[via r/TomLehrer]

Anyway, The Tranquil Domain has just put out a 15 minute interview with Jay and Paul about the history of the Geeba / Sligh deck. Enjoy!

Tom Lehrer wasn’t just a brilliant musical satirist, he was also a mensch: a few years ago he signed over literally his entire catalog to the public domain and put the whole thing — including a music files, sheet music and lyrics — on his website at https://tomlehrersongs.com/. So download and stream to your heart’s content. Just take note of the warning at the end of Lehrer’s personal note: “THIS WEBSITE WILL BE SHUT DOWN AT SOME DATE IN THE NOT TOO DISTANT FUTURE, SO IF YOU WANT TO DOWNLOAD ANYTHING, DON’T WAIT TOO LONG.”

The vast majority of gender-affirming surgery for minors are mastectomies (breast reduction) performed on cisgender males (i.e. removal of “man boobs”), which are not being paused or targeted by the Trump administration. Gender-affirming surgery for transgender youth is much more rare (probably fewer than 100 cases per year in all of Kaiser NorCal), with the vast majority being that exact same breast-reduction surgery. These will generally be the most extreme cases of gender dysphoria, where other forms of gender-affirming care aren’t enough and the risks and permanence of surgery are outweighed by the risks of self-harm or suicide. As an example, see this case study of a 16-year-old trans male patient who was admitted to the emergency room after an attempt to remove his own breasts.

So what are Kaiser and Stanford thinking? Stopping surgeries while continuing to provide other forms of gender-affirming care is unlikely to placate the Trump administration, which has vowed to end all forms of care. And Trump has repeatedly shown that he treats any capitulation as weakness and a reason to push even harder.

Both providers presumably know all this, so even if they think pausing surgeries will disrupt the least number of patients, why bother if it does no good? Do surgeries come with more legal jeopardy than hormone treatment or other forms of care, even though the administration suggests all forms of gender-affirming care are fraud? Or is this just the first step to giving up on all trans kids in their network?

And so the court continues to gaslight us, explaining how actually the founding fathers would welcome making the president immune from prosecution (and that courts should stay out of his way), how the Second Amendment was never about maintaining well-regulated militia, that a ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors does not discriminate on the basis of transgender status, that the First Amendment requires that public schools allow parents to opt out from learning that gay people exist, and it’s okay for states to ban individual organizations from Medicaid because “words, who can say what they really mean?” John Roberts insists the court is simply following logic and critics are just sore losers, even though the criticism is increasingly coming from minority members of his own court. And if the majority’s logic was sound, consistent or hell even sensical his calls to blame the author (congress / framers) and not the messenger (the courts) would be a lot easier to accept, but sound logic went out the window the moment the conservative majority got their fifth reliable vote. Nowadays it’s so bad that “Trump-appointed judge” has become shorthand for “you’re about to hear something bat-shit crazy.”

As a practical matter it may not matter that Supreme Court’s rulings are increasingly so much bovine excrement, at least in the short term. After all, the Trump administration is even more corrupt than the current Supreme Court (which is terrifying) and the Republican-controlled congress is completely supine. Fair enough, but it’s still important to remember that what the court is doing is fundamentally corrupt and illegitimate. Josh Marshall calls this Civic Sede Vacantism, a reference to the hyper-traditionalist Catholic movement that holds that none of the Popes since 1958 (and thus none of the canons from Vatican II on) are valid. But if that’s too esoteric for you I have a simpler metaphor: just remember that this is bullshit. “The Supreme Court says the president is above the law so I guess that’s that.” No, that’s bullshit. “The state can force kids to take a pregnancy to term or to go through puberty for a sex that doesn’t match their identity, regardless of parental consent, but the state can’t let kids read a picture book that includes gay characters without parental consent?” Bullshit. “The president can fire heads of (formerly) independent agencies without cause… except for the chairman of the Fed because reasons.” Serious bullshit. And if in a few months the Supreme Court decides to eliminate birthright citizenship (which they just backdoor greenlit in 27 states), that will be bullshit too.

Unfortunately a lot of folks are reacting to these bullshit rulings as if they were legit, calling for congress to pass clarifying legislation or pushing for constitutional amendments. That’s like trying to improve your passing game after the opposing team replaced all their players with killer robots — sure it might help a little, but you’re still going to lose until you realize the other team is no longer playing by the old rules. The problem isn’t clarity: the conservative majority is quite happy to shoehorn whatever reasoning reaches their preferred conclusion within the bounds of their own shame, and at this point they have very little shame. Case in point, the 14th Amendment (“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”) is pretty damn clear. I doubt a new constitutional amendment saying “we really mean it” would protect it from more skullduggery.

