#expert evidence

[reallyimpossibledetective]

A Disjointed and Somewhat Incoherent Discrimination Case.

The discrimination law case of Giggle -v- Tickle For Girls (No 2) [2024] FCA 960 agitated some interesting issues.

Relevantly, the Court looked at Dr Helen Joyce and found: • She has a PhD in mathematics and is also a journalist and author • but does not have any formal education or qualifications even in biology, let alone in gender, sex or law, being the topics which her report purports to address. • She has no recognised expertise in any of the areas in which she purports to express an expert opinion. • What was proffered as an expert report, was received as nothing more than submissions [Paragraph 145]. • Her opinion was of no assistance to the case of the Respondents or to the Court [Paragraph 147].

The Court also found that case of the Respondents was run in a disjointed and somewhat incoherent way [Paragraph 215].

I find it extraordinary that a litigant (represented by experienced lawyers) seeking to be taken seriously, would endeavour to lead evidence from someone with no recognised expertise in any of the areas in which they purport to express an expert opinion.

Similarly, running your case in a disjointed and incoherent way is hardly a recipe for success and does little to enhance a reputation as capable and credible lawyers.

This critique informs the capacity of those litigants and lawyers to subsequently credibly comment upon the strengths and weaknesses of the case.

Credibility and coherence are crucial in legal proceedings. Sometimes, the passion to win can overshadow critical self-assessment, leading to disjointed arguments and reliance on unqualified witnesses who are proffered as experts.

Offering a non-expert as an expert and presenting a disjointed case can stem from a few key issues: • Overconfidence: The litigants or their lawyers might believe that the credibility of the individual or the strength of their arguments will prevail, regardless of expertise. • Desperation: Sometimes, a lack of strong, qualified experts can lead parties to lean on anyone with relevant-sounding credentials, even if they do not have recognised expertise. • Zealous Advocacy: A passionate belief in the righteousness of their cause can blind lawyers to the weaknesses in their approach. They become so focussed on winning, that they overlook the importance of coherence and credible evidence.

These missteps often result in weakened cases and can undermine the credibility of those involved. A successful strategy requires a clear, coherent presentation and expert testimony that stands up to scrutiny. Not always easy to acquire, but necessary.

It is quite telling when those who were ill-prepared lament their loss. Running a case in such a way and then decrying the outcome, shows a glaring lack of self-awareness and accountability. Preparing thoroughly and presenting a coherent, well-supported argument is foundational for credibility.

Presenting a non-expert as an expert is a sure-fire way to erode trust and credibility. It is astonishing that experienced lawyers would risk the attendant diminution of their reputation. This not only weakens their case, but also makes them look laughably under-prepared.

When you are too invested, sometimes your own biases and emotions cloud your judgment.

In the subject case the legislation was the problem and the judgment of the Court clearly stated that biology was not a relevant issue. Subsequently dealing with the problematic legislation has more utility than endlessly crying about biology.

If the legislation is flawed, that is the root issue to tackle. Getting bogged down in irrelevant debates only distracts from meaningful progress. Addressing the problematic legislation directly is the way forward, rather than fixating on ancillary issues.

[aiolegalservices]

Pre-Action Protocols, Expert Evidence, and Alternative Dispute Resolution: A Guide to Efficient Legal Dispute Management

  Paragraph 6 of the Pre-action Conduct of all proceedings confirms that if a relevant pre-action protocol exists, parties are required to follow it before initiating legal action. This ensures that both sides take certain preliminary steps, such as sharing information and exploring potential settlements, to possibly resolve the dispute without court intervention. If no specific protocol applies,…

[hotvintagepoll]

recently discovered some fascinating hobbies for a few of the older tv men ive been submitting for the vintage tv polls and that got me wondering what (if any) strange/niche/unique hobbies have you ever encountered among classic film actors?

I think my favorite is Danny Kaye, who was apparently the type of guy who would fall in love with something and fall hard—he wanted to learn how to fly a plane, so he did; he conducted orchestras with 0 ability to read sheet music; he became so riveted by the art of Asian cuisine he started studying under master chefs Johnny Kan and Cecilia Chiang in their San Francisco restaurants, eventually building a separate kitchen into his house to support his obsession, which lasted the rest of his life. I just think that's neat.

