Quotulatiousness

September 4, 2023

“… the ‘Teachers should tell parents’ people outnumber the ‘Teachers must not tell parents’ folks by something like four-to-one”

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the free-to-cheapskates segment of The Line‘s weekly round-up post, they discuss the suddenly “brave” Conservative provincial premiers jumping onto a hot culture war topic on the side of the vast majority of Canadians:

New Brunswick now has Policy 713, that requires teachers or school officials to notify parents and obtain consent if a child younger than 16 wishes to change his or her name or pronouns. Saskatchewan has announced a similar proposal; Ontario is considering one, too.

The Line looks upon these proposals with extreme skepticism. To be frank, we wish the provinces weren’t doing this. We think it’s strategically misguided: every moment a Conservative spends defending “parental rights” is a moment in which they are not talking about highly salient economic issues that affect far more people. Further, we don’t trust their motives. Either they’ve decided to pick this fight because they thought parental consent was going to be a winner for them, or they simply felt pushed into it by the more excitable elements of their respective bases. (We assign a probability assessment of absolute zero to the notion that the leaders might be doing this out of moral conviction.)

So yeah, it’s cynical and exploitive policy, but gosh, is it ever popular policy, too. Polling shows it’s like 80-per-cent approval popular.

Because of course it is.

Again, we stress that we don’t support the imposition of sweeping legislation. Absent evidence of abuse or mismanagement, we think parental notification of social transition should be handled on a case-by-case basis. In the midst of a moral panic on trans issues, we’d prefer to keep politicians as far away from this third rail as possible, with long pointy sticks and cages if necessary.

However, we also recognize that cynicism cuts both ways. We have also borne witness this week to some hysterical rhetoric from those who seem to seriously believe that schools should be forbidden from sharing this information, if the minor in question so chooses.

These people are in the minority, as we suggested above. The polling shows that the “Teachers should tell parents” people outnumber the “Teachers must not tell parents” folks by something like four-to-one. This is the kind of lopsided result you almost never see on contentious policy issues — the numbers are what we would expect if we asked Canadians “Is ice cream tasty?” or “Do you enjoy cuddling a puppy?” And of course this is so. Parents are, generally speaking, not going to have a whole lot of time for the suggestion that children will be better off if the state, at any level, adopts a policy of withholding information from them.

We don’t support what the conservative premiers are doing, because we think they’re doing it for cynical reasons, but we would absolutely oppose any policy that goes in the opposite direction. And the majority of the country — a massive supermajority — is onside with us on this one.

There are no easy answers here, because we do not dismiss the concerns raised by the minority. We absolutely agree and accept that there are going to be families and parents that may react badly, even dangerously, to their child changing their name or pronoun. But the answer isn’t to involve teachers and schools in a coverup; it’s to have policies in place that give any child that may fear for their safety all the help they need, including, if necessary, intervention. To this end, we would note that teachers are mandatory reporters — they must report a variety of issues (or concerns) because society has learned through tragedy and horror what happens when parents and other guardians are excluded from knowing details of their child’s life. If teachers have reasonable grounds to suspect abuse, mental health issues and more, they are legally required to inform authorities and families. Limiting their ability to inform parents would cut against this necessary and overdue progress. Further, we have already passed laws banning “conversion therapy.”

Your Line editors support the right of trans people to live lives of legal equality, safety and dignity, and we honestly believe that most Canadians would agree with us on that. We also note that the rising tide of trans activism has raised complicated concerns that exist at the edges of reasonable accommodation, and must necessarily raise thorny concerns about how we manage competing rights between disadvantaged people. Can minors consent to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones? Is it fair to allow trans women who enjoy the permanent physical advantages bestowed by male puberty into female athletics? When should trans men be permitted in women’s prisons and shelters, if ever? These questions demand a thoughtful and nuanced response. They don’t disappear the moment someone screams “trans women are women!” and threatens to kill that bigoted TERF J.K. Rowling. They aren’t resolved by hysterics and warnings of suicide.

By staking out maximalist positions on the most difficult topics, and granting no ground for concession and compromise, trans-rights activists have polarized their own cause. Shouting down critics worked for a while, but the pendulum is now rapidly swinging back to the plumb line. Labelling every concerned parent a transphobe is tired and played out. It’s failing as a strategy of persuasion. Which brings us to the current moment; the place of four-to-one support for cynical policies proposed by conservative premiers. Keep it up, and we suspect it’ll be nine-to-one in short order.

Backlashes are rarely measured, sane, or logical, and we fear this one is already teasing out some very dark and long-repressed demons, even among people who once counted themselves allies of LGBTQ people and causes. We are seeing this backlash in a rise in hate crimes, growing counter-protests, and in a decline in support for LGBTQ people generally. And, yes, we are seeing it in in heavy-handed and misguided legislation both here and in the U.S. We aren’t arguing that any of this is justifiable; rather, we are merely noting that it has long been inevitable and predictable. We were warned.

One of the only real questions we have is how self-styled progressive parties and leaders are going to navigate trans issues when the population is very much not on their side. We talk a lot about how the conservatives are beholden to the most vocal minorities within their parties; but we fear that the progressives suffer the same fundamental problem.

We’d like to think that the Liberals and the NDP will handle trans issues maturely, responsibly and well. But we know better. They’ll go all in, setting everyone up for a very nasty confrontation that we think they’ll lose, and badly. Brace yourselves, friends.

