Tea at Trianon: Pediatric Gender Medicine and the Moral Panic Over Suicide

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, July 22, 2022

Pediatric Gender Medicine and the Moral Panic Over Suicide

From Reality's Last Stand:

In a recent exchange between Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Berkeley Law professor Khiara Bridges on the ramifications of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Hawley wanted to know whether the Court’s decision affected women as a class. After initially informing Hawley that not all “cis women” have the “capacity for pregnancy” while some “trans men” and “non-binary” people do, Bridges appeared caught between her loyalties to gender identity ideology and to the long-held idea that abortion is a women’s issue. And so rather than clarify her position, Bridges berated Hawley for his “transphobic” line of questioning, insisting that he and those like him are the reason why “one in five” transgender people attempt suicide.

The affirm-or-suicide mantra has become the central strategy of contemporary transgender activism, and at times it would seem that activists have little else in their rhetorical arsenal. Federal courts have used it to impose new policies on schools under Title IX. When Florida passed the Parental Rights in Education Act—a law that limits classroom discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation to “age appropriate” circumstances and that requires schools to notify parents when their children are being “socially transitioned” to the opposite gender—Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg agreed with his husband Chasten that it would “kill kids.” Florida’s law was in response to, among other things, books like Gender Queer: A Memoir, which contains graphic depictions of oral sex, appearing on school library shelves. The book’s “non-binary” author, Maia Kobabe, countered that her book’s presence in libraries was “life-saving.”

A few weeks later, transgender Assistant Secretary for Health and Human Services Rachel Levine used the same word to justify the federal government’s support for “gender affirming” interventions. Neither Levine nor President Biden, who has given his own imprimatur to the controversial practice, seemed to care much that Europe’s most progressive welfare states have been moving in the opposite direction, placing strict limitations on the use of puberty blockers to treat adolescents in distress presumably because of their “gender.” Scandinavians are not indifferent to teen suicide. Rather, they have examined the evidence behind the affirm-or-suicide claim and have found it wanting.

Despite the unwaveringly confident manner in which these claims are often asserted, there is no good evidence that failing to “affirm” minors in their “gender identity” will increase the likelihood of them committing suicide. As I discuss below, that claim is based on a small handful of deeply flawed studies that, at most, find loose correlations between “affirming” interventions and improved mental health. Some find no reduction of suicide at all, and a new study claims to find that puberty blockers actually increase the risk of suicide.

Not only is the empirical basis for the affirm-or-suicide mantra shoddy at best, but its dissemination is also profoundly irresponsible. Such extreme rhetoric limits our ability to better understand and respond to mental health problems in vulnerable youth, and may itself contribute to the real and documented phenomenon of “suicide contagion.” (Read more.)