[antaripirate]

apologies for the random ass personal post but i graduated!!!!

having finished a degree feels incredibly fucking weird, but i now have a BSc. and the fact that i have a full scholarship for my research MSc in a couple of months is still insane to me. i’m also going to be working with the British Antarctic Survey which has always been a fucking dream for me.

anyway. successfully collected my first set of letters and i wanted to post something even though i’ll delete it.

this is a sappy ass post but i’m working class, disabled and first gen and so for me this is fucking huge.

anyway. i’m very proud of this :)

[sandymybeloved]

an incomplete guide to UNIT Dating

I recently made and gave this presentation, so the information isn't entirely complete, but here. Basically I looked at every story the Brigadier appeared in and (with the help of this TARDIS wiki article) tried to put a date to all of them. some slides are missing to fit this into a single post, but not many and none essential

[bananonbinary]

god i miss when the internet wasn't garbage. you can't google anything these days without whatever answer you're looking for getting lost under a deluge of seo ai bullshit. cannot wait until the bubble pops and we might get useable search engines again.

[userautumn]

I just always love how you talk about 911. My brain was in scrambles when I watched 8x06 because of the whole break up. But reading your thoughts about it and about the other storylines made everything a bit clearer. It also made me realize that I should, like I always did before, wait till the seasons over to pass my actual judgment about what I think about it.

That's so nice of you to say! 🥹 Thank you. I said some months ago that I lost the "hyperfixation" part of my interest in 9-1-1 and, even though I wasn't sure what that would mean for me at the time, I feel like stepping back and viewing this show outside the lens of my ardent love for it has given me a lot more clarity with how I engage with the show and their storylines. I love these characters, I love how deeply heartfelt this show is, and I love how aspects of this season have felt like a return to their classic roots (smaller cast, investing in single-episode characters so they don't just feel like "extras" but actually feel like part of the show, balancing the key dynamics, etc). I just would really love to have a lot more vision on what they're doing with the characters themselves, because right now, the visions for Eddie, Buck, and Hen (and Maddie) especially feel muddled and I don't like that. Lol. But! Time will tell, I suppose. Time will tell.

[wonder-worker]

"Among their complaints [in 1460, the Yorkists] specifically blamed the earls of Wiltshire and Shrewsbury and Viscount Beaumont for ‘stirring’ the king [Henry VI] to hold a parliament at Coventry that would attaint them and for keeping them from the king’s presence and likely mercy, asserting that this was done against [the king's] will. To this they added the charge that these evil counselors were also tyrannizing other true men* without the king’s knowledge. Such claims of malfeasance obliquely raised the question of Henry’s fitness as a king, for how could he be deemed competent if such things happened without his knowledge and against his wishes? They also tied in rumors circulating somewhat earlier in the southern counties and likely to have originated in Calais that Henry was really ‘good and gracious Lord to the [Yorkists] since, it was alleged, he had not known of or assented to their attainders. On 11 June the king was compelled to issue a proclamation stating that they were indeed traitors and that assertions to the contrary were to be ignored." - Helen Maurer, "Margaret of Anjou: "Queenship and Power in Late Medieval England"

Three things that we can surmise from this:

We know where the "Henry was an innocent helpless king being controlled and manipulated by his Evil™ advisors" rhetoric came from**.

The Yorkists were deliberately trying to downplay Henry VI's actual role and involvement in politics and the Wars of the Roses. They cast him as a "statue of a king", blamed all royal policies and decisions on others*** (claiming that Henry wasn't even aware of them), and framed themselves as righteous and misunderstood counselors who remained loyal to the crown. We should keep this in mind when we look at chronicles' comments of Henry's alleged passivity and the so-called "role reversal" between him and Queen Margaret.

Henry VI's actual agency and involvement is nevertheless proven by his own actions. We know what he thought of the Yorkists, and we know he took the effort to publicly counter their claims through a proclamation of his own. That speaks louder than the politically motivated narrative of his enemies, don't you think?

