Those plates appear to be shifting, which can only be a good thing for the folks involved, legitimately or not. Andrew Sullivan has a summary (paywall):
An unusual thing happened in the conversation about transgender identity in America this week. The New York Times conceded that there is, indeed, a debate among medical professionals, transgender people, gays and lesbians and others about medical intervention for pre-pubescent minors who have gender dysphoria. The story pulled some factual punches, but any mildly-fair airing of this debate in the US MSM is a breakthrough of a kind.
Here’s the truth that the NYT was finally forced to acknowledge: “Clinicians are divided” over the role of mental health counseling before making irreversible changes to a child’s body. Among those who are urging more counseling and caution for kids are ground-breaking transgender surgeons. This very public divide was first aired by Abigail Shrier a few months ago on Bari’s Substack, of course, where a trans pioneer in sex-change surgery opined: “It is my considered opinion that due to some of the … I’ll call it just ‘sloppy,’ sloppy healthcare work, that we’re going to have more young adults who will regret having gone through this process.” Oof.
Sullivan has been one of many charged with being a ‘bigot’ by those who, consciously or not, chose to bypass having any debate over the entire issue, an abrogation of our moral, if not legal, obligation under the tenets of liberal democracy, to which we aspire if not attain; other names include Richard Dawkins, PhD, and J. K. Rowling, author; I believe Margaret Atwood has been similarly branded.
I’ve noted before this abrogation and its possible political consequences for the left & the Democrats, proved out in the Virginia gubernatorial election, and I once again call upon them to repair the abrogation, as mentioned above, in whatever way seems practical; without such efforts, the left’s chances of success in the future remain dicey, at best.
I’ll be ignored again, as I have no profile in this area.
But it’s worth briefly meditating on the practical consequences of debate. Debate is often seen as a rhetorical war between two sides, but it’s actually quite a bit more. A debate, conducted informally yet rigorously, can lead to new insights. As information, generally accepted as fact, is clarified, validated or rejected, and emerges from the gauntlet of the thoughtful, new intellects consider these facts, and where the old intellects may have settled comfortably into their trenches, to fight their perceived enemies, the new intellects almost inevitably will perceive new connections, false and self-serving narratives, and other significant configurations of knowledge and misperception, and come to clarified conclusions that are more convincing than those of the previous generation of intellects.
And, by so doing, improve the situation of those directly involved in the subject under debate.
When the “advocates” of the transgendered scream “bigot” at Dawkins, et al, they are not supporting the transgender, past and future. They’ve quashed debate, they’ve stoppered better knowledge and conclusions, they’ve, through their frantic need to do the simplest and wrongest, subjected the honest questioner to hatred and loathing. I shan’t take it further, as it’s unwarranted, and I suspect many of these haters are themselves victims of a concerted campaign to induce self-loathing, a campaign of which I don’t know the details, but have only seen hints. But it’s worth understanding that these supposed supporters are those that are endangering the transgenders, past, present, and future, and need to reconsider their brutal, primitive tactics that are not part of being a member of a liberal democracy.
