Ignore that amateur prognosticator


I was watching this video — it’s very good, debunking all the nonsense anti-trans bigots regurgitate to justify their bias — when a face popped up at about 12 minutes that I recognized. Hey! That’s Jay Richards!

Jay Richards was predicting that in about 5 years there’s going to be a massive wave of kids who were duped into sex-change operations coming back to sue the public school system.

In case you don’t know about Jay Richards, he was formerly one of the leaders of the Discovery Institute (he’s now at the Heritage Foundation) who was predicting over 25 years ago that Darwinism was going to be dead and replaced with Intelligent Design creationism in about 5 years.

Comments

  1. raven says

    Jay Richards just lies about everything.

    Jay Richards was predicting that in about 5 years there’s going to be a massive wave of kids who were duped into sex-change operations coming back to sue the public school system.

    This won’t happen because this doesn’t happen.

    We don’t do Trans surgical procedures on children under the age of 18. And the public schools have nothing to do with it one way or another anyway.

    Cthulhu, even by the low standards of fundie xians, this is a pathetic lie.

  2. raven says

    How common is transgender treatment regret, detransitioning?

    BY LINDSEY TANNER AP
    Published 5:55 AM PST, March 5, 2023

    Some studies suggest that rates of regret have declined over the years as patient selection and treatment methods have improved. In a review of 27 studies involving almost 8,000 teens and adults who had transgender surgeries, mostly in Europe, the U.S and Canada, 1% on average expressed regret. For some, regret was temporary, but a small number went on to have detransitioning or reversal surgeries, the 2021 review said.

    Actually in the Real World, regret for Transitioning is very low at around 1%.

    In comparison, polls show that 8-12% of people regret having children. You would think that is an irreversible decision but too often parents try to reverse it anyway. Quite often, one parent, usually but not always the father, just walks out and goes away.
    And, every day we read about some parent who killed their kids.

    About 50% of people regret get married.
    We know that because the divorce rate is…50%.

    The level of regret for any decision we can make is never going to be zero. Regret is part of being alive.
    Who hasn’t done something they later regret? Most of us have long lists.

    The regret level for Trans people transitioning is very low compared to many other life changing decisions.

  3. freeline says

    Trial lawyer here. There may indeed be such a wave of lawsuits because (1) anyone with a word processor and the filing fee can file a lawsuit and (2) if you’re going to file a lawsuit, sue everybody in sight. And it may even be that the schools’ insurance carriers will make a business decision to settle rather than risk what a transphobic jury might decide.

    But those practicalities are all separate questions from whether the public schools have done anything wrong, and I don’t see that they have. People of all ages make decisions they later regret but that doesn’t mean it’s the schools’ fault.

    I do see a wave of lawsuits coming against doctors who do bottom surgery by retransitioners who later regret it. If such doctors came to me, my legal advice would be that under no circumstances should bottom surgery be done on a minor, especially if the parents are opposed to it. You’re just asking for trouble.

  4. says

    Don’t forget (3) there’s at least one very rich transphobe who’d very likely be willing to back up and finance any frivolous bigoted lawsuit he wants to.

  5. Pierce R. Butler says

    …formerly one of the leaders of the Discovery Institute (he’s now at the Heritage Foundation) …

    Sounds like a rising professional prognosticator to me – just a bad (in both senses of the word) one.

  6. chrislawson says

    freeline@3– nice to see a chickenshit lawyer tell doctors not to do surgery “under any circumstances”, not even with well-documented consent for potentially life-saving treatment.

  7. dangerousbeans says

    It’s interesting that they never ask about the regret rate for not transitioning. That’s a decision too

  8. John Morales says

    [meta]

    chrislawson, to be fair, that’s a bit abusive in my mind.
    Context is clear, given the preface: “Trial lawyer here.”

    freeline@3 is not being “a chickenshit lawyer”, he’s being a lawyer.
    I reckon a competent lawyer.

    Just as with you and your medical advice, they (I vibe ‘he’, but don’t know) do lawyerly advice.

    (Doesn’t mean they approve of what is necessary to minimise the likelihood of prosecution and ensuing consequences, just means they are giving lawyerly advice)

    [I don’t myself like this sort of instant antipathy]

  9. anat says

    freeline, there are 2 situations I know of when bottom surgery is done on minors and neither involve transgender kids transitoning. One is medical necessity – there is some problem, usually congenital, with the urogenital system that needs to be resolved surgically (because the problem is causing frequent infections, for instance). The other is when a child has ambiguous genitals and instead of waiting for the child to decide which set they want to have parents and doctors decide for them. So if there are going to be a lot of lawsuits over this sort of thing, it will not come from kids who were misidentified as transgender but from intersex kids.

