I read that long article. Agree it was anecdotal. And too long. And that sudden gender identity diagnosis sounds very questionable.
However I must admit that I am a little ambivalent. If society was better about gay people and people who cross dress and intersex, I would be happy. And I wonder if there’d be less desire for transitioning.
I don’t like cutting off body parts for dysphoria. There have been a few people who want an arm or leg amputated. And some people support that (I am told). Not me. We need a clear line drawn for amputations. I’m not sure we have that.
Plastic surgery can be amoral, encouraging unnecessary work. I don’t want to use unhappy gay people to make plastic surgeons think they’re heroes.
>> However I must admit that I am a little ambivalent. <<
You can be ambivalent, and that's fine. But as far as public policy is concerned, what role should your ambivalence play in someone else's medical care?
So, prehaps you can explain what you mean by "comprehensive data", and why the current best available evidence regarding gender affirming surgery regret rates falls short of that?
And, as a follow up question, do you think it is reasonable to act in accordance with the best evidence currently available until and/or unless new evidence is presented?
I notice you still haven´t provided any objective standard for assessment - and without this, I cannot see how you can comment regarding the quality at all. Would you care to provide one so we can examine what would be necessary to meet the standard you have in mind?
"The evidence that children change their minds is very strong."
But we were not discussing whether or not children can change their minds - we were discussing regret rates in gender affirming surgery in general (I´d prefer it if you didn´t change the scope of the topic mid-conversation). Respectfully, it seems to me you have yet to provide a satisfactory response regarding your assertion that the best currently available evidence is insufficient to suggest that the regret rate of gender affirming surgery is low.
So, again I would ask:
1) On what basis do you think the best currently available evidence is insufficient to warrant accepting that the regret rate of gender affirming surgery is low.
2) Do you think it is reasonable to act in accordance with the best evidence currently available until and/or unless new evidence is presented?
"If society was better about gay people and people who cross dress and intersex, I would be happy. And I wonder if there’d be less desire for transitioning."
Certainly it would be better if society were better about people in general. But rather than wondering if there would be less desire for transitioning, why not ask trans people what they think?
I think the implication here is that people are transition so as to avoid stigma (e.g. associated with being gay)? If so, it might be worth considering that a) being trans is far more stigmatised than being gay and b) given that many trans people are gay/queer/bisexual post transition, it would seem unlikely on the face of it.
"I don’t like cutting off body parts for dysphoria."
I would fully support your choice not to cut off any of your own body parts for your own dysphoria.
"Plastic surgery can be amoral, encouraging unnecessary work."
It can be, but that does not mean it necessarily is. It may be worth considering the many countries for which gender affirming care is not "for profit" (and so would not have such pressures), as well as people seeking surgery when being tans is actively discouraged.
"I don’t want to use unhappy gay people to make plastic surgeons think they’re heroes. "
Certainly. But what does "unhappy gay people" have to do with "trans people suffering from dysphoria"?
It is worth remembering that the reported regret rate for gender affirming surgery is incredibly low (less, as is often pointed out, than replacement knee surgery). The trans people I know and talk to seem very clear that they are trans, and that gender affirming care (including surgery) benefits them. While I'm sure you don't intend it that way, to assume they are not capable of making these decisions (e.g. because they are confused about what they want, being manipulated by unscrupulous medical people, etc.) is to assume they are not capable of making an informed decision based on what they need (which, and I don’t intend this to be insulting, does seem a little bit infantilising).
Perhaps it is worth considering that bodily autonomy is rather an important principle, and that - like all decisions in life - there are risks and benefits, so society should support people making their own decisions accordingly?
The way I see telling others what they can and can't do, like cut parts off of their own body, is that if I am not willing to take all responsibility for those kinds of decisions, then I should just stay quiet.
Like annoying children in a supermarket: If I am not willing to take responsibility and adopt those kids, then I should respect the ones who do want the responsibility of taking care of those kids and let them make the decisions on how to deal with this tantrum.
If instead of a kid it is a body part that is misbehaving, then unless I want to take responsibility for the owner of that body part, i.e. dominate/enslave them (which I will never want to do), hen I should just let them make their own decisions. Even if they're dumb.
