Navigating the extremes: A search for middle ground on transgender issues
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For many people, it's simply common sense that children too young to vote should not be allowed to make a life-altering medical decision based on what may be a phase or a childhood fantasy. Others feel just as strongly that kids who say they are transgender know exactly who they are.
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The reality is, as often happens, more complicated. Severe and persistent childhood gender dysphoria does exist; even some critics of pediatric gender medicine, such as science journalist Jesse Singal, have
Youth gender medicine is just one aspect of a larger controversy over what
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While gender transitions in the United States began in the 1950s and gained
Claims that the 'gender binary' — the division of humanity into male and female — was an artificial, oppressive construct trickled down from academic discourse to far broader left-of-center circles, with such concepts as 'sex assigned at birth' becoming common even in the mainstream media. 'Nonbinary' identities beyond male and female proliferated. Universities and some corporations tried to normalize the exchange of pronouns as part of introductions (in 2019, then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris once
All these changes moved forward with little if any mainstream debate. Those who argued for protecting single-sex female spaces or opposed the participation of biologically male athletes in women's and girls' sports were routinely accused of bigotry — including people with strong progressive credentials like author J.K. Rowling and pioneering lesbian athlete Martina Navratilova. Psychologists were sidelined if they warned that transgender identification among teenagers, which had
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Fear of questioning advocacy narratives caused sloppy journalism: Thus, a 2022
The result is a widespread sense that the transgender rights movement, enabled by various institutions, has gone off the rails — with effects that range from relatively trivial (the erasure of women from language about pregnancy) to clearly damaging (a transgender prisoner housed in a women's facility
Yet the backlash, emboldened by the movement's setbacks, has its own excesses. Alongside people with legitimate concerns, there are anti-trans advocates: right-wingers who see any deviation from traditional sexual norms as degenerate, or radical feminists who associate biological maleness with entrenched evil. Alongside
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These illiberal and cruel attitudes are reflected in some of Trump's executive orders — ones that, for instance,
Blanket bans on transgender youth care of the kind that has been upheld in Tennessee may also be too extreme. But it is important to recognize that such bans are in part a response to shoddy practices and shoddy science (as documented in '
A course correction should be based on common sense, solid facts, and respect — respect for the humanity of transgender people but also for people who dissent from various aspects of transgender-advocacy dogma. That's extremely difficult to achieve in a toxically polarized political environment. Open and civil dialogue is a place to start.
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