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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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Of course it's ideological, as would be the case for a whistle-blower doing a report on how the clinic they worked at was disregarding the risk to the lives of trans youth from suicide and pushing conversion therapy on them.

The difference there is that the media would be doing pieces on how wonderful the whistle-blower was and how this revealed the ugly agenda of anti-trans activists.

When/if the Zeitgeist does swing around to mainstream "hey maybe putting ten year olds on puberty blockers is a bit risky", then the whistle-blowing around clinics being pressured by interest groups to just rubber-stamp and be a conveyor belt for transition will be celebrated by the media. We're not quite at that point yet, hence the "this is all in the same vein as Project Veritas to do away with our human rights" coverage.

I think it is starting to swing around, but we're still in the area where stories like this are celebrated, not regarded with horror and outrage.

Oh, the kid is around twelve now? And has two trans parents? And it was all "her" idea to speak out on trans issues and be a fashion model? And the biological father sure doesn't sound like a spineless wimp who has washed his hands of all responsibility? Though it does sound like he was legally bullied into it, as with all the best divorce and access cases:

Noella and her younger brother Levi (who his parents say is a boy and wants to remain a boy) were born to Dee and Dee’s then-husband, Timothy McCord, a scientist in the Chicago area.

McCord told The Post he has no issue with Noella coming out as trans but said he is somewhat concerned about her life being too public as a model. As for Noella having any possible future medical intervention, like being given puberty blockers and hormones, McCord said he is not quite sure what to make of that.

“I have no say in it,” he said. “She’s not my kid anymore.”

Well, I guess Desmond is Amazing is a bit long in the tooth now he's 16, time for fresh meat! And what fresher than a then-10 year old "youngest ever transgender model for New York Fashion Week"?

And what fresher than a then-10 year old "youngest ever transgender model for New York Fashion Week"?

So I wonder about this. I don't pay much attention to trans issues in particular, but I've run into headlines and documents claiming that kids can know they're trans even before they can talk, which would be quite a bit fresher than 10 year olds. It seems to me that, to whatever extent that such a belief exists, it must be quite niche and extreme even within the trans activist circles, but one of the defining features of the wider progressivism movement that can be said to hold the trans activist movement within is that it seeks to bring the niche and extreme to the mainstream. Could we see some trans toddler celebrities in the future?

Could we see some trans toddler celebrities in the future?

Perhaps; there are already children who are socially transitioning at young ages.

When I met Gracie, she was a few months out of kindergarten — pretty young for a transgender kid, I thought. Gracie lives with her parents and younger brother in a small city in the East Bay. She is already two years into her transition, having started her public life as a girl at four. The family began by discarding her boy name and referring to Gracie as “she” and “her.” She was also allowed to wear girl clothes outside the home, and her parents changed the gender on her birth certificate to avoid confusion at school.

The flip side of the Russell case above was the Zucker case, where a doctor involved with a clinic treating transgender children was controversially fired because his approach was too conservative. One trans activist website at least isn't too dubious about accepting the narrative:

Kenneth J. Zucker (born 1950) is an American psychologist whose ideology has caused profound harm to sex and gender minorities over the course of his long career. Zucker has created several disease models to describe these minorities. He has promoted many more sex and gender “disorders” via The Archives of Sexual Behavior, a journal he edits. He developed a non-affirming model of care for gender diverse children that has been described as “child abuse.” Zucker was fired by his employer CAMH in 2015, his clinic was shut down, and his model of care has now been outlawed in many jurisdictions.