    Gender affirming care for minors involves all kinds of things, most of them non-surgical. Even top surgery is very rare and reserved for extreme cases.

  10. Silentbob says

    @ 9 Morales

    [I don’t myself like this sort of instant antipathy]

    Lol. X-D

    So what’s your schoolyard bully name for me this week, dude? SludgeBoil, perhaps? StupidBog?

    Anyway, leaving Morales’ hypocrisy aside, freeline is being ridiculous. “Bottom surgery” is almost never done on minors. I think the earliest ever was age 16, and that was because the person had made multiple suicide attempts due to severe dysphoria, and was with full parental consent. (And they have had no regrets.)

    The suggestion there is such a thing as “bottom surgery” on minors without parental consent is scaremongering nonsense.

    Common procedures like getting tubes tied, or vasectomy, or gastric banding have percentage regret rates well into double figures but we don’t see a wave of lawsuits against doctors for procedures to which the patient consented.

    Regret rates for any kind of gender affirming surgery are less than 1% – barely single figures, let alone double.

  11. Silentbob says

    Trapped in a body she hated, Jackie first overdosed aged 11 and made six more suicide attempts before she was 15. Medicines were locked in a safe and knives had to be hidden away. She threatened to mutilate her genitals.

    And so, aged 16, Jackie Green became the youngest person in the world to undergo transgender surgery.

    [… ]

    Thanks to her supportive parents, she was started on hormone drug treatment at 14, which meant she never underwent male puberty, her voice never deepened, and she never grew masculine proportions or features.

    [… ]

    In the UK, gender reassignment cannot be performed until the patient is 18, but [her mother] Susan discovered a surgeon in Thailand willing to do the operation when Jackie was 16 (Thailand has since adopted the international guideline of 18).

    Eighteen months of discussions with the surgeon followed and on her 16th birthday she underwent a seven-hour operation.

    She returned to Thailand when she was 18 for £2,000 breast augmentation surgery, and now has a body she is delighted with.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/fb-6329525/WHO-JACKIE-GREEN-ONE-YOUNGEST-UNDERGO-SEX-AFFIRMATION-SURGERY.html

  12. John Morales says

    Lol. X-

    Indeed.

    So what’s your schoolyard bully name for me this week, dude? SludgeBoil, perhaps? StupidBog?

    PZ has proscribed my fun with specimens such as you, so, nothing.

    In any case, it was always about your persistent misnyming of me to try to be as shitty as you could, your fucking stupid insistence you knew more about me and my name and my culture and how it works, your eventual concession, and your absolutely ridiculous after-the-fact claim you were honouring me by so doing, and that was your intent.

    Facts, all. Quite verifiable.

    Anyway, leaving Morales’ hypocrisy aside […]

    Your slyme is surely not left aside.

    Silentbob.

  13. John Morales says

    I even told you at the time, Silentbob.

    I told you it was a promise I would keep.

    You know fuck-all about honour or honour cultures, so you made light of that.

    It took PZ to stop me.

    Silentbob.

  14. chrislawson says

    John, it’s not instant antipathy. It is a response to lawyers, politicians, administrators, and so on advising people to take cowardly options to avoid upsetting agitators. It is in the context of malicious culture warriors talking up litigation risk in order to prevent access to transgender care (note, if you really want to make yourself sick, read this article for its fake-‘gotcha’ comparison of gender reassignment surgery to female genital mutilation). Please note that I am not calling freeline an anti-trans agitator. I am saying that freeline’s argument is exactly what the agitators want to spread and would be especially delighted to see them being aired in progressive circles.

    Some facts: the most up-to-date evidence on gender surgery in the US, published in 2024 using data from 2019: of the 22.8 million minors covered by insurance, only 82 had any kind of gender reassignment surgery, and only 3 had non-chest related surgery (the study doesn’t say explicitly, but I assume this means “bottom surgery”). Almost all surgical cases were age 15-17.

    The only actual lawsuit I know of is that of Jay Langadinos in the NSW Supreme Court. She is not suing the surgeons but the psychiatrist for allegedly misdiagnosing autism as transgenderism when she was 19 years old. This is still sub judice, so we cannot comment on the evidence, but I note that the last action in the NSW court list database was a subpoena return in Feb 2022 so we don’t even know if the case will proceed. There may well be other cases, but the fact that this one Australian case has echoed around the world suggests to me that there is a distinct lack of such cases for the media to report on and the agitators to flagwave over.