Bullshiters try to win through dominance rather than logic, with arguments that ultimately boil down to “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” That’s why it’s the go-to argument for bullies and abusers, and it’s why John Roberts and the other conservatives keep trying to convince everyone that Of course the Emperor is wearing clothes! Bullies get their way by intimidating the opposition into capitulation. If enough people say “I don’t agree with their logic, but Supreme Court rulings are valid by definition,” or “I hate it, but you can’t question the validity of the court and still support the rule of law,” or even “The rulings sound pretty sus, but I’m no lawyer so I’ll just assume they know what they’re doing” then they get away with it.

But if enough people remember those three simple words, this is bullshit, and more importantly come to recognize that this particular Supreme Court is corrupt and an aberration, then we can claw back our laws. Power ebbs and flows, and barring the complete collapse of our democracy liberals will eventually take back the levers of power. The moment they do you can be sure that conservatives will suddenly start squawking about restoring the norms that protect the minority party, the importance of following precedent and respecting settled law, and everything else they jettisoned in their power grab. And we should return to those norms, because they really are important for a well-running democracy. But first we need to purge the corrupt court, and once that’s done we need to ensure that every single ruling from this court has a little virtual asterisk next to it in every legal scholar’s mind that means “Warning: suspected bullshit, please reexamine.”

So I was thrilled when I discovered that Raina and Scott have collaborated on The Cartoonists Club, which from the description sounds kind of like Understanding Comics for the younger crowd. And now that we’ve read it I can say it is all that and more, and it’s delightful. You can really see the mix of Raina and Scott’s styles shine through, with both the natural-feeling childhood relationships and the hilarious breaking of the fourth wall in the Magic of Comics chapter. In the end it manages to both tell a compelling story about kids coming together around a hobby and convey practical knowledge young aspiring comic book writers can really use to start their journey, all taught by two maters of the craft. [Scholastic]

Before I get into what they did, here’s a quick refresher on how we see color. White light is made up of a broad spectrum of wavelengths, but our eyes only have three types of color detectors (called cones), each sensitive to its own overlapping range of wavelengths. What we see as color is the relative response of just those three type of cones at a certain point, so light around 575 nm triggers the L cones the most, M cones a little less and hardly any S, which we perceive as yellow. But you can get the exact same response from a mixture of light around 549 nm and 612 nm (green and red), which is how RGB monitors get away with displaying practically any color with just three color subpixels. It’s also why we can perceive magenta, a color that isn’t in the rainbow at all but results from a combination of blue and red light (that is, a high response from S and L cones but low response from M cones). Notice that it’s possible to trigger just the S cones with short-wavelength light and just the L cones with long-wavelength light, but there’s normally no way to trigger just the M cones without also triggering L or S cones as well because of the overlap.

The Berkeley and UW team has developed a prototype system, called Oz, that scans a subject’s retina to identify the exact location of S, M and L cones and then uses a laser to excite just the ones to produce a desired color at any given location. In theory such a system could render every possible color, including ones that are impossible to see in nature because they’re outside the range of S/M/L responses you can get with natural light. In practice they estimate up to two thirds of the light “leaks” over to neighboring cones, but that’s still enough to produce a large range of colors including ones outside the natural gamut. One such color, the one produced by stimulating only M cones and no others, they’ve named olo (from 010 — get it?).

In theory only five subjects in the world have seen olo, which they describe as a “blue-green of unprecedented saturation, when viewed relative to a neutral gray background.” But that’s not very satisfying. If you’ve just discovered a new color naturally the first thing anyone is going to ask is “what does it look like?” — it’s much nicer if you can answer “here, take a look” instead of “come back to my lab and I’ll shoot you in the eye with a laser.”

Luckily, I think I’ve found a way to see olo without any of the complex set-up. The Oz team creates olo by selectively stimulating M cones in a region of the retina, but we should be able to get the same effect by first staring at a magenta color field for 20-30 seconds (which suppresses responses from the S and L cones) and then quickly shifting over to a pure green. The difference is analogous to additive vs subtractive color: Oz works by stimulating only the M cones, while color adaptation involves the suppression of the stimulus color (in this case magenta, the complement of green).

