I keep hearing from anti-trans activists that this major review of the literature on the efficacy of transgender treatments, the Cass Report, confirms their position, which I don’t understand. What I’ve read of the report isn’t very overwhelming at all. Rather than wading into almost 400 pages of text, though, I thought this succinct summary of the whole thing was very good.

A systematic review collects all the published research in an area and ranks the research based on how likely it is to be reliable. The weakest form of evidence are case reports, where a doctor formally writes up an anecdote about a patient. The strongest form of evidence are randomized controlled trials where patients are randomly assigned to some type of medication or intervention, or to no intervention, or to a placebo, and the groups are compared to see how an intervention compares to alternatives/no treatment/placebo. Systematic reviews of several interventions for trans youth were undertaken by the University of York including puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, social transition, and psychosocial support measures.

The results of each of the systematic reviews was to characterize the overall evidence as weak, which was the Report’s most significant finding and has been widely reported. When looking more granularly at the York papers, a pattern appears of some papers showing a psychological benefit of the intervention, a smaller number showing no change positive or negative, and no papers showing any psychological harm. For example, in the systematic review of the evidence on puberty blockers, several included studies suggested psychological benefits to treatment in a range of areas, while a smaller number of studies found no significant impact. This was summarized in both the papers and the Report as “weak evidence” but could also be accurately described as “weak evidence (in favor of treatment).”

That the evidence was weak is not an indictment of the report — by their nature, case reports are necessarily weak. The alternative is to do controlled experimentation on human children, which is going to be even more problematic! The weak evidence is what we have, and that evidence says that, for the sake of the children, we should be treating kids.

The report itself actively endorses the use of puberty blockers, as well as other treatments, in addition to further studies of their effects. However, it takes a very conservative position on when young people should be allowed to take them, and even discouraged social transitioning in young children.

A full programme of research should be established to look at the characteristics, interventions and outcomes of every young person presenting to the NHS gender services.
The puberty blocker trial previously announced by NHS England should be part of a programme of research which also evaluates outcomes of psychosocial interventions and masculinising/ feminising hormones.

So I don’t get it. Why are the trans haters treating this as a vindication of their position? What I’m seeing is a cautious, conservative review that is compelled by the evidence to give cautious, conservative recommendations in favor of some degree of treatment, and I don’t care how much Helen Lewis and The Atlantic strain to twist it into a condemnation of American policy.

As usual, expect the issue to continue to be unresolved as ideology is used to torment trans kids further.

Oh, look. Another bogus claim by an extremist conservative.

The point of sex is to create children — this is natural, normal, and good.

No, that is one of the purposes of sex. One of many. Do he and his wife only have sex when they intend to have children?

Masturbation is perfectly natural. So is every sex act I can imagine. I’d like to know which ones are unnatural or supernatural…list them for us, Chris. I’m sure it would be educational.

I don’t have procreative sex. Am I not normal? Is everyone who has sex after menopause or after sterilization abnormal? What about people who are naturally sterile?

If Rufo’s attitude is “good,” how do we account for all the oppressive, puritanical harm done to people in its name?

His whole schtick isn’t about natural, normal, or good. It’s all about control and punishing people who don’t follow his sick, sad ideology.

I did not know that Chaya Raichik, the hatemonger behind Libs of TikTok, had an official position in Oklahoma schools. But she did. She was on the Oklahoma Department of Education’s Library Media Advisory Committee, placed there by the far-right extremist, Ryan Walters, who runs things in that state, unfortunately.

Raichik specifically targeted one school district for her hate campaign.

One of these instances was at the Owasso School District (just outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma). In 2022, Chaya Raichik targeted an Owasso teacher for speaking out in support of LGBTQ+ students who lacked acceptance from their parents. Raichik’s post was shared thousands of times on social media and resulted in the teacher getting condemned and harassed until they resigned. The posts Raichik made about the teacher were later deleted, but have been archived. It’s unclear what prompted the deletion of the posts by Raichik. We know Raichik’s Libs of TikTok posts have contributed to a culture of intolerance against LGBTQ+ youth in schools, and now this hate may be manifesting beyond mere threats.