August 28, 2023

Charter school students do better academically, yet are funded at a lower level than other students

Filed under: Education, Government, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jack Elbaum on recent studies that show charter schools in the United States have higher academic success rates than ordinary state-funded schools, despite a significantly lower funding rate:

If you thought charter schools received anywhere near the same amount of funding as traditional public schools, then think again.

A new, massive study from the University of Arkansas finds that “On average, charter schools across 18 cities in 16 states (…) receive about 30 percent or $7,147 (2020 dollars) less funding per pupil than traditional public schools.” Over the past two decades, this funding disparity has remained relatively stable.

The gaps are, predictably, more severe in some places than others. The study notes that “Atlanta has the largest percentage-based charter funding disparity (about 53 percent), while Camden has the largest disparity in dollars ($19,711). Houston has the smallest disparity in terms of percent (three percent) and dollars ($417).”

Importantly, the regression analysis run by the authors did not suggest differences in the proportion of students in poverty or English Language Learners are the reason for the disparity. However, it did find that after taking into account differences in the number of special needs students, the disparity dropped considerably — although it remained significant ($1,707).

[…]

Based on these data alone, it would not be unreasonable for one to expect that these charter schools had worse educational outcomes than their traditional public school counterparts.

The only issue is that this is not the case.

A recent study from Stanford University, for example, found that charter school students gain 16 days’ worth of reading and six days of math per year relative to those in traditional public schools. These benefits were particularly pronounced among minority students who were also in poverty. Education Week reported that “Black charter students in poverty gained 37 days of learning in reading and 36 days in math over their counterparts in traditional public schools, and Hispanic students in poverty gained 36 days of reading and 30 days of math over their traditional public school peers.”

Economist Thomas Sowell’s 2020 book Charter Schools and Their Enemies also offers compelling data suggesting the efficacy of charter schools. He studied a set of charters and traditional public schools in New York City that served essentially identical populations. In many cases in the study, a charter school and traditional public school would even occupy the same building.

August 10, 2023

“… most boys start being treated as second class citizens around middle school … boys are treated as defective girls”

Filed under: Business, Education, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sarah Hoyt on the plight of boys and young men these days:

It’s far worse for the kids, because most of them are not even working at what they trained for. Or if they are, they are working at a level as though they were never trained.

But there is a bigger problem: most boys start being treated as second class citizens around middle school. If you’re older than me, you might think I lost my mind. Heck, if you’re younger than me, and never looked closely at what your kids’ school is doing, or you have no kids, you might think I’m nuts.

Well, I might be nuts but not on this. Starting at about middle school, boys are treated as defective girls. Because women are the majority and treated like a protected minority, every school is afraid of not “treating them fairly” which means giving them primacy. Now just your boy’s behavior as a boy will be punished, but assignments are geared for how girls/women think (which means they also annoy the living daylights of atypical females like myself), they are oriented to group work (which by and large punishes males, though again, atypical females ain’t too happy either), and they’re geared to at least external compliance (which again is a female trait.) Most of the teachers are not just women, but they’re women indoctrinated in a system that tells them that male work is superior and that women are unfairly discriminated against for “being kept out of it.”

If at this point you’re puzzled over my referring to male and female characteristics, and to male work, let’s take the gloves off and speak like adults, instead of the mush most of us have been fed our entire lives.

While we’re rational, thinking creatures, and creatures with our own will power, and therefore can work on a lot of our characteristics and change them: there are differences between men and women. Innate, inborn differences, starting in the uterus with the “hormone baths” that guide development of different sexes. Period.

No real scientist would ever deny that, unless of course he/she feared for his/her job.

… and because we live in retarded times, let me explain that though our bodies and brains are completely different and run on two models, yes, how much that difference manifests is a spectrum. First, because development has glitches. I.e. some people don’t get the right hormones at the right time, and might outright have a brain that leans more the way opposite their body. This is very rare. It is also, btw, not covalent with gender dysphoria. It’s mostly 100% living frustrated by the rest of humanity and assumptions made. But there are other issues. Other types of characteristics might emphasize/mitigate/mimic the way of thinking of the opposite sex. Autistic females tend to think more like males (go figure) and ADHD women might appear to (though it’s not necessarily true.)

Also, like every gendered characteristic, there is a spectrum. Gender doesn’t exist on a spectrum (mostly because it’s a grammatical construct and those are very binary/trienary) but GENDER EXPRESSING CHARACTERISTICS do. Every adult knows tall, hairy men with deep voices, and slight, almost hairless males who are tenors. And every combination thereof. This without regard to maleness/fertility/orientation. And every adult knows vavaboom females that look like they should be painted on the nose of WWII planes, and tall, broad shouldered, practically no hips or breasts females and every combination in between. And these women might or might not be straight/fertile without regard to those combinations.

And yes, all of us know strong women and weak males, though testosterone unreasonably favors males from early development.

[…]

Look, to level set: if you have a son, even a relatively high performing one, chances are he’s working under a level of throttling-down. And most boys are checked out. They no longer care. They’ve been told they’re oppressors and evil by reason of being born male from the moment they were conscious of being male. They no longer care. They no longer want to do anything. Burned out before they even start their lives.

And under it, because they’re males, with testosterone, there’s a level of anger that women will never understand, unless they live surrounded by males and really, really work at understanding. This means that this treatment of boys is creating that much ballyhooed “toxic masculinity” which idiots confuse with “being male”.

Yes, some boys are finding their way into professions the feminists have no interest in, and bless Mike Rowe, whatever his issues, for showing the way to a bunch of males.

