A Parent’s Letter to a Gender Clinic

I’m glad that some people with legal standing, or close to children with legal standing once regret sets in, are saying things like this:

You are receiving this letter because our child is a patient at your clinic or a clinic like yours. The purpose of the letter is to make you aware of a concern that many parents, including myself, and a large and growing number of medical professionals, share about the care you are providing for our children. Some of these young people are over the age of 18 and therefore do not have to include us in their health decisions. Regardless of their age, and regardless of whether or not we are involved in discussions between you and our children, you have an obligation to do what is best for their long-term health. We do not believe this is happening.

The increasing rate at which young people, aged 11-21, are coming out as transgender cannot be explained by the fact that the broader transgender movement in western societies is removing the social stigma around coming out. The evidence is very clear at this point, and becoming clearer by the day, that what is going on with at least some of these young people, particularly young women, has elements of a social contagion.

We are including links to multiple pieces of research at the end of this letter to support our statements and to elucidate our concerns. As medical professionals, you should be aware of this research, and you have an obligation to take it seriously. At a minimum, you should be raising the bar and making selection criteria considerably more stringent before prescribing “puberty blockers,” HRT and surgeries. Because these treatments have permanent effects on patients’ bodies and minds, you should be first requiring alternatives to these treatments which are more reversible. Unless social contagion and other underlying and preexisting factors (including other mental health issues) are ruled out, it is insufficient and negligent to place undue emphasis on self-reporting from the youths themselves.

We understand that you may be under the impression that existing law provides protection against future liability for prescribing these dangerous drugs and performing these surgical interventions. We disagree. Moreover, as human beings and responsible medical professionals, you can raise the bar for treatment, reduce future regret rates, and put pressure on your peers to be better informed and to act responsibly.

Be advised that through this letter, we are putting you on notice. So far as we know, the current course of medical transgender treatment for minors has never been tested in the context of medical malpractice liability, and we do not believe that these interventions will be found to meet the standard of care for the treatment of juvenile dysphoria.

If you do not act in the best interests of all of your patients, the day may well come that you will be held accountable. We are planning for that day. Clinics and doctors will be called out by name. We will call you out by name in legal proceedings, and in social and conventional media. You should assume that, particularly given the irreversible and (at least in some cases) unwanted changes that these young people will suffer, damages can reasonably be expected to be substantial.

In addition to the risk of legal action, you should think about your place in history and your reputation. This contagion will pass, as they all do. But due to its size and impact, you should expect this social contagion to be a topic for years to come. It is already large and catastrophic enough to garner significant interest and publication in medical, social and psychological journals. I urge you to think carefully about how your clinic and your name will be mentioned in the course of this crisis, and whether you protected or ultimately harmed young people; whether you acted out of concern for youth or for your profits. You can dismiss any single case or patient as justifiable, but history will be less kind when looking at the body of your work over time.

I would encourage you to read the referenced research, including the multiple links to additional published research in these articles, and familiarize yourself with it. There is sufficient information there to warrant serious soul-searching in any practitioner involved in the medical transition of minors and young adults.

(PADad2018 at 4thWaveNow) My lawyerly instinct is that a successful suit along these lines is just a matter of time.

* * * * *

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

(Philip K. Dick)

The waters are out and no human force can turn them back, but I do not see why as we go with the stream we need sing Hallelujah to the river god.

(Sir James Fitzjames Stephen)

Place. Limits. Liberty.

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Children don’t do tragedy

I have spent the past few days watching old videos of the civil-rights era, the King era, and there is something unexpectedly poignant in them. When you see those involved in that momentous time, you notice: They dressed as adults, with dignity. They presented themselves with self-respect. Those who moved against segregation and racial indignity went forward in adult attire—suits, dresses, coats, ties, hats—as if adulthood were something to which to aspire. As if a claiming of just rights required a showing of gravity. Look at the pictures of Martin Luther King Jr. speaking, the pictures of those marching across the Edmund Pettus bridge, of those in attendance that day when George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door and then stepped aside to the force of the federal government, and suddenly the University of Alabama was integrated. Even the first students who went in, all young, acted and presented themselves as adults. Of course they won. Who could stop such people?

I miss their style and seriousness. What we’re stuck with now is Mark Zuckerberg’s .