Stare at the center dot for 30 seconds. Then without moving your eyes, move your mouse pointer into the square (or tap on mobile). You should briefly see a super-saturated blue-green image.

Cute effect, but is it olo — are you and I actually seeing the same color the Oz team sees with their device? Short answer is… maybe? For an effect that’s so readily testable there’s still surprisingly little consensus about exactly what causes negative after-images, or even exactly what colors one is expected to see. Explanations range from simple cone adaptation to the currently dominant theory that after-images are caused by some kind of opponent process between different color responses higher up the processing chain (probably in the retinal ganglion cells). If something like the cone adaptation model is correct then I’d definitely expect the two methods to produce the same color, modulo how much leakage is in Oz vs. how much the S and L cone responses are suppressed in the after-image. But even if the processing is higher up the chain it wouldn’t surprise me if the effects are essentially the same, because regardless of the underlying mechanism it’s clear that when an after-image is mixed with a real image (e.g. when viewed against a colored background) the result is as if the original stimulus was partially subtracted from the background. That’s why the after-image from magenta appears green on a white background, but greenish-yellow on a yellow background and brownish-red on a red background.

One way to test whether the two colors really are the same would be to do the same tests the Oz team did but with the after-image + green, using a tunable laser plus white light to match the perceived color. Alternatively one could turn the experiment on its head and use Oz itself to match the perceived color directly, and see how close it gets to their olo.

I plan on reaching out to the Oz team to see what they think, and I’ll update if they write back.

The reality: Harassment, sexual assault and invasion of privacy is already illegal, and incidents of harassment didn’t increase in places that passed non-discrimination laws allowing trans people to use bathroom matching their gender.

From a logical perspective the whole safety argument is dumb: as comedian Raanan Hershberg put it, “that means you you believe that there are guys out there going ‘Man, I’d love to go into a woman’s bathroom and abduct and murder someone… but unfortunately I’m not allowed in there.'” But it’s powerful emotionally, and fear of sexual predators has been used time and again to convince an otherwise tolerant public to support discrimination, from using fear of black men attacking white women to support racially segregated bathrooms in the Jim Crow South to using fear of unisex bathrooms to tank the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s.

Ironically bathroom bans embolden random strangers to insist that women provide “proof” of their sex for the temerity of using a public restroom. The also require trans men to use women’s public restrooms (and vice versa), which needless to say will not make anyone feel more secure. But as amusing as that image might be (until the poor guy gets pepper sprayed just for following the law) the bans mostly just encourage trans people to avoid public restrooms (and public spaces) whenever possible, and that’s probably the real goal. And as with sports, cis women who don’t look feminine enough are are also being targetted [archive].

One thing that makes me optimistic is how much of an improvement the design of modern unisex restrooms is over what I grew up with. The traditional bathroom stall design (especially in the US) lacks privacy and make people feel uncomfortable regardless of gender issues, so it’s understandable that sense of vulnerability is exacerbated when you add the idea of strangers who are trans also being there. Modern gender-neutral bathrooms, changing rooms and showers are designed with with single stalls around a semi-public common area for hand washing and the like, which is not only more private for everyone but also solves the question of which restroom non-binary people should use (not to mention making shorter lines for the women’s restroom).

How it’s being weaponized: Nineteen states have passed bathroom ban that apply at least to K-12 schools, with eleven extending to at least some government-owned buildings and properties. The Trump administration is threatening to withhold federal funding from K-12 schools that don’t make similar bans of their own (even if doing so goes against state law), and is also reportedly targeting K-12 schools that have installed gender-neutral bathrooms for violations of anti-discrimination laws.

The tip of the spear posts:

• Intro: Debunking anti-trans rhetoric
• Gender-affirming care for minors
• Trans women in women’s sports
• Bathroom bans

The reality: Testosterone promotes muscle growth, and on average post-pubescent men are both stronger and taller than women. Exactly how much of an advantage that is depends on the sport, and since we’re talking about two shifted but overlapping bell curves the difference is more consequential for elite athletes. The same physical advantages apply to trans women who have socially transitioned but haven’t taken puberty blockers or hormone therapy, but the science gets a lot murkier when you compare cis women to trans women who have medically transitioned (i.e. are taking estrogen). Trans women lose muscle mass once they start estrogen, though trans women who started blockers and/or estrogen after puberty started may retain some advantage. Exactly how much of an advantage is hard to say since we’re talking about a very small population (trans athletes) and characteristics with a large variance, but it’s almost certainly less of a predictor than say having tall parents.

