate was higher than that for natal girls and was likely higher overall by 2023. One way of reporting this news is to simply provide readers with the figures and let them decide whether they represent a little or a lot. open.substack.com/pub/benryan/p/…

The Advocate reports: "Asked whether a parent concerned about their child facing a trans kid in girls’ sports 'has a case,' Pete Buttigieg @PeteButtigieg said, “Sure.” But he rejected blanket policies like the federal bans being enacted by the Trump administration, saying, “These decisions should be in the hands of sports leagues and school boards and not politicians, least of all politicians in Washington trying to use this as a political pawn.”

This statement has inspired a blistering response on Bleuskie—see the 🧵⬇️ Journalist Walter Bragman issues a blistering response to @PeteButtigieg’s statement over trans inclusion in sports, calling it “craven shit” and saying Mr. Buttigieg is catering to bigots.

“To just put a fine point on it: Parents do not, in fact, have legitimate concerns about trans kids playing sports,” Mr. Bragman says.

“Just because they believe bullshit doesn’t make it legitimate.

“Fuck anti-trans bigots.”

Clara Jeffery, editor in chief of Mother Jones, says that it is for the best that JD Vance’s children be subjected to boos at Disneyland, so that they “know now what their father is about.” Debunking podcaster Michael Hobbes also endorses the jeers at @JDVance’s family at Disneyland.

Democrats Lost Voters on Transgender Rights. Winning Them Back Won’t Be Easy.

The party’s vanguard position got ahead of voters in 2024, and the internal debate now underway reveals an uncertainty on how to adapt, by @chashomans for @nytimes.

"Stuck in a widening gulf between the views of the party’s liberal voters and advocacy organizations on one side, and those of the broader American electorate on the other, many Democratic politicians had resolved to say as little as possible about the subject. In surveys, Ms. Erickson and other public-opinion researchers had found that this allowed Republicans, who spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads attacking Democrats on transgender rights in 2024, to define voters’ perceptions of Democratic policy positions." nytimes.com/2025/07/13/us/…

Dr. Rachel Levine, a former Biden administration health official, tells @TheAdvocateMag that "the evidence base is strong for the safety and efficacy" of prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat gender dysphoria in minors.

A slew of systematic literature reviews have found this is not the case. Instead, they have found that the relevant evidence is weak and inconclusive. They have suggested that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health erred in making strong recommendations for these treatments. Evidence-based medicine guidelines discourage making a strong recommendation based on weak evidence. Despite subpoenaed email records showing that Dr. Rachel Levine pushed WPATH to remove age limits on pediatric gender-transition treatments and surgeries for political reasons, Dr. Levine denied ever having done so in an interview with @TheAdvocate.

Fact checking Michael Hobbes

Debunking podcaster Michael Hobbes has a new episode of his podcast If Books Could Kill, about the US v. Skrmetti Supreme Court decision upholding Tennessee's ban on pediatric gender-transition treatment.

In this🧵I will fact check Hobbes:
⬇️ Here is a link to the podcast: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the…

If, for the sake of argument, no one can prove that pediatric gender-transition treatment prevents suicide death only because such deaths are so rare, then why has this treatment been sold, first and foremost, as “lifesaving”?

Why have people who have called that claim into question been savagely attacked and sidelined?

Marci Bowers, former head of WPATH, herself told me last year that suicide death has never been a good metric of the success of this treatment.
Debunking podcaster Michael Hobbes is himself one of the prime sources of misinformation about pediatric gender-transition treatment. He has routinely falsely claimed that there is no evidence that children get these drugs after absent or cursory assessment periods. There is copious evidence that this happens routinely at some of the top gender clinics in the nation. Despite all this evidence, Hobbes has never acknowledged his fault.

But you can see here that he is combining his longstanding claim about assessments with a claim about what he characterizes as false claims that there are large numbers of kids getting these drugs. That question should not necessarily be conflated with the assessment question.

About 1 in 1,000 youth with private health insurance went on cross sex hormones by age 17 between 2018 and 2022. That number was higher for natal girls and was probably higher for all youth by the end of that period.

