Helen Lewis in the Atlantic - Gender medecine and the suicide lie

I am concerned by the lack of clarity in some of the articles and podcasts. I agree that Helen Lewis has written a good article and it lays it all out, but in an article striving to bring clarity, there are some missing components that are important.

It was like this with the podcasts too. I am worried that these bits that end up being not discussed will mean that the new position will solidify at a line that we already know is not going to work, if you know what I mean.

For me it's the gap between her articles and when she appears live on other media and then is much more willing to play purity games, eg that others might have reached broadly the same position that she (now) has but they've not done it in a way that she considers to be proper.

Helen Lewis was an important voice in raising awareness of the Conservative Party's proposed changes to the GRA in 2017.
She wasn't out there in 2005 with Julie Bindel, or 1995 with Germaine Greer, but she's hardly a johnny-come-lately. I don't agree with her true trans beliefs but they haven't protected her from vitriol and misogynistic abuse for her vocal opposition to self ID for nearly a decade now.

Who here is "freaking out"?

Yes, I agree she’s reaching out to people who need to come over the “golden bridge” that we used to bang on about on here a few years ago. A huge part of why she’s in a position to do that is because, though she’s taken a huge amount of flack, she’s avoided being outright cancelled. That puts her in a strong position to speak to people who are still happily believing they are just being kind/supporting gay rights 2.0. Helen Joyce, heroine though she is, has been effectively stopped from having much of a platform in a lot of places since she broke cover. Her clarity may be very satisfying for us, but if she’s only being read by us she’s preaching to the converted. Many, many people are still unaware there‘s any debate at all, and that‘s by design.

One of the fights we’ve been having over the past 10 years has been that every time anyone even vaguely reasonable/credible with a platform of any kind - JKR, Helen Joyce, Hadley Freeman, Suzanne Moore - has piped up on this topic, they’ve been immediately jumped on and so thoroughly smeared that the smear has reached mainstream awareness before the truth has. (I mean look at how effective that approach was against Graham Linehan - even Blocked and Reported still can’t admit he didn’t do anything particularly wrong.)

It’s been a specific tactic, aimed at stopping half-aware, “Be Kind” types from ever getting near that there’s a reasonable debate at all, let along learn what the it’s about. (Ironically, given that WE are always the people accused of bringing more heat than light to proceedings - sigh.)

The last thing we need is to indulge in the sort of purity spirals we’ve been watching the GI side whip themselves into for years. And - given all the justifications here for why we can read Spiked and not be right wing, etc because we’re all grown ups and can agree on some things and disagree on others, seeing people here freaking out at Lewis for basically not sitting at the right GC girls lunch table is a little depressing.

As annoying as I sometimes find HL (and Jesse Singal, for similar reasons) their fence-sitting, studiously moderate, "don't worry, I'm part of the liberal tribe" positioning does make them very useful for communicating to people who have doubts.

I could do without HL's dismissive attitude towards those who got there before her, but I suppose it's the price we pay for having her in that position, and we're not her target audience.

I think she has been writing about this subject and taking the resultant flack since around 2013 - certainly commissioning New Statesman articles by Sarah Ditum and Victoria Smith.

but i don't know how this attitude prevails. From the article:

“Adolescents actually have the capacity to make a reasoned logical decision,” she src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2TrNE8a53dI" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen> once told an industry seminar, adding: “If you want breasts at a later point in your life, you can go and get them.”

You can't even drink a beer until you're 21. But you can get your tits lopped off at 13? and if you have buyer's remorse? why you just get new fake ones.

it is utterly batshit.

100% agree. She seems to care more her tribal affiliations and their group think than where the truth and child safeguarding is. I am glad she is writing this stuff for the Atlantic, but I am not hailing either of them as heroes.

And she'd do well to stop being so dismissive of those who trod this difficult path before her meaning that she is able to come along now, in their wake, with much less difficulty and at considerably less personal cost.

She is a very good journalist. I do agree on that.

However it's still a glaring gap in critical thinking on display there.

That might be the editorial line from the publication or it might be her personal.

But it's still there. We can't just ignore that, despite her credentials as a journalist.