Perhaps the cleanest case study you could hope for is Lia Thomas, an openly trans woman swimmer who competed in the NCAA for UPenn. She didn’t medically transition until she was twenty and was already a top athlete by then, and since she’s a swimmer we can directly compare her race times both before and after transition and to other athletes. The results: Thomas’s times were about 7% slower after she transitioned, roughly in line with the differences between men and women for the same distance. She did well in her post-transition year and even came in first in the 500 yard freestyle at the NCAA championship, but she didn’t dominate the competition or break any records — that honor went to cisgendered Kate Douglass who broke 18 records that meet. As Erin Reed put it, “The backlash to trans swimmer Lia Thomas is ridiculous. Pre-transition, she was 10s behind the male record. Post-transition, she is 10s behind the female record. She lost 30s in transition. Nobody had a problem before. Its almost like the only difference is that she’s trans.”

But there’s a more fundamental flaw here. The crux of the fairness argument is that the whole point of having a separate league for women is to make the sport more competitive, like weight classes in boxing, so trans women are “playing down” when they play against other women. But that’s not historically accurate: women’s sports teams weren’t formed to make sports more competitive, they were formed to allow women and girls to participate at all in an activity that until that point had been exclusively available to men. Throughout the 19th century the prevailing thought was that women were fragile creatures, and that unladylike sports (or for that matter too much education) “desexed” them and led to infertility. So with most organized sports closed off to them, women began forming their own separate leagues in the early 20th century. These organizations and their successors, founded by and for women, promoted universal participation in sports (“every girl in a sport and a sport for every girl”) and explicitly rejected the “win at all costs” attitude and exploitation of amateur athletes that was already common in men’s sports. Over the next century the existing men’s-only organizations like the IOC, NCAA and the AAU slowly and grudgingly added women’s divisions, prodded by the fear of having to contend with a rival organization if they didn’t. But the idea that strength, aggression and competition are inherently male traits and that any women who exhibits them is somehow masculinized never fully went away (despite attempts to dress female athletes in frilly and/or revealing uniforms).

This history gives some insight into what I think of as the three paradoxes of gender fairness in sports:

1. Almost all physical advantages like height, body shape, lung capacity and natural strength are considered fair and even celebrated in sports so long as they’re endogenous (i.e. not from doping or equipment). Why are women with naturally high testosterone the exception? And if high testosterone is so much of an advantage that it should be singled out, why are men with higher than usual testosterone not banned as well?
2. Why are trans women banned from women’s divisions in games like Chess where physical strength doesn’t come into play at all?
3. Why is it unsafe for a women to compete against a man due to strength differences, but not unsafe for a man of similar height and build?

All three “paradoxes” make sense when viewed through the 19th and early-20th century lens where women aren’t supposed to be strong, aren’t supposed to be competitive, and certainly aren’t supposed to be able to compete against men — and any that break this image might not be “real” women at all.

To be clear, I’m not saying that there are no differences between male and female athletes, nor am I saying that all or even most sports should be sexually integrated. Even small differences in average strength or size have a disproportionate effect at the highest levels of competition, so it makes sense to segregate professional and high-end amateur competitions like the Olympics on the basis of sex. Depending on the sport the requirement that transgender female athletes medically transition before competing might also make sense at these elite levels for the same reason. But that raises a fourth paradox of the fairness argument: if trans women would dominate high-end sports, where are they? There are currently only a handful of transgender athletes in women’s sports even playing at any level, much less dominating. Maybe it’s just because of transphobia, and maybe if women’s sports was more accepting of trans athletes then suddenly all the top players would be trans women. But I don’t buy it, and it’s certainly not a problem now.

Segregating teams by sex often makes sense in non-elite athletics as well. Women in coed leagues often face discrimination, with male teammates and competitors either assuming they’re not as skilled as they are or getting mad and aggressive if they are. Men are also on average more aggressive than women, both culturally and because of increased testosterone. Segregated teams solves both problems. But these are also reasons to include trans women (especially those who have undergone hormone treatment) in women’s sports, because both culturally and hormone-wise they are women.

