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

[ArabellaScott]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/06/transgender-youth-skrmetti/683350/

Archive

https://archive.ph/qDisi

'Trans-rights activists like to accuse skeptics of youth gender medicine—and publications that dare to report their views—of fomenting a “<a class="break-all" href="https://archive.ph/o/qDisi/theflaw.org/articles/profiting-from-moral-panic/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">moral panic.” But the movement has spent the past decade telling gender-nonconforming children that anyone who tries to restrict access to puberty blockers and hormones is, effectively, trying to kill them. This was false, as Strangio’s answer tacitly conceded. It was also irresponsible.'

https://the-lies-they-tell.org/2022/05/21/review-of-trans-memoir-by-sarah-mcbride/

https://malcolmrichardclark.substack.com/p/the-state-of-sarah-mcbride

This is possible, but I was totally unaware. Obama didn't even support gay marriage until 2012. Obergefell v. Hodges was in 2015, I don't remember anything particularly on the gender issue until that ruling.

I agree.

Even though it's painful to listen to / read the desperation to be seen as even handed, I was astounded by this article.

I can't imagine it being published even a year ago - the author would have been too afraid of a backlash.

Some people aren't ready for all the facts yet. Realising the suicide myth is just that is a real biggie, and will be to her readers.

They both play a part in perpetuating the 'suicide myth', and Strangios took the lead in this case not because of the law but because of her politics.
Her background as a trans female should have been mentioned because she had to own up to the fact that it was all exaggerated, in front of the highest court in the land, which makes her background and her motivations very pertinent.

This by Jennifer Bilek in Tablet Magazine:

"Over the past decade, the Pritzkers of Illinois, who helped put Barack Obama in the White House and include among their number former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, current Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and philanthropist Jennifer Pritzker, appear to have used a family philanthropic apparatus to drive an ideology and practice of disembodiment into our medical, legal, cultural, and educational institutions....."

.....In 2013, around the time gender ideology reached the level of mainstream American culture, Jennifer Pritzker announced a transition to womanhood. Since then, Pritzker has used the Tawani Foundation to help fund various institutions that support the concept of a spectrum of human sexes"

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/billionaire-family-pushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers

"The Pritzker family, particularly Penny Pritzker, played a significant role in funding Barack Obama's political career, especially in his early campaigns.Penny Pritzker was an early and major fundraiser for Obama, starting with his 2004 Senate campaign and continuing through his presidential primary and general election bids in 2008. She helped him secure crucial financial support during challenging periods, like when he was trailing Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary"

https://www.obama.org/about/leadership/penny-pritzker/

https://www.obama.org/presidential-center/

It was always going to be this way though. This only stops if the people who got it publicly wrong have a story they can tell that makes them feel safe to change their minds. HL is giving them a script that can do that. And they won't challange it too hard because they all need it.

TRSOH will smoothly elide the sides until they have executed a 180 turn without ever directly admitting it. TERFs will still be the bad witches, only now our crime will be that we were so hateful and mean, and almost certainly also homophobic, sex essentialist racist right wing loons, that TRSOH very understandably thought trans issues were the same as all our other crazy prejudices.

Yes, it was all the TERFs fault because our unhinged and unreasonable hate of trans people hid the real problems. That TERFs might have been right on this one will be just a coincidence - we weren't right because we actually understood what was going on or did the research that TROSH didn't, or really cared about the damage being done to women and to trans identifying children, it's just that our blind hate of difference and change happened to stumble on an actual issue.

TERFs were right but for the wrong reasons, while TRSOH were ok wrong on this one, but driven by very much the right reasons. And in socially progresssive politics/media/society, where the fundamental (expressed) value is tolerance and respect for difference, it's less damaging to be wrong for the right reasons than right for the wrong ones. Wrong for the right reasons means you are still a good person; better to fail because you are too good for reality than suceed because you are a cynic.

I expect all of this.

But if it gets us to where we need to be which is that society moves past this weird obsession with genderising personalities and then trying to bully away sex to support that belief by medicalising bodies and by denying the significance of sex to women's life experiences, I am ok with it. TERFs are not the feminism they want, but TERFs are the feminism they need.

And behind that, I think many liberal men, especially his age, do see us as "kind of like a guy, except with a woman's body, you know tits and a vagina and stuff, and usually a bit soft and fluffy so not really a guy's guy, maybe not someone you'd trust to have the backbone to have your back in a fight or the grit to think through really hard ideas, but not that different really".

Which is a hell of a lot better than the people who see us as barely sentient sexbots, domestic appliances and baby making machines, but does leave them open to thinking "so if a guy is a bit soft and fluffy, not really a guy's guy, and says he's really a woman and we can give him a woman's body, you know tits and stuff, then he pretty much is a woman and we should respect that".

Which I'm guessing is how he saw McBride. A good guy who wants to be a girl so fair enough, what's the harm in that?

So to some degree, I do think some of it is less "the support humans just need to suck this up, a guy needs it" and more "come on, I have to accept guys in the golf club/bowling team that I'm not 100% keen on, you can accept women in the ladies that you are not 100% keen on."

And behind that, I think many liberal men, especially his age, do see us as "kind of like a guy, except with a woman's body,

And, TBF, lots of women of about his age, especially politicians, women in business and science and intellectuals generally, actively endorse and perpetuate this idea (I’m a little younger, but recognise it in my age group as well).

I'm not sure I'd overthink it. Delaware is this corrupt little Mickey Mouse state, and for decades the way to get ahead in Delaware politics has been to schmooze the Biden family. It would be rational for the young Tim McBride to make his career plans on that basis.

I don't know where Joe was during the important gay struggles, but I'm guessing that in keeping with his blue collar Democrat image, he was mostly absent. But if you know Biden you know he's got a habit of rewriting his own history to make himself the hero he wishes he was, so of course he became super pro-gay in his old age.

I'm not sure that he thought much about McBride's transition beyond "hey, that young guy who works in Beau's office wants to be a girl. That's cool I guess."

And then Beau died, and McBride effectively became part of the family. And, because Biden has always had this very relational approach to politics, if he were still president, and more or less lucid, McBride would be a much bigger deal.

I'm waiting to see if McBride can use his identity to become a rising star of the party, or if the Biden connection is an albatross.

Interview with McBride:

'We have been an exclusionary tent that is shedding imperfect allies, which is great. We’re going to have a really, really miserable self-righteous, morally pure club in the gulag we’ve all been sent off to.'

I'm wondering if McBride reads Mumsnet.

He certainly does care about women's issues, only not in the way that women do:

'I think abortion to some degree had been a wedge issue that was to the Democrats’ advantage'

(Interviewer: 'To destabilize the fundamental gender binary that people understand as operating is touching something very deep in society. Versus treating other people with respect and courtesy and decency and grace is a much easier sell. ')

From this interview, I gather McBride remains entirely intent on winning his arguments. He just intends to be nicer about forcing women to accept his demands.

https://archive.ph/e1KnM

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Thanks for the links!

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.

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

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

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.

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.

"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.

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

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.