…

The signal fact of Mr. Zuckerberg is that he is supremely gifted in one area—monetizing technical expertise by marrying it to a canny sense of human weakness. Beyond that, what a shallow and banal figure. He too appears to have difficulties coming to terms with who he is. Perhaps he hopes to keep you, too, from coming to terms with it, by literally dressing as a child, in T-shirts, hoodies and jeans—soft clothes, the kind 5-year-olds favor. In interviews he presents an oddly blank look, as if perhaps his audiences will take blankness for innocence. As has been said here, he is like one of those hollow-eyed busts of forgotten Caesars you see in museums.

But he is no child; he is a giant bestride the age, a titan, one of the richest men not only in the world but in the history of the world. His power is awesome.

His public reputation is now damaged, and about this he is very concerned. Next week he will appear before Congress. The Onion recently headlined that he was preparing for his questioning by studying up on the private data of congressmen. The comic Albert Brooks tweeted: “I sent Mark Zuckerberg my entire medical history just to save him some time.”

His current problems may have yielded a moment of promise, however. Tim Cook of Apple, in an impressive and sober interview with Recode’s Kara Swisher and MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, said last week something startling, almost revolutionary: “Privacy to us is a human right.” This was stunning because it was the exact opposite of what Silicon Valley has been telling us since social media’s inception, which is: Privacy is dead. Get over it. Some variation on that statement has been made over and over by Silicon Valley’s pioneers, and they say it blithely, cavalierly, with no apparent sense of tragedy.

Because they don’t do tragedy. They do children’s clothes.

(Peggy Noonan, If Adults Won’t Grow Up, Nobody Will)

* * * * *

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

(Philip K. Dick)

The waters are out and no human force can turn them back, but I do not see why as we go with the stream we need sing Hallelujah to the river god.

(Sir James Fitzjames Stephen)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Adult literature

I suspect that Hemingway could have sexed up this discreet paragraph had he not been a writer as good as, well, Hemingway:

The last year in the mountains new people came deep into our lives and nothing was ever the same again. The winter of the avalanches was like a happy and innocent winter in childhood compared to that winter and the murderous summer that was to follow. Hadley and I had become too confident in each other and careless in our confidence and pride. In the mechanics of how this was penetrated I have never tried to apportion the blame, except my own part, and that was clearer all my life. The bulldozing of three people’s hearts to destroy one happiness and build another and the love and the good work and all that came out of it is not part of this book. I wrote it and left it out. It is a complicated, valuable and instructive story. How it all ended, finally, has nothing to do with this either. Any blame in that was mine to take and possess and understand. The only one, Hadley, who had no possible blame, ever, came well out of it finally and married a much finer man than I ever was or could hope to be and is happy and deserves it and that was one good and lasting thing that came of that year.

On rereading this, I note that Hemingway and Hadley, in the early years of their Paris stays, lived next-door to the hotel at which I coincidentally will be staying when I visit.

* * * * *

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

(Philip K. Dick)

The waters are out and no human force can turn them back, but I do not see why as we go with the stream we need sing Hallelujah to the river god.

(Sir James Fitzjames Stephen)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Pet Peeve Venting

The NCAA Men’s tournament, which I’m still watching despite Purdue’s loss to Texas Tech, has been flooded with offensive, aggressive ads.

Forget the dueling ads for Johnson County Sheriff.

And forget the loud ads for Samsung’s newest phone. They’re dumb, but their dumbness is just loud and generational.

These are what I have in mind:

AT&T just loves it when households form — and then break up. They make money coming and going, because “more for your thing is our thing”:

AT&T celebrating that moment when a couple moves in together without mention of wedlock. But they can get really good two-for-one deals on iPhone 8 now.

Direct TV (an AT&T brand) with an angry young woman throwing her boyfriend’s valuables out a second-floor window as he cringes and dodges. Then she settles down to watch Direct TV.

NCAA Athletes inexplicably glaring into the camera, saying “Label me. Don’t be shy. You know you want to. You’d do it behind my back.” What is that about?!
Experian running ads about how scary the “Dark Web” is with identities being sold — identities stolen, they neglect to mention, from them due to lax security — and how you can have them run a check for you. (Okay, they’ve got a lemon surplus so they’re making lemonade. I get that.)

