If Books Could Kill - February 28, 2023


The New York Times's War On Trans Kids [TEASER]

The Clash of Civilizations The Coddling Of The American Mind

Episode Stats


Length

27 minutes

Words per minute

180.74

Word count

4,988

Sentence count

251

Harmful content

Misogyny

8

sentences flagged

Toxicity

22

sentences flagged

Hate speech

26

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hey gang, just a quick note before we get started.
00:00:02.620 As usual, we are releasing a teaser of this month's bonus episode in the main feed.
00:00:07.920 We recorded this a couple weeks ago, so that's why we don't cover any of the recent events
00:00:12.400 in like the question-asking industrial complex.
00:00:16.000 As we've been editing this, we started to feel increasingly weird about making any money
00:00:21.240 on anything related to this issue right now.
00:00:23.600 So we decided to donate all of the support we receive from this episode to the three
00:00:28.540 trans journalists who have been extremely helpful in walking me through this issue for the last
00:00:32.900 year. They are in the description. We're also including links for you to support them directly.
00:00:38.000 Please go do that. Also, we know that eggs cost like $12 right now. So if you're not in a position
00:00:43.120 to support us, that's also totally fine. This teaser is kind of a condensed version of the
00:00:48.040 full episode. So it has all of the most important like messages and statistics in it. So hopefully
00:00:52.800 you can share that with people who haven't been following this issue as closely. Thanks for
00:00:56.640 listening. Thanks for supporting our trans friends. And we will see you next week.
00:01:01.980 Peter. Michael. What do you know about the New York Times' war on trans people?
00:01:07.180 All I know is that conservatives only have one joke and the New York Times only has one op-ed piece.
00:01:26.640 So, Peter, how much do you know about the quote unquote debate over whether too many kids are transitioning too fast?
00:01:35.260 I think not as much as I would have liked to. The more prominent this has gotten in our culture war debates, the more behind I feel on the substantive content.
00:01:48.080 This is sort of the the inspiration for this episode, too, that I feel like there's a huge number of people in your position who are like generally like nice and smart liberals, but who don't really know very much about this issue or who haven't really thought that, like, this is my issue to follow very closely. 0.96
00:02:07.040 All of a sudden, this is like the fucking only thing that America is talking about. 0.93
00:02:11.960 Right. 0.97
00:02:12.540 And the media has not informed people of like what is actually going on.
00:02:16.660 And that is what I am trying to do.
00:02:19.080 Right.
00:02:19.200 I think that I'm a little bit ahead only because I simply do not trust the New York Times to
00:02:26.100 handle these issues.
00:02:27.660 You also see my tweets about Jesse Singel.
00:02:29.420 So I feel like you've kind of been spoiled.
00:02:31.020 That's true.
00:02:32.360 Although I will say that is in a genre of Hobbes tweet that I don't always go through
00:02:37.900 the whole thread of.
00:02:40.820 This is like your sports tweets, Peter.
00:02:43.100 You know what?
00:02:44.300 He's having thoughts on things.
00:02:45.700 Similar to how the actual Super Bowl is like a day from when we're recording this.
00:02:52.220 Your Super Bowl, of course, happened this week when you got into an online screaming
00:02:58.880 match with Jesse Singel.
00:02:59.920 The yearly ritual in my life.
00:03:01.500 Yeah, I guess that was if the Super Bowl happened twice a month.
00:03:08.080 So are you ready to talk about the New York Times? 0.94
00:03:12.160 The old gray lady. 0.86
00:03:13.220 The transphobic mean gray lady. 0.78
00:03:14.820 Yes.
00:03:15.700 So in 2022, the New York Times published six front page stories, essentially asking exactly
00:03:24.020 the same question.
00:03:26.080 In January, we have doctors debate whether trans teens need therapy before hormones.
00:03:32.080 There's not a debate.
00:03:33.100 Everyone says they need therapy before hormones.
00:03:34.960 Right. 1.00
00:03:35.260 In May, we get few transgender children change their minds after five years, study finds. 0.54
00:03:41.400 so like a like people say they're trans they stay trans for five more years sub headline but the
00:03:48.500 study which began in 2013 may not fully reflect what's happening today when many more children