Is that a slippery slope I see? I think you're trying to imply that there is some dividing line after which people are not, and should not be, allowed to make decisions concerning their own bodily autonomy, and using Heaven's Gate as an example of something that is past that line.
But such a line is still arbitrary. It may be an absolute FOR YOU, but that does not and should not make it one FOR ME. And while I am well aware that choosing to 'unalive' oneself, as the social medias insist we say, is a very difficult situation for those who loved that person and would have had them choose differently, you either (imo) agree that people should have full bodily autonomy - or you don't. I may not like or agree with the choice(s) they make - ask me what I think of some of my daughter's tattoos - but while I am fully entitled to have an opinion on the matter, I am NOT entitled to make that opinion binding upon them.
I don't know and won't try to guess what populates the bathing suit regions of various commenters and how that aligns with their own internal perceptions. I will say that it often appears to me that cishet males can get *really bent* over the idea of gender-affirming surgery, as they often consider that to consist solely of the loss of their own most prized bodily part and react accordingly. These same folks also often seem completely unaware of the existence of trans men, but if they do blip their radars, the outcry at the 'loss' of feminine apparatus never seems quite as strident or even mentioned at all. Curious, that. But then, I could be completely wrong - again, this is my own observation, made from many comment sections on various sites that I have observed or participated in.
Anywhoodle, let's just say that if it isn't your body, it isn't your decision; and if you don't like it, you can't have any. Peace.
Heh, I know that feeling :) But I try to remind myself that I need to push through it, because keeping our ideas quiet out of fear of critique doesn't allow us to get better :)
"“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."
This is similar to what I hear from Christian apologists: "Science hasn't answered all the questions, therefore God." It's an argument from ignorance that points to a preferred and predetermined outcome that has nothing to do with the thing being present, or else it's a take on the Nirvana fallacy where one has to answer all the questions in order to be able to make any decisions (in which case we would never be able to make any decisions because we will always have unanswered questions).
If people can claim that trans people are suffering from mental disorder, can't the same be said of any religious people of any religion? After all they are believing in things that aren't evidently true too.
"We said what we wanted, we were told to wait for the science. Then when the science proved we were right, we were told to wait some more." Sounds familiar. Bullying from the privileged class has a depressing sameness.
I'm hoping we can speed run through this era of anti-trans bigotry and finally come to our senses as a nation in the end. Thankfully more and more people are realizing that the REAL "groomers" are in the Christian Church, not in the trans community.
Pam Paul gives two--TWO--sentences to the real source of the problem in this country, which is not "gender affirming care" but the nihilistic and cynical adoption of trans people as a political target by the American right.
They had taken abortion and racism past their sell-by dates, so they hunted for a vulnerable but provocative group. Paul might as well be on their payroll. This is journalistic malpractice.
Trans people in Thailand have been around, openly, since as early as the 14th century. They are generally accepted as who they are (some religious Buddhists, not so much.) I am interacting with trans females everyday.......not a big deal......As a side note, probably the most physically attractive women I have ever met in my 70 years are Kathoey.....
Diogenes chastizes a young man for dressing and behaving like a young woman, basically saying why would you want to be the lesser sex when you were born a man? Not exactly progressive, but it's evidence of trans people from fucking 400 BC.
And early humans often had members switching gender roles. In fact many of the "Two Spirited" were considered special and held sacred ceremonial roles in society.
In fact, archaeologists have traced trans-identified humans through sculpture dating back 5000 years. Among the ancient Sumerians the Gala were priests of the fertility, desire, and warfare goddess Inanna. They spoke a female dialect of Sumerian called Eme-sal and practiced a ritual of transformation that allowed them to present as female and engage in female sexual practices.
So yeah, this goes WAYYYYY back into human history.
They're deadly afraid of penises. So they always want to know exactly how many and where all penises are. Anything other than complete gender conformity means they can never be quite sure whether one of those trouser snakes will jump out and bite them.
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
What Union said, plus there's probably a percentage of them that are just jealous -- they might not recognize it themselves, or describe it that way, but they're jealous that here's someone living according to what makes them happy about themselves, while the bigot has been forcing themselves into whatever box they thought society defined them as belonging in. So they're angry, and they take it out on the person that triggered that anger rather than reflecting on the root cause and being angry about *that*.
