#Lisa Selin Davis

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Lisa Selin Davis

Published: Apr 11, 2024

A long-awaited report out this week found that medical professionals in the UK who advocate for gender transition in children are misguided ideologues.

Written by British pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass, The Cass Review, which is nearly 400 pages and took more than four years to compile, comes to the following conclusions:

Thousands of vulnerable young people were given life-altering treatments with “no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress.” 

“It has been suggested that hormone treatment reduces the elevated risk of death by suicide in this population, but the evidence found did not support this conclusion.”

“Social justice” ideology is driving medical decision-making, and “the toxicity of the debate” has created an environment “where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views.”

Activists insist the science on this matter is settled, but Cass’s tone recalls a stern British nanny calmly explaining to unruly children how to get their room in order. She shows us that everything about this issue is unsettled, and unsettling. For instance, she notes that “social transition”—when very young children assume other gender identities—is an “active intervention” that may set youths on a path to medical transition. And it may even make gender dysphoria worse.

The review, commissioned by England’s National Health Service, comes after more than a decade of whistleblowing by clinicians at the country’s Gender Identity Development Services, or GIDS, which was established in 1989 (but mostly off the radar for its first 20 years, because few children and families sought its services). 

These whistleblowers detailed how kids were fast-tracked to medication while a culture of fear grew around raising any concerns, even as demand for youth gender medicine exploded. Eventually, the NHS decommissioned GIDS and hired the neutral, no-nonsense Cass to detail what went wrong and what to do right moving forward.

Her report made the further damning conclusions:

Clinicians “are unable to reliably predict which children/young people will transition successfully and which might regret or detransition at a later date.”

A disproportionate number of patients were “birth registered females presenting in adolescence. . . . a different cohort from that looked at by earlier studies.”

Many parents feared their children had been medicalized by professionals who didn’t take other difficulties into account, “such as loss of a parent, traumatic illness, diagnosis of neurodiversity, and isolation or bullying in school.”

There is a lack of strong evidence to show that puberty blockers “may improve gender dysphoria or overall mental health.”

The majority of gender-dysphoric patients in early studies found that their symptoms desisted during puberty, with most coming out as gay or bisexual later.

Cass notes that “for most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress.” She supports expanding the treatment to regional, holistic centers, essentially ending the specialist gender clinic model. That treatment should be based on unbiased psychological care, and robust and consistent evaluation tools must be developed so reliable evidence can finally be gathered. 

This final report—and an interim one Cass issued in 2022—echoes what a number of Western nations, such as Finland and Sweden, have found when they reviewed their own youth gender services. It also underscores what we see in the United States: poor quality research, an unstudied population, and detransitioners traumatized by the treatment they received.

Today, red states are banning the medicalization of gender dysphoric youth, while some blue states have declared themselves medical sanctuaries for minors seeking transition. Medical associations—from the American Academy of Pediatrics to the American Psychological Association—continue to support the “affirmative” model criticized by Cass in her report. 

In her review, Cass directly addresses the 9,000 young people who have moved through gender treatments via the NHS, stating bluntly: research “has let us all down, most importantly you.” 

The U.S. needs to form a truly bipartisan commission that looks at the evidence regarding youth gender medicine. As things stand now, we will continue to be stuck in a perpetual culture war, with parents and distressed kids paying the price.

[medusasbush]

read april 2024

Beyoncé Knowles-Carter and the flip-flop, flippy flip flop and ass bitches.

Unlikable Women Like Me: On Being a “Bitch”

How therapy-speak ‘processed’ its way into pop-music

This is not a COWBOY CARTER review

Elon Musk Didn’t Want His Latest Deposition Released. Here It Is.

Which Kirsten Dunst movie are you?

Who needs state surveillance when we're willingly surveilling each other?

When Everyone's the Main Character, We're All Alone.

Optimization Will Not Save You

Terror & Mundanity In A Makeup Bag: On beauty products, local politics, and Palestine.

I Have My Father’s Eyes and His Temper Too: A Personal Commentary on Mainstream Media’s Portrayal of Father-Daughter Relationships

Why Women Pay the Price for Caring for and Understanding Men

Wife Sentences: Lisa Selin Davis’s confused history of homemakers

Sex Positivity Was Fake, But We'll Miss It When It's Gone

The Myth of Writer's Block: and the importance of shutting the fuck up

The Tyranny of Stans

Exposed Bra Straps Exposed: Post-feminism, Mean Girls the Musical and the lore of visible bra straps.

what can we expect from friendship?