On the other hand, though I don’t care for Capital One, I grin at their ads with Charles Barkley, Spike Lee and Samuel Jackson, especially the one with Jim Nance and the other where Barkley calls an Armadillo a “turtle-rat.”

* * * * *

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

(Philip K. Dick)

The waters are out and no human force can turn them back, but I do not see why as we go with the stream we need sing Hallelujah to the river god.

(Sir James Fitzjames Stephen)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Fear of the unknown

When I was a child, my late mother was well-nigh paranoid about electricity. I’m reminded of her every time I stick a knife in a toaster to retrieve a slice of toast too small to stick out the top after the toaster pops.

“Don’t stick a knife in a toaster!”

Well, no. Not while it’s, like, toasting things and those little heating elements are brimming with electricicals. The heating filaments are very fragile when they’re red hot and you might break one. Or something else bad might even happen, like getting a 110v “bite,” which is unpleasant. If you’re in a swimming pool at the time, it could be even worse.* But I’m not going to let the toast get cold while I go retrieve some insulator with which to go toast-fishing.

I think of my mother, too, when I think of guns. I learned decades later that she was petrified because, unknown to us children, my late father had acquired a handgun after being physically attacked by someone who intended to cause him severe bodily harm for helping some employer who was dealing with a union. This also may explain why solicitations from the National Right to Work Committee continued coming, addressed to him, for years after his death, and why my first recollection of the word “union” was adjectival, modifying “goon.” (My own views, for what it’s worth, include that the pendulum has swung too far toward the business of business, and away from unions, the business of representing workers.)

I don’t think, though, that my mother would have had any problem with some selected teachers in my school bearing concealed weapons against the remote prospect of someone, bearing unconcealed weapons, trying to do children harm within the school’s hallowed halls. Her fear was of snoopy children finding a gun hidden in home and becoming one of those sad stories in the newspaper.

Anyway, I can’t shake the idea that it might be a good idea to allow selected teachers to arm themselves, and to let it be known that such is the status quo in a school district.

At least one school superintendent and his board — in Texas, unsurprisingly — agree with me:

The program was simple: The school board would individually approve school employees who already held state concealed handgun licenses to participate in the program and the district would provide them with extra training. (In 2007, the district engaged a private consultant to develop additional training; in 2013, I worked with the Texas legislature to develop and pass Senate Bill 1857, which created a school safety certification course that could be utilized by schools opting to employ programs similar to ours — Harrold ISD Guardians are scheduled to complete this certification in the near future.) The names of our Guardians are kept confidential and they are paid a small yearly stipend in addition to their regular salaries to have them carry concealed handguns at school.

…

[W]e believed that if the shooter had thought it likely, or even just possible, that someone might be there to return fire, he would have been hesitant to move forward …

The participants’ anonymity is key to our program; no one in the general public knows the identity of the Guardian Plan team members. We don’t release numbers, but at all times there is an armed school employee, or employees, on site. Experts note that mass-shooting perpetrators look for “soft” targets — places not protected by anyone who can effectively resist attack. If a person planning an assault knows that he may meet resistance, he’s less likely to attempt to attack that venue.

I floated the idea on Facebook (without the Texas example, which I had not yet known of) and got a lot of push-back from teachers, some of whom said they’d resign if they knew that unidentified colleagues had concealed handguns with the school board’s blessing.

I don’t get that. There were no explanations proffered by those teachers, just hypothetical ultimatums in response to my hypothetical scenario.

If any reader of this blog has an explanation of the badness of my idea, I’d be glad to hear it. Just know that when the topic is deterrence, I’m skeptical of generalizations about whether guns are more likely to shoot bad guys or loved ones when actually discharged.

I’ve got some “skin in the game,” too. Though I was a Conscientious Objector and am generally pacific, I do believe in the right of self-defense, and nobody beyond a tiny circle knows how armed or disarmed my home is.

Care to try breaking in to find out?

In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need to talk about such things, would we?

Does anyone live there?

_______________________________

* This is not a course on electrical safety, of course. I may have understated the risks. But I’ve been bit by 110v several times, and I have a friend who closed a circuit of 440v, I think, in an institutional kitchen (and somehow survived).

* * * * *

The waters are out and no human force can turn them back, but I do not see why as we go with the stream we need sing Hallelujah to the river god.