The rhetoric: Since there are so few trans female athletes to begin with, anti-trans activists have had to get creative to stoke outrage in the general populace. One example is Imain Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu‑ting of Taiwan, two cisgender women who won gold for welterweight and featherweight boxing the 2024 Summer Olympics. Both had been accused by the Russian-led International Boxing Association in 2023 of being “biologically men” due to undisclosed tests, an accusation that the IOC dismissed both due to lack of evidence and because the IBA had already been suspended due to alleged corruption. The accusations spread again at the Olympics when Angela Carini of Italy lasted only 46 seconds against Khelif, afterwards stating “I got into the ring to fight. I didn’t give up, but one punch hurt too much and so I said enough.” (She later apologized to Khelif.) The UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls later tweeted “Angela Carini… and other female athletes should not have been exposed to this physical and psychological violence based on their sex” (just a reminder that we’re talking about Olympic-level boxing here), and the Italian Prime Minister finished off with “I think that athletes who have male genetic characteristics should not be admitted to women’s competitions … from my point of view it was not an even contest.” So far that’s the same old bogus accusations that top-performing female athletes “must be men” we’ve heard for over a century, but at his February speech before Congress President Trump aimed it at transgender athletes instead, declaring without regard to reality that both athletes were “transitioned”.

Another cause célèbre of the anti-trans movement is Payton McNabb, who as a high school senior in 2022 suffered a concussion after being hit by a volleyball that was spiked by an opponent that McNabb claims was transgender. The British tabloid Daily Mail reported that the ball was spiked at an estimated 70 mph (a claim repeated by the National Review), and later reported “Ms McNabb was left with brain damage and paralysis on her right side, which ended her dreams of getting a volleyball college scholarship and has made it difficult to walk without falling.” They also added that “The 5ft 11in trans player cackled in delight, Ms McNabb said, after sending her to the floor. As did other players in the opposite team.” Within months McNabb became a spokesperson for for the conservative Independent Women’s Forum (who recently produced a 15-minute YouTube video about the incident called “Kill Shot: How Payton McNabb Turned Tragedy into Triumph”), was being interviewed on Fox News and testifying before the North Carolina state legislature, and most recently was a guest at Trump’s speech before Congress where he repeated that the concussion caused a traumatic brain injury that partially paralyzed her right side and ended her athletic career. It all sounds awful, in a made-for-TV movie kind of way.

At this point I could point out that we only have McNabb’s word that the girl who spiked the ball is transgender (she hasn’t come forward, and really who could blame her). Or that McNabb played varsity basketball less than three months after her injury, followed by varsity softball where she boasted an impressive 0.429 batting average. Or that NHFS guidelines forbid playing sports if you still have symptoms from a brain injury. Or that in the recent IWF video McNabb says after she was hit the entire gym went silent, which brings into question the whole “cackled in delight” quote that was attributed to her earlier.

But I’d like to just focus on the spike itself — which the Daily Mail claims was estimated at around 70 mph and quoted an anonymous observer describing it as “abnormally fast” — because we can estimate the speed ourselves from the video. The ball was spiked about two feet from the net and hit Payton either right at or just past the attack line, so about 12-13 feet horizontal. It started one or two feet above the net (which is 7’4″ in girl’s HS volleyball) and sank to about 4′ (McNabb is 5’4″ but was crouching), so about 4-5 feet vertical. The spike lasts five video frames at 24 frames/second, or 0.21 seconds. Do the math and that’s between 41 and 45 mph, which slightly above average but still well within normal range for a spike hit by a girl on a high-school volleyball team. The simple truth is that girl’s high-school volleyball is a dangerous sport, with an astonishing 6% of players suffering concussions in a single 12-month period. Payton got hit in the head with a volleyball and suffered a concussion, just like over 28,000 other girls did while playing girl’s high-school volleyball last year. The only difference is that Payton seems to have turned the experience into something of a career opportunity.

How it’s being weaponized: Half the states have passed laws banning trans women and girls from playing on sports teams that match their gender since 2020, most covering both K-12 and college level sports, and the Trump administration has issued an executive order requiring the remaining states to enact a similar ban or risk losing federal funding. This year we also saw six NCAA volleyball teams choose to forfeit rather than play against the 130th ranked San Jose State University Spartans because one of the Spartans is trans, which honestly sounds a lot like how all-white teams reacted to integration back in the 1950s.

More ominously, the State Department is using the issue of trans women in sports as an excuse to require all US visa applications to list their sex at birth on their applications, and granting consular offices authority to deny visas and/or require additional documentation if they have reasonable suspicion that the gender marker is not accurate. Though ostensibly the rule is to prevent trans female athletes from traveling to the US to compete in women’s sports (regardless of what the competition organizers want) some sections of the order are more general and apply beyond athletics.