On Finding the Freedom to Rage Against Our Fathers

Don’t Call it Girlhood

Romance & Rivalry By Proxy: When vicarious experiences deliver the dollars.

Is It Ok To Dislike Children?

What Does Your Bookshelf Say About You?

‘Monkey Man’: Welcome to the Action-Movie Pantheon, Dev Patel

The problem with fan studies: Are we entrenching stan culture instead of dissecting it?

maybe we should all call our friends more

Ambiguity & Delusion: Lessons Learned From Pop Culture Worship

An Academic F*ck You to Chip Wilson's Fatphobia

Just call it jihad

[amatsuki]

There is nothing suspicious—or particularly gendered—about a desire to rest. But if we can sympathize in this respect with women who are drawn to the housewife fantasy, then we must also address the housewife’s immature side: her refusal of responsibility in the public sphere. The housewife lifestyle abandons the struggles of feminist advancement, community building, justice, and political engagement. It trades them for insularity, callowness, and superficial self-regard.

And here we return to Davis’s initial characterization of housewifery’s appeal: “I might have liked to hitch my wagon to someone, confident that he loved me enough that I could be comfortable in a state of financial dependency,” she writes. This desire to be taken care of, to be loved in a way that obviates responsibility, is not a fantasy of a marriage. It is a fantasy of a return to childhood. She’s not looking for a husband; she’s looking for a parent.

[itsawritblr]

"I Was Told to Approve All Teen Gender Transitions. I Refused."

Via The Free Press:

Perhaps you read the long investigation about detransitioners published in this weekend’s New York Times. It is comprehensive and sober and we highly recommend it.

It’s also a piece we are confident would never have made it into the paper were it not for independent publications like ours taking the journalistic and reputational risk over the past few years to pursue the subject of “gender-affirming” care and the subsequent harms inflicted on vulnerable young people. In this, we are proud to stand alongside Hannah Barnes, Lisa Selin Davis, Hadley Freeman, Helen Joyce, Leor Sapir, Abigail Shrier, Jesse Singal, Kathleen Stock, Quillette and others, who took the arrows so that the mainstream press could finally start reporting on what’s really happening. 

What is immensely clear is that individual testimonies—whistleblower accounts like those we’ve published by Jamie Reed and Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala—have made the change we are now beginning to see. 

And that change is now impossible to deny: witness the arrival of lawsuits from young people who say they have suffered the consequences of these life-altering treatments. 

Today, therapist Tamara Pietzke adds her voice to those of our other whistleblowers, and tells how she could no longer go along with the pressure to transition her patients.

By Tamara Pietzke

February 5, 2024

For six years I worked at a hospital that said all teenagers with gender dysphoria must be affirmed. I quit my job to blow the whistle.

I know from firsthand experience what hard times are. Though I had a happy childhood, raised as the middle child by working-class parents in Washington State, my mom died of ovarian cancer when I was 22.

After that, my family fell apart. I felt lost and alone.

I  decided to become a therapist because I didn’t want anyone to go through what I had, feeling like no one on this planet cares about them. At least they can say their therapist does.

I earned my master’s in social work from the University of Washington in 2012, and I have worked as a therapist for over a decade in the Puget Sound area. Most recently, I was employed by MultiCare, one of the largest hospital systems in the state.

For the six years I was there, I worked with hundreds of clients. But in mid-January, I left my job because of what I will go on to describe.

The therapeutic relationship is a special one. We are the original “safe space,” where people are able to explore their darker feelings and painful experiences. The job of the therapist is to guide a patient to self-understanding and sound mental health. This is a process that requires careful assessment and time, not snap judgments and confirmation of a patient’s worldview.

But in the past year I noticed a concerning new trend in my field. I was getting the message from my supervisors that when a young person I was seeing expressed discomfort with their gender—the diagnostic term is gender dysphoria—I should throw out all my training. No matter the patient’s history or other mental health conditions that could be complicating the situation, I was simply to affirm that the patient was transgender, and even approve the start of a medical transition.

I believe this rise of “affirmative care” for young people with gender dysphoria challenges the very fundamentals of what therapy is supposed to provide.

I am a 36-year-old single mother of three young kids all under the age of six. I am terrified of speaking out, but that fear pales in comparison to my strong belief that we can no longer medicalize youth and cause them potentially irreversible harm. The three patients I describe below explain why I am taking the risk of coming forward.

Last spring, I started seeing a new client, who at 13 years old had one of the most extreme and heartbreaking life stories I’ve ever heard. (For the sake of clarity, I am referring to all patients by their biological sex.)

