The Post-Partisan Emporium

The Ethical Quandary of Social Transition Novel psychological interventions now being implemented in schools create a pipeline to lifelong medicalization of people who would otherwise have become gay Wesley Yang Today’s guest post by Lisa Selin Davis looks at how the media framed a recently published study of the effects of socially transitioning gender nonconforming youths ( “a process that typically involves changing a child’s pronouns, first name, hairstyle, and clothing,”)  to support a favored conclusion (that cross-gender identity is stable over time in trans kids) when the findings might better be seen as providing evidence for a very different conclusion (that social transition primes many gender nonconforming and dysphoric young people for a lifetime of intensive medical interventions with a broad range of known and unknown risks and harms that they would not otherwise have undertaken in the absence of such interventions.) This tendentious massaging of  the findings o...

Running On Empty John Michael Greer Well, we definitely seem to have passed a threshold of sorts. For most of the sixteen years since I started blogging, one of the things I had to point out constantly to my readers was the slow pace of historical change.  Whenever I posted an essay on the twilight of industrial society, I could count on fielding at least one comment from a reader who expected the entire modern world to crash and burn in the next few months.  I’d have to patiently remind them that Rome wasn’t sacked in a day—that it takes years of breathtakingly moronic decisions motivated by mindless greed, vicious partisan hatred, blind ideological dogmatism, and a total unwillingness to think about the long-term consequences of short-term decisions, to bring a civilization down. Now of course all through the years while I was telling people this, decisions of the kind I’ve just described, guided by motives of the sort I’ve just characterized, were standard operating procedu...

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