Sunday, February 13, 2022


Gender dysphoria is often in fact autism

This is interesting to me as a high functioning autistic. But there are of course many varieties of autism. The tale below sounds partly familiar. I have always had male friends but not so much. I have always got on best with women. But I didn't want to become one, however. I just wanted to get into their pants! It led me to much happiness. And it continues. Even at age 78 I have just acquired a bright and attractive new girlfriend

How many trans-identified children “desist”? That is, how many identify as transgender for a time, and then eventually stop doing so, prior to medical intervention (as distinct from detransitioners, who return to identifying with their natal sex after undergoing some form of medical transition)? The answer is that no one knows, in part because few experts are keeping track, and in part because what research does exist is highly politicized.

Some trans activists and advocates, for instance, object to the very idea of measuring “desistance” in the first place, on the argument that this approach may discourage a child from embracing a transgender identity. One Canadian trans activist and researcher insists that research in this area is simply “not relevant when deciding between models of care.” Others claim that the idea of desistance is rooted in transphobic “myth,” though research often shows otherwise.

High-end estimates of desistance tended to arise from longitudinal studies of children who first reported gender dysphoria at an early age. The vast majority of those children resolved their gender dysphoria before, or early in, puberty. In one 2021 study published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, for instance, 88 percent of boys with gender dysphoria were found to have desisted by their teens or adulthood (and more than 63 percent were same-sex attracted). These results are consistent with established research; yet, in the current ideological climate, they often are seen as suspect. That’s because the traditional “watchful waiting” approach used by clinicians to treat children who present with gender dysphoria—which tends to be associated with a high rate of desistance—has largely been supplanted by a policy of encouraging social transition, an approach associated with an increase in observed dysphoria. Indeed, several studies show that nearly all children on puberty blockers go on to cross-sex hormones.

Behind these numbers lie individual stories. Here, I share one—that of a brilliant and insightful young man who struggled with gender issues for several years. His harrowing journey to self-awareness will be instructive for many of those talking and teaching about gender issues to children and young adults.

It was clear to Ash from an early age that he was different from other boys. Their world seemed to revolve around their bodies, while he was in his mind. They were sporty. He was scientific. They roamed in packs together, while he gravitated toward the girls. They were rowdy. He was gentle. And he had a vague sense that other people could connect emotionally in some way that eluded him.

Puberty was particularly hard on him. He’d had a high, clear tenor voice—unusual and strong and something he’d liked about himself—which descended into an unfamiliar bass. He grew body and facial hair that upset him on some visceral level—the thickness and coarseness of it. The pace of change unnerved him. He came out as bisexual in eighth grade, and his classmates responded by calling him a faggot—though they’d called him that in seventh grade, too, simply because of his not being traditionally masculine.

In ninth grade, he transferred to a new school where, for the first time, he found a group of friends. But something happened—he had no idea what, since it was so hard for him to understand social cues—and soon enough they abandoned him. In the winter, he had what he described as “a psychotic break,” and surrounded himself with imaginary friends.

Ash asked Google why puberty had been so unpleasant for him. Why he had trouble making friends. Why it was so hard for him to befriend boys, in particular, and why he felt different from them. Was it bad if your whole friend group was girls? “Very, very quickly I found different websites talking about being trans and how people had similar experiences to me,” he said. “And then they had transitioned and were happy now. And I thought that, wow, this is an easy way out. I love the idea of this.” He came to the conclusion that perhaps he was a woman.

He went to his therapist, whom he’d been seeing since the psychotic break, and told her that he’d hated puberty and his body hair, he didn’t fit in with other boys, he was mostly friends with girls, he didn’t like being a boy. All true things. She suggested that perhaps he was transgender, confirming his suspicions.

Because of his negative experience coming out as bisexual, Ash didn’t tell many people that he was identifying as trans besides his pediatrician and his therapist. Only they used she/her pronouns when addressing him.

“How did that feel?” I asked him.

He thought about that for a moment. “It felt … exhilarating,” he finally said. But despite the euphoria, his identity was still in flux. When school ended, and he went to summer camp, Ash asked people to use they/them pronouns.

Being science-minded, Ash scoured reputable medical websites for information about transition. He found that they either didn’t talk about the side effects of medical interventions, or that they would be mentioned in passing near the end of the article, without citations, or with citations to articles that he didn’t scrutinize. Later on, he came to wish he had done so.