My patient’s mother has bipolar disorder and was so abusive to my patient that the mother was given a restraining order. My patient was sexually assaulted by an older cousin, by one of her mother’s boyfriends, and also once at school by a classmate. Her diagnoses include depression, PTSD, anxiety, intermittent explosive disorder, and autism. She is being raised by her mother’s ex-boyfriend (not the one who assaulted her).

The year before I started seeing her, when she was 11, she was hospitalized for talking about committing suicide. Later that year, a pediatrician diagnosed her with gender dysphoria after she started to question her gender. The pediatrician referred her to Mary Bridge Children’s Gender Health Clinic, whose clinicians recommended she take medicine to suppress her periods and that she think about starting testosterone.

Mary Bridge, MultiCare’s pediatric hospital, runs the gender clinic for minors and employs nurses, social workers, dietitians, and endocrinologists, who provide gender-affirming care, which includes prescribing hormones to young patients who question their gender. In order to get that prescription, patients first need a recommendation letter from a therapist. Because Mary Bridge is a part of MultiCare, their patients were often referred to therapists like me who were in their system.

In an April 2022 blog post, a Mary Bridge social worker wrote that the gender clinic’s referrals increased from less than five a month in 2019 to more than 35 a month in 2022. In May 2022, the clinic received a $100,000 donation from Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute “to study health care disparities” in transgender youth.

The clinic operates in Washington, one of the states with some of the most lenient legislation on gender transition for youth. In May 2023, the state legislature passed a law guaranteeing that youth seeking a medical gender transition can stay at Washington shelters—and the shelters are not required to notify their parents.

Because of my patient’s autism, it was difficult for us to engage in introspective conversations. During our first visit, she came over to my desk to show me extremely sadistic and graphic pornographic videos on her phone. She stood next to me, hunched over, hyper-fixated on the videos as she rocked back and forth. She told me during one session that she watched horror and porn movies growing up because they were the only ones available in her house.

She showed up to our therapy sessions in disheveled, loose-fitting clothes, her hair greasy, her eyes staring down at the ground, her face covered by a Covid mask almost like a protective layer. She went by a boy’s name, but she never raised gender dysphoria with me directly—though one time she told me she would get mad at the sound of her own voice because “it sounds too girly.” When I asked her how she felt about an upcoming appointment at the gender clinic, she told me she didn’t know she had one.

In between scrolling through videos on her phone, she told me how she cried every night in bed and felt “insane.” She described a time when she was eight years old and her mother nearly killed her sister. She remembered her mother being taken away. At times, she would “age-regress,” she told me, by watching Teletubbies and sucking on pacifiers.

When she started seeing me, she had recently threatened to “blow up the school,” which resulted in her expulsion.

I knew I couldn’t solve all of her problems, or make her feel better in just a few therapy sessions. My initial goal was to make her feel comfortable opening up to me, to make the therapy room a place where she was heard and felt safe. I also wanted to try to protect her from falling prey to outside influences from social media, her peers, or even the adults in her life.

With a patient like this, with so many intersecting and overwhelming problems, and with such a tragic history of abuse, it took our first three sessions to get her feeling more comfortable to even talk to me, and to understand the dimensions of her problems. But when I called her guardian last fall to schedule a fourth appointment, he asked me to write her a letter of recommendation for cross-sex hormone treatment. That is, at age 13, she was to start taking testosterone. Such a letter from me begins the process of medical transition for a patient.

In Washington State, that’s all it takes—a few visits with a therapist and a letter, often written using a template provided by one’s superiors—for minors to undergo the irreversible treatments that patients must take for a lifetime.

I was scared for this patient. She had so many overlapping problems that needed addressing it seemed like malpractice to abruptly begin her on a medical gender transition that could quickly produce permanent changes.

The MultiCare recommendation letter Tamara was given for approving the medical treatment of minors with gender dysphoria. I emailed a program manager in my department at MultiCare and outlined my concerns. She wrote back that my client’s trauma history has no bearing on whether or not she should receive hormone treatment.

“There is not valid, evidenced-based, peer-reviewed research that would indicate that gender dysphoria arises from anything other than gender (including trauma, autism, other mental health conditions, etc.),” she wrote.

She also warned that “there is the potential in causing harm to a client’s mental health when restricting access to gender-affirming care” and suggested I “examine [my] personal beliefs and biases about trans kids.”

When Tamara outlined her concerns about giving a patient testosterone to her manager at MultiCare, she was told to “examine your personal beliefs and biases about trans kids.” She then reported me to MultiCare’s risk management team, who removed my client from my care and placed her with a new therapist.