00:03:54.340 are identifying as trans i don't know if there's a huge difference between 2013 and now but okay
00:03:59.460 no no no the kids are out of control now and then in june we get a feature story called what leah
00:04:05.980 thomas could mean for women's elite sports i didn't read that one because it's related to sports
00:04:10.600 then in june we get a front page story called the battle over gender therapy okay we then
00:04:17.700 you're gonna like this one in june we get a front page story called a vanishing word in abortion 0.98
00:04:24.920 debate women yes now as someone it's it's unfair for me because i love to erase women you know
00:04:30.660 so i i will say pregnant people just to do that uh in september we get another front page story
00:04:35.820 more trans teens are choosing top surgery then the following month we get another front page story
00:04:41.480 they paused puberty but is there a cost and then in january we get another one when students change 0.88
00:04:49.960 gender identity and parents don't know that could be a fun romp if they were taking the right angle
00:04:55.460 you know that's a cool like early aughts movie uh about a about a teen having fun with gender
00:05:01.920 identity. Yeah. I really feel like the potential for hijinks on this issue has not been adequately 0.96
00:05:06.420 explored. So I want to talk about a couple of the tendencies of these articles. We're not going to
00:05:12.540 go through every single one individually because they're all basically identical and they're all
00:05:17.840 doing like the same few things. So the first tendency that I want to talk about is that they
00:05:24.860 never include examples of their central premise. I have read all of these feature articles. I have
00:05:31.120 read all like all of the panicked stuff about like too many kids transition too fast. None of these
00:05:37.500 stories include kids who transition too fast. Right. In the original Atlantic article from 2018,
00:05:43.000 it says Carrie Stella is the author of a blog called Guide on Raging Stars. Stella, now 24,
00:05:49.640 listen closely, socially transitioned at 15, started hormones at 17, got a double mastectomy 0.97
00:05:56.240 at 20 and detransitioned at 22. If that length of time between the ages of 15 and 20 is not long
00:06:05.100 enough such that like there should be, for example, government intervention preventing it from
00:06:10.680 happening, then you're just saying that transitioning is illegal. The next example is from
00:06:15.960 more trans teens are choosing top surgery. This article that pretends to be kind of a sober 0.99
00:06:23.180 overview of just the rise in the number of mastectomies among minors over the last couple
00:06:27.700 years. But it's very clear that the article is trying to invalidate these surgeries.
00:06:34.860 Right. For no reason profiles a plastic surgeon who's on TikTok and like uses the hashtag
00:06:41.740 yeet the teat to basically imply like, look, look at all these grifters in the sector,
00:06:47.660 even though this plastic surgeon essentially doesn't do surgeries on minors. The nut graph,
00:06:52.980 the kind of summary of the article. It says, some clinicians have pointed to the rising demand and
00:06:57.960 the turmoil of adolescent development as reasons for doctors to slow down before offering irreversible
00:07:04.680 procedures. Although medical experts believe the likelihood to be small, some patients come to
00:07:10.440 regret their surgeries. The article opens with this anecdote. All right. Since hitting puberty
00:07:17.580 at age 10, Michael said he felt a gnawing discomfort about his breasts. By the time he
00:07:21.920 was 12, he wore hooded sweatshirts every day in their Miami suburb. He came out to his parents
00:07:26.580 as a transgender boy when he was 14. A year later, at the start of the pandemic, he started weekly
00:07:32.080 testosterone injections while doing remote school. Michael started in-person school feeling 10 times
00:07:38.240 happier, he said, but his chest still tormented him. When Michael was 17, Annie said, she decided
00:07:44.580 that waiting another year for surgery would put him in too much pain. Because her insurance covered
00:07:48.980 the procedure only for adults, she took out a loan to help pay for it. He comes out at 14,
00:07:55.400 spends a year waiting for hormone injections, and then gets surgery at age 17. Right. And it's been
00:08:03.020 seven years since the onset of like these dysphoric feelings around puberty. So the
00:08:08.760 whole article is framed around like the worrying rise of these surgeries, right? And they're being