*There was some truth to these criticisms. For example, Wiltshire (ie: one of the men named in the pamphlet) was reportedly involved in a horrible situation in June which included hangings and imprisonments for tax resistance in Newbury. The best propagandists always contain a degree of truth, etc. **I've seen some theories on why Margaret of Anjou wasn't mentioned in these pamphlets alongside the others even though she was clearly being vilified during that time as well, and honestly, I think those speculations are mostly unnecessary. Margaret was absent because it was regarded as very unseemly to target queens in such an officially public manner. We see a similar situation a decade later: Elizabeth Woodville was vilified and her whole family - popularly and administratively known as "the queen's kin" - was disparaged in Warwick and Clarence's pamphlets. This would have inevitably associated her with their official complaints far more than Margaret had been, but she was also not directly mentioned. It was simply not considered appropriate. ***This narrative was begun by the Duke of York & Warwick and was - demonstrably - already widespread by the end of 1460. When Edward IV came to power, there seems to have been a slight shift in how he spoke of Henry (he referred to Henry as their "great enemy and adversary"; his envoys were clearly willing to acknowledge Henry's role in Lancastrian resistance to Yorkist rule; etc), but he nevertheless continued the former narrative for the most part. I think this was because 1) it was already well-established and widespread by his father, and 2) downplaying Henry's authority would have served to emphasize Edward's own kingship, which was probably advantageous for a usurper whose deposed rival was still alive and out of reach. In some sense, the Lancastrians did the same thing with their own propaganda across the 1460s, which was clearly not as effective in terms of garnering support and is too long to get into right now, but was still very relevant when it came to emphasizing their own right to the throne while disparaging the Yorkists' claim.

[wernerherzogs]

billie hasnt been tinkering with her face? if u see images of her from her teenager years she looks the same except ya know older cause shes 42 now

kindly disagree! as someone who has steadily watcher her career for years now, she's clearly had her share of Beauty Procedures, with the last two years in particular becoming Worrying to me

[angelmush]

ugh ur recipe posts motivate me to feed myself better, i love seeing them whenever u post! how do you manage to like grocery shop and cook ur meals in a productive way? i find myself wanting to try recipes but end up getting the same few ingredients and making the same things 😭

i just answered a really similar ask you can refer to if this doesn't feel helpful, but the way i grocery shop and meal plan is hinged on the fact that i consume a wild amount of cooking content on the internet LOL . my process is basically that i'll pick 3-4 meals and a baked good/dessert to make throughout the week. i either come up with them myself or i'll choose a recipe to try from videos i've seen on instagram or posts from tumblr or youtube. i will try to coordinate these choices so they share some of the same ingredients to stretch my dollar and finish the things in my fridge for the week. idk if that is useful but that's the way i do it!! i also make lists of the meals i'm planning on so i don't forget and i try to plan which days i want to make them based on my work schedule and decide if/when i need to prep things ahead of time (dry brines, sauces, marinades etc) and i keep a little schedule in my notes app

[surprisinglydomestickakashi]

My favorite part about being still into Naruto is the way I'm into it means I frequently have to tell algorithms that I don't actually want to consume Naruto like they want me to. Don't give me bland voice over theories from people who need to be reminded of minor characters. I need my clinically not-normal girls, gays, and theys to talk with about the little side guys they have entire lives mapped out for, the interpretations that include their favorite filler episode because they like it and above all else people who don't shit on the women characters or only consider them, annoying and useless or waifu material.

[cave-monkey]

It dawns on me that the journey to the west took 5,040 days exactly, right, and while the book goes from tribulation to tribulation, there were still only 81 of those. And they were missing one when they got there. And some of the tribulations Tripitaka went through happened before the journey even started.

So, even being generous and saying that most of the tribulations that occurred during the actual journey could be said to have taken a few days to handle each, that's still only about 10% of the journey. A tribulation was anything that happened that put Tripitaka in danger or presented any sort of obstacle to him. Anything even remotely exciting would have fallen into that ~10%, and nothing else could have happened, because otherwise they wouldn't have gotten west one moderate inconvenience and/or major trauma short of the prize. (I mean, unless the thing that happened managed to not involve Tripitaka at all in any way, but that's very hard to do when you are all attached at the hip.)

Holy cow they really were just walking. ALL THAT TIME. No wonder Zhu Bajie was stirring the pot at any given opportunity. It was literally the only thing to do.

