Scientific American Looks at Misinformation Being Used Against Transgender People

In Great Britain recently, they dropped the Cass Report, an extensive long-term study that found that the treatment gender-confused kids had received was built on “shaky foundations” and found “no good evidence to support the global clinical practice of prescribing hormones to under-18s to pause puberty or transition to the opposite sex.” In other words, prescribing puberty blockers for a 12-year-old after a one-hour consultation wasn’t backed by science.

In steps Scientific American to assure us that anti-trans people are using disinformation and fabricated research to argue against “gender-affirming care” for minors.

So is Scientific American supporting the idea that the doctor makes a guess as to the baby’s sex and sometimes gets it wrong? Because that’s oversimplifying scientific knowledge by a wide margin.

So, how many genders are there?

Many of the arguments against trans rights center on the idea that transness itself is not legitimate—that there are just two sexes, period. You describe this idea as “sex essentialism.” Can you explain that term, and talk about how it shapes the debate

Simón(e) Sun: Essentialism is the idea that you can take any phenomenon that is complex and distill it down to a particular set of traits. In the case of sex essentialism, the idea is that you can sufficiently describe sex by a few particular characteristics. In this debate, it used to be chromosomes, now it’s gametes (egg and sperm cells). The target is always moving, because if you want to make something binary, then you need to find the most binary characteristic. Today, sex essentialism boils all of sex down to the gametes that a person produces. Then you draw a line from gametes to all of these other characteristics—to sex roles, even to the personality of an entire individual. But biology is just not that simple. The sex essentialist perspective is completely wrong about the biology of how sex characteristics arise.

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OK, then. One scientist says that biology is just not that simple.

Scientific American kicks off the piece by noting that “In 2023 alone, more than 500 anti-trans bills were proposed or adopted in nearly every state in the United States, targeting everything from drag performances to gender-affirming medical care to school inclusion policies for trans people.”

Drag performances for children and gender-affirming medical care for children. Life-altering drugs and surgeries for kids is the only appropriate stance.

Oh no, all of the anti-trans erasure. That is why the president had trans women flashing their fake books on the White House lawn and rewrote Title IX to change “sex” to “gender identity” so biological teen boys can compete on girls’ teams and then shower with them afterward. We don’t need a Trans Day of Visibility — a minuscule percentage of people are dictating federal policy now.

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