But that’s not going to solve our problems as a society in general. Because, sure, we need machinists and HVAC technicians. But we also need engineers who are more fascinated with the “thing” that is the main part of their job, than with office politics. We need researchers who will work hard at figuring the problem, and not spend most of their time figuring out on whom to step to get higher. We need doctors who are gruff and not particularly good at “customer service” but view disease as an enemy to be conquered. (I could go for days about medicine. I’m not going to. But part of our favoring women in medical school is that we are importing most of the people involved in actual day to day doctoring — a dirty, unpalatable position educated women tend to disdain — from countries without the same standards of training. This is one of the idiotic consequences of denying biology in favor of bizarre Marxist social engineering. And not that, yes, I have several female doctors among the regulars. Yes, females can be good and passionate doctors. And several of them are. But those who read here are old enough they were admitted on an equal footing with males. No one was trying to make it 80% female, which is what I’m complaining about. That level of discrimination distorts everything down the line.)

We are INTENTIONALLY blocking males from pursuing their interests and talents, while pushing women to pursue what are traditionally male interests and talents.

This extends from professions to modes of behavior. Women are encouraged to join the hook up culture, with no emotional attachments and behave like BAD and IRRESPONSIBLE men of the 50s (or at least the popular image of those. None of us lived them. Wait. Some of you did. But I didn’t. And those who did as adults are, at this point, a minority.)

The only possible conclusion is that our culture has gone insane and thinks that male modes of work, and male modes of social behavior are VASTLY superior to females. And that females would normally behave like males, unless they were prevented. So, women must have been prevented for MILLENNIA. MILLENNIA. And now, we’re taking revenge for all those oppressed women, by making men behave like women and women like men. Ah. See how they like being oppressed!

Stated like this, openly, it sounds completely insane. It’s like these people are bizarrely misogynistic aliens, who never met a human. Which is largely true. They’re Marxists, for whom every human is a widget, interchangeable with every other human.

July 16, 2023

QotD: The girls’ locker room at school

Filed under: Education, Health, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One of the few skills I’ve retained from my teen years in the public school system of mid-Nineties America is the ability to get undressed in front of people without ever actually being naked. It is an art form particular to girls of a certain age, mastered in the locker room in the five minutes between gym class and the rest of the day: a sort of anti-strip tease in which you take off your sports bra while still wearing a T-shirt, always taking care not to expose so much as a millimetre of bare breast.

This method of bra removal was part of a larger, elaborate set of rules, unwritten but ironclad, whereby the locker room was a place to be naked as little as humanly possible. Being in your underwear was okay, but only if you were clearly making haste to put on more clothing. The bathing facilities, it was understood, were for decoration only and not to be used; people still talked about the time a few years back when a girl named Katie, a transfer student from some other country, or possibly another planet, actually took a shower after gym class one day — here you would lower your voice to a dramatic whisper — in the nude.

This cautionary tale of Katie revealed the true nature of our shared pathology: it wasn’t just that we didn’t want to be seen naked, or to see each other naked. It was that allowing yourself to be seen naked signified something sinister about you. You had to be some kind of pervert, an exhibitionist weirdo who lacked the good sense to be ashamed of your body — which was, of course, disgusting, and should be hidden at all costs.

Obviously, this was not a healthy way to be. Obviously, we all had eating disorders. Obviously, the kids were not, in this particular case, all right — or right at all. It’s strange, then, that in 2023, the neuroses of a bunch of 15-year-old girls trying to hide their developing bodies from each other in an upstate New York locker room seem to have somehow become the basis for a new Western paradigm. Nudity is now seen as invariably sexual, highly suspicious, and probably dangerous, particularly to children.

Kat Rosenfield, “The case for getting naked”, UnHerd, 2023-04-12.

June 6, 2023

Australia’s “teen smoking rates rose sixfold between 2018 and 2023”

Filed under: Australia, Government, Health, Law — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Christopher Snowdon on Australia’s determination to stamp out vaping … even at the cost of vastly increasing the number of tobacco smokers:

More bad news from the supposed world leader in tobacco control. Official figures show that teen smoking rates rose sixfold between 2018 and 2023, from 2% to 12.8%.

It’s been over a decade since Australia introduced plain packaging, a policy that the Southern hemisphere’s wrongest man, Simon Chapman, likened to a vaccine for lung cancer. Australia has had the highest cigarette taxes in the world for ages, the sale of nicotine e-cigarettes has always been illegal, and all they have to show for it is an insanely big black market for both tobacco and e-cigarettes, more children smoking and a whole bunch of people using unregulated vapes. The wowsers just can’t stop winning, can they?

Naturally, this has led to much soul searching among the tobacco control elite who are having to reassess their assumptions in the face of this overwhelming evidence of policy failure.

I’m joking, of course. They are doubling down again.

If you spoke to someone from the reality-based community, they would tell you that children find it easier to access a product when the market is in the hands of illicit traders because illicit traders don’t care who they sell to. They might also point out that the Australian government has gone out of its way to portray vaping as being at least as bad as smoking. School children in Australia are taught that vaping causes brain damage. Public health agencies produce websites that purport to tell people the facts about vaping but actually tell them lies and misleading half-truths.

April 22, 2023

QotD: The yawning vaccuum that used to be “white culture”

Filed under: Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Current Year White people are not allowed to have a culture. Any culture. Hence, in a perverse way, hipsterism.