The tip of the spear posts:

• Intro: Debunking anti-trans rhetoric
• Gender-affirming care for minors
• Trans women in women’s sports
• Bathroom bans

The reality: It’s obviously true that kids, and especially younger kids, need guardrails to prevent them from making decisions that they’ll later regret. And while most studies show gender-affirming care is both effective and relatively safe it’s still fairly new, and pretty much every parent of a trans kid and every doctor that treats them would love to see more research on the subject. That’s why the World Professional Association of Transgender Health, Endocrine Society and American Academy of Pediatrics all recommend having a multidisciplinary care team of experts to help both kids and their caregivers to figure out what kind of gender-affirming care (if any) is right for them, with an emphasis on reversible interventions for younger children and recognition that the gender trajectories for children and adolescents may evolve over time.

But it’s important to remember that when it comes to transgender adolescents it eventually becomes impossible to avoid “irreversible” decisions. Trans adolescents have the opportunity to choose which secondary sexual characteristics they want to develop, either by starting hormone therapy or by letting their natal hormones take their course. But they can’t take no choice. Trans youth are also at increased risk for mental health issues, substance use, becoming victims of physical violence, homelessness and suicide — one study found transgender teens attempt suicide over seven times more often than their cisgender counterparts. It’s a mixed bag how much this distress comes from gender incongruence and how much comes from having to fend of constant prejudice and lack of acceptance, but it’s clear that for many trans teens the need to be their true self is literally as important as life itself. It’s not something that can simply be ignored. It’s also notable that gender-affirming care is provided to cisgender minors without any controversy at all. Boys with gynecomastia (man boobs) can get breast reduction surgery without controversy. Same with hormone replacement therapy for girls with PCOS. Blockers have been used for decades to delay precocious puberty. And no one bats an eye when a girl undergoing chemo wears a wig or a skinny boy lifts weights to build up his upper body. It’s only when a person’s gender identity doesn’t match their genitalia that it suddenly becomes an issue.

The last point argues that gender incongruence is at least partially caused by some combination of peer pressure, fad and/or social contagion, and that this explains the recent rise in young people who self-report as transgender (particularly female-to-male). While the idea that kids are choosing to be vilified by literally the most powerful men in the country and to constantly worry about being physically assaulted in public restrooms “because it’s cool” is laughable, the more general idea of social contagion has a certain logic to it. After all, the thinking goes, how could someone identify as transgender if they’ve never heard the word or had the concept explained? Fair enough, and certainly transgender adults often report having had vague feelings of gender dysphoria at a young age but not having the vocabulary to describe it until they got older. But the strong implication of the social contagion argument is not that more people whose gender identity doesn’t align with their natal sex now have the vocabulary to talk about it, but rather that if these vulnerable kids were not exposed to this “radical gender ideology” then they would grow up to be happy healthy cisgendered adults.

As Elon Musk would say “concerning if true”, but there’s simply no evidence in favor of the social contagion argument and a good bit of evidence against it. The 2018 paper that sparked the idea of a new type of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” caused by social media was based entirely on parent surveys solicited from trans-skeptical discussion groups, and has been widely criticized for its methodology. In particular, its primary evidence for social contagion is that parents often reported that multiple people in their kid’s friend group came out at trans around the same time — which honestly sounds a lot like claiming cancer support groups cause cancer. On the other hand, there is a good deal of evidence that gender identity is innate, though it’s not a completely settled matter. Transgender and non-binary people often remember feeling gender dysphoria even when they were very young, long before they had the vocabulary or concepts to understand it. Transgender individuals have also existed since ancient times and in all parts of the world with no indication of social contagion — is it really so likely that we have only now discovered a brand new way that it can spread? Both twin studies and brain scans show a strong biological component to gender identity, whether or not it matches natal sex.

How it’s being weaponized: Trump’s executive order banning gender-affirming care is already literally killing children who would rather die than detransition. But as bad as this immediate effect is, the idea of social contagion is potentially even more insidious, because once you accept that simply talking about gender identity can cause irreparable harm to children the next logical step is to stamp out any mentions of it at all. The administration is already already doing just that in the razing of government websites, and is pressuring private universities and other institutions to do the same. It’s also laying the legal groundwork to go into the classroom itself, claiming that K-12 teachers who support students who are questioning their gender are guilty of practicing medicine without a license and instructing the Attorney General to file “appropriate actions”.

The tip of the spear posts:

• Intro: Debunking anti-trans rhetoric
• Gender-affirming care for minors
• Trans women in women’s sports
• Bathroom bans