When I started this Substack, it made intuitive sense to pretend I was writing a book, chapter by chapter. Three posts in, a fellow Substacker with a successful book publishing career offered that same advice to us novices, so I’ve stuck with it.
In what would constitute Book One, the first three ‘chapters’ of TransMuted concern the social pressures against interrogating trans ideology in the first place. Those pressures created a speech-limiting atmosphere in which a seasoned, famous television journalist with an audience in the millions can’t or won’t report major developments in a highly consequential healthcare story that impacts many of his own viewers. Instead, he offloads the reporting opportunity to right-wing media — or, if you prefer, to some mom with an Etsy shop and a Substack.
The figurative ‘Book Two’ begins to pull at various threads that help explain how the situation became so dire, beginning with the ‘chain of trust’ that is foundational to medicine but also, when you think about it, to most other areas of human endeavor. It’s the best explanation for how a barrage of low-quality studies came to assume the mantle of ‘settled science’ in gender medicine. For more detail, you can read this post on WPATH’s Standards of Care, this post on the Dutch Studies, and this post on the 2015 Transgender Survey.
In my one actually-published book chapter, I touched on social media and online porn; two threads implicated in the explosion of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD), both of which need more academic study and attention.
A post that’s a personal favorite of mine recounts the seemingly made-for-cable drama of a reputable scholar who was bullied, threatened and unambiguously cancelled (twice, now) by certain deranged and powerful members of the peculiar tribe —autogynephiles— about which he’d studied and written with not just tolerance but compassion in the book whose cancellation foreshadowed the still-metastacizing social cancer that brings us together, twenty years on.
Two illuminating facts surfaced from that meticulously documented drama:
Autogynephilic, heterosexual men have been funding and orchestrating the campaign to deny biological sex from the beginning; and
The notion of widespread ‘gender dysphoria,’ whether the childhood or adult kind, is a tactical construct that’s been cunningly exploited in order to sanitize the whole project and divert attention from fact #1.
Next up:
What interests me now is the widening gulf between the status quo in North America versus those European countries where political polarization hasn’t infected every brain cell and where health care is less affected by profit and loss calculations than it is here.
For the articles that will serve as ‘Book Three,’ I plan to explore the array of perverse incentives that keep the trans train running in the U.S. via ‘institutional capture.’ This line of inquiry is less straightforward than the threads mentioned above, in the same way proving ‘intent’ is tricky for prosecutors: you can’t easily demonstrate bad intentions. Luckily, the stakes are low here in the court of TransMuted: we’re just gathering intel to scrutinize for posterity. Sentencing will come later, and (alas) in real court.
The best source of research on institutional capture is, for me, Leor Sapir, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute who studies the constituent drivers of what we take to be public policy in America, in all their intentionally-veiled complexity. If we can apprehend the deeply flawed science that ‘identifies’ as a reliable evidence base for medical experiments on healthy children, so too can we locate the quiet, ‘sub rosa’ legal maneuvers influencing rules and policies that ‘identify’ as settled law without having to clear any of the hurdles we might assume are in place. Dr. Sapir has mapped many of the vulnerabilities that pervade our ad hoc, decentralized administrative power structures, and he’s shown how those vulnerabilities can be, and are, routinely manipulated by ideologues, profiteers, and the ubiquitous, well-meaning but mal-informed members of Team Kindness who help to make possible all things ‘trans.’
I’ll spend the next few weeks trying to distill some of that information, using recorded interviews, presentations and articles published by Leor Sapir. For now I will leave you with a related idea from a book review I wrote for Wesley Yang on “When Kids Say They’re Trans.” The excerpt below is meant to be entertaining, but it also makes an important point that will be useful going forward:
Consider all the money and machinery, the livelihoods and political commitments invested in the full flourishing of pediatric ‘sex-change’ medicine. It is a juggernaut with no pre-existing institutional opponent: a Big Oil with no Sierra Club, a Big Tobacco with no Lung Association.
WPATH is a sort of malign incarnation of the Ministry of Silly Walks, the classic Monty Python sketch. Just as no one thought there needed to be a Ministry of Regular Walks, so it goes with human sexual dimorphism. These days even material reality needs a good lobbyist.
Enjoy!
The concept of “Team Kindness” has really stuck with me. That’s what I think my daughter’s pediatrician and my other daughter’s psychologist (yes, both my 13 and now 16 yo daughters have been infected by the contagion) believed and thought of themselves (as kind). The pediatrician and the psychologist were both let go and told why.
Awesome possum 👍🙂. And love your "TransMuted", not least because it suggests the maybe more apt "trans-mogrified". 😉🙂
Will have to spend a bit more time later looking into the specifics of your post, and what you've linked to. But since you've frequently referred to WPATH -- which should have a wooden stake driven through the heart of it, you might have some interest in Genspect's recent kick at that kitty, and in my response to it:
https://stellaomalley.substack.com/p/why-genspect-doesnt-want-to-replace/comment/46754357
https://substack.com/profile/21792752-steersman/note/c-46754356
Of particular note -- in my Note -- is a couple of pictures which I think, or at least hope, get to the heart of the matter.
But pleased -- as punch 🙂 -- to see that your quote of your earlier book review on Yang's Substack provides some new scare quotes around "sex-change". Likewise pleased to see that Eva Kurilova is following suit:
https://www.evakurilova.com/p/lets-talk-about-it-guardrails-for
No doubt we CAN redefine the sexes to make them just a matter of genitalia -- maybe "Scientific" American and Nature can come out fully endorsing the Kindergarten Cop definitions: boys have penises and girls have vaginas. "Change your genitalia, change your sex! Act now! Offer ends soon!" 🙄
But it ain't biology, little more than rank Lysenkoism, in fact. And it would be little more than peddling a little lie to grease the skids for bigger and more odious ones, to obscure the fact that, as Genspect puts it, "childhood medical transition is diabolical". Amen to that.