First: I think we can agree that there’s no such thing as a black hipster, or a Latino hipster, or an Asian hipster. What would be the point? Those groups already have a culture, in both the “personal identity” and “grievance group” sense. […]

The 1990s were the last time there was some common ground. Growing up as I did in the Tech Boom South, I saw it firsthand. It was just accepted that your Hispanic (not “Latino”, and certainly not “LatinX”) friends would have certain cultural specific things they’d have to do from time to time. If you were friends, they might invite you. If they were good friends, they wouldn’t invite you (do not, under any circumstances, go to your buddy’s sister’s quinceañera. You will meet a whole bunch of hot, horny young Mexican nubiles. You will also meet their brothers and fathers and cousins and uncles and etc., so you will spend the whole evening running around like a homo, doing everything in your power not to talk to girls. It’s torture*).

Same thing with the Chinese kids, and the Indian kids, and all the rest. You’d never see your Asian buddies on Friday nights, because that’s when they had Chinese school (yes, of course their parents would schedule something academic on a Friday night). Diwali was cool, because your friends’ moms would make those crazy-sweet Indian desserts and send you a care package (also known as “diabetes in a box”). That was just an accepted part of life, the same way those guys wouldn’t start a pickup basketball game until after 10 on a Sunday morning, because they knew we’d be in church. Nobody thought much of it, in the same way all our moms just kinda learned by osmosis to keep tortilla chips and salsa in the cupboard as an all-purpose snack (no worries about anyone’s religious food prohibitions).

This worked, because there was still enough of a monoculture back then — this is the late 1980s / early 1990s — to provide common ground. Alas, as White culture disintegrated, the other guys started subsuming their cultural identities into their grievance group identities: The Chinese kids were worried about being called “bananas” (yellow on the outside, White on the inside); the Indian kids were ABCDs (American-Born Confused Desis); and so on. And the White kids were the most anti-White of all, since they’d gone to college for a semester or two and had learned how to parrot pop-Marxism (technically, pop-Gramscianism and pop-Frankfurt School-ism and pop-Marcuse, but who’s counting?).

Thinking back on it, those were the ostentatious “slackers”; the real “Grunge” kids — White kids who found their own Whiteness “problematic” (a phrase debuting in egghead circles around that time). I always assumed it was a problem with traditional, cock-rocking masculinity — not least because that’s what all the male “Grunge” rock stars said it was — but in retrospect I think it was a rising problem with Whiteness itself. Maybe all the grievance groups had a point, and maybe they didn’t, but either way the dominant Boomer culture sucks, so what else can you do?

I know how naive that must sound now, but 30 years ago …

    * It wasn’t my buddy’s fault. He warned me. But c’mon, man — his mom invited me. We’d spent the whole summer working together on his dad’s landscaping crew; I practically lived at their house. What was I gonna say, no? Looking back on it, Mrs. Rodriguez was either trying to set me up with her daughter, or was Aztec goddess-level sadistic.

Severian, “To Mock It, It Must Exist”, Founding Questions, 2022-12-29.

April 4, 2023

QotD: We used to have this concept of “healthy socialization” for kids

Filed under: Education, Health, Quotations, Sports, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Back when there were still a few grownups in charge, it was understood that kids are, in fact, kids, and that a major part of healthy socialization is performing a kind of differential diagnosis on your identity — if I’m not this, then I must be that, until you finally realize that you’re more than any of them, or all of them put together. Younger readers will have to take it on faith that this was possible, but I myself was, at one point, a preppie, a jock, a skater, a Goth, a burnout, and I think I’m forgetting a few. If that seems dubious, then this will really blow your circuits: I went out for, and made, the baseball team even though I didn’t particularly like baseball and wasn’t particularly good at it.

30 years ago, that kind of thing wasn’t just possible, it was pretty easy, since Little League was still about silly stuff like having fun, and when high school coaches gave you the speech about teamwork and character building, he — get this — actually meant it. I know how crazy this sounds, but it was pretty much expected of us benchwarmers to take the piss out of the kid who carried on like he was some kind of Big League prospect. Nobody but parents came to the games, anyway, and wearing a letter jacket didn’t help you get girls (I tested this hypothesis extensively). Nowadays, of course, Little League squads are ruthlessly culled, and if you make the team, you’d better be ready to be put on a nutrition plan and workout schedule, to attend summer skills camps, to be no-shit scouted, by professionals, at an age where you’re still not really sure what girls are for.

You don’t get to be “a jock” for a semester, in other words. You are one, and that’s all you are, starting before puberty, and woe to the kid who only made the team because his hormonal clock was set a little ahead of the other boys’. The kid who can throw 75 at age ten, as we all know, is 99.8% certain to still be throwing 75 at age sixteen, when everyone on the JV team can catch up to it. In my day, that’s when the coach pulled you aside and explained a few things to you, gently but firmly pointing you towards the Model UN Club. He was good at it, and since he was good at giving those “teamwork and character” speeches, too, he’d tell you that this, right here, is one of those situations, so man up and accept your limitations.

Ah well. So much for being a jock. Cross it off the list, and try not to notice the relief in Mom’s eyes — and, yeah, the little bit of sadness in Dad’s — when they realize they don’t have to schlep you all over the goddamn place on summer evenings, sitting in the bleachers watching you ride the pine. Time to find something else …

Severian, “Alienation”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-29.