One thing that has concerned some people is not necessarily the number of kids getting these drugs, but the rate of increase of that number. They have been concerned over where that figure might end up.

The Liberal Misinformation Bubble About Youth Gender Medicine

How the left ended up disbelieving the science

By @HelenLewis for @TheAtlantic theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

The Bleuskie crowd is livid over Andrew Sullivan’s Times opinion essay about LGBTQ activism: 🧵

https://twitter.com/benryanwriter/status/1938294607852212616

How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized, and Lost Its Way

By Andrew Sullivan for @nytopinion
🧵⬇️ GIFT LINK: How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized, and Lost Its Way

By Andrew Sullivan
nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opi…

Debunking podcaster Michael Hobbes has issued a stream of false or misleading claims about the Times article about the @ACLU’s tangled path to Skrmetti—the SCOTUS case on pediatric gender-transition treatment.

Allow me to demonstrate how wrong Hobbes is.

🧵⬇️ The thing about conspiracies is that sometimes they actually occur. Subpoenaed records show WPATH squelched systematic reviews of gender care they commissioned when the results did not support their advocacy movement.

And Hobbes, perhaps because he doesn’t know or understand what those reviews are about, issues a sleight of hand by suggesting that the reviews were irrelevant since there is no evidence kids are getting rushed into surgeries. But that’s not what the reviews were about. They were about the strength of the evidence backing gender-transition treatments.

A must-read that diagrams how Chase Strangio at the @ACLU and others in what @MattYglesias, for one, calls The Groups—the advocacy nonprofits that form a backbone of Democratic power structures—advocated for maximalist advances in trans rights and lost spectacularly.

https://twitter.com/benryanwriter/status/1935678922009526583

Alejandra Caraballo is livid over the Times article, in particular for citing @BriannaWu, who has called for moderation while Caraballo has been out front taking maximalist positions on trans rights and attacking her perceived adversaries left and right.

How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost

The inside story of the case that could set the movement back a generation, by @NickConfessore for @NYTimes. nytimes.com/2025/06/19/mag…

BREAKING: U.S. v Skrmetti has been decided, 6-3, upholding the constitutionality of Tennessee's ban on gender-transition treatments for minors.

This will likely entrench bans of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat gender dysphoria in 25 states. supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf…

NEWS: Under pressure from all sides by the Trump administration, the pediatric gender clinic at Children's Hospital Los Angeles that is run by Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, will stop providing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and gender-transition surgeries to minors. removepaywall.com/search?url=htt…
latimes.com/california/sto…

Despite copious evidence supporting the conclusion that there are many avenues for kids to be referred to an endocrinologist to receive pediatric gender-transition treatment after a single assessment appointment, debunking podcaster Michael Hobbes continues to pretend otherwise. open.substack.com/pub/benryan/p/…

The long-awaited New York Times six-part podcast series on pediatric gender medicine, The Protocol, is up. Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the…

YouTube: youtube.com/playlist?list=…

I have been subjected to Alejandra Caraballo’s calls for people to blacklist me. She is one of the loudest and most effective voices to silence and intimidate reporters covering pediatric gender-transition treatment.

https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1929909094556520486

How Cancel Culture Is Still Coming For Me


And how activists will eagerly cut off their noses to spite their faces in service of virtue signaling and maintaining an image of ideological purity amid the battle over pediatric gender medicine. open.substack.com/pub/benryan/p/…

Pete Buttigieg told @BulwarkOnline that if he could do it over, he would’ve worked to get the schools open faster in 2020. In response, @TaylorLorenz denounced him as a eugenicist.

Meanwhile, @DavidZweig’s new book presents an avalanche of evidence indicating that school closures likely did not reduce morbidity and mortality and harmed children. He also demonstrates that there was considerable evidence of the apparent lack of benefit from European nations as early as May 2020. I interviewed @davidzweig about his book about the folly of the Covid school closures, An Abundance of Caution, for my pod. I drew parallels to the pediatric gender medicine field:

open.substack.com/pub/benryan/p/…