00:08:14.400 given to kids and there's like hashtags involved it's like oh also this this kid got assessed and
00:08:21.340 got gender surgery and his mom had to pay out of pocket and he's really happy right so why isn't
00:08:26.580 the story about how like top surgeries have allowed people to be themselves and be happy
00:08:31.180 right i have spent the last year interviewing trans kids and parents of trans kids and doctors
00:08:38.720 and researchers and like i am doing the thing that other journals don't seem to want to do where i'm
00:08:43.940 trying to actually answer this question. Are a lot of kids transitioning without assessment?
00:08:48.080 All of the indication that I've gotten is that the answer is a very firm no. So the first reason to
00:08:56.100 think that this is not an issue worth the amount of hand-wringing attention it has received is just
00:09:01.420 the sheer numbers. So earlier this year, in one of these panicked, long feature stories, Reuters
00:09:08.680 actually got a database of patient records from an insurance company. I'm sure it's not perfect,
00:09:14.200 but it gives a pretty good ballpark of how many kids are getting these procedures. So there's
00:09:19.780 somewhere around 30 to 40 million kids in like the ages at which they would be getting these
00:09:24.620 procedures, right? Somewhere between 10 and 17. Among those 30 to 40 million kids,
00:09:29.520 In 2021, 1,390 kids got puberty blockers, 4,231 got hormones, and for top surgeries
00:09:41.380 in 2021, there were 282 mastectomies performed on minors.
00:09:47.220 These are fractions of a fraction of a fraction of a percent.
00:09:51.900 Those numbers are so low that I feel like the Hollywood elite need to step their game
00:09:56.980 up.
00:09:57.380 I know.
00:09:57.760 Get involved. 0.78
00:09:59.180 What is Hollywood there for, if not to push our evil liberal agenda?
00:10:05.520 And if they're not doing it, who's going to do it?
00:10:07.140 We should also note that you're constantly hearing this thing from the right about like,
00:10:10.360 ma, they're mutilating kids.
00:10:12.320 Bottom surgeries are essentially prohibited. 0.68
00:10:15.480 All of the guidelines say that doctors are not supposed to do them.
00:10:18.660 The numbers from the Reuters report say that 56 genital surgeries were performed on minors
00:10:24.560 over three years.
00:10:26.240 So that's fewer than 20 per year.
00:10:28.180 And also, we don't have the specific details of those. So those might be something like intersex surgeries. Yeah. So it's extremely likely that there are more articles about genital surgeries on kids than there are genital surgeries on kids.
00:10:45.220 You know, this is something we're going to talk about in our upcoming Coddling of the American Mind episode.
00:10:50.060 But this is like when they're like, speakers are being disinvited from college campuses at record rates.
00:10:54.720 And then like, how many?
00:10:56.380 Like, oh, like 40.
00:10:57.840 Right.
00:10:59.080 You might as well just name them at that point.
00:11:01.100 It's not even like a statistic.
00:11:02.660 Just give me the list.
00:11:04.140 List them out.
00:11:04.660 Tell me the circumstances and I will draw my own conclusions.
00:11:07.080 And then the second reason to believe that this whole thing is a moral panic is all of the various barriers there are to care.
00:11:14.580 So first of all, they have to have affirming parents, right? Kids cannot get procedures under 18 without the consent of their parents. Then they have to go to the doctor. They have to actually get an appointment with a primary care provider, which means that they have to be linked up to the health insurance system, which we know in America lots of people aren't.
00:11:31.520 They then have to get a referral to a gender clinic. America only has 60 gender clinics for 1.00
00:11:37.840 all 50 states, and all of them are way overprescribed because as these panicked articles
00:11:42.940 love pointing out, there's been a huge increase in the number of kids identifying as trans,
00:11:47.620 right? And all of these gender clinics are swamped. So if you talk to people who work 0.89
00:11:51.460 at these gender clinics, we're talking about six months to a year waiting period. So just
00:11:57.020 logistically, when they're like, oh, there's too many kids transitioning, it's like,
00:12:01.220 how? Literally how? The kids are not getting appointments, right?
00:12:04.920 And then once you get an appointment, you have to go through the whole assessment process.