March 30, 2023

QotD: Revealed preference in the teenage hellscape of high school

Filed under: Health, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This demonization of masculinity conflicts with the reality that any boy can see with his own two eyes: The cutest girls in school are attracted to the most masculine boys, and masculine not just in terms of physical traits, but also in terms of personality traits — confidence, assertiveness, “swagger”. Here we see a problem with what Rational Male author Rollo Tomassi calls the feminine-primary social order. Every observant man knows that there is a yawning chasm between (a) what women say they value most in a man and (b) the kind of man women actually go for. Listen to what women say, and you’d think they are magnetically attracted to “sensitive” guys. Watch what women actually do, and you can see that women obviously don’t actually care about “sensitivity”. Women want men who are tall and muscular and, ceteris parabus, rich, although no amount of money is going to make a short chubby guy sexy. As for the claim that women go for “sensitive” guys, anyone with two eyes and a brain knows this is nonsense. You don’t see throngs of lovestruck college girls chasing after guys who major in sociology or English literature (unless, of course, these guys are also tall, muscular and rich). No, it’s the jocks and frat boys who get the best action on campus, and if you pay attention to the choices women make, you’ll begin to suspect that their professed preference for “sensitive” men is the exact opposite of truth. That girl who was lecturing you about your need to be more “sensitive” will, with surprising regularity, end up falling head-over-heels for some selfish creep or dimwit brute who can’t even spell the word “sensitivity”.

Robert Stacy McCain, “Conflicting Signals”, The Other McCain, 2019-05-23.

March 9, 2023

Want to feel more depressed? Spend more time with your smartphone

Filed under: Health, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Freddie deBoer is convinced that much of the reason for widespread depression among teenagers can be traced directly to their obsessive devotion to the online world through their smartphones:

Are smartphones to blame for the mental health crisis among teens? The debate has picked up steam lately, in part because of the steady accumulation of evidence that they are indeed, at least partially. (As you know, I’m a believer.) Jonathan Haidt has done considerable work marshaling this evidence. But there’s an attendant question of how phones make kids miserable, if indeed they do. In this post I offer some plausible answers. This is mostly just speculation and I don’t know if the proffered explanations can be tested empirically.

I want to start by establishing a sort of meta-layer on which a lot of these problems rest. We might be inclined to say that these problems are inherently problems of the internet/online life/digital culture, rather than smartphones as such; you can be hurt by what I’m going to describe from a laptop as well as from a smartphone. And I think that’s right, except for one key difference: ubiquity. No matter how portable and light it is, you’re not reflexively checking your laptop on the subway platform or in the bathroom. The iPhone took all of the various pathologies of the internet, made it possible for them to be experienced repetitively and at zero cost morning and night, and dramatically scaled up the financial incentives for companies to exploit those pathologies for gain. You can certainly have an unhealthy relationship with the internet when it’s confined to your desktop. But phones make relentless conditioning and reflexive engagement a mass phenomenon.

The other overriding factor here is the fact that adolescents are still developing mentally, and thus are likely more susceptible to these problems.

Constant exposure to unachievable conditions. Back in my youth, you might watch an MTV show about how rich people lived, or leaf through a magazine like US Weekly, and be exposed to opulence and material excess. Or you might go on vacation and see how the other half lives if you took a tour of the Hollywood hills or whatever. You were perfectly well aware that rich people and their privileged lives existed. But then you turned off the show or you put down the magazine or your vacation ended, and unless you were born rich, you lived in an environment that of necessity was modest and real. Your friends might have lived in nice houses, but you didn’t see riches everywhere you looked, and your definition of what a hot girl looked like was mostly derived from the girls you went to school with. Your environment conditioned the scope of your desires.

Now, exposure to lifestyles that are completely unachievable is constant. Instagram is a machine for making you feel like whatever you’ve got isn’t enough. (That’s how it functions financially, through advertising idealized lives.) There are young people out there who have arranged their various feeds such that they’re always a few seconds away from seeing concerts they can’t attend, cars they can’t drive, houses they can’t live in, clothes they can’t wear, women they can’t fuck or whose bodies they can’t have, places they can’t travel to, food they can’t eat, and lives they can’t live. When I was young, if I wanted to see a picture of a Ferrari, I had to seek out a picture of a Ferrari. It was hard to see suggestive photos of intimidatingly hot women, which is why the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition was a big deal. Mostly, the world around you was quotidian and its pleasures attainable. What can it be doing to these generations of young people, having completely unrealistic visions of what life is like being shoved into their brains all the time? How could their actual lives ever compare?

(Incidentally, I am thoroughly convinced that a majority of self-described incels are men who could find meaningful and fulfilling sexual and romantic success, both short-term and long, but who have developed such a wildly unrealistic idea about what actual human women look like that their standards are laughably high. And it’s easy to make fun of that, but I also think that the conditioning inherent to constantly looking at filtered and photoshopped pictures is powerful.)

February 19, 2023

Andrew Sullivan on the legacy media’s coverage of transgender issues

Filed under: Britain, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the free portion of his Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan looks at how the legacy media chooses to cover (or ignore) different aspects of pre-teen and teenage transgenderism:

Two people at EuroPride 2019 in Vienna holding an LGBTQ+ pride rainbow flag featuring a design by Daniel Quasar; this variation of the rainbow flag was initially promoted as “Progress” a PRIDE Flag Reboot.
Photo by Bojan Cvetanović via Wikimedia Commons.

One more criticism of the letter. It uses the terrible history of the [New York Times] on coverage of gay men and AIDS in the 20th century as equivalent to the reporting of Bazelon, Baker, et al, today. This is unhinged. Transgender people today are fully covered under the Civil Rights Act; in the 1980s, gays had nothing. In the 1980s and 1990s, the NYT opposed using the word “gay” because it legitimized homosexuality in some way; today the NYT prints “queer” or “trans” or LGBTQ+ in almost every other article.