[jakeperalta]

in honour of grammys weekend being here, these are what I'm rooting for:

rolling up the welcome mat for best country album. probably a total long shot but I would literally sacrifice all my other hopes for this one to win

anti hero for song of the year (+ record of the year would be nice, but I'm mostly hoping for soty)

I think I'd like guts for album of the year, although obviously would be happy for it to go to midnights

noah kahan for best new artist

as usual, jack antonoff for producer of the year

ballad of a homeschooled girl for best rock song (I know nothing about rock I just think it would be fun for a song about being an awkward teenage girl to win this category)

in your love by tyler childers for best music video (also country song or country solo)

[savage-rhi]

MAGENTA.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Leor Sapri

Published: Dec 15, 2023

The core question in lawsuits over state-level age restrictions on “gender-affirming care” or former patients suing their providers for fraud or malpractice is whether sex-trait modification is an evidence-based and ethical medical practice. Recognizing the limits of their own knowledge on such matters, judges have turned to expert witnesses to help them understand the key issues at play. But since both sides in these legal contests appoint expert witnesses to back their claims (typically medical doctors and mental-health professionals), judges must determine which are more credible.

A recent exchange between Moti Gorin, an associate professor of philosophy and bioethicist at Colorado State University, and Alejandra Caraballo, a transgender activist and cyberlaw instructor at Harvard Law School, provides crucial insight into how these questions bear on the outcome of lawsuits over gender medicine. In a paper titled “The Anti-Transgender Medical Expert Industry,” published earlier this year in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, Caraballo argues that judges should disregard the opinions of medical professionals who testify on behalf of states seeking to restrict “gender-affirming care.” In a newly published letter to the editor in the same journal, Gorin shows the fatal flaws in Caraballo’s arguments. (The journal also gave Caraballo the chance to respond to Gorin.)

Caraballo devotes considerable space to maligning experts and organizations skeptical or critical of “gender-affirming care” as being driven by “anti-transgender” animus. As Gorin points out, these are

serious allegations, directed at named entities and individuals, and presented not on a social media platform or in the opening statement of an attorney engaged in courtroom advocacy but in the pages of a peer-reviewed, academic journal. One should therefore expect strong evidence in support of such allegations, in keeping with the usual norms of academic publishing. Those norms require, inter alia, that easily-verifiable factual claims be true, that accurate and otherwise adequate citations be provided, that the author avoid unnecessarily inflammatory language, and so on.

Caraballo provides zero evidence for these accusations. For example, Caraballo describes Stephen Levine, a professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine with five decades of clinical experience treating gender dysphoric patients, as “one of the most prolific anti-transgender medical expert [sic] in the country” and claims that he “has not published peer-reviewed research in the relevant field.” As Gorin observes, however, “It is easy to confirm that this claim is plainly false.” Levine, who chaired the HBIGDA’s (now WPATH) Fifth Standards of Care and served on the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-IV Subcommittee on Gender Identity Disorders, has many peer-reviewed publications in the field, including landmark papers like “The Myth of ‘Reliable Research’” that touch directly on the evidence base for pediatric gender medicine.

Gorin provides other examples of blatant falsehoods in Caraballo’s paper, raising the question of how the Journal of Law, Medicine, & Ethics could allow such defamatory statements to be made in its pages without even minimal corroboration. As Gorin later explained on X, academic publishing relies on a certain degree of trust. Editors and reviewers assume that scholars will not, for instance, blatantly mischaracterize sources they cite, as Caraballo appears to have done. Recently, a prominent physician argued that the scandal of pediatric “gender-affirming care” was made possible due to a “broken chain of trust” within the medical and scientific establishment, with activist clinicians and researchers exploiting the chains of trust built up over generations by their professional forebearers. That physician is Stephen Levine.

No less embarrassing for Caraballo than the many factual errors in the original article is Caraballo’s apparent misunderstanding of the rules of evidence in adjudication. Here, Gorin takes Caraballo to task on the author's own turf and shows a superior grasp of the issues.

First, some context. Courts are generally a bad forum in which to settle scientific debates. Among other problems, judges are not subject-area experts and have little time to master the nuances of scientific controversies; they must inevitably decide between competing claims of subject-area experts. By definition, such contests require non-experts to substitute their own judgment for that of at least one expert—a scenario that can easily undermine the judge’s credibility in the eyes of scientific critics.

In the 1923 case Frye v. United States, the D.C. Court of Appeals opined that it was hard to determine when a “scientific principle or discovery crosses the line between the experimental and demonstrable stages,” and that, in order to do so, judges should consider whether a scientific principle or discovery has “gained general acceptance in the particular field in which it belongs.”