00:12:09.560 So one of the kids that I talked to outside of an East Coast city, she was lucky and she got
00:12:14.600 an appointment at the gender clinic in her city after around six months. I think her mom knew
00:12:19.900 someone who worked there and she was able to get in early. But then she spent 15 months going
00:12:25.740 through assessments before she was put on hormones. She had a bunch of individual appointments. She
00:12:31.040 had appointments with her parents. Her parents are divorced and she had to bring both of them
00:12:34.540 together to be in these like tripartite psychology appointments. She had to meet with the
00:12:39.260 endocrinologist to talk about like the side effects of all of the hormones. From the doctors
00:12:44.040 of these clinics that I've talked to, this is fairly typical, that it's between one and two
00:12:47.380 years of assessment before kids get on hormones. The next barrier is cost and insurance companies,
00:12:53.140 right? These procedures cost tens of thousands of dollars. Many of them are not covered for
00:12:57.940 children under 18. And if you want to get them covered, oftentimes you need three letters from
00:13:04.260 three different doctors documenting the fact that you've socially transitioned young. So if you
00:13:09.540 socially transitioned but didn't tell a doctor, they might not believe you. This is why in the 0.98
00:13:14.520 category of these stories don't include examples of their central premise. All of these stories
00:13:18.700 are built around like, what if kids are transitioning too fast? What if it's just a 1.00
00:13:21.560 phase kids are getting these surgeries very few people in these stories got surgeries as kids
00:13:27.620 right this is from one of the new york times articles others decide they want to fully
00:13:32.440 detransition and return to their cis identities grace ledinski smith who is 28 has written about
00:13:38.080 her regret over taking testosterone and having her breasts removed in her early 20s if adults
00:13:43.800 are having surgeries that they later come to regret that is a perfectly fair enough conversation to be
00:13:49.340 having within the medical field that is not something that needs to be a front page story 0.73
00:13:53.660 of the new york times six fucking times in one year so this is a question i i um i've always had 0.74
00:14:00.040 what are the downsides of puberty blockers in the event that you choose not to transition 0.96
00:14:07.220 ultimately because on the right they make it seem catastrophic and from what i've seen on the left
00:14:13.980 they're basically saying no it's harmless or nearly harmless the puberty blockers thing i find
00:14:18.520 totally baffling so puberty blockers have been prescribed to kids since the 1980s they were
00:14:24.060 originally a treatment for something called precocious puberty oh i i knew a few of those
00:14:28.380 i sort of was one of those kids too but it's like you start going through puberty at like
00:14:35.040 seven or eight and there's various like social and physiological reasons why it's just not a
00:14:40.900 good idea to go through puberty that early so in the 1980s and 1990s they started prescribing
00:14:45.900 this medication to block puberty. So you would take puberty blockers for like two years, and then
00:14:50.900 you would stop taking them when you were like 10, and then you'd go through puberty at the same time
00:14:54.780 as everybody else. And so the very odd thing is that the main claim about puberty blockers on the
00:15:01.480 right is that like, we don't know if they're reversible, but it's like the whole point of them
00:15:05.680 is to be reversible. If they weren't reversible, we wouldn't have been prescribing them to kids
00:15:09.940 going through precocious puberty for 30 years. If you are of an age where you should be having
00:15:15.500 puberty, if you're 13 or whatever, is one or two years of delaying it something that causes
00:15:22.440 long-term damage of any type? It does not appear so. I mean,
00:15:25.400 there's this stuff about bone density. Apparently, when you go through puberty,
00:15:29.020 your bone density increases really significantly. So there's some evidence that when you block
00:15:33.620 puberty, your bones kind of stay the same levels of density that they were before.
00:15:38.940 But it's not really clear sort of what that means in a practical sense, because typically
00:15:42.800 when, you know, cisgender kids go on puberty blockers, they just also take a calcium supplement.
00:15:47.860 The effects of that typically would only show up once you're like in your 50s, right? All of our