Today, the paper has published a mountain of empathetic coverage of trans people — over 800 stories in the past year. Since January 1, the NYT has run a moving profile about a trans man in Mexico; a celebration of “queer” life in Alabama by a trans staffer; an exploration of nonbinary fashion; a critical orgasm over “queer” theater; and a news story explaining that “the flood of [trans-related] legislation is part of a long-term campaign by national groups that see transgender rights as an issue on which they can harness voter anger”. Comparing this with A.M. Rosenthal’s reign of homophobic terror and censorship is just obscene.

One historical analogy does seem salient to me, though: the drugs they now give to gender-dysphoric teens are very closely related to the drugs they used to “cure” Alan Turing of his gayness. Every time I think of that I shudder.

And this attempt to suppress reporting on the subject comes at a very strange time. Next week, a new book will be published about the Tavistock Centre, the place responsible for the medical and psychological treatment of children with gender dysphoria in Britain. It’s written by a liberal female journalist, Hannah Barnes, of a flagship British documentary show, Newsnight.

Her book exposes a huge medical scandal, in which countless children were put on puberty blockers with almost no psychological evaluation, and with rates of autism and domestic abuse that were already through the roof. It shows what happened when the new affirmation-only puberty-blocker experiment, only begun in the late 1990s, was left to run its course, with no opposition and no dissent allowed. Check out an extract here. Here’s where I sat up straight:

    Clinicians recall multiple instances of young people who had suffered homophobic bullying at school or at home, and then identified as trans. According to the clinician Anastassis Spiliadis, “so many times” a family would say, “Thank God my child is trans and not gay or lesbian.” Girls said, “When I hear the word ‘lesbian’ I cringe”, and boys talked to doctors about their disgust at being attracted to other boys.

    When Gids [the Gender Identity Development Service] asked adolescents referred to the service in 2012 about their sexuality, more than 90 per cent of females and 80 per cent of males said they were same-sex attracted or bisexual. Bristow came to believe that Gids was performing “conversion therapy for gay kids” and there was a bleak joke on the team that there would be “no gay people left at the rate Gids was going”.

Just think about that for a second. And remember that gay groups cheer this on; and several gay writers put their names to the letter. What a massive reckoning may be in store for them. If any of this pans out, and gay groups have endorsed it, it could easily be the greatest scandal in the history of the gay rights movement.

More than a third of the kids pushed onto the trans track had autism, sometimes severe. Others were victims of domestic abuse: “[A natal girl] who’s being abused by a male, I think a question to ask is whether there’s some relationship between identifying as male and feeling safe”, one clinician at the center said. No questions about other aspects of a child’s mental health were considered if the kid was identifying as the opposite sex. And this took place in a socialized system, with constant oversight, and no massive financial incentives to treat children. Just imagine what could be happening in the US private system where trans patients are among the most lucrative to have in your care, and are under treatment their entire life.

[…]

One obvious area for research: why have the sex ratios shifted so radically in the past decade or so — with girls now vastly outstripping boys in the young patients involved? Why the explosion in requests? It’s far more dramatic and skewed to one sex than it would be if merely a function of declining stigma. Yet for woke journalists, it’s all Principal Skinner: “Let’s have no more curiosity about this bizarre cover-up.”

Something is going on among teen girls more generally. The CDC just issued a frightening new report:

    Nearly 3 in 5 teen girls (57%) said they felt “persistently sad or hopeless”. That’s the highest rate in a decade. And 30% said they have seriously considered dying by suicide — a percentage that’s risen by nearly 60% over the past 10 years.

Now check out Jamie Reed’s and Tavistock’s overwhelmingly female, often deeply unhappy, clients. Is there a connection? I don’t know. What I do know is that it’s the job of the media to find out, and not to shut itself down.

The lobby groups and often well-intentioned doctors who have pioneered this massive experiment on children will naturally resist any idea they have been facilitating abuse, or concede any points — because as soon as they confess doubt, the whole house of cards can come tumbling down; and lawsuits alone could end the practice very quickly. The Democrats and the Biden administration have locked themselves to the idea that this kind of treatment is a no-brainer and never does any harm — and they just keep repeating that like a mantra and never address the recent restriction of these experimental practices in progressive Europe. The far right can use the issue to gin up homophobic tropes and cruel treatment of trans people.

February 10, 2023

“What’s happening to children is morally and medically appalling”

Filed under: Health, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Free Press, Jamie Reed explains why she gave up her job as as a case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital and is now speaking out against the early and aggressive therapeutic treatment of gender-confused children and teens:

Reed in her office. (Theo R. Welling).

Soon after my arrival at the Transgender Center, I was struck by the lack of formal protocols for treatment. The center’s physician co-directors were essentially the sole authority.

At first, the patient population was tipped toward what used to be the “traditional” instance of a child with gender dysphoria: a boy, often quite young, who wanted to present as — who wanted to be — a girl.

Until 2015 or so, a very small number of these boys comprised the population of pediatric gender dysphoria cases. Then, across the Western world, there began to be a dramatic increase in a new population: Teenage girls, many with no previous history of gender distress, suddenly declared they were transgender and demanded immediate treatment with testosterone.

I certainly saw this at the center. One of my jobs was to do intake for new patients and their families. When I started there were probably 10 such calls a month. When I left there were 50, and about 70 percent of the new patients were girls. Sometimes clusters of girls arrived from the same high school.

This concerned me, but didn’t feel I was in the position to sound some kind of alarm back then. There was a team of about eight of us, and only one other person brought up the kinds of questions I had. Anyone who raised doubts ran the risk of being called a transphobe.