I shouldn’t have been surprised by this. Just a few months earlier, in September of last year, I was one of over 100 therapists and behavioral specialists at the MultiCare hospital system required to attend mandatory training on “gender-affirming care.”

As hard as it is to believe given my work, I hadn’t heard about gender-affirming care before that moment. I needed to know more. So each night in the week leading up to the training, I searched online for information about gender-affirming care. After putting my kids to bed, I sat glued to my computer screen, losing sleep, horrified at what I found.

I discovered that neither puberty blockers nor cross-sex hormones (testosterone or estrogen) were approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a treatment for gender dysphoria. In fact, prescribing these treatments to kids can have drastic side effects, including infertility, loss of sexual function, increased risk of heart attack, stroke, cardiovascular disease, cancer, bone density problems, blood clots, liver toxicity, cataracts, brain swelling, and even death.

While gender clinicians claim hormonal treatment improved their patients’ psychological health, the studies on this are few and highly disputed.

I found that those experiencing gender dysphoria are up to six times more likely to also be autistic, and they are also more likely to suffer from schizophrenia, trauma, and abuse.

A risk manager’s job is to minimize the hospital’s liability, but in my case, they deemed that my concerns posed a greater risk to my client than giving her a life-altering procedure with no proven long-term benefit.

I shouldn’t have been surprised by this. Just a few months earlier, in September of last year, I was one of over 100 therapists and behavioral specialists at the MultiCare hospital system required to attend mandatory training on “gender-affirming care.”

As hard as it is to believe given my work, I hadn’t heard about gender-affirming care before that moment. I needed to know more. So each night in the week leading up to the training, I searched online for information about gender-affirming care. After putting my kids to bed, I sat glued to my computer screen, losing sleep, horrified at what I found.

I discovered that neither puberty blockers nor cross-sex hormones (testosterone or estrogen) were approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a treatment for gender dysphoria. In fact, prescribing these treatments to kids can have drastic side effects, including infertility, loss of sexual function, increased risk of heart attack, stroke, cardiovascular disease, cancer, bone density problems, blood clots, liver toxicity, cataracts, brain swelling, and even death.

While gender clinicians claim hormonal treatment improved their patients’ psychological health, the studies on this are few and highly disputed.

I found that those experiencing gender dysphoria are up to six times more likely to also be autistic, and they are also more likely to suffer from schizophrenia, trauma, and abuse.

The research also implies that the dramatic rise in these diagnoses across the West likely have a strong element of social contagion. In children ages 6 to 17, there was a 70 percent increase in diagnoses of gender dysphoria in the U.S. from 2020 to 2021. In Sweden there was a 1,500 percent increase in these diagnoses among girls 13–17 from 2008 to 2018.

Yet, countries that were once the pioneers of gender transition medicine are now starting to backtrack. In 2022, England announced it will close its only gender clinic after an investigation uncovered subpar medical care, including findings that some patients were rushed toward gender transitions. Sweden and Finland undertook comprehensive analyses of the state of gender medicine and recommended restrictions on transition of minors.

I decided—though it was potentially dangerous to my career and to me—to ask questions about the findings I discovered.

The training I attended laid out an affirming model of gender care—from pronouns and “social transition” to hormone treatments and surgical intervention. In order for children to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria, the training stated, patients must meet six of eight characteristics, ranging from “a strong desire/insistence of being another gender” to “strong preference for cross-gender toys and games.”

Tamara and her MultiCare colleagues were trained to diagnose gender dysphoria among their young patients when they met six of the eight above characteristics. It was made abundantly clear to all in attendance that these recommendations were “best practice” at MultiCare, and that the hospital would not tolerate anything less.

When the leader of the training brought up hormone treatments, I shakily tapped the unmute button on Zoom and asked why 70 to 80 percent of female adolescents diagnosed with gender dysphoria have prior mental health diagnoses.

She flashed a look of disgust as she warned me against spreading “misinformation on trans kids.” Soon the chat box started blowing up with comments directed at me. One colleague stated it was not “appropriate to bring politics into this” and another wrote that I was “demonstrating a hostility toward trans folks which is [a] direct violation of the Hippocratic Oath,” and recommended I “seek additional support and information so as not to harm trans clients.”

In the training, gender-affirming treatment is presented as “suicide prevention.” As soon as I closed my laptop, I burst into tears. I care so deeply about my clients that even thinking about this now makes me cry. I couldn’t understand how my colleagues, who are supposed to be my teammates, could be so quick to villainize me. I also wondered if maybe my colleagues were right, and if I had gone insane.