She deleted a bunch of those posts? Why? Has she learned some shame?

No, that’s not it.

This month, a non-binary 16-year-old student at Owasso High School was brutally murdered in the girl’s restroom. According to local news outlets and family, Nex Benedict was beaten by three older female students. The mother of Benedict’s best friend told KJRH News that “one of the girls was pretty much repeatedly beating [Benedict’s] head across the floor.” Reports say Benedict was unable to take themselves to the nurse’s office after a teacher finally intervened in the brutal assault. For reasons that remain unclear, Owasso High School refused to call an ambulance for 16-year-old Nex Benedict, who died from their injuries in the hospital the next day. A motive for this killing has not been shared by law enforcement, but we know that schools in Oklahoma have been specifically pushing violent eliminationist rhetoric against transgender and non-binary youth— a fact exemplified by the state’s hiring of Chaya Raichik following her incitements of terror against the state’s schools over LGBTQ+ rights.

This is not a murder mystery, even though the MSN headline is “16-year-old Owasso student who died unexpectedly was laid to rest”. Died unexpectedly? They were brutally beaten to the point they couldn’t walk, and died in the hospital the next day. They were killed by those three students, who had been incited to the act by Chaya Raichik. That’s 4 people, at least, who need to be arrested for manslaughter, for a start.

Maybe Ryan Walters should be fired, too.

CripDyke has a thoughtful post on this crime. Go read that.

We can make all kinds of arguments about what defines or doesn’t define a sex, but it really doesn’t matter — especially when it’s from a stock vanilla cishet person like Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, or me. What we should be discussing is the lived experience of trans people who are better acquainted with the actual life in a trans body.

So they did.

The report, called the 2022 US Trans Survey, presents an early look at findings from a survey of more than 92,000 people who identify as binary or nonbinary transgender adults. It is the first such report since the NCTE produced a survey of more than 28,000 individuals in 2015. Individuals were asked a variety of more than 600 possible questions. No respondent received all questions.

Importantly, the transgender survey is large but is not random. Although surveyors weighted the responses to try to account for biases, people who took the survey might still be unrepresentative of transgender people living in the US as a whole.

The report found that 94% of transgender individuals who live at least part of the time in a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth – in other words, who “transitioned” – were either “a lot” (79%) or “a little more satisfied” (15%) with their lives. Nearly 98% of respondents were receiving some kind of hormone replacement therapy, which made them “a lot” (84%) or “a little” (14%) more satisfied with their lives.

I don’t think the report will convince the opposition to shut the fuck up, unfortunately. I predict two responses. One, they’ll focus on the 6% (although it’s actually less than 1% who were unhappy after hormone treatments or surgery) and shriek about their ruined lives while ignoring the majority of successful outcomes, and not bothering to ask what went wrong in that minority. Two, they’ll point to the study as proof that they were right all along, see how seductive the trans lifestyle is? I remember how the anti-gay people moaned about how appealing the self-indulgent, self-gratifying, sybaritic gay life was, and how we must ban all gay references to keep our children from falling into the trap. This is the same thing. They’re going to call this study trans propaganda and ignore the actual data.

The one thing I can say as a stock vanilla cishet person is that no, I’m not going to suddenly shed all my sexual preferences and change my interests because I see somebody else having a good time. I’m going to be happy for them. What’s the matter with those people who’d rather others were unhappy?

It looks like it’s Jerry Coyne. Those two need to be separated — every time they get together they start hooting and jumping on the furniture and throwing unmentionables out the window.

The New Zealand Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor is so ignorant of science that she thinks sex isn’t binary. She may be right about “gender” (whatever that might be) but sex is binary, defined by gamete size. A government’s Chief Scientific Advisor should advise on science, not on the latest fashionable opinion of Generation TikTok.