00:15:52.980 bones lose density as we get older. That's why like old people fall down and they break a hip 1.00
00:15:56.540 and young people fall down and they don't. And so the idea basically is that like the levels of bone 1.00
00:16:02.860 density that you, that all of us are going to have in our 60s, people who took puberty blockers for
00:16:07.320 a long time might have those levels of bone density when they're like in their 50s. That's
00:16:12.020 not nothing right like that's right that's a meaningful side effect everybody says like we
00:16:16.360 should continue to study this we should basically do like baselines of bone density when kids are on
00:16:22.280 this and this would be part of like the ongoing monitoring process that you do like every six
00:16:25.500 months get like a scan for bone density to see if things are going okay right but then what really
00:16:30.340 frustrates me about this is that this is brought up as like oh what about the side effects as if
00:16:35.700 this is the only medication prescribed to children that has side effects right there are bone density
00:16:40.880 the downsides of taking birth control. There are acne medications that reduce bone density.
00:16:45.720 There are antidepressants and ADHD medications for kids that have like pretty severe and pretty
00:16:50.160 immediate side effects. What we do in every single one of these cases, we tell the parents what to
00:16:56.440 expect. We tell the kids what to expect and we let them make the trade-off. The idea of like,
00:17:01.380 I'm experiencing this like debilitating gender dysphoria and I'm depressed and my body is
00:17:07.240 changing in ways that cause me huge discomfort. And to alleviate that, what it costs me is my
00:17:14.500 bones might be brittle 10 years earlier than they would be. That doesn't seem like a completely
00:17:19.940 unreasonable trade-off to make. No, it's one that you would see with a lot of medications
00:17:25.160 being taken at a young age. I think it's also really important to talk about the benefits of
00:17:29.640 youth transition. So one of the trans ladies I talked to, she transitioned at age 28. What she
00:17:36.080 said is, you know, when you transition at age 28, it's profoundly disruptive. You will probably lose
00:17:43.020 your job. A lot of people have to fall out of their marriages. It affects their relationships
00:17:47.660 with their kids. And what we're talking about is, you know, getting these kids this care when
00:17:52.860 they're younger. The way that she put it was like, we're giving them the chance to have an
00:17:56.720 adulthood, right? We're actually giving them a chance to sort of start from scratch. One thing
00:18:01.380 that really bugs me about all the quote unquote debate about this is that there's a huge number
00:18:05.000 of surveys of trans people who have transitioned and like the regret rates are like less than two
00:18:10.820 percent one thing i always think about when we're having these conversations is that minors can get
00:18:16.160 breast implants in this country yes i was just looking at these numbers the other day it's like 0.78
00:18:19.880 5 000 minors get breast implants every year yo um can this kid have bigger titties and everyone's
00:18:25.760 like yeah yeah that's fine but then the the other tendency of these articles which we've kind of
00:18:33.540 covered is what i call but still where they basically just include evidence against their
00:18:41.720 premise but just like wave it off so this is from the article called few transgender children change
00:18:49.680 their minds after five years study finds this is based on a survey of kids who started transitioning
00:18:55.400 in 2013 and like you look and all of them are still trans okay it says the vast majority of
00:19:01.340 the group still identified with their new gender five years later, according to the study, and many
00:19:05.560 had begun hormonal medications in adolescence to prompt biological changes to align with their
00:19:10.020 gender identities. The study found that 2.5% of the group had reverted to identifying as the gender
00:19:15.400 they were assigned at birth. The new study could suggest that transgender children, when supported
00:19:20.120 by their parents, thrive in their identities. But it's also possible that some of the children who
00:19:25.280 still identified as transgender by the end of the study, or their parents, felt pressure to continue
00:19:30.720 on the path they started so the evidence is that people who say they're trans are still trans
