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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Who here is "freaking out"?

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.

Nobody is 'freaking out'.

And I'm not criticising her courage nor her beliefs.

It's something in her writing style that always makes me feel like I've had a tiny sip of water when I needed a whole huge glass with ice cubes.

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.

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.

Totally agree with this.

Ultimately it will be the Helen Lewis's rather than the Helen Joyce's who win the echo-chambered-left round.

I am a total Helen Joyce fan girl, btw, so no disrespect to her. She plays a different part - her insight on people's behaviour on this issue is unparalleled.

I think so.

But it will be the Helen Joyce's that allowed her to do it by moving the Overton Window.

I'm thinking now in the somewhat colder light of day, that although I definitely appreciate the need for articles like this by journalists like Helen Lewis, and the gap they fill for either resistant or oblivious liberals, I am noticing the desperate "at last!" thoughts that I have when reading it. And the resentment and anger I'm feeling that we have grasp gratefully at every crumb of sanity and even the merest hint of responsible fact based reporting from journalists, when that's their fucking job, which they should have been doing in the first place. And if enough of them had done their job properly in the early stages of this epic medical ethics failure and not decided that activism could replace journalism, we probably wouldn't have got so far into this disaster.

I am utterly furious with the liberal media and their culpability for the rise of pediatric gender medicine and their complicity in the cancelling of people with even the most moderate objections.Even if their influence has now largely been eclipsed by social media they played a huge role in shaping the culture of silence and cancellations around this topic.

This week I have noticed more twitter posters that used to be more aligned with Helen Lewis and using pronouns etc (when not necessary for the publication guidelines) have changed and are now also saying that they now understand the power of those demanded pronouns and now won’t use them.

It is a step by step process for some.

I've been a big fan for years of the idea that there are many different audiences to reach over the insanity of genderism and there are many different ways to get to them. So I definitely see a valuable role for Helen Lewis here. But at the same time I have no problem with people making temperate criticism of her approach over the past 8 years or so. But I've posted enough so I'll leave things there.

I've understood for a long time that there will be no responsibility taken by these people for what they've done. No reflection. No spologies. As someone upthread said, it'll be all about how the TERFs made the debate too toxic, yadda, yadda. While this sticks in the craw big time, there will be great comfort in the narrative finally shifting all the same.

It's been interesting to watch this play out in real time. Also tragic, but from a more distanced/intellectual curiosity point of view, I've learnt that those ahead of the curve on these issues get no thanks at all for being so. it stacks up - look at how society treats whistle blowers.

It made me think a lot about the Cassandra myth too, but that's another post:

This is a good observation. For Signal the ideological positioning is even more explicit and refined: I should be a center left aligned culture and political analyst in good standing; instead have been vilified as alt-right (e.g. suspended on Twiter and almost kicked of Bluesky) by left wing lunatics, and this is emblematic of what's destroying the Democrats and making it impossible to hold the line against real anti-democratic right wing authoritarianism.

The strength of Signal's particular message comes from his own personal demonstrably moderate positions of compromise across major issues that if anything position him to the left of majority popular opinion polling. To maintain the strength and coherence of this augment, Signal can't take a fully GC position even if he had come around to believing it is correct and even though that would still be a popular moderate position, just a centre right one rather than center left.

IMO It's an unfortunate state of affairs because, inherently, it tends toward cynicism and hypocrisy - I have to hold certain views to maintain the journalistic legitimacy of my reporting niche. It also describes the Atlantic's editorial position writ large. It's part of the identity politics driven narrative that's poisoned all national debate. But it's important to realize that it is a prevailing dynamic far larger than any one person or publication and to be effective as journalists Signal and HL must adhere to its premise.

Interesting article pointing out that Lewis's article is part of a sudden wave of realism and truth telling in US liberal Media. With the admission that Thomas was a cheating man by the Uni of Pennsylvania things really are changing.

Truth-telling time

Well, this is an interesting moment. Three major US media outlets—left-leaning and champions of “gender-affirming care,” by and large—have published solid articles unpicking the dogmas and delusions of extreme trans rights and puberty blockers.

On June 26, The New York Times had the headline “How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized and Lost Its Way.” Meaning, it got badly misdirected by trans-queer ideology. The occasion for the article was the tenth anniversary of a judicial ruling that nationalised same-sex marriage in America, and the author, Andrew Sullivan, was a prime mover in that cause. (The newspaper had prepared the ground for him with a devastating investigative piece the week before by Nicholas Confessore: “How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost”.)

The same day as Mr Sullivan’s guest essay in The Times, The Washington Post published a confessional article by an East Coast liberal philosopher, Alex Byrne, confirming that he was among the anonymous authors of the gender dysphoria review commissioned—and not, it seems, in any way doctored—by the Trump-era US Department of Health and Human Services.

And then, last week, The Atlantic magazine allowed journalist Helen Lewis to utter some uncomfortable home truths in her article “The Liberal Misinformation Bubble About Youth Gender Medicine: How the Left Ended Up Disbelieving the Science.”

https://www.genderclinicnews.com/p/trans-wrongs

Helen Lewis has been writing similar articles in the Atlantic for a few years.

The NYT and Atlantic articles have been posted before, but I don’t think the Washington Post one has - it’s good, worth a read:

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/06/26/hhs-review-anonymous-author/

I needed to find an archived version of the WP article so I thought I'd share the link: https://archive.ph/dZZjx

From the Washington Post:

"The days of medicalizing same-sex attraction are supposed to be shameful history. The review suggests that the old days are back under the new guise of care for “gender-diverse youth.” Speaking for myself, the progressive embrace of this regressive practice is one of the great ironies of the modern age.

The review is a sober examination of what by any standards are drastic medical interventions for physically healthy minors. It deserves to be read by people of all political leanings. Whether its early critics bothered to do so is unclear."

On a slightly different note, Archiv ph has stopped working for me. Is anyone else having the same issue?

I find that the archive collection of sites, .ph, .is, .today, etc, stops working for me from time to time on my laptop. I'm unsure of the cause, sometimes going in via VPN, or not via a VPN, will cure it, other times I have to switch over to my phone. I don't think the cause is my ISP because when I do switch from laptop to phone, with the phone connected over my home wifi, I can find access working on my phone but not on my laptop.