Gender

Cockburn started his Sunday