00:19:36.760 but what if they're being forced to stay trans what if every person who detransitioned was
00:19:43.100 actually just being pressured by their parents to detransition exactly they are trans i was also
00:19:50.140 reading this like i started identifying as gay when i was 12 and now i'm 40 and i still identify
00:19:55.400 is gay. And like, I don't have proof that that's not due to social pressure. Like, I don't know
00:20:01.200 how you could possibly demonstrate that this isn't true. You have to meditate while a guy 1.00
00:20:06.540 is going down on you and gaze upon it from above. Am I enjoying this? I have become super fucking
00:20:14.480 pilled on this in the last two years because one of my very good friends, a guy that I grew up with, 0.98
00:20:18.720 his daughter is trans. He's in Seattle. He's super affirming. His wife is super affirming.
00:20:24.380 and it has been a huge fucking hassle like an unbelievable fucking hassle they had to move 0.98
00:20:30.580 daycares because they said to the head of the daycare whatever like our daughter's transitioning 0.98
00:20:35.980 what you know policies you have in place or whatever and the principal was like oh uh this
00:20:41.000 is our first trans kid uh do you mind writing an email to all of the parents explaining that 0.99
00:20:46.300 she's trans and then if anyone has any questions they can just contact you directly oh shit love 0.97
00:20:52.480 love to be uh made to do the emotional but also actual labor of school administrators of like 0.97
00:20:59.980 physically sitting down and writing a long explanatory email and dealing with people's
00:21:03.080 like reply guy bullshit right they just had to move schools there's been huge friction with the
00:21:08.180 grandparents because the grandparents are like kind of atlantic pilled are like well what if 0.95
00:21:12.180 it's just a phase yeah you know he had to write an email to all the relatives like the distant
00:21:16.380 cousins there's been some like friction there and this idea that it's like you're just gonna 0.93
00:21:21.720 fucking tell everybody you're trans and the whole world just like lifts you up on their shoulders 0.97
00:21:26.020 and it's like rudy rudy just doesn't make any sense right the entire process is miserable 1.00
00:21:32.280 you're predicating a conspiracy around like a really vague aimless cultural pressure to do
00:21:43.060 like queer stuff right from what i can gather right another thing that i that has become very
00:21:48.780 clear in my mind, too, knowing my friend going through this process is, you know, the idea that
00:21:53.760 some kid would say, I'm trans to get attention. Yes. I think it is extremely likely that like
00:22:01.400 someone would do that. Yeah. I thought I was an anarcho-syndicalist.
00:22:07.760 I thought I was a libertarian. Significantly worse. Way worse. Way worse. But like the idea
00:22:13.120 that kids would say, I'm trans to like get attention or, you know, gin up some sort of
00:22:17.960 conflict or they're exploring their identity makes perfect sense to me. But would they persist in this 0.72
00:22:24.000 for years going to medical treatments, right? Their parents scheduling things, going to therapy
00:22:30.400 and whatever initial burst of attention that you get by being like, daddy, I'm trans. That wears
00:22:37.160 off pretty quick, right? At a certain point, it's just like my normal daughter, right? All of this,
00:22:42.300 It's like, what if it's a phase stuff is an argument to make social transition as easy
00:22:48.220 as possible, right? 0.60
00:22:49.680 The best way for your kid to figure out if they're quote unquote really trans is for 0.91
00:22:54.420 them to live as a boy or a girl for a while to the point where it becomes normal and they 0.85
00:22:59.340 see if it really does feel better.
00:23:01.000 And so my friend has, of course, told his daughter, like, if in a couple of years you
00:23:04.440 decide that you want to be a boy, we love you no matter what.
00:23:07.340 If you're non-binary, we love you no matter what.
00:23:08.900 there's no excuse not to do exactly that, right? And this to me, it reveals the fundamental bad 0.99
00:23:16.960 faith of this entire panic. Because if what we're worried about is kids transitioning without
00:23:22.960 knowing if they're really trans, we should want to make this stage of the process as easy as
00:23:28.480 possible. And that's not what we're seeing, right? We're seeing huge pushback to schools. 1.00
00:23:32.280 We're seeing huge pushback to like any gender nonconformity and like the materials or the