The girls who came to us had many comorbidities: depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, obesity. Many were diagnosed with autism, or had autism-like symptoms. A report last year on a British pediatric transgender center found that about one-third of the patients referred there were on the autism spectrum.

Frequently, our patients declared they had disorders that no one believed they had. We had patients who said they had Tourette syndrome (but they didn’t); that they had tic disorders (but they didn’t); that they had multiple personalities (but they didn’t).

The doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion. They even acknowledged that suicide has an element of social contagion. But when I said the clusters of girls streaming into our service looked as if their gender issues might be a manifestation of social contagion, the doctors said gender identity reflected something innate.

To begin transitioning, the girls needed a letter of support from a therapist — usually one we recommended — who they had to see only once or twice for the green light. To make it more efficient for the therapists, we offered them a template for how to write a letter in support of transition. The next stop was a single visit to the endocrinologist for a testosterone prescription.

That’s all it took.

When a female takes testosterone, the profound and permanent effects of the hormone can be seen in a matter of months. Voices drop, beards sprout, body fat is redistributed. Sexual interest explodes, aggression increases, and mood can be unpredictable. Our patients were told about some side effects, including sterility. But after working at the center, I came to believe that teenagers are simply not capable of fully grasping what it means to make the decision to become infertile while still a minor.

December 31, 2022

If Hell is “other people”, then the deepest level of Hell must be “other high school students”

Filed under: Education, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tom Knighton on a recent post from FEE about the awfulness of the school experience for a lot of students:

“Leaside High School entrance Toronto Ontario Canada” by ammiiirrrr is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 .

I was never a big fan of school. While I always thought education was important, I never liked school itself.

Part of that was because I was the kid most likely to get picked on, but even when that wasn’t happening, I still didn’t like it. Learning boring stuff while not getting to delve deeper into interesting topics just made it a chore to be endured.

Couple with the fact that cruelty is such a part of the “educational experience”, it’s no wonder that I didn’t like it.

Hell, even when everyone was being chill, the fact that I didn’t fit in did a number on me, including a time when I genuinely wanted to end my own life. I don’t talk about that kind of thing much, but it was a stark reality of that time.

[…]

Granted, I always chalked my difficulties at the time — and I’m much better now, I should note — with a number of things besides the structure of school itself. Mostly the fact that it was a small school, I was the weird kid, and while I had friends, I never felt like I really fit in.

Yet I can’t rule out that the structured nature of education at the time contributed greatly to the problem.

As noted in the original piece, the patterns for suicidal behavior in teens don’t match up with adults. That tells us that there’s something at play other than just the weather, the temperature, or whatever.

Regardless, it raises serious questions about our schools as an environment. Teachers and administrators would tell you that they strive to create a nurturing environment for students of all ages. I’m pretty sure most of them mean it, too.

Yet these studies suggest that they’re failing. Miserably.

But let’s not ignore the possibility that much of this may well be because, frankly, kids can be little sociopaths. They’re mean. They’re cruel. Someone will seek out those they perceive as weak and victimize them while others get to enjoy the show, even while being glad they’re not the target.

Then there’s the fact that it’s impossible to hide from any deficiencies you might have, including social deficiencies just as good fortune with finding romantic partners of your preferred sex and that’s going to play a role as well.

October 14, 2022

QotD: High school

Filed under: Education, Health, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Those of us on the back nine of our lives remember high school as a process of differential diagnosis. You try on a certain set of social roles to see which, if any, fit. You don’t go out for the baseball team because it’s the first step to making the Majors. Really, you might not even like playing baseball all that much. You go out for the baseball team because you want to be a Jock. If you make the team, you’re a Jock for a while, leading the Jock life and learning its lessons. If you don’t make the team, you go find something else — the Debate Club, heavy metal music, whatever — and learn the lessons those lifestyles teach.

You didn’t understand this back then, of course, but your parents did, and — crucially — your teachers did. If you wanted to be a Metalhead this semester, they’d treat you like a Metalhead, complete with the “Why are you wasting your potential (and ruining your ears) with that godawful noise?” They’d make a show of having a Very Serious Conversation with you about the dangers of drugs and satanism … knowing full well that you weren’t on drugs, weren’t sacrificing virgins to Moloch (if for no other reason than you didn’t actually know any girls), and would, in fact, come back as a clean-scrubbed Preppie after summer break your junior year.

The key word in “adolescent rebellion”, after all, is adolescent. All of that stuff was just practice. If it proceeded in the normal way, what going through all the permutations of high school identity taught you was:

  • you’re a fairly normal person; and
  • that’s ok.

In other words, you are not a collection of externals — clothes, music, hairstyles. You’re you. The externals can change, fairly radically — remember that one summer you broke your nose trying to be a skater? — but there’s a core in there that’s you. Which is great, because it means that you are just a person who takes customer service calls in a cubicle farm to pay the bills; they’re not going to put “Here lies Bill, a Customer Service Representative” on your tombstone.

Severian, “The Basic College Girl”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-07-24.

October 8, 2022

QotD: Does homework, well, work? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Filed under: Education, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Yesterday I wrote about bottlenecks to learning. I wanted to discuss the effectiveness of homework. If it works well, that would suggest students are bottlenecked on examples and repetition. If it works poorly, it would have to be something else.

Unfortunately, all the research on this (showcased in eg Cooper 2006) is terrible.

Most studies cited by both sides use “time spent doing homework” as the independent variable, then correlate it with test scores or grades. If students who do more time on homework get better test scores, they conclude homework works; otherwise, that it doesn’t.