In case you’re curious to know what outrageous insanity the science advisor, Juliet Gerrard, said, it’s this: “Sex and gender are different but related things. Neither is binary. For an accessible introduction to why sex isn’t binary, Wikipedia is not a bad place to start.”

Are you reeling in shock? No? Neither am I. That’s actually an eminently sensible statement, since sex and gender are different but related, and neither is binary. This is the kind of thing biology professors all around the world, at least those who aren’t poisoned by an ideological freak-out, are saying all the time. That’s a mundane, normal, healthy expression of our current understanding of the science of sex. Calm down, guys.

I have a couple of other objections to Dawkins’ statement.

1. Pretending to not know what gender is is childish and stupid, well beneath him. Yeah, Richard, you can look up “gender”. It’s what we’d expect of a serious scholar.

2. Biologists do not define sex by gamete size. Gamete size is one of the many consequences of sexual development, and not the only one.

3. Come on, complaining about “Generation TikTok”? Do you also shake your cane at those kids on your lawn? Face it, we’re older than most people, the young’uns will be taking over the world soon enough. Get used to it.

You know, those two olds are making the rest of us look foolish. If you can’t keep up, Grandpa, go back to gumming your pablum while watching Wheel of Fortune. Some of us still have brains that are relatively uncalcified and can enjoy watching the world progress around us.

Did you know that Richard Dawkins began his career as an ethologist? He got his Ph.D. studying animal behavior under Niko Tinbergen. If you’re an ethologist, you might study things like courtship behavior and parental investment and feeding strategies etc., etc., etc. Dawkins studied how animals make choices.

That was in 1966. Apparently he’s forgotten all that ever since.

Sex is not defined by chromosomes, nor by anatomy, nor by psychology or sociology, nor by personal inclination, nor by “assignment at birth”, but by gamete size. It happens to be embryologically DETERMINED by chromosomes in mammals and (in the opposite direction) birds, by temperature in some reptiles, by social factors in some fish. But it is universally DEFINED by the binary distinction between sperms and eggs.
You may argue about “gender” if you wish (biologists have better things to do) but sex is a true binary, one of rather few in biology.

Somehow, an awful lot of biologists study sexual behavior — like lekking, or sexual displays, or fidelity, and on and on — that don’t necessarily involve sperm collection or measuring ovulation or that kind of thing. It is absurd to insist that only gametes define sex. I recognize spider sexes by the morphology of their palps, and by their differences in behavior, not gametes. I see the birds flying outside my window, and I discriminate sexes by color, primarily. To say that biologists have better things to do than study gender is ridiculous. Every biologist who looks at the plumage of birds or watches the courtship of spiders is studying a phenomenon far removed from basic gamete formation yet is an indispensable, unavoidable, intrinsic consequence of sex in that species…and the animal isn’t getting a semen count before engaging in it.

This is true of human biology, too. People don’t have to check their gonads before engaging in all kinds of sexual behaviors; they would rather not have to worry about the sex police telling them what they can and can’t do, and generally they disregard the prudes in private anyway. You can be a feminine man or a masculine woman, or any shade in between or beyond, and gametes don’t come into play at all, except in reproduction. Reproduction is not the sole function of sex.

Dawkins is just being an extreme reductionist to the point he’s making himself and his position look silly. Go ahead, all you reactionary biologists, rant about how there can be only two true sexes because people have some cells that are almost never seen in public, in defiance of all the other valid signals they openly display. Better biologists will go on recognizing all the factors that define sex without your self-imposed, narrow-minded blinders.

P.S. Dawkins is not an embryologist. No, sex isn’t solely determined by chromosomes embryologically, but by a battery of influences that shape the embryo, including a few genes on some chromosomes. He is an evolutionary biologist, and he doesn’t recognize that the fluidity of sex determination mechanisms suggests that maybe biology isn’t as rigid as he thinks?