GC Review: Saturday, October 1, 2022
In our weekly GC Review, we return to important articles from the war to date. You might have already seen some of them, but we think they all warrant revisiting.
This day in Herstory: On October 1, 1931, Clara Campoamor persuaded the Constituent Cortes to enfranchise women in Spain's new constitution.
Clara Campoamor Rodríguez (12 February 1888 – 30 April 1972) was a Spanish politician, lawyer and writer, considered by some the mother of the Spanish feminist movement. She was one of the main promoters for women's suffrage in Spain, included in the Spanish Constitution of 1931 in part owing to her advocacy.
She was elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1931, before women were allowed to vote themselves. She later lost her parliamentary seat and briefly served as a government minister, before fleeing the country during the Spanish Civil War. Campoamor died in exile in Switzerland, and was later buried at the Polloe Cemetery in San Sebastian, Spain. (more)
The current conflict over trans rights was entirely avoidable.
From Reality's Last Stand (USA)
By Eliza Mondegreen
August 19, 2022
Halfway through Dave Chappelle’s controversial Netflix special, The Closer, his tone changes as he relates the story of a transgender-identifying friend and fellow comedian:
“Well, Daphne,” I said “Well, that was fun.” I go, “I love you to death, but I have no fuckin’ idea what you’re talking about.” The whole crowd laughed except for Daphne. …
One thing that strikes me every time I talk to friends, colleagues, and near-perfect strangers about gender is just how far something like Daphne’s plea—“I just need you to believe that I’m having a human experience… Just believe I’m a person and I’m going through it”—would have gone in winning people’s empathy. … read full article
Blocking puberty–and the right to an identity crisis
From 4th Wave Now (USA)
February 8, 2016
I recently wrote about research findings that gay and lesbian youth are typically older than their heterosexual counterparts when they first act upon and realize their sexual orientation. While same-sex attracted girls, in particular, reach this milestone between 19-early 20s, the current trend is to “socially transition,” then puberty block, and finally move on to cross sex hormones at age 16.
It’s easy to see that many of these teens are being set up to short-circuit the natural discovery of their sexual orientation. But is that the only potential problem with social transition and puberty blocking—the preemptive conversion of likely gay and lesbian youth to transgender?
Not by a longshot. There are so many important things that happen at puberty which are critically important to the maturation necessary to make informed decisions about major life changes (you know–things like sterility, loss of breasts, and a permanently deepened voice) that a developmental psychologist or cognitive scientist could write a doctoral dissertation about the subject. … read full article
Pre-Colonial Māori Culture Had No Diverse Gender Identities
Our culture is contaminated by academics and politics instead of being guided by custom
From 4W (USA)
By Michelle Uriarau
September 23, 2022
Of all the profound questions posed to humankind throughout time, no one could have guessed that the question "what is a woman?" would be one of them. Especially as the question itself is not profound at all. Yet the trending narrative that "anyone can be a woman" is now considered a truth to the point that major changes have recently been passed into New Zealand law that allows men to legally falsify the nominated sex on their birth certificate, hiding evidence of their actual sex. The new law allows them to be legally recognized as a woman based on nothing more than a personal declaration.
Unlike previous stringent conditions, the requirements to provide medical evidence, and undergo years of therapy and radical surgery have been removed. In other words, no man needs to change a thing about his appearance to legally be considered a "woman." The Big Lie, typically credited to Goebbels, comes to mind. … read full article
Transgender Confusions
A series of court rulings illustrates how bad ideas travel from fringe academic theory into law and policy.
From City Journal (USA)
By Leor Sapir
Winter, 2022 Issue of City Journal Magazine
It’s hard to think of an area of medicine more controversial today than the treatment of gender dysphoria in youth. Proponents and opponents of the new “affirming” paradigm of treatment routinely accuse each other of politicizing medicine, promoting dangerous ideologies, and abusing vulnerable children.