    In short, (1) “bottom” surgery in minors is already incredibly rare, (2) it is already exclusively in the age group where minors are assumed to be able to give medical consent unless otherwise demonstrated, and (3) surgeons are already being extremely selective about “bottom surgery” in minors. It is impossible to know for certain from this study, but it is likely that these surgeries were performed because of extreme gender dysphoria, i.e. severe impact on the person’s mental health with high suicidality risk. And given the best estimate of transition regret being around 1%, this would suggest (with caveats for the limitations and applicability of the studies), that only one such minor will come to regret the surgery every 33 years, and there is no way of estimating how many will seek legal action, let alone succeed. (By way of comparison, around 20% of women who have mastectomies for breast cancer regret their decision — and it can be as high as 42.5% in certain groups — but nobody is suggesting we stop therapeutic mastectomies to avoid potential law suits.)

    Therefore, the advice to change from performing bottom surgery for minors rarely to never doing them under any circumstances is throwing those minors who need it under the bus just to avoid a fight that might not even happen due to a serious shortage of exploitable cases.

    I can also say that in the US right now, there will be a rush of right-wing agitators looking for any justification to bring legal action against doctors who provide abortions. Actually, it’s already happening. Should we advise doctors to not provide abortions, especially for minors, under any circumstances? No, we should not. We should advise them to be extremely fastidious about obtaining and documenting consent. Which they should anyway, regardless of any specific lawfare risk. And that is the better approach for gender surgery — I’m certainly not criticising freeline for drawing attention to the problem of transphobic misuse of medical consent and detransitioning, or for recommending clinical caution, I’m criticising the strategy of giving up even before the fight begins.

    Not to pile on freeline, but being a trial lawyer does not automatically imply expertise in medical negligence. Perhaps freeline does have this expertise, but it is not implicit. And even as a doctor, if I write something wrong or ill-informed on a medical topic, which is irksome to admit but it happens, I would hope to be corrected. If freeline can accept that their recommendation was unhelpful, I will gladly withdraw my description.

  15. chrislawson says

    freeline–

    I withdraw the offending adjective and apologise for being rude. I know you’re not anti-trans.

    I have a longer comment in moderation (because of the number of links I believe). I would appreciate if you could give it a read when it comes through, at least to understand why I disagree with your recommendation so bluntly. Please bear in mind that I was still pretty cranky when I wrote it.

    Best wishes

  16. Silentbob says

    Regret after Gender-affirmation Surgery: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Prevalence

    A total of 27 studies, pooling 7928 transgender patients who underwent any type of GAS [Gender Affirming Surgery], were included. The pooled prevalence of regret after GAS was 1% (95% CI <1%-2%). Overall, 33% underwent transmasculine procedures and 67% transfemenine procedures. The prevalence of regret among patients undergoing transmasculine and transfemenine surgeries was <1% (IC <1%-<1%) and 1% (CI <1%-2%), respectively.

    [… ]

    Based on this review, there is an extremely low prevalence of regret in transgender patients after GAS.

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33968550/

  17. John Morales says

    Executive Order 14168 is quite clear (I quote):

    (c) When administering or enforcing sex-based distinctions, every agency and all Federal employees acting in an official capacity on behalf of their agency shall use the term “sex” and not “gender” in all applicable Federal policies and documents.

    So, there are no transgender patients, there are transsex patients, Federally speaking.
    They used to be transgender, now they are transsexual.

    (Maybe Trump should buy Transylvania — but that’s beyond the forests)

  18. freeline says

    Chris, thank you for your gracious comment. Fortunately, I read it before I drafted my own cranky response to your earlier comment :) And I look forward to reading your longer comment once it clears moderation.

    A lot of times it is unfortunately my job to tell people to do or not do things that I think are outrageous because that’s just where the law is. I personally am not, assuming proper vetting, opposed in principle to bottom surgery for minors in appropriate cases. But the reality is that in these times I would not risk what an anti-trans jury may do if a doctor gets sued by someone who had the surgery and later regrets it. The prudent thing is not to do them.

    Of course, that then puts the doctor in the position of having to decide whether to assume the risk if the doctor believes the surgery is medically indicated. Candidly, I’m not anti-trans, but if I were in that position I honestly don’t know if I would have the courage of my convictions or not. And that’s the whole point: To instill fear.

  19. chrislawson says

    freeline–

    Thanks for being so considerate. I understand that it is your professional duty to advise a client on the legal consequences of their actions regardless of one’s personal values on the matter.

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