Later, my boss reached out to me and told me it was “inappropriate” of me to raise these questions, telling me that a training session was not the proper forum. When I tried to present the evidence that caused me concern—the lack of long-term studies, the devastating side effects—she told me she didn’t have time to read it.

“I am speaking out because nothing will change unless people like me blow the whistle,” Tamara writes. “I am desperate to help my patients.” In retrospect, this ideology had been growing in power for a long time.

I remember in 2019 seeing signs of how gender dysphoria arose among many of my most vulnerable female clients, all of whom struggled with previous psychological problems.

In 2019, I started seeing a 16-year-old client after her pediatrician referred her to me for anxiety, depression, and ADHD. When I first met her, she had long blonde hair covering her eyes, to the point you could barely see her face. It was like she was going through the world trying to be invisible.

In 2020, during the pandemic, she told me she had started reading online a lot about gender, and said she started feeling like she wasn’t a girl anymore.

Around this time, her anxiety became so debilitating she couldn’t leave her house—not even to go to school. After taking a year off school during the pandemic, she enrolled in an alternative school for kids struggling with mental health. I was relieved that she was making friends for the first time, and seemed to be feeling a lot better.

Then she started using they/he pronouns, identified as pansexual, and replaced the skirts and fishnet stockings she often wore with disheveled and baggy clothes. Her long hair became shorter and shorter. She started wearing a binder to flatten her breasts. She tried out a few different names before settling on one that’s gender neutral.

The official diagnosis I gave her was “adjustment disorder”—an umbrella term often applied to young people who are having a hard time coping with difficult and stressful circumstances. It’s the type of diagnosis that doesn’t follow a child forever—it implies that mental distress among kids is often transient.

She came out as transgender to her family in 2021. Her mother was supportive, but her dad wasn’t. Regardless, she went to her pediatrician seeking a referral to a gender clinic.

In 2022, she went to Mary Bridge Children’s Gender Health Clinic for the first time, where the clinicians informed her and her parents that if she didn’t receive hormone replacement therapy, she could be “at increased risk for anxiety, depression, and worsening of mental health/psychological trauma,” according to her patient records. Her dad refused to start his daughter on testosterone, and so all the clinic could do was prescribe birth control to stop her period due to her “menstrual dysphoria,” or distress over getting her period. Which is something I thought all teenage girls experienced.

Five months later, she swallowed a bottle of pills and her mother had to rush her to the emergency room.

By early 2023, my client logged on to our weekly session, which we started doing by Zoom, and she told me she identified as a “wounded male dog.” She explained to me that this was her “xenogender,” a concept she had discovered online, which references gender identities that go “beyond the human understanding of gender.” She said she felt she didn’t have all of the right appendages, and that she wanted to start wearing ears and a tail to truly feel like herself.

I was stunned. All I could do was silently nod along.

After the session, I emailed my colleagues looking for advice. “I want to be accepting and inclusive and all of that,” I wrote, but “I guess I just don’t understand at what point, if ever, a person’s gender identity is indicative of a bigger issue.”

I asked them: “Is there ever a time where acceptance of a person’s identity isn’t freely given?”

The consensus from my colleagues was that it wasn’t a big deal.

“It sounds like this isn’t something that’s ‘broken,’ ” one colleague wrote me back, “so let’s not try to ‘fix’ it.”

“If someone told me they use a litterbox instead of a toilet and they were happy with it and it’s part of their life that brings them fulfillment, then great!” she continued. “I might think it’s weird, but then again, not my life.”

After learning that one of Tamara’s patients identified as “a wounded male dog,” a colleague replied: “If someone told me they use a litterbox instead of a toilet and they were happy with it and it’s part of their life that brings them fulfillment, then great!” I was baffled and alarmed by her unquestioning affirmation. At what point does a change in identity represent a mental health concern, and not something to be celebrated and affirmed? Fortunately, my client never brought up her “xenogender” again. She also isn’t on testosterone due to her father’s disapproval. So I kept these thoughts to myself, and ultimately, in order to keep my job, I let it go.

Another female patient, who transitioned as a teen, serves as a warning of what happens when we passively accept the idea that gender transition will entirely resolve a patient’s mental health issues.

This client, who I started seeing in 2022, is now 23 and rarely leaves the house, spends most of the day in bed playing video games, and envisions no path to working or functioning in the outside world due to a variety of mental health problems. In 2016, this patient was diagnosed with autism, anxiety, and gender dysphoria. Later the diagnoses grew to include depression, Tourette syndrome, and a conversion disorder. In 2018, at age 17, the Mary Bridge Gender Health Clinic prescribed testosterone, despite the fact that this patient is diabetic and one of the hormone’s side effects is that it might increase insulin resistance. The patient’s mother, who has another transgender child, strongly encouraged it.