In 1975, Congress adopted the Federal Rules of Evidence. Rule 702 states, “If scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge will assist the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue, a witness qualified as an expert by knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education, may testify thereto in the form of an opinion or otherwise.” In the 1993 case Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., the Supreme Court held that Rule 702 supersedes the Frye test of “general acceptance." The Court laid out four criteria to guide judges in their assessment of the reliability of expert testimony:

1. The expert’s scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge will help the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue; 2. The testimony is based on sufficient facts or data; 3. The testimony is the product of reliable principles and methods; and 4. The expert has reliably applied the principles and methods to the facts of the case.

It’s easy to see how these doctrinal issues bear directly on the current debate over “gender-affirming care.” When advocates of gender-affirming care maintain that these controversial procedures are evidence-based, they cite the consensus of professional medical associations. Critics point out that this consensus is manufactured and enforced through suppression of contrary viewpoints. They point out that consensus-based medicine is not necessarily evidence-based medicine.

Caraballo’s position is that expert testimony from the likes of Levine and the psychologist James Cantor—author of the definitive, peer-reviewed fact-check of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ policy statement on “gender-affirming care”—should be discounted on the grounds that Levine and Cantor do not directly provide “gender-affirming” medical treatments to minors and that they operate outside the consensus of U.S. medical associations.

Regarding the first claim, if clinicians do not approve minors for puberty suppression, cross-sex hormones, or surgeries, that might be because they don’t believe that these interventions are evidence-based and ethical. Moreover, as Cantor has explained in expert witness testimony, the expertise of clinicians is different from that of scientists. The clinician’s expertise “regards applying general principles to the care of an individual patient and the unique features of that case.” The scientist’s expertise “is the reverse, accumulating information about many individual cases and identifying the generalizable principles that may be applied to all cases.” Accordingly, Cantor writes, “In legal matters, the most familiar situation pertains to whether a given clinician correctly employed relevant clinical standards. Often, it is other clinicians who practice in that field who will be best equipped to speak to that question. When it is the clinical standards that are themselves in question, however, it is the experts in the assessment of scientific studies who are the relevant experts.” For good reason, Caraballo’s criterion—that a doctor must practice a type of intervention in order to qualify as an expert in the evidence base for that intervention—is neither mentioned nor implied in the Daubert standards.

Not just that, but clinicians who practice “gender-affirming care” are likely to find themselves in intellectual, professional, and financial conflicts of interest, which may produce confirmation bias and impair their ability to dispassionately assess the evidence for the care they provide.

In short, Caraballo’s characterization of who counts as an expert is a classic example of the No True Scotsman fallacy. Caraballo conveniently defines as “experts” only those who practice, and by implication agree with, “gender-affirming care” for kids. It would be as if we agreed to define only clinicians who practice lobotomy as “experts” on whether lobotomy is an evidence-based practice.

As for Caraballo’s second point, about “anti-transgender” experts being outside the consensus in the field, Gorin points out that, under Daubert, this should not disqualify the opinions of these experts. To recall, the court in Daubert explicitlyrejected the “general acceptance” standard in Frye as a prerequisite for determining the reliability of testimony. “It is easy to see why ‘general acceptance’ is too strict a requirement,” writes Gorin. “It would exclude from the start expert testimony that, despite being inconsistent with generally-held opinion or consensus, proves to be consistent with the truth.” Commitment to science means above all commitment to the scientific method. As the Court put it in Daubert, “The focus . . . must be solely on principles and methodology, not on the conclusions they generate.”

Caraballo’s typo-riddled response to Gorin’s criticism complains that he is “hyper fixat[ed] on minor errors rather than the broader argument.” (In fact, Gorin’s examples of Caraballo’s factual errors go to the heart of Caraballo’s thesis that the experts in question are driven by animus rather than good-faith disagreement with the prevailing consensus.) Caraballo then resorts to more mudslinging and name-calling, for instance characterizing Levine as a “conversion therapist” because he uses exploratory therapy for his pediatric patients rather than automatically “affirming” their self-diagnosed “gender identity” as permanent and eligible for hormonal treatments. To support the accusation, Caraballo cites a paper by a transgender bioethicist who opposes “gatekeeping” for drugs and surgeries on the grounds that teenagers should have the right to turn their bodies into “gendered art pieces.”

