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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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It genuinely worries me that this is the strength of the evidence base on which doctors are heavily implying to parents, "Give your kid this drug or they will kill themselves."

And here, we're back to the beginning. While it matters what the right thing to do is given the pitiful state of the evidence we have (Scott just posted about people dying from an overabundance of caution), I firmly agree that I'd much, much rather know whether the use of puberty blockers in certain instances prevent suicide than not know.

As it stands now, we're either endangering a lot of kids' mental health and very lives, or we're performing nontrivial medical procedures on them that, while not "sterilizing children and making lifelong medical patients of them", aren't actually necessary. I think the evidence leans more toward the former, you think the latter, but the confidence interval is disconcertingly wide.

She may yet prove a liar, but Hannah Barnes, chronicler of the Tavistock's implosion, considers Reed's story basically plausible.

Maybe we're doing Reference Class Tennis here, but the thing this reminds me of is people making outlandish claims about Planned Parenthood, i.e., that they're coercing women into getting abortions so they can sell the parts on the black market, which turn out not to be nearly as spicy as originally reported.

Mainly it looks like you're citing violations of WPATH's standards. You'd think the solution would be to enforce the agreed-on standards, not essentially ban this class treatment altogether. The solution to Kermit Gosnell, for example, wasn't to shut down Planned Parenthood, because performing a service badly doesn't mean that the service shouldn't be provided.