How Many Forests Did The New York Times Cut Down To Print Pamela Paul's 'Poor Deluded Trans People' Term Paper?

They simply can't stop.

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

Hey, all! Have you been reading the New York Times editorial page? Because I got to tell you this latest from Pamela Paul on Friday is LOLOBARF. (I am charging Trix extra to cover my vomit removal expenses or maybe just buy a new carpet.)

Now I know you all remember Pamela Paul as the word-wizard who ‘splained to us all that we were using the word “queer” wrong and had to shut our gay and lesbian mouths. She added to that with other delights, like how JK Rowling is the new Salman Rushdie and how a core plank of the Left’s support of trans people is that women don’t count. She is now back with a ZOMG 4,500 word term paper on how trans health care for adolescents is wrong and we have to shut our gender-affirming mouths. Of course me calling somebody overly wordy is like the pot calling the kettle, “Hey, you fucking pot!” But the point isn’t the prolix.

Paul’s is a new and different take about how trans people are mentally ill and don’t know ourselves enough to be trusted with our own health care decisions, and also how doctors want nothing more than to transify the gays and the lesbians and the traumatized, probably for the big SorosBux! Let’s look!

On second thought, it is a very silly piece. Let’s not go there.

Wait, what? You’re expecting more insight than 200 words of, “Well that was laughably wrong and horribly emetic”? FINE. We shall go there.

The first thing to know about this piece is that Julia Serano predicted it last year. When summarizing why our entire public conversation about trans children and health care is devastatingly misguided, she noted that the problem for the “Wait, let’s stop and have a conversation before we do anything serious!” crowd is that all the science is on the side of providing care. So what can you really expect the anti-health care crowd to say? Serano had the answer:

[A]nti-trans activists will say, “But what about ‘shifting sex ratios,’ or ‘ROGD/social contagion,’ or ‘detransition,’ or ’80% desistance,’ or ‘gay conversion/lesbian extinction,’ or ‘autogynephilia,’ or ‘grooming,’ and so on.” Ad nauseam, ad infinitum.

And I am here to say that I spent three hours reading this piece and checking its sources and I can tell you, “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And ROFL Yupadoodledoo!” I will add that she missed a large helping of “Cancel culture!” with a side order of “Both sides!” but Serano was speaking generally and perhaps that’s a specialty of the New York Times. Also, too, ROGD (“Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria”) is not a thing, so you will not see it again in this piece. Not even in quotes. I am replacing it with “tCH” or “the Cooties Hypothesis” because, yeah, that’s the intellectual sophistication of this thing. I would replace autogynephilia with the same thing except we are just not going to talk about that one again.

“That is a great summary, Crip Dyke!” I can hear you saying, “But how can I take your word for it if there are no receipts?” Oh, my sweet summer children. The receipts are all over the internet. Trust me when I say that Serano’s piece above thoroughly debunked Paul’s piece eight months before it was written. If you need your debunking to follow linear time for some reason, you could also go to secret Wonkette girlcrush Erin Reed of Erin In The Morning who did all the journalisms on Paul, and then proceeded to create a list of five other great sources kicking Paul’s Gish Gallop around the internets. (I expect my own august piece of analysis to be excluded because whether we like it or not, Reed gives every indication of having “journalistic ethics” and “standards” and whatnot. Wonkette forgives her because she is awesome.)

Would you like to see the journalisms Reed did? How about this one? When Paul encourages her readers to believe in the Cooties Hypothesis, Reed points out LOLWHOOPS:

Her first source, used to support [the Cooties Hypothesis] is an article by Lisa Littman that has been retracted.

Retracted? That sounds bad. Is it bad when your science is “retracted”?¹

[U]nable to validate the theory, she collaborated with Leor Sapir, who lacks a background in transgender mental health care and works at the anti-trans Manhattan Institute, to broaden the definition of "Rapid" so that even a period of two to four years could be considered rapid.

Okay, but this is some kind of study, presumably peer reviewed. Shouldn’t we trust that?

She then published it in a journal run by Ken Zucker, an anti-trans "expert" whose clinic was closed following accusations of conversion therapy.

Oh, that Canadian guy who accused everyone else of deciding in advance what genders their patients were instead of listening to the actual kids and their problems? That one who was then found to assume that he knew what genders his patients were without listening to the actual kids (and those genders were “that thing we told you to do when you were born that you are not doing good enough”) and got shut down for “first, do the thing we know causes harm”? That guy? Well.

There are many more debunks, and honestly fisking this NYT monstrosity might actually be good fun, but I am not a doctor. I am a trans woman who has been out for decades now who has seen all this shit before and so I will give you what you did not know you needed. The Context.

“The hell you say?” you say. “How can there be context to this when trans kids were just invented in 2018 and no one knows what the hell to do with them yet?”

Good question. Paul would be proud of you.

The context is that Paul is the latest in a long, long list of people who ignore that every improvement in trans health care was fought for by trans people ourselves. Every time we rose up and demanded something that made our lives better, there were people telling us to sit down, shut up, and wait on the science. And every time they did the science, it turned out that what trans people were asking for actually benefited trans folks. Paul herself cites plenty of sources that find current care benefits quality of life in many ways. However, she cites these sources only to quote them saying, “But here’s a question we haven’t answered yet.” To her mind, the existence of unanswered questions is a reason to do nothing, or worse, actively talk trans people out of seeking care. This is neither justified, nor wise, nor harmless.

In early days (and in rare cases into the 1980s), they treated trans women with testosterone and trans men with estrogen in hopes that this would normalize us by providing missing masculinity to trans women and missing femininity to trans men. This made trans people feel terrible, and we rebelled.

In later days they decided that there were “real” trans people and then there were deluded crossdressers with a bad case of the gay. Their solution to this discovery that non-trans people exist and also sometimes violate gender norms was to create gender clinics ruled by experts. Doctors would categorize patients, and based on their opinions patients would be provided hormones, legal documents, and probably surgery. If in their expert opinion you were not trans, you got a support group or nothing. This made trans people feel terrible, and we rebelled.

The gender affirmation Paul complains about throughout her piece isn’t doctors telling patients that they’re trans regardless of their actual experience. We had that already under the Harry Benjamin regime. What has come to be known as the gender affirmation model is when doctors tell a client that they can do whatever and that’s actually fine. Staff affirm us as we are, and they affirm us as we grow and change. What it is is a patient-centered approach. All the bullshit about doctors telling adolescents that they are trans and should transition is entirely the opposite of what gender affirmation care is about.

And guess what? This gender affirmation model that has been shown by the best research to be healthier for trans people than every past strategy that has been tried? It’s what trans people fought for in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s and what doctors finally agreed to in the oughts when they looked at the data and figured out that telling us our genders and what we should do with our bodies didn’t work as well as just listening, asking questions, and helping us figure ourselves out.

Paul claims to want doctors to slow down and listen, but when she does that she’s not only entirely wrong about the state of care, what she’s actually doing — and what you won’t find other places that are focussed on debunking this study or that — is she’s being white Elvis taking credit for rock and roll. I mean, sure, it’s insulting to my intelligence to cite the same researcher three times and call that “several” people opposed to the consensus, but the thing that really gets my gender in a blender is having to read 4,500 words of some cis woman wanting credit for heroically defending trans people against the dictatorial treatment approach that trans people resisted, subverted, and fought against for fifty years before thoroughly defeating it over twenty years ago.

Crip Dyke writes Pervert Justice.

1. I regret to inform you that the first piece was actually retracted as Reed claimed, but was written by two other authors, not Littman. Littman has her own problematic publishing history, but she wasn’t responsible for this paper.