Small percentage of the population, the average person has little exposure to or interaction with trans people on a daily or even weekly basis, many only encounter the subject through media (often pornography) and are easily swayed to misguidedly view it as sexual deviancy.
Conservatives need to have a marginalized group to hammer on in order to appeal to their base. If their base didn't have someone to feel superior to, they might start noticing how their politicians and celebrities are abusing them.
Trust me, when trans rights and trans healthcare become mostly normalized, they will move on to a new target. They've already been market testing "the furry menace".
Even I, a small town school teacher, knew about trans people back in the 70s .
In the early days of my internet experience (late 1980s) I was on several usenet groups. Just before trolls took over all my groups, one of the people I interacted with was trans, and had some horrible problems with their surgeries. Sent me a scan of a newspaper article about their experience. Until then the only trans persons I knew of were Christine Jorgensen and Wendy Carlos (knew her first as a solar eclipse photographer).
I'm also very concerned about the high desistance rate of orange juice. I once bought a bottle of orange juice from the store, and after finishing it I did *not* immediately buy another one. That's sometimes called "deorangejuicing," and I'm glad the New York Times has published my 75,000 page opinion column about how deorangejuicers are being silenced by Big Orange Juice. Imagine the horror I went through drinking orange juice and then...stopping.
That's why we need to ban orange juice. Some OJRAs are calling me "orangejuicephobic" just because I stopped drinking orange juice, but I'm going to prove them wrong by spending the remaining 74,499 pages calling orange-juiced-identifieds slurs.
Can we hold off on the orange juice ban for awhile? My orange tree has gone crazy this year so it's orange juice for breakfast, orange juice for dinner, orange marmalade, orange pastries, etc. Good thing I like fresh oranges.
BTW, I can't stand the pasteurized stuff that most stores sell as orange juice. There seems to be a heat-sensitive component in oranges that changes taste when pasteurized. Bleh. Can I form a subset of pasteurizedorangejuicephobics?
NYT. “Biden Surges to Massive Win in South Carolina. Some Dems remain skeptical because of Biden’s lack of popularity with 3% of voters. What non-voters at Chicken Shack Diner are saying.
BTW I've been writing about the history of transgender people in society transgender civil rights issue on my Substack "WokeAF". https://wokeaf.substack.com/
For example did you know that the Nazis set gender affirming care back literally centuries when they burned a big old pile of gender care books from the world's first gender care clinic, located in Berlin? The image of those burning books became so famous that it's used as the typical "Nazi Book Burning" photo that everyone is familiar with.
So all this hue and cry from bigots and transphobes about this "sudden" onset of trans youth is all just a big old pile of bull and shit. Trans people have been around literally since the dawn of humanity and many cultures recognized gender on a continuum rather than a binary, as our moronic right wing insists on.
The way we fight this is with KNOWLEDGE and INFORMATION to counter the lies and disinformation being spread by these heteronormative cisgender jackasses that insist sex and gender are the same thing when they are most certainly not.
NYT can never fail, it can only be failed
NYT saw the pleas to stop demonizing trans people with shitty op-ed pieces and decided to double down
This is the kind of story that makes me happy that I cancelled my NYT subscription.
Heck, this is the kind of story that makes me glad that I never subscribed to the fucking 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘕𝘦𝘸 𝘠𝘰𝘳𝘬 𝘛𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘴.
I read that long article. Agree it was anecdotal. And too long. And that sudden gender identity diagnosis sounds very questionable.
However I must admit that I am a little ambivalent. If society was better about gay people and people who cross dress and intersex, I would be happy. And I wonder if there’d be less desire for transitioning.
I don’t like cutting off body parts for dysphoria. There have been a few people who want an arm or leg amputated. And some people support that (I am told). Not me. We need a clear line drawn for amputations. I’m not sure we have that.
Plastic surgery can be amoral, encouraging unnecessary work. I don’t want to use unhappy gay people to make plastic surgeons think they’re heroes.
I hope I don’t get too much hate in the replies.
>> However I must admit that I am a little ambivalent. <<
You can be ambivalent, and that's fine. But as far as public policy is concerned, what role should your ambivalence play in someone else's medical care?