Caraballo then continues to impugn the motives of “anti-transgender” expert witnesses by claiming that they are paid for their work—an unremarkable observation and one that conveniently ignores the fact that experts on the other side are also paid. For example, Jack Turban is paid up to $400 per hour to testify against state age-restriction laws. (It was money well spent: Turban revealed that he does not understand the basics of evidence-based medicine.)

Speaking of ulterior motives: in a footnote, Caraballo discloses that “these witnesses provided a report that impacted my ability to access care when I visit family in Florida. I can no longer obtain refills there legally due to restrictions placed on adult care. Additionally, my care in Massachusetts has been severely affected by the large influx of trans people fleeing states such as Florida. While this may be an elective academic indulgence for Gorin, this affects my healthcare directly.”

Caraballo ends by wondering, “Why should gender affirming care be considered differently where non-practitioners of a field testify on the relevant standards, they themselves do not practice?”

The answer is simple: those who provide irreversible, sterilizing, and often disfiguring “treatments” to kids on the belief that these young people were “born in the wrong body” are ideologues who need to be reined in by their more professional colleagues. For Caraballo, apparently, only blood-letters should testify on the merits of blood-letting.

==

When activists get desperate, their lies get more egregious.

Caraballo needs to return his law degree. He's dangerously unqualified.

[zinniajones]

SEGM advisor Michael Biggs admitting under oath that some people are just trans because we're trans and because it helps to make sense of our lives and he doesn't have any idea whether that's the wrong answer for any one of us: https://transgender.agency/files/dekker-v-weida/130-2.pdf

Q. Well, no, I read to you the statement that's in your report, that there is -- apparently, there is -- people are promoting transgenderism in health care, schools, and on social media. And I asked you for the evidence that you have to support that statement? A. Yes, I've said that I think -- believe there is abundant evidence in -- for example, if you look at searches on Google trans. If you look at the -- Q. What specific searches -- sir, what specific searches, what specific evidence did you rely upon when you made that statement in your report. I'm asking you the specific evidence that you relied upon? A. If you search for various combinations and permutations of the word "transsexual child," "transgender child," "trans child," "trans kid," "trans children" and so on, you can see a massive peak in that, particularly after 2005 but more particularly after 2010. Q. Okay. So, sir, it is not my responsibility to conduct these searches. I'm asking you what specific scientific basis do you have before you made that statement in this report, what -- did you do those searches, if so, are they -- are the results listed in your bibliography? MR. BEATO: Object to form. Dr. Biggs, you can answer those questions. THE WITNESS: I did do those searches. The results are not listed in my -- in the bibliography because I thought it was -- BY MS. ALTMAN: Q. Why not? A. It was so obvious that the increase in the prominence of transgenderism in health care and schools and social media would be obvious. Q. Sir, did you look at all of the possible reasons why being transgender is more at the forefront today, like perhaps US states that are banning transgender health care -- just as an example, throwing it out there -- and then putting that in the media. Did you look at that, maybe that's the reason why people are more frequent to be discussing the issue? A. Well, bans on health care have only been around for a couple of years. I'm talking about a long -- long-term trend from -- I think I did 1990 to 2020. So it's -- yeah, that's the basis of it. Q. So other than your Google searches, is there anything else that you relied upon in making that statement in your report? A. Just to clarify, it wasn't a Google search. It was a search of Google's corpus and the entire body of printed material in -- in the English language. Q. Right. The one -- the things that you did not list in your report as resources, correct? A. Yes. Q. Sir, do you believe it's -- that it is easy to be transgender, it is appealing to be transgender? A. I believe in some cases it can be appealing, yes. Q. What about in others? A. In other cases, it is not. Q. You are not making a -- you are not providing a general opinion that people are jumping on the transgender bandwagon because it is so easy and it is being promoted, are you? A. No. I believe that sometimes it makes sense of an individual's predicament of suffering or distress about their body, about their gender roles. Q. And it might make sense just because they are transgender, right? A. Yes, it might. Q. Right. And you don't know in any particular case whether that's true, right? A. Not in any individual case, no.

The judgment snake is RAVENOUS