When Ash finally told his parents that he believed he was trans, they were skeptical—not because they were bigots, but because they didn’t think the treatments Ash wanted were safe, nor that he fit the description of earlier generations of kids with gender dysphoria. Ash had never been particularly feminine or previously expressed any desire to be a girl. Ash wanted to get hormones right away, but his parents were determined to wait.

Rather than confront Ash directly over gender issues, they focused on strengthening their connection with him in other ways, through music, board games, and intellectual pursuits. “When I brought it up, they were happy to talk with me, but they didn’t engage or aggravate me, which was, I think, the best thing to do,” Ash recalls.

Still, their relationship became strained, because many of the websites Ash was reading encouraged trans kids to detach from their parents if they were not affirming. “There was a part of me that started to vilify them,” he told me. “[The sites] said, ‘Oh, if your parents aren’t ‘with it,’ they’re evil people.’”

This, too, was hard on Ash, who’d valued his relationship with his parents. There was also part of his mind that didn’t actually buy into the material he was reading online. Ash describes this period as being one of “cognitive dissonance.”

The next year, Ash got a new therapist, one who diagnosed him as autistic. And this, he says, was like a ray of sunshine: enlightenment.

The therapist “didn’t focus on the issues I was having with gender, but focused on the anxiety, depression, and living as an autistic person in this world, which were much, much more important, and I think [the discussion] relieved a lot of the distress that was fuelling my dysphoria,” Ash said. “I sort of came to a place where I thought, you know, just very internally, that perhaps I am not born in the wrong body … I found [an] identity of non-binaryness.”

Ash’s therapist had been working with him on seeing nuance in the world—something autistic people, prone to black-and-white thinking, sometimes struggle to do. The goal was to be “able to take a step back, to get a bird’s eye view in the stoic tradition and try to see things from other people’s points of view.”

His father, he learned, had been part of an online support group for so-called “gender-critical” parents of kids identifying as trans—i.e., parents who reject the model of instant affirmation and are aware of the uncertain science behind youth medical transition. Ash asked his father for data to back up his position. “I’m very amenable to concrete scientific evidence to an extent which most people are not,” he told me. “I think that the fact that my dad was there to have a conversation with me when I was ready was very important.”

After listening to his father and conducting his own research, Ash concluded that he’d been “misled.” He also learned about desisters and detransitioners from social media and Reddit, and read Keira Bell’s story. Bell had been an unhappy young lesbian with a traumatic childhood. She medically transitioned with a double mastectomy and testosterone, regretted it, and later petitioned the UK gender-identity development service to stop allowing vulnerable under-16s to make such life-altering decisions without adequate counselling. Her court victory was partly overturned, but an evidence review spurred by the case, concerning the effectiveness of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, showed that the “quality of evidence for these outcomes was assessed as very low certainty.”

Ash found out about other kids who were certain their struggles were located in their gender identity and who had undergone medical treatments, only to regret them and realize that their problems navigating the world were connected to autism. From there, he dove deeper into the side effects of those medical treatments—the effects on bones, heart health, and fertility, among other things. He came to feel grateful that his parents had drawn a hard line on medicalization.

Ash went to college early, but his social struggles followed him, and he found the woke culture that silenced debate about controversial social issues to be confusing. On several occasions, he was called out or humiliated, forced to apologize when he legitimately didn’t understand that what he had said was wrong. In time, he became afraid to speak.

For a while at college, Ash was still continuing to identify as transgender, even after coming to terms with his autism and the reality of transition. In part, this was because his transgender self-identification gave him entree into his school’s large LGBT social scene.

Yet at the same time that this peer group was providing Ash with a social landing pad, there also were aspects of it that unnerved him. “There were a lot of people talking about trans ideology quite a lot, and they were very adamant about it,” he said. It dawned on him that he needed to start thinking about himself in a holistic way, and not through the lens of a popular ideology.

What helped him finally leave that identity behind, he said, was interacting more with his sexuality: using his body for pleasure, understanding his sexual orientation, and coming to terms with the idea that nothing was wrong with his body or his way of being in the world. “Then I realized, why would I want to get rid of this?” he said. “This [body] is so cool and does interesting things.” (He still does not like his body hair, but now understands this to be a sensory issue related to his autism, one that can be addressed with shaving, not estrogen.)