One minor complaint about this methodology is that we don’t really know if anyone is reporting time spent on homework accurately. Cooper cites some studies showing that student-reported time-spent-on-homework correlates with test scores at a respectable r = 0.25. But in the same sample, parent-reported time-spent-on-homework correlates at close to zero. Cooper speculates that the students’ estimates are better than the parents’, and I think this makes sense — it’s easier to reduce a correlation by adding noise than to increase it — but in the end we don’t know. According to a Washington Post article, students in two very similar datasets reported very different amounts of time spent on homework — maybe because of the way they asked the question? I don’t know, self-report from schoolchildren seems fraught.

But this is the least of our problems. This methodology assumes that time spent on homework is a safe proxy for amount of homework. It isn’t. Students may spend less time on homework because they’re smart, find it easy, and can finish it very quickly. Or they might spend more time on homework because they love learning and care about the subject matter a lot. Or they might spend more time because they’re second-generation Asian immigrants with taskmaster parents who insist on it being perfect. Or they might spend less time because they’re in some kind of horrible living environment not conducive to sitting at a desk quietly. All of these make “time spent doing homework” a poor proxy for “amount of homework that teacher assigned” in a way that directly confounds a homework-test scores correlation. Most studies don’t bother to adjust for these factors. The ones that do choose a few of them haphazardly, make wild guesses about what model to use, and then come up with basically random results.

Both homework proponents (Harris Cooper) and opponents (Alfie Kohn) briefly nod to this problem, then take these studies seriously anyway. If you do that, you find that probably homework isn’t helpful in elementary school, but might be helpful during high school (though some people disagree with either half of that statement). But why would you take these seriously?

Scott Alexander, “Nobody Knows How Well Homework Works”, Astral Codex Ten, 2022-07-07.

October 3, 2022

“Still, what about the boys?”

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Janice Fiamengo on the far-from-impartial emphasis of concern on young people being pushed toward radical “solutions” to gender dysphoria:

Last year, conservative educational institution Prager U published “Why Girls Become Boys“, a short video by journalist Abigail Shrier, the author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, published in 2020. Shrier’s focus is evident from the titles: girls. Previously, Shrier had been profiled in an interview with Candace Owens when she was still working on the book. Though the interview is now three years old, its canvassing of teen transitioning — in a discussion that moves from concern about girls being “seduced” into trans, to anger at society’s failure to protect girls from boys who transition — provides a fairly accurate representation, I believe, of conservative positioning on this subject. Girls who transition are seen as victims; while boys who transition are seen (if they are seen at all) as predators.

This double emphasis is clear in the interview. Shrier and Owens describe the collusion of media influencers, the public school system, woke punditry, and medical authorities to encourage girls (but not boys, it seems) to consider their gender identity “fluid”. Feelings of discomfort are too readily interpreted as signs of a trans identity. Girls can be made to believe themselves trans very quickly, sometimes simply from viewing one or more internet videos; and schools are not required to tell parents if their daughter begins identifying as male. From age fifteen, girls can find gender clinics willing to prescribe testosterone without their parents’ consent; a girl can have her breasts amputated as early as age sixteen. The lifetime of dependency on hormones (their consequences unknown), the risky surgeries, and the tragic missed opportunities — of motherhood in particular, but even of having breasts — were emphasized by both pundits.

It’s almost impossible to imagine these two women discussing the tragedy of losing a penis, of being denied the opportunity to become a father, of being denied the joy of male sexuality.

From this point, the conversation moved seamlessly into discussing the victimhood of girls forced to share their private spaces — and of course their sporting competitions — with biological males (often called “men” as in “Men are invading girls’ sports”). These males are not discussed as vulnerable innocents duped into taking body-altering hormones or undergoing dangerous surgeries. No imaginative effort was spent on why these boys want to live as trans female. The underlying assumption seemed to be that boys’ transition, far from being an attempt to relieve real distress, is an act of appropriation of female experience. The boys were depicted as aggressors who invade girls’ locker-rooms and deny girls opportunities (or, even worse, masquerade as trans in order to prey on girls sexually). Are there boys made uncomfortable in their change rooms or other private spaces by the presence of biological girls? The question seems never to have occurred to Shrier and Owens.

Shrier and Owens agree in decrying feminism for failing to protect girls and for failing (allegedly) to affirm femininity and girlhood. “Girls aren’t being told how wonderful it is to be a girl!” Their own feminist — or at least female-centered — assumptions are clearly evident in their conviction that the trans phenomenon is about multiple harms to females, harms which must always take precedence over the legitimate needs and experiences of males. And in fact, contrary to what Shrier and Owens seem to believe, there are many feminists who vehemently denounce biological male incursions into female bodies and spaces; many of them, such as Meghan Murphy, Julie Bindel, and Sheila Jeffreys, to name only a few, advocate from an avowedly anti-male perspective.

Shrier might respond that the overwhelming majority of adolescents who believe themselves to be trans are female (as she states in her Prager U video). This may be true (a recent Psychology Today article puts the number at greater than 80% female) but does not mitigate my objection. Teen suicide is about 80% male (more on this later), but it is hard to imagine concerned pundits ignoring the troubles of girls. Many discussions of teen suicide, in fact, make much of the fact that girls attempt suicide more often than boys, downplaying the fact that boys carry out their suicides in such distinctively high numbers. Don’t get me wrong: I have no objection to a focus on girls’ difficulties in adolescence — except when it improperly ignores and even maligns boys.

It wasn’t all that long ago that the vast majority of young people seeking “gender-affirming” therapy were males hoping to become trans-females. In the last few years, that proportion has flipped completely.

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