00:23:36.480 books that kids are reading in school conservatives like switch back and forth between parental rights
00:23:41.720 framings whenever it's convenient right like yeah they'll be talking about parental rights when it's
00:23:46.100 them preventing their uh kid who wants to be who wants to socially transition from doing so
00:23:52.360 right but when it's like a more accepting parent being like yeah i think my kid's trans
00:23:56.900 they're like oh do you you liberal freak and also what's amazing to me is this this thing
00:24:02.760 where you use evidence against your thesis as evidence for your thesis. So one of the talking
00:24:08.360 points that comes up in right wing messaging on this is that like nine out of 10 kids who socially
00:24:13.100 transition go on to puberty blockers and nine out of 10 kids who go on puberty blockers go on to
00:24:18.920 hormones. And it's like, right, that's an indication the kids are trans. Right. That literally means 0.58
00:24:25.380 that the opposite of what you think is happening, where everyone is just like socially transitioning
00:24:29.700 is happening right right if it was like two out of ten they would use that as proof kids that kids
00:24:36.380 are being pushed into social transition yeah and that people do not socially transition lightly
00:24:41.160 right people are doing this with a huge amount of forethought and people are oftentimes really slow
00:24:46.780 to do this right like i came out over the course of like five years and i feel like coming out as
00:24:51.340 gay is easier than coming out as trans are you sure that it's not just an underlying mental
00:24:55.200 illness and that's what caused you to be libertarian and then eventually gay. It's hard 0.99
00:25:01.560 to imagine what the New York Times even thinks it's achieving here. Right. Other than maybe
00:25:07.160 getting like the general sense that this is contrarian amongst portions of its audience
00:25:13.660 and then therefore like deducing that they're doing good. What I think is really interesting
00:25:19.560 and really telling is how all of these articles are framed around the concerns of parents.
00:25:27.400 What would you do if your kid said she's trans, right? Not, what if you had been a trans kid and
00:25:33.460 had been prevented from transitioning? So I'm sending you the first couple paragraphs of the
00:25:41.140 most recent feature story about this. We're going to do these anecdote things and then we're going
00:25:46.180 to the nut graph. All right. Jessica Bradshaw found out that her 15-year-old identified as
00:25:51.440 transgender at school after she glimpsed a homework assignment with an unfamiliar name
00:25:56.620 scrawled at the top. When she asked about the name, the teenager acknowledged that at his request,
00:26:02.660 teachers and administrators at his high school in Southern California had for six months been
00:26:06.640 letting him use the boys' bathroom and calling him by male pronouns. Mrs. Bradshaw was confused.
00:26:12.740 Didn't the school need her permission or at least need to tell her?
00:26:16.900 It did not, a counselor later explained, because they knew that she might go to the New York Times.
00:26:22.940 Okay, I don't remember going. 0.94
00:26:26.300 And be real fucking weird about it. 0.79
00:26:28.240 It did not, a counselor later explained, because the student did not want his parents to know. 0.93
00:26:33.840 District and state policies instructed the school to respect his wishes.
00:26:37.420 There was never any word from anyone to let us know that on paper and in the classroom, our daughter was our son, Mrs. Bradshaw said.
00:26:46.620 All right, here's the nut graph. This is a couple paragraphs later, but this is like the main gist of the story.
00:26:50.860 Dozens of parents whose children have socially transitioned at school told The Times they felt villainized by educators who seemed to think that they, not the parents, knew what was best for their children.
00:27:00.440 They insisted that educators should not intervene without notifying parents unless there is evidence of physical abuse at home.
00:27:08.920 Although, okay, I'm getting pretty mad.
00:27:12.600 Although some didn't want their children to transition at all, others said they were open to it, but felt schools forced the process to move too quickly and that they couldn't raise concerns without being cut out completely or having their home labeled unsafe.
00:27:28.020 safe. So these are the people we're being asked to like have sympathy with.
00:27:32.600 All right. I am going to break. I want to break this into its component parts.