You won't from me. There are fads in sex as in everything else.
When a trans person says, I regret my decision, that's not an anecdote.
That's the very definition of an anecdote. What point were you trying to make?
and when a trans person says "I do not regret my decision"....?
Another datum. Crip Dyke's position that the statistics are dispositive is weak, since there are no comprehensive data.
And the plural of datum is data.
So, prehaps you can explain what you mean by "comprehensive data", and why the current best available evidence regarding gender affirming surgery regret rates falls short of that?
And, as a follow up question, do you think it is reasonable to act in accordance with the best evidence currently available until and/or unless new evidence is presented?
Depends on the quality of the evidence. The evidence that children change their minds is very strong.
"Depends on the quality of the evidence."
I notice you still haven´t provided any objective standard for assessment - and without this, I cannot see how you can comment regarding the quality at all. Would you care to provide one so we can examine what would be necessary to meet the standard you have in mind?
"The evidence that children change their minds is very strong."
But we were not discussing whether or not children can change their minds - we were discussing regret rates in gender affirming surgery in general (I´d prefer it if you didn´t change the scope of the topic mid-conversation). Respectfully, it seems to me you have yet to provide a satisfactory response regarding your assertion that the best currently available evidence is insufficient to suggest that the regret rate of gender affirming surgery is low.
So, again I would ask:
1) On what basis do you think the best currently available evidence is insufficient to warrant accepting that the regret rate of gender affirming surgery is low.
2) Do you think it is reasonable to act in accordance with the best evidence currently available until and/or unless new evidence is presented?
"If society was better about gay people and people who cross dress and intersex, I would be happy. And I wonder if there’d be less desire for transitioning."
Certainly it would be better if society were better about people in general. But rather than wondering if there would be less desire for transitioning, why not ask trans people what they think?
I think the implication here is that people are transition so as to avoid stigma (e.g. associated with being gay)? If so, it might be worth considering that a) being trans is far more stigmatised than being gay and b) given that many trans people are gay/queer/bisexual post transition, it would seem unlikely on the face of it.
"I don’t like cutting off body parts for dysphoria."
I would fully support your choice not to cut off any of your own body parts for your own dysphoria.
"Plastic surgery can be amoral, encouraging unnecessary work."
It can be, but that does not mean it necessarily is. It may be worth considering the many countries for which gender affirming care is not "for profit" (and so would not have such pressures), as well as people seeking surgery when being tans is actively discouraged.
"I don’t want to use unhappy gay people to make plastic surgeons think they’re heroes. "
Certainly. But what does "unhappy gay people" have to do with "trans people suffering from dysphoria"?
It is worth remembering that the reported regret rate for gender affirming surgery is incredibly low (less, as is often pointed out, than replacement knee surgery). The trans people I know and talk to seem very clear that they are trans, and that gender affirming care (including surgery) benefits them. While I'm sure you don't intend it that way, to assume they are not capable of making these decisions (e.g. because they are confused about what they want, being manipulated by unscrupulous medical people, etc.) is to assume they are not capable of making an informed decision based on what they need (which, and I don’t intend this to be insulting, does seem a little bit infantilising).
Perhaps it is worth considering that bodily autonomy is rather an important principle, and that - like all decisions in life - there are risks and benefits, so society should support people making their own decisions accordingly?
Just a thought.
The way I see telling others what they can and can't do, like cut parts off of their own body, is that if I am not willing to take all responsibility for those kinds of decisions, then I should just stay quiet.
Like annoying children in a supermarket: If I am not willing to take responsibility and adopt those kids, then I should respect the ones who do want the responsibility of taking care of those kids and let them make the decisions on how to deal with this tantrum.
If instead of a kid it is a body part that is misbehaving, then unless I want to take responsibility for the owner of that body part, i.e. dominate/enslave them (which I will never want to do), hen I should just let them make their own decisions. Even if they're dumb.
Oh, really? Heaven's Gate.
Is that a slippery slope I see? I think you're trying to imply that there is some dividing line after which people are not, and should not be, allowed to make decisions concerning their own bodily autonomy, and using Heaven's Gate as an example of something that is past that line.
