I see that a major review into transgender policy with respect to children and teens has just been released in England, and confirms a major realignment towards a more conservative approach to "gender affirmation" of children and teens with puberty delaying drugs and hormones. This means Twitter is going to be flooded with comments about this: many of them from angry trans activists and their sympathisers, and the rest from the pro-Rowling group crowing about vindication.
Also, I see that netball has the latest sporting governing body to go "yeah, nah" to ignoring transgenderism:
World Netball has relied on “robust” research to determine a ban on transgender players from international competition with immediate effect will form a key plank of a new participation and inclusion policy.
The global governing body made the ruling after a review and lengthy consultation as other sports around the world tighten their participation rules for transgender athletes in elite women’s competitions.
There are no transgender players in the Australian Super Netball competition and therefore none in line for promotion to the Diamonds in the immediate future.
But the ban means they won’t be allowed to represent their country should a transgender star emerge.
It really does puzzle me that some people who I would call in most other respects moderate Lefties have a complete blind spot when it comes to this: taking a completely dismissive (and basically, politically tribal) attitude to any and all criticism or reassessment of trends and attitudes towards a issue that is obviously complex and obviously capable of trends and fashions getting ahead of evidence and, well, common sense. I mean, treatment of conditions with a large mental health component has always been like that - "reasonable" people thought for a time that lobotomies were a pretty good idea too, to take an extreme, but I think still valid, example.
Update: Seems to me that this New York Times article summarising the current "state of play", so to speak, is pretty balanced.
What is clear is that the US official medical position is now lagging behind the reassessments underway in most of Europe. I wonder if the aggressive legislative, culture war, pushback approach in Republican states might be a little counterproductive by making the professional bodies dig their heals in and take longer to admit reassessment is warranted. (I also wish, though, that Biden would defuse this culture war issue by also taking a neutral stance on it, instead of being something of a an apparent captive of "gender ideology".)
I have always been with Rowling.
ReplyDeletedown here in my own sporting territory we are having an 'argument' about a female football team that contains a lot of transgender players that the females do not want to play against.
As a former referee I rarely saw shoulder to shoulder tackles in female games.
It is ironic the females are now being penalised by being too physical.
They have little idea of how to be physical.
This will not go away
These paragraphs, to the end of that NY Times piece, are extremely weird:
ReplyDelete"Some critics said that Europe, like the United States, had also been influenced by a growing backlash against transgender people.
In Britain, for example, a yearslong fight over a proposed law that would have made it easier for transgender people to change the gender on their identification documents galvanized a political movement to try to exclude transgender women from women’s sports, prisons and domestic violence shelters.
“The intention with the Cass review is to be neutral, but I think that neutral has maybe moved,” said Laurence Webb, a representative from Mermaids, a trans youth advocacy organization in Britain. “Extremist views have become much more normalized.”"
Concerns over biological males in women's prisons and domestic violence shelters are *very real* and certainly not extremist!