Ash has become an advocate for autistic children. Around one in 44 kids is diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum these days, and some studies show that as many as five percent of them will identify as transgender (compared to about 0.7 percent of non-neurodiverse children).

“Currently, I do prefer to use they/them pronouns, but I’m not a Nazi about it because it’s a linguistic adaptation that is difficult for many people to make,” he told me. “I’m not responsible for affirming other people’s identities, and they shouldn’t be responsible for affirming my identity … For me, the way I am functioning in this society, the way people treat gender and categories and stuff, I just happen to fit into that [they/them] category.”

These pronouns do a lot of work. They not only signal to people that you’re cool, Ash said, but they signal a desire not to be subject to traditional gender norms. That was one of the things Ash desperately needed in the first place.

But that’s not how he thinks it should be. The boy category should be wide enough to accommodate him. Boys should be allowed to wear dresses—as young boys did in the 19th century. “I think people have gotten more sexist,” he said. “The trans ideology says, if you act and feel this way, then you’re just not in the right body.” It sends a message to effeminate gay men and butch lesbians that there’s something wrong with them as they are.

At the same time, Ash believes that the experience of being transgender is real for many people and that, for some, transitioning is the best way to ease their pain.

“A lot of gender critical people fall into this trap of thinking all trans people are fake, which I don’t believe is proper … I do believe that there are people who are legitimately transitioning and it is the best thing for them.”

“[Yet] I also know that there are people [for whom] that is a terrible thing. But whenever you’re talking to a person who’s identifying as trans, you don’t know which one they are.”

This strikes at the heart of the debates about desistance: There is no surefire way to know who will desist and who won’t. The only way to render evaluations is on a case-by-case basis through good-faith clinical care guided by fact, not ideology. Children must be made aware that many in their position do end up ultimately desisting. We owe it to these children not to pretend, for the sake of “affirmation,” that their current mental state about gender is a surefire indicator of how they’ll feel in the future.

Children and their families should know about the desistance literature, and that the way they feel now, no matter how intensely, isn’t necessarily a sign of how they’ll feel in the future. By exposing them to a diversity of stories, including Ash’s, we can restore balance to the discussion in a way that may help many distressed young people navigate a difficult and confusing time.

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A working-class liberty movement

We begin today in the Canadian Parliament, which has its own version of prime minister’s questions. And while it isn’t as entertaining as the famously unruly UK Parliament or the gem that is the Australian Parliament (“the honorable membah is a grub, Mistah Speakah!”), it can still get pretty rowdy.

So it was that last week, Candice Bergen, the interim leader of the Canadian Conservative Party, rose to ask a simple question of the ruling Liberals: would they work with the truckers who have been protesting Covid restrictions in Ottawa to resolve the impasse? She may as well have been talking to a Speak & Spell. The Liberal minister Chrystia Freeland chided and patronized. She condemned swastikas and Confederate flags. What she never did was to answer the question.

This finger-wagging approach to the most serious political strife Canada has seen in a generation was also adopted by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Last week, as the protests began, he was scurried away to an undisclosed location where he railed against the truckers like some blow-dried Lear. Trudeau did return to Parliament on Monday, but he still refused to extend any kind of olive branch. To the demonstrators outside, he said only: “This has to stop.”

The problem is that no one seems to know what stopping this would look like. The same Canadian left that regularly suffers heart palpitations over police brutality in America is now demanding that the cops clear out Ottawa like it’s some kind of Tim Hortons-spangled Fallujah. But the city’s chief of police says his force can’t just do that, that they’re overwhelmed and outmanned. Towing experts warn it would be all but impossible to remove the big rigs. And Trudeau himself has ruled out sending in the military, an unthinkable move in a country that prides itself on politeness and peace.

So what then? Some in the Canadian establishment seem to think the trucker protest will eventually buckle under the sheer weight of public opinion. They point to an industry estimate that 90 percent of Canadian truckers are vaccinated, before daintily clearing their throats and asseverating that unlike those rubes down south, Canadians don’t tolerate divisive politics. Americans might be uppity libertarians, but Canada’s founding values are “peace, order, and good government.” Emphasis on the “order” part: assault rifles and Gadsden flags are nothing but gauche up north.

Let’s assume for a moment that all this is true. The problem is that the single biggest threat to any “order” is a disenchanted and capable minority — like, say, truckers able to snarl downtowns and blockade highways. If the consensus that underpins an order crumbles, if the mass buy-in that’s needed to sustain an order is no longer there, then the order itself can also give way. This is why Trudeau has no choice but to talk to the truckers: there is no other way out and they wield more power than he seems to think they do.