This patient now has a wispy mustache and a deepened voice, but does not pass as male. It turns out that testosterone, which will be prescribed for life, did not relieve the patient’s other mental illnesses.

My biggest fear about the gender-affirming practices my industry has blindly adopted is that they are causing irreversible damage to our clients. Especially as they are vulnerable people who come to us at their lowest moments in life, and who entrust us with their health and safety. And yet, instead of treating them as we would patients with any other mental health condition, we have been instructed—and even bullied—to abandon our professional judgment and training in favor of unquestioning affirmation.

I am speaking out because nothing will change unless people like me—who know the risks of medicalizing troubled young people—blow the whistle. I am desperate to help my patients.

And I believe, if I don’t speak out, I will have betrayed them.

(note: previously posted this with a lot of repetition because of copy/pasting. This is the fixed version. But if you see any repetition or mistakes please let me know!)

[hearthmistress]

Thoroughly enjoyed this book review by Moira Donegan of Lisa Selin Davis’s dubious book on housewives and the modern tradwife.

Specifically:

But if Davis is loyal to anything, it is the aggressively equivocal notion that women should pursue their own desires and shouldn’t have to ask whether those desires challenge or reaffirm the subordination of women. This approach is sometimes called “choice feminism.” By its logic, all choices—no matter their motivations or outcomes—must be judged the same.

The ways tradwives co-opt progressive language (especially regarding capitalism/anti-capitalism) to promote essentially capitalist and conservative ideas:

But Housewife quickly progresses to twentieth-century America. This great jump through time conveniently allows Housewife to largely skip over the advent of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. This might have proved more fertile ground: the definition of “housewife,” after all, relies on a stark divide between the home and the workplace that is historically quite recent: for most of human history, these were one and the same. It was only the advent of industrial capitalism that divided work from home—and, despite Davis’s forays into speculation about cavemen, it was only the Industrial Revolution that led to the Victorian idea of “separate spheres,” and the subsequent invention of the housewife. Davis misses an opportunity to seriously examine the work of women she calls “militant housewives,” like the African American activist Fannie B. Peck, who organized the National Housewives League in 1933 to encourage Black women to patronize Black-owned businesses—a pointed politicization of women’s consumer power. A serious historian might dwell on these connections between the ideology of gender and the needs of capital, and many have. Davis doesn’t.

For years, this was the bargain that feminism struck with heterosexuality: give us our rights in the public sphere and we will not infringe upon men’s entitlements in the private one. It was never a tenable arrangement; the terms undermined each other. Being serviced and tended to by women at home made men less inclined to treat women with respect at work; achievement and independence at work made women less interested in performing subservient labor at home. 

There is nothing suspicious—or particularly gendered—about a desire to rest. But if we can sympathize in this respect with women who are drawn to the housewife fantasy, then we must also address the housewife’s immature side: her refusal of responsibility in the public sphere. The housewife lifestyle abandons the struggles of feminist advancement, community building, justice, and political engagement. It trades them for insularity, callowness, and superficial self-regard.

[analeekasudia]

Big fan of Moira's words.

[jurassicworldtieindrpepper]

"Wife Sentences" by Moira Donegan

Really great review on Bookforum by one of my favorite writers, Moira Donegan. This one covers a new, deceptively choice feminist history of housewifery. For your friend who likes to jokingly request a lobotomy <3

[roleshirked]

A good ref for ur protect gnc ppl tag is lisa selin davis substack Broadview, i feel like youll resonate with her essays. She focuses on understanding and defending nonconformity, does interviews and comes from a gentle centrist position partly influenced by her unsavoury experience of social pressure exerted on her tomboy daughter to either become more feminine or transition

Thanks for this tip anon, I'll look up her and her essays once I get a beat at work!

[ninja-muse]

Just finished! I found Tomboy to be a very thoughtful and thought-provoking look at gender nonconformity and gender policing. It talks about the historical contexts for tomboyism, the sorts of people tomboys grow up to be, how “tomboy” gets defined and redefined as cultural ideas of “girl” and “boy” shift, whether “tomboy” is always different from or the same as “nonbinary” or “trans”, and a lot more. Davis is more interested in asking questions, discussing research, and talking to current and former tomboys, than in providing answers, and her overall message is to open up gendered activities, interests, and clothes to all kids and accept kids’ interests and needs, whatever they are.