But such a line is still arbitrary. It may be an absolute FOR YOU, but that does not and should not make it one FOR ME. And while I am well aware that choosing to 'unalive' oneself, as the social medias insist we say, is a very difficult situation for those who loved that person and would have had them choose differently, you either (imo) agree that people should have full bodily autonomy - or you don't. I may not like or agree with the choice(s) they make - ask me what I think of some of my daughter's tattoos - but while I am fully entitled to have an opinion on the matter, I am NOT entitled to make that opinion binding upon them.
I don't know and won't try to guess what populates the bathing suit regions of various commenters and how that aligns with their own internal perceptions. I will say that it often appears to me that cishet males can get *really bent* over the idea of gender-affirming surgery, as they often consider that to consist solely of the loss of their own most prized bodily part and react accordingly. These same folks also often seem completely unaware of the existence of trans men, but if they do blip their radars, the outcry at the 'loss' of feminine apparatus never seems quite as strident or even mentioned at all. Curious, that. But then, I could be completely wrong - again, this is my own observation, made from many comment sections on various sites that I have observed or participated in.
Anywhoodle, let's just say that if it isn't your body, it isn't your decision; and if you don't like it, you can't have any. Peace.
"while I am fully entitled to have an opinion on the matter, I am NOT entitled to make that opinion binding upon them."
Well said!
Thank you. After tossing this screed off over lunch yesterday I kinda forgot about it and then was cringing when opening my notifications today.
Heh, I know that feeling :) But I try to remind myself that I need to push through it, because keeping our ideas quiet out of fear of critique doesn't allow us to get better :)
"“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."
This is similar to what I hear from Christian apologists: "Science hasn't answered all the questions, therefore God." It's an argument from ignorance that points to a preferred and predetermined outcome that has nothing to do with the thing being present, or else it's a take on the Nirvana fallacy where one has to answer all the questions in order to be able to make any decisions (in which case we would never be able to make any decisions because we will always have unanswered questions).
If people can claim that trans people are suffering from mental disorder, can't the same be said of any religious people of any religion? After all they are believing in things that aren't evidently true too.
Excellent piece (and not prolix; you made every word count!). Just catching up on my reading this/last week, thanks.
These are the people "still asking questions" about whether the earth is round. Intelligent people ask questions but the reverse is not implied.
"We said what we wanted, we were told to wait for the science. Then when the science proved we were right, we were told to wait some more." Sounds familiar. Bullying from the privileged class has a depressing sameness.
The search for “more and perfect science” fucked up a lot of things, including addressing climate change. It’s an excuse to do nothing.
I'm hoping we can speed run through this era of anti-trans bigotry and finally come to our senses as a nation in the end. Thankfully more and more people are realizing that the REAL "groomers" are in the Christian Church, not in the trans community.
Pam Paul gives two--TWO--sentences to the real source of the problem in this country, which is not "gender affirming care" but the nihilistic and cynical adoption of trans people as a political target by the American right.
They had taken abortion and racism past their sell-by dates, so they hunted for a vulnerable but provocative group. Paul might as well be on their payroll. This is journalistic malpractice.
>> "the nihilistic and cynical adoption of trans people as a political target by the American right." <<
Well, given that's what she's doing, she can hardly complain about it.
Thank you for your service, both the vomiting and the fighting.
Trans people in Thailand have been around, openly, since as early as the 14th century. They are generally accepted as who they are (some religious Buddhists, not so much.) I am interacting with trans females everyday.......not a big deal......As a side note, probably the most physically attractive women I have ever met in my 70 years are Kathoey.....
Diogenes chastizes a young man for dressing and behaving like a young woman, basically saying why would you want to be the lesser sex when you were born a man? Not exactly progressive, but it's evidence of trans people from fucking 400 BC.
And early humans often had members switching gender roles. In fact many of the "Two Spirited" were considered special and held sacred ceremonial roles in society.
In fact, archaeologists have traced trans-identified humans through sculpture dating back 5000 years. Among the ancient Sumerians the Gala were priests of the fertility, desire, and warfare goddess Inanna. They spoke a female dialect of Sumerian called Eme-sal and practiced a ritual of transformation that allowed them to present as female and engage in female sexual practices.