Yet beyond that, it’s also worth asking: do Canadians really subordinate liberty to order? Do their leaders really imagine that one of the most reliable impulses in human history, the desire to be free, suddenly goes dormant north of Buffalo? Yes, Canadians are more likely than Americans to be vaccinated and to support vaccine rules. But that doesn’t mean they haven’t grown weary of all the hectoring and bullying, the isolation and the depression and the enforced gloom, just like the rest of us have.

Protests often begin in response to specific policies only to grow into something larger. And just as the Tea Party in the United States blossomed out of opposition to Obamacare, just as the gilets jaunes in France exploded out of a fuel tax, so too do the Canadian truckers appear to be expanding their brief beyond cross-border vaccine mandates and into grander ideas of freedom and choice. The demonstrations have become a kind of primal honk against the entire dismal public health regime. And as another winter quarantine drags on, it’s not unforeseeable that they could garner mass support.

There’s another dimension to this too: political movements are very often mobilizations of one class against another. This appears to be the case with the truckers. I haven’t gone outside in days! white-collar remote workers wearing their Succession snuggies cry, neglecting to mention that their public-health staycations are made possible by those who must go out, by cooks and grocers and deliverymen and, yes, truckers. This is what the class divide looks like in the year 2022.

It may be that those who procure our food for a living have finally had enough of being pushed around. And the class identity here is enjoined to the ideology. It has been most absurdly suggested in some conservative circles of late that individual liberty is mainly a concern of elites. In fact, the opposite is true. It’s the ambitious bureaucrat and the gooey-eyed professor of theory who think they can remake society through force; the working man covets his freedom. The real divide over liberty runs not down the American-Canadian border but between the managerial class and the hardhats.

And so, thanks to those hardhats, things are now moving quickly. The truckers’ latest move has been to blockade the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, Michigan, responsible for much of the commerce between Canada and the United States. Another border crossing into Montana has also been corked up. The provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan have responded by announcing they’re ending all Covid restrictions. Copycat protests have popped up from Australia to New Zealand to France to Belgium.

Trudeau has thus backed himself into a corner. Against such a mighty adversary, he has no choice but to negotiate, yet by sneering at the truckers, he’s ensured that any overture will look like a humiliating about-face. And that’s not even touching on the trainwreck of optics he’s created: this spoiled dauphin, this ludicrous Kennedy of the tundra, talking down to workers who want only to make decisions for themselves. After months of gray austerity imposed by heavy-handed government, a cheerful spirit of liberty is in the air.

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Tesla sued by california civil-rights agency for alleged racial discrimination, harassment

If this prosecution goes ahead, Musk could well move his car factory to a more friendly State. He is already half-way down that path. He also has a factory in China that could be expanded. And that would largely complete the de-industrialization of California, with the resultant loss of working-class jobs and an expanded welfare bill

A California regulatory agency has sued Tesla for alleged racial discrimination and harassment, saying the electric-vehicle maker turned a blind eye to years of complaints from Black factory workers.

The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing’s complaint filed Wednesday targets alleged workplace issues at Tesla’s principal US car plant, located in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“After receiving hundreds of complaints from workers, DFEH found evidence that Tesla’s Fremont factory is a racially segregated workplace where Black workers are subjected to racial slurs and discriminated against in job assignments, discipline, pay, and promotion creating a hostile work environment,” Kevin Kish, the agency’s director, said in a statement.

Tesla didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The company criticised the civil-rights agency’s investigation in a blog post that pre-empted the lawsuit. “Tesla strongly opposes all forms of discrimination and harassment and has a dedicated Employee Relations team that responds to and investigates all complaints,” the company said Wednesday.

Tesla, in the blog post, also cited its status as a manufacturing employer in the state. “Tesla is also the last remaining automobile manufacturer in California. The Fremont factory has a majority-minority workforce and provides the best paying jobs in the automotive industry to over 30,000 Californians,” the company said, adding that legal action was “unfair and counter-productive.” Tesla moved its headquarters to Texas from California last year, though it still makes a large portion of its cars in California.