I enjoyed seeming Davis discuss not only how girls and other AFAB people are affected by ideas of “girl things”, but also how those ideas limit and affect boys and how class and race affect who’s perceived as a tomboy. I liked that she made a point to say that tomboys grow up to be cis and trans and nonbinary and of talking to people from all those groups for their experiences, and I was also glad to see her discussing how tomboy rep has declined in media in favour of trans rep and the pros and cons of that shift. I was a little disappointed that Davis kept saying “straight or lesbian”, despite her knowing that bi and pan people exist, and that ace people didn’t even get a nod. (Perhaps it’s a lack of studies on both fronts? The fact that asexuality is relatively “new” and adult aces might be harder to find?)

Overall, I loved the nuance, enjoyed the information presented, and will be carrying some of the questions and ideas in the book forward. As someone who fit the tomboy mold even if I don’t think the term was ever used, I felt pretty validated at points too, which is always nice. :) Despite the bi and ace erasure, I still feel pretty comfortable saying “this is how you feminism” and want to rec this to everyone interested in gender and sexuality (and also parents).

(Photo taken with three of my own childhood interests.)

[bigtickhk]

Tomboy: The Surprising History and Future of Girls Who Dare to Be Different by Lisa Selin Davis https://amzn.to/2SEkUqe

[wazafam]

By BY LISA SELIN DAVIS from U.S. in the New York Times-https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/04/us/supermom-work-family-kids.html?partner=IFTTT That archetypal female who is both a career woman and a housewife — whose to-do list spans cooking, cleaning, parenting and earning a substantial paycheck — isn’t doing families any favors. It’s 2021. Why Is ‘Supermom’ Still Around? New York Times

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Lisa Selin Davis

Published: Jul 5, 2023

“Have you seen the latest study?” the psychologist asked me. 

I had called Dr. Ken Zucker, a man who had spent decades working with children and young people with gender dysphoria, to talk to him about the history of that diagnosis. I wanted to know who got to decide when something was a variation versus a deviation; who got to decide when a way of being gendered in the world was abnormal, and required treatment. 

By this time, I’d been writing about gender issues full time for about four years, since I published an op-ed in The New York Times about people assuming my masculine daughter was transgender and required social transition. Why, I asked, would we create so much meaning from a child rejecting the gender role associated with her sex? Isn’t that what GenX kids like me, reared with the soundtrack of Free to Be, You and Me, were raised to do?

The op-ed was supported by many, but vociferously objected to by some who accused me of transphobia. I was shocked and stung by that reaction. In the piece I said that I supported trans kids, but wanted to encourage children to explore both sides of the pink/blue divide without it reflecting on their identities—how could that be hateful? I reached out to some of my detractors to ask them to explain their views to me, and perhaps because I put in the subject line “What I got wrong,” some of them—including very prominent trans activists—agreed to do so.

I won’t name him, but one person who’d written a response to my piece, which had also gone viral, was a lawyer for an influential non-profit law group. He spent an hour-and-a-half at a coffee shop in the Financial District explaining to me that nuanced arguments like mine were dangerous. Deviating from the script, he said, always provided fodder for the right wing that wanted to oppress trans people and take away their rights and healthcare. Indeed, to my shock, Breitbart had written about my piece as an example of “slamming transgender ideology.” And Laura Ingraham’s people had reached out to me to appear on her show, even though I was clearly a full-throttle liberal. This confused and frightened me. I didn’t want to play for the other team. 

Others reached out to me, too, including a healthcare lawyer, and lesbian, who lived in my neighborhood. We met for coffee, and she explained the issue from her point of view: pharmaceutical companies were conducting experiments on gay kids. Though it sounded too wild to be true, ringing of conspiracy theory, her idea dislodged some doubt inside me. Two years before, a friend of mine had made a documentary about trans kids. I’d said to her at the time, “Why do they all seem gay?”

I powered through my doubts, writing a book about gender nonconforming girls, trying to represent diverse points of view in the project. Well, some diverse points of view. My friend who’d written a book about trans teens five years before told me that I should never mention detransitioners; I’m sad to say I took this advice to heart. It was too dangerous for trans people, she said, and I didn’t want to make life any worse for people struggling to be understood and accepted. 

Still, I questioned why so many of the people identifying as trans seemed to be rooting their identities in stereotypes. I was nuanced, but not in a way that could excite Tucker Carlson. I knew, like so many people, that something was wrong with the increasingly pervasive narrative about trans kids. I just didn’t have the knowledge and the language to articulate it. (This is something many people identifying as trans also say: they had a feeling. They didn’t have information, or a name.)