So yeah, this goes WAYYYYY back into human history.
https://wokeaf.substack.com/p/transgender-history-that-was-never
I just don't understand why all these bigots are so obsessed about trans people.
They're deadly afraid of penises. So they always want to know exactly how many and where all penises are. Anything other than complete gender conformity means they can never be quite sure whether one of those trouser snakes will jump out and bite them.
lololololol but depressing...
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
What Union said, plus there's probably a percentage of them that are just jealous -- they might not recognize it themselves, or describe it that way, but they're jealous that here's someone living according to what makes them happy about themselves, while the bigot has been forcing themselves into whatever box they thought society defined them as belonging in. So they're angry, and they take it out on the person that triggered that anger rather than reflecting on the root cause and being angry about *that*.
Small percentage of the population, the average person has little exposure to or interaction with trans people on a daily or even weekly basis, many only encounter the subject through media (often pornography) and are easily swayed to misguidedly view it as sexual deviancy.
Conservatives need to have a marginalized group to hammer on in order to appeal to their base. If their base didn't have someone to feel superior to, they might start noticing how their politicians and celebrities are abusing them.
Trust me, when trans rights and trans healthcare become mostly normalized, they will move on to a new target. They've already been market testing "the furry menace".
Which includes a lot of queer people,one notes.
Even I, a small town school teacher, knew about trans people back in the 70s .
In the early days of my internet experience (late 1980s) I was on several usenet groups. Just before trolls took over all my groups, one of the people I interacted with was trans, and had some horrible problems with their surgeries. Sent me a scan of a newspaper article about their experience. Until then the only trans persons I knew of were Christine Jorgensen and Wendy Carlos (knew her first as a solar eclipse photographer).
I'm always glad to see a Crip Dyke article!
I'm also very concerned about the high desistance rate of orange juice. I once bought a bottle of orange juice from the store, and after finishing it I did *not* immediately buy another one. That's sometimes called "deorangejuicing," and I'm glad the New York Times has published my 75,000 page opinion column about how deorangejuicers are being silenced by Big Orange Juice. Imagine the horror I went through drinking orange juice and then...stopping.
That's why we need to ban orange juice. Some OJRAs are calling me "orangejuicephobic" just because I stopped drinking orange juice, but I'm going to prove them wrong by spending the remaining 74,499 pages calling orange-juiced-identifieds slurs.
Sadly it makes the exact same amount of sense as these people's bullshit.
Can we hold off on the orange juice ban for awhile? My orange tree has gone crazy this year so it's orange juice for breakfast, orange juice for dinner, orange marmalade, orange pastries, etc. Good thing I like fresh oranges.
BTW, I can't stand the pasteurized stuff that most stores sell as orange juice. There seems to be a heat-sensitive component in oranges that changes taste when pasteurized. Bleh. Can I form a subset of pasteurizedorangejuicephobics?
I was devastated by the shrinkflation of OJ cartons and bottles, from a Constitutionally guaranteed 64 Oz (none of this metric BS) to an unholy 59 Oz.
Metric is fine if you go from 64 Oz to 2 litres (67.6 Oz)
NYT. “Biden Surges to Massive Win in South Carolina. Some Dems remain skeptical because of Biden’s lack of popularity with 3% of voters. What non-voters at Chicken Shack Diner are saying.
[WARNING: SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION]
BTW I've been writing about the history of transgender people in society transgender civil rights issue on my Substack "WokeAF". https://wokeaf.substack.com/
For example did you know that the Nazis set gender affirming care back literally centuries when they burned a big old pile of gender care books from the world's first gender care clinic, located in Berlin? The image of those burning books became so famous that it's used as the typical "Nazi Book Burning" photo that everyone is familiar with.
So all this hue and cry from bigots and transphobes about this "sudden" onset of trans youth is all just a big old pile of bull and shit. Trans people have been around literally since the dawn of humanity and many cultures recognized gender on a continuum rather than a binary, as our moronic right wing insists on.
The way we fight this is with KNOWLEDGE and INFORMATION to counter the lies and disinformation being spread by these heteronormative cisgender jackasses that insist sex and gender are the same thing when they are most certainly not.