(Sir James Fitzjames Stephen)

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

(Philip K. Dick)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

World Poetry Day

Rod Dreher has asked readers to submit favorite poems in honor of World Poetry Day.

No poem has revolutionized my life, but I enjoy poetry more and more as I grow older. Like most art forms, it seems to do some things no other form can do. I once asked someone struggling for words to express something very important to them whether they might sing, dance, paint or build it.

My dirty little secret: poetry is especially good after eight ounces or so of wine. Call that “transcending the left brain/right brain dichotomy.”

I quote or allude often to Yeats’ Second Coming, so I’ll not repeat that. Here are four others, not randomly chosen, but not my final answer, either:

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.
A penny for the Old Guy

I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

(T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men)

The world unfurls its flag of toleration,
issues its edicts of equality,
and he who bears the sign of our salvation
is banished as a public enemy.
As Athanasius, when the world awoke
to find itself ensconced in heresy,
so we whose world must wear a harsher yoke
are called to Athanasian constancy.

We, too, may need to navigate a Nile
to dwell in desert solitude awhile,
with foreign tongue and unfamiliar face
endure injustice, exile, and disgrace.
Hold fast the Faith. Set swords about the Creed.
And call on Athanasius in your need.

(Mark Amorose)

“I hate to say most of these prayers written by saints-in-an-emotional-state.
You feel you are wearing someone else’s finery and I can never describe my heart
as ‘burning’ to the Lord (who knows better) without snickering.”
—Flannery O’Connor

And so I limit myself to the saints
who are sensible, the ones who wear flats
to a party, prickly wool skirts and pink
shirts with a Peter Pan collar. I think
too much, my mother claims. Still, it’s my aim
to talk to God in a voice that’s just my own,
not one on loan from a lonely nun
or a love-starved Spanish priest. The least
I can do is try to be true
though often my words betray me. Like just
now. I tried to read Thérèse of Lisieux
but couldn’t choke down all the icing, a feast
for the sweet tooth where my soul loves salt.
I know. I’m a sinner. I know it’s my fault.

(Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, Flannery’s confession)

You passed me on the street
I rode the subway with you
You lived down the hall from me
I admired your dog in the park one morning
We waited in line for a concert
I ate with you in the cafes
You stood next to me at the bar
We huddled under an awning during a downpour
We dashed across the street to beat the light
I bumped into you coming round the corner
You stepped on my foot
I held the door for you
You helped me up when I slipped on the ice
I grabbed the last Sunday Times
You stole my cab
We waited forever at the bus stop
We sweated in steamy August
We hunched our shoulders against the sleet
We laughed at the movies
We groaned after the election
We sang in church
Tonight I lit a candle for you
All of you

(Charlotte Parsons, Nine-Eleven, via the Writer’s Almanac — which is no more thanks to MPR’s unpersoning Garrison Keillor.)

* * * * *

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Facebook

I have issue with Facebook. Doesn’t everybody?

One of those issues is not that Facebook allowed political campaigns to harvest data to sell us to Barack Obama and Donald Trump. They sell us to all manner of commercial ventures; why not to politicians, too?

Yes, as with television and radio, we are ultimately the product being sold on the “free” majority of the internet. That ramifies, but I don’t have time to go into that.

Get over it.

* * * * *

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Living by lies

Donald Trump isn’t the only person in the public square asking his minions to believe absurd, damnable lies:

I was very struck by [Rod] Dreher’s saying that the Czechs are too quick to dismiss the danger that their own country could adopt transgender insanity with terrifying swiftness (they assume that their fellow Czechs are too sensible to do this) but that, at the same time, we Americans are too quick to dismiss the danger that we could lose our religious liberty with terrifying swiftness. I would also add that there is a distinct link between the Communism that forcibly de-Christianized Eastern Europe and current transgender ideology. Both, as in the book 1984, show their power by forcing people to “live by lies,” blatant, obvious lies, and both glory in their power to do so.

(Lydia McGrew at What’s Wrong with the World? Hyperlink and bold added.)

Could it be that the foremost obligation of all sane people today (which should, but sadly does not, include all putative Christians) is to resist all lies, loudly and unabashedly?

UPDATE:

Eric Mader calls this “getting red-pilled.”

* * * * *

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.

Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.

A man … is only a bigot if he cannot understand that his dogma is a dogma, even if it is true.