The auto industry has long faced issues of discrimination on the factory floor. For instance, in 2017, Ford agreed to pay as much as roughly $US10m to settle sexual- and racial-harassment claims brought by individuals at two Chicago-area plants. The settlement followed an investigation by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which said it found female and African-American employees had been subject to harassment. Unlike at Tesla, factory workers at other US automakers are organised by the United Auto Workers union, which represents them in their dealings with the companies, including on workplace issues.

The Department of Fair Employment and Housing, in its lawsuit against Tesla, is seeking unspecified monetary damages, as well as relief including job reinstatement and payment of lost wages and benefits.

The agency said in its lawsuit that Black workers routinely heard Tesla supervisors and managers using racial slurs and were confronted with racist graffiti in the factory. One Black worker heard racial slurs as often as 50 to 100 times a day, the agency said.

Black workers also reported being assigned to more physically demanding roles, experiencing more severe discipline and being passed over for professional opportunities, the agency said. Black workers were severely under-represented in managerial and other professional roles, the agency said.

Tesla said in a 2020 diversity report that Black employees made up 10 per cent of its US workforce and 4 per cent of people in leadership roles. The Department of Fair Employment and Housing said in the lawsuit that Black workers make up roughly 3 per cent of professionals at the Fremont, California plant and about 20 per cent of factory operatives.

“Tesla’s brand, purportedly highlighting a socially conscious future, masks the reality of a company that profits from an army of production workers, many of whom are people of colour, working under egregious conditions,” the agency said in its lawsuit, adding that Tesla’s investigations of complaints aren’t compliant with the law.

Shares in Tesla fell 3 per cent to close at $US904.55 on Thursday.

A federal jury in San Francisco last year found that Tesla had subjected a Black former contract worker to a racially hostile work environment, awarding him roughly $US137m in damages. Tesla has said it doesn’t believe the verdict is justified and has asked for a new trial or for the damages to be reduced.

Another Black former Tesla worker, Melvin Berry, won a $US1m judgment last year after an arbitrator found that his supervisors at the Fremont factory called him a racial slur. Tesla was obligated to investigate and stop the racial discrimination and failed to do so, the arbitrator said in her order. Tesla said that any actions the company took weren’t racially based, according to the order.

Tesla has also faced allegations of sexual harassment in California. More than half a dozen current and former Tesla workers sued the company late last year alleging that Tesla failed to prevent sexual harassment at its facilities, among other claims. Tesla has said it intends to try to move those cases into private arbitration, court records show.

The Department of Fair Employment and Housing has brought other high-profile cases. The California regulator last year sued Activision Blizzard, accusing the video game company of paying female employees less than their male counterparts, among other claims. The company pushed back against the allegations. Microsoft in January agreed to buy Activision.

This isn’t the first time Tesla has clashed with California officials. Nearly two years ago, early in the coronavirus pandemic, Chief Executive Elon Musk took aim at a high-ranking county health official in California over government orders that the company’s Fremont vehicle-assembly plant remain temporarily closed to slow the spread of Covid-19.

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Ontario government freezes Freedom Convoy funds

The Ford government has gone to court to freeze the funds of the Freedom Convoy, according to the Toronto Sun's Brian Lilley. The order was issued by the court today and all funds are frozen until further notice.

It is worth noting that the funds have been frozen, not seized.

According to a statement: "Today, the Attorney General brought an application in the Superior Court of Justice for an order pursuant to section 490.8 of the Criminal Code prohibiting any person from disposing of, or otherwise dealing with, in any manner whatsoever, any and all monetary donations made through the Freedom Convoy 2022 and Adopt-a-Trucker campaign pages on the GiveSendGo online fundraising platform.
"This afternoon, the order was issued. It binds any and all parties with possession or control over these donations."

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New Canadian Law Could Send Parents to Jail for Not Affirming Gender Identity

It’s a conversation many have had at least once in their life. A friend or family member shares that he or she is struggling with same-sex attraction.

No doubt there are countless opinions on the most loving way to respond in these moments, but a new law in Canada mandates the response to be given. Affirm the same-sex attraction—or risk jail time.

Yes, Canada’s “conversion therapy” ban requires parents, pastors, counselors, friends, and others to affirm a person’s gender identity, gender expression, or sexual orientation, or face jail or prison time.

Canada has surrendered “to the political sphere to let them decide how we can counsel, how we can love our LGBT neighbors in the name of Jesus, and how to teach our own kids what a biblical view of sexuality and gender looks like,” says Jojo Ruba, the communications director for the Calgary, Alberta-based Free to Care.

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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