Then, almost a year after my book was published, I called Dr. Zucker. He showed me the study, and it was then I knew I’d allowed myself to be captured. The study followed young boys with gender dysphoria over a 15-year period. Almost 90 percent of boys desisted during or after puberty—that is, their gender dysphoria subsided. And almost 70 percent of them were bisexual or gay. Left alone, and not socially transitioned, almost all young kids now labeled as trans would not grow up to identify that way, and most would be same-sex attracted. The only time the media mentions this and the other studies with similar results is to discount them. Kids are routinely taught that gender and sexuality are not connected, but in fact, they are deeply intertwined.

From that moment of awakening, I allowed myself to look at the mountains of disruptive evidence that I had blinded myself to in years before. Once I saw it, I couldn’t look away. The mainstream media narrative about conversion therapy, detransitioners, puberty blockers, trans kids—it’s all deeply distorted and leaves out information that every person—especially every gender dysphoric kid and parent of one—deserves to know. 

One reason so many gay and lesbian adults are concerned about the medical treatment of gender dysphoric youth is that they experienced that condition as children. Like so many, they grew out of it, and later identified as gay. There is overlap between childhood GD, and childhood gender nonconformity, and later homosexuality; thus they see these medical interventions as a kind of conversion therapy. The media and medical community’s refusal to acknowledge that has left a generation misinformed. The left wing, and especially the left and center press, have gotten this story very, very wrong.

Perhaps the most shocking thing I learned is that the medical protocol used to “liberate” trans kids is the same protocol once used to treat or cure homosexuality, and still used to chemically castrate sex offenders. What if every brochure, every children’s hospital gender clinic website, every activist organization, led with that fact? Would more of us wake up, and faster? Would more of us covert to be on the side of evidence, truth, and nuance, rather than thought-terminating clichés? 

Let’s find out, shall we? Let’s inform people on the left properly, and see if we can push past the culture war to do what’s best for kids.

==

More successful at "fixing" gay kids than the Xian Right ever was.

[dyke-bars-never-last]

Any woman who had “fallen in love … with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man,” as Alcott once said, might simply believe that they had the soul of one sex and the body of another.

... mapping trans identities onto masculine females of the past, whether real or fictional, is complicated. It imposes modern interpretations onto history, ignoring historical roles and norms and laws that created confining sex-based scripts while removing models of gender nonconformity among girls.

Was Mulan a liberated trans man or a woman who couldn’t otherwise fight in wars because of regressive ideas about females?

Tomboy, sexist though the word may be, once conferred a freedom upon girls to explore the blue side of the pink/blue divide and push the boundaries of acceptable behavior and appearance. But that freedom usually evaporated at puberty. Its offerings were limited and temporary.

The message to them is that if they veer too far toward masculine — being tough, rejecting dresses and skirts, wearing short hair — they're no longer girls.

While it is impossible to know how people from the past would have . While IT IS WONDERFUL to have trans characters represented in film, re-gendering tomboys as trans can end up reinforcing stereotypes.

What liberates one group, may limit another.

While it is impossible to know how people from the past would have identified or lived if 21st century choices had been available, I imagine that those who suffered because ideas of gender in their time didn’t accommodate them would indeed FIND TODAY'S ZEITGEIST FREEING.

But imposing modern definitions of gender on the past, and assuming that all gender nonconforming people would change their pronouns or bodies, doesn’t make room for masculine girls and feminine boys to be themselves; it tells them that they have to be somebody else.

Davis, Lisa Selin. “Tomboys, Trans Boys and ‘West Side Story.’” Yahoo | 19 Dec. 2021, https://www.yahoo.com/news/tomboys-trans-boys-west-side-110029891.html.

[teachingrounds]

Lisa Selin Davis, "Why Modern Medicine Keeps Overlooking Menopause," New York Times (6 April 2021).

[dan-levy-is-my-life-coach]

“My daughter will be able to dream what Dan Levy couldn’t. Through his creation, and through our discussions at home, she’s seen a world in which LGBTQ people are loving and loved, and can create happy, full lives no matter their circumstances, no matter how far they travel against the grain.

For that, I’m grateful to Dan Levy, too.”

Lisa Selin Davis in Romper, Feb 13, 2021

https://www.romper.com/entertainment/schitts-creek-sex-ed-dan-pansexual

Photo: Cara Robbins

+++++++

I love the way she puts this.  Dan Levy and Schitt’s Creek really are saving lives and giving hope, comfort and love to so many.  Especially those that love outside the mainstream.

[vodka-aunt69]

Highly recommend reading Tomboy by Lisa Selin Davis if you're as obsessed as I am with psychoanalyzing the masses