(G.K. Chesterton) Be of good courage, you who are called “bigots” by those who are unable to conceive seriously the alternatives to their dogmas.

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Imposter Syndrome

A gem of an essay at Aeon:

‘Impostor syndrome’ describes a problem I don’t especially wish to solve. Its remedy is to recognise that one does in fact belong. Yet I can’t convince myself I want to fully belong – indeed, I would experience belonging as a loss. The reasons for this are several, though all converge on a conviction that being ill-adapted has a value I would not forfeit.

Lately, academia has grown more sensitive to how its culture flattens and normalises those who populate its ranks. Impostor syndrome is a way of explaining how non-standard identities can provoke alienation. Class is one such structure of exclusion, alongside race, gender, sexual identity and disability. But what are the epistemic costs of ‘fitting’? If we look only at alienation, we ignore the ways in which that subtly enforced sameness diminishes understanding.

…

In his exquisite poem ‘Digging’ (1966), Seamus Heaney observes his own descent from men who laboured. Of his father digging potatoes, he writes:

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

Against this raw strength, Heaney registers with melancholy humility: ‘I’ve no spade to follow men like them’ and the poem concludes:

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

The poem’s beauty is its ambivalence, its reluctance to mark a generational shift from spade to pen as unambiguous progress. I long to wield both, and rue how often academic life would strip spades from those who have them. And that, more than anything else, is what I suspect betrays me as an impostor, though not in the anxious, normalised way.

Impostor syndrome rides on the perception, most fundamentally, that one is getting away with something. I struggle to grasp just why this sleight-of-hand ought be counted a bad thing. I sometimes still feel a fraud in academic environments, but neither do I mind it much. Indeed, taking a little pleasure in getting away with things is something I come by honestly – a family legacy, if you will.

None of my academic bona fides reassure me more than counting myself a squatter

(Amy Olberding, How useful is ‘impostor syndrome’ in academia?, Aeon Essays)

Update:

Did you ever feel like an imposter in Church?

“The Rooted Faith in Wendell Berry’s Fiction.” Jack Baker and I write about how Berry’s exemplary characters root themselves in order to bring healing to damaged places:

Berry describes himself as a “marginal” Christian, and his position on the outskirts of our dominant, consumerist culture makes his a voice from the wilderness—one many evangelicals with more orthodox theology might do well to consider. Perhaps the greatest threat to the church today isn’t falling for doctrinal heresy but implicitly adopting the consumerist, self-centered assumptions of our Western culture. It’s all too easy for American Christians to assent to the right doctrines on Sunday while inhabiting a counter-Christian economy the rest of the week, loving ourselves more than God and neighbor.

(Jeffrey Bilbro, for whom also a tip of the hat for pointing me to Amy Olberding’s essay)

* * * * *

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.

Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.

A man … is only a bigot if he cannot understand that his dogma is a dogma, even if it is true.

(G.K. Chesterton) Be of good courage, you who are called “bigots” by those who are unable to conceive seriously the alternatives to their dogmas.

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Another sign of major realignment

More interesting … was Mrs. Clinton’s commentary on the role of economic concerns in the 2016 contest. “There’s all that red in the middle, where Trump won,” she said. “But what the map doesn’t show you is that I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product.” To scattered applause, she continued: “So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.”

… She sees her electoral disappointment in economically downscale regions not as a political failure but a source of validation—and, apparently, an indication of those voters’ failings. Similarly, last September she told Vox that the Electoral College is “an anachronism” in part because “I won in counties that produce two-thirds of the economic output in the United States.” Should those voters have more of a say?

Since Andrew Jackson, the Democratic Party has usually been identified as the party of the “common man,” and its adversaries as defenders of wealth and economic privilege. Jackson earned that reputation for his party by reducing property qualifications for the franchise for white men. But the Democrats’ most recent standard-bearer sounds an awful lot like the 19th-century conservatives who thought political representation should be tied to wealth. This is a significant moment in America’s partisan realignment.

(Jason Willick, What Happened to the Common Man?, Wall Street Journal — emphasis added, paywall)

* * * * *

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.

Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.

A man … is only a bigot if he cannot understand that his dogma is a dogma, even if it is true.

(G.K. Chesterton) Be of good courage, you who are called “bigots” by those who are unable to conceive seriously the alternatives to their dogmas.

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.