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Notes -
I had a lengthy analogy about the catholic church's sex abuse scandals (the right in trans debate: are the people who say "WTF PEDO CATHOLIC CHILDRAPE EVIL!!!!! EVERY PRIEST A PEDO!!!", the left in trans debate: catholics who say everything is fine and the anti-catholics (the real pedos) are motivated by hating truth and beauty), but i forgout about it, then accidentally closed the tab. so, shorter:
Reed makes many claims of the form - nearly all children had serious mental health issues, the center often gave out hormones the same week. That 'nearly all' (80%? 90%?) was facially implausible in a way that 50% wasn't. If you interact with randomly-selected underage trans people, even in hyper-selected-for-weirdness internet communities - at least half just don't have, or claim to have, diagnosed mental health issues! The affidavit makes much stronger claims than the FP piece, jumping between broad claims about most patients and specific claims of misconduct in specific tail-of-distribution cases. And its claims are correspondingly more obviously flawed. Even without the local news accounts, she's clearly significantly exaggerating the problems. And the local news accounts confirm the expected - many patients wait a while for hormones, get multiple consultations, don't have diagnosed mental health issues, are told of side effects, etc.
But ... this doesn't, and can't dispute the specific claims of misconduct in the extreme cases. And if we assume Reed wasn't fabricating specific stories whole-cloth (so the specific examples they gave at least sort-of happened) - but just exaggerating particularly noteworthy experiences she had (as many do), it could still be bad. If 85% of trans kids are mentally healthy and get treatment on a reasonable and conservative schedule (in a relative sense), and 10% of trans kids declare they're trans because they want to be cool on tumblr and being trans is uwu, and some of the latter are 'mentally ill' ... is that really implausible? And it explains her writeup better than a "Stephen Glass-type fabrication" does, and is compatible with the local news investigations. (lol @ original article mentioning her keeping a document with all the bad cases, but not mentioning the number of bad cases in the document, or the ratio between that and all patients)
"Treegender" and co aren't fake, quite a few dumb kinds on tumblr and tiktok really do that. The "attack helicopter" thing was probably a joke, but maybe it was someone being dumb and making absurd claims, involving a common internet meme.
That all would contradict both the "leo sapir" types' desired claims (they like to imply that kids either shouldn't transition generally, or that at least half of current trans kids aren't really trans in some sense) and the "michael hobbes" types' desired claims (kids aren't really transitioning for stupid reasons, the entire issue is just a right-wing selection bias hatemachine).
So I don't think the debunking penetrates the right-wing motte, though it demolishes the bailey.
Not sure why OP got so few comments. Compare to a nearby right-wing debunking, which got 49 updoots and quite a few.
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