In the United States, civil rights discourse has come to overlay—some would say distort—these debates. In 2016, Attorney General Loretta Lynch likened North Carolina’s “bathroom bill” to the “dark days” of Jim Crow, when states “had signs above restrooms, water fountains and on public accommodations keeping people out based upon a distinction without a difference.” … read full article
Not up to standard
The transgender health guild WPATH has issued a messy update to its treatment guideline amid growing pressure and scrutiny
From Gender Clinic News (Australia)
By Bernard Lane
September 28, 2022
It sounds authoritative and reassuring — the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. If parents are anxious about entrusting a child to gender medicine, they may be told that the clinic follows the gold standard of WPATH’s treatment guideline. And now, after “five years of rigorous scientific effort by more than 120 health care clinical and academic professionals across the globe”, WPATH has released its Standards of Care Version 8 (SOC 8), which “clearly define the treatment of transgender and gender-diverse children and adolescents, including medical interventions such as puberty delaying medications or gender-affirming hormones, and when appropriate, surgical interventions, as medically necessary”.
At least, those are the claims made in WPATH’s media statements. Publicity, politics and the management of competing expectations all overshadow the content of SOC 8. Since the last SOC in 2012, the gender clinic business model has seen rapid global growth with the uptake of puberty blocker drugs and a new patient profile: teenagers, disproportionately female, of the social media epoch. ROGD and detransition are terms of quite recent currency. Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage is only two years old, and Dr Lisa Littman’s study hypothesising a new, rapid-onset form of gender dysphoria was published just four years ago. … read full article
US - Shaky foundations
New guidelines for transgender medicine are undermined by a weak evidence base
From Gender Clinic News (Australia)
By Bernard Lane
September 29, 2022
GCN asked various people for their thoughts on the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s new standards of care, SOC 8, focusing on children and adolescents. The resulting commentary, in alphabetical order by surname, has been divided into two parts. This is the second part. (The first part is here.)
Part 2
Riitakerttu Kaltiala, professor of adolescent psychiatry, clinician and researcher in Finland (which in 2020 broke with the WPATH approach and shifted to psychotherapy as the first-line treatment for gender-dysphoric youth):
I have to admit that the [new WPATH] standard is better than I expected, because there is an emphasis that any interventions with adolescents have to be based on a thorough assessment. And this guideline even admits that it may not always be the right course to proceed quickly to hormonal — not to mention surgical — interventions in adolescents. It is embedded in this guideline that some adolescents may thrive without any medical intervention. … read full article
The Progressive Erasure of Feminism
The radical feminist revolution has been hijacked
From Tablet (USA)
By Phyllis Chesler
August 03, 2021
They are marching across the streets of America, both women and men—for an end to police brutality toward Black men and for an immigrant-friendly, ecologically sane, and a “classless” society. Everywhere, criminals, anarchists, and left political operatives are moving among the peaceful protesters and toppling statues, burning cars, smashing windows, shooting people down, looting shops, and harassing civilians on the street and at outdoor cafes.
The marchers and their funders believe that bloodletting, even in the midst of a global pandemic, is well worth it in order to radically “perfect” our society. And yet, none of this acting up and acting out constitutes a strategy for solving the problems of alleged structural racism, alleged police brutality toward African Americans, the prison-industrial complex, the economic inequalities in America, as well as the problems of guns, drugs, prostitution, and Black-on-Black violence among racially marginalized African Americans. … read full article
About GC Review
Every day, there are more relevant news and opinion pieces from around the world than we can include. Some days, particularly important news occurs, gets written about by everyone who writes, then gets submerged in the torrent and disappears, quickly swallowed by what, in retrospect, was merely another eddy in this rushing river of rage, regret, and reinvention.
Some of these stories are worth revisiting. Not everyone saw them when they came out. Or, if you’re like me, you might have read it but can no longer remember it. And in many cases, they were simply so relevant, beautifully expressed, or seminal that they deserve rereading.
GC Review, Saturday’s issue of GC News, is devoted to stories that have already been published. They might be from the past week, month, year, or twenty years. They’re all relevant to the central theme of GC News: rejecting the current cultish adulation of gender ideology. And we will choose them carefully, looking for the ones that we personally want to reread and, hopefully, remember. We also will include a few of the most important stories from the previous week.
An invitation to subscribers: if there’s a really important article from the past few years that you’d like us to include in an upcoming Saturday GC Review issue of GC News, please include your suggestion in a reply, or send us email at gcnews@substack.com.