I think it's a very good & well balanced article. She is a very good journalist. Don't forget this article is published in The Atlantic whose readership is predominantly those liberal Democrats who have completely lost their minds over the trans issue. It's a well researched article with lots of references debunking the TRA lies

"The LGBT movement isn’t any one thing; like any other big-tent group, it has always had its internecine disputes. At one end are conservative <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.ph/o/HQrGr/nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/andrew-sullivan-the-next-step-for-gay-pride.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">integrationists like Andrew Sullivan (that’s the term he prefers), and at the other are radical types who, as Confessore puts it, have “sought to deconstruct assumptions about what was normal—to dismantle bourgeois institutions, not seek inclusion in them.” And I would argue that the LGBT movement won its recent victories in part due to the power of the integrationist camp."

I think this is an interesting point in the Singal article.

He is obviously writing about US politics, but I think the same contradictions exist in the UK, specifically within trans activism.

The case law that led to the GRA assumed a trans-sexual who very much did want to be included in bourgeois institutions, but was prevented from doing so because their right to privacy was being breached.

That doesn't represent the situation now, with a very significant number of census respondents describing themselves as trans, but not identifying as either male or female.

However, there doesn't seem to be any acknowldegment of this when e.g. the Good Law Project talk about their various challenges to the SC decision.

Thanks for the link, op. I instantly thought of 2 people I could send this article to - people who who would never read some of my own favourite writers on the subject. Horses for courses, and respect to Helen Lewis for rethinking some of her views in the light of evidence.

Thank you @fromorbit

A useful term I’ve learned from that very good article is pluralistic ignorance, which I’ve not heard before.

It really was bonkers to advance an argument based on sex discrimination that was based on the premise that there is no difference between the sexes when it comes to pubertal changes - so essentially rendering biological sex itself irrelevant.

It is another useful article. The wheels are starting to fall of the clown car. Still a lot more to be done though.

Another good summary of the state of play in the states post the Supreme Court thing this time from Jesse Singal.

Logic Trips Up the Trans Movement
The sex discrimination arguments against a Tennessee law were never going to work.

By Jesse Singal
https://archive.ph/HQrGr

Whether or not people agree with everything Helen Lewis says, she has been facing a back lash for her writing on this issue for over a decade

helenlewis.substack.com/p/the-gender-debate-from-the-gaslighting?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true

This is the thread I saw; the poster is pleased it’s in the Atlantic as he knows many trans issue deniers who read it.

https://x.com/historyboomer/status/1939673173638701107?s=46&t=A2fpFNgDRyXF2d6ye97wEA

also, as he says, zombie facts is a GREAT term.

i also learnt the term pigeon chess this week; zombie facts are a common feature there.

Thanks for the links!

So glad there’s a thread; I stumbled on this on Twitter but couldn’t access the whole article

Absolutely agree with you and @maltravers

We're not the audience for articles like this, as frustrating as that might be. The average regular poster on this board is probably far more knowledgeable than HL!

However, she's writing for an audience who is very unwilling to diverge from the required "correct" liberal opinions and she's giving them a softly, softly handhold towards the off-ramp.

I think it's telling that the NYT has also recently published Andrew Sullivan's piece on gender identity and gender medicine. There does seem to be a shift in what it's possible to publish at least.

That said, I have no idea how that's translating into what your average NYT and Atlantic reading liberal are willing to say out loud to their friends.

Maybe the pool of people still reading old-school style journalism will start to take notice, but I think this is a small group of people. My fear is that people's viewpoints are so influenced by their bubble and get most of their "news" from their social media feeds that articles like this will have little influence. These articles are often media people trying to convince other media people.

This is mostly what I notice in the liberal people I know - the media landscape is very fragmented and people are reading less news or long-form "serious" journalism and so have very limited knowledge of what's really going on. But I can only hope that articles like this have a slowburn effect on the wider culture.

I think she's hoping we'll get back to a place where experiemental, sterilising treatments aren't administered to children because the medical profession returns to functioning according to standards of nonmaleficence, evidence &c. - without having to politicise medical practice and decision making. The politicisation of everything weakens liberal society.

I can understand wanting to just stop medical experimentation on children by any means available but at the same time I still think banning treatments is dire for the medical profession. And, once normalised, could do as much harm as it's now preventing.

Those points are definitely the elephant in the room.

'We can respect people regardless of the way they dress and their mannerisms and may make things unisex in certain scenarios but they remain the sex they were born and single sex provision remains a necessity' is the only really acceptable resolution from a safeguarding point of view.

It's when people like Helen Lewis get around to realising this, is the real question.

Great work by Helen Lewis, as ever. She’s been excellent at getting articles under centre-left noses and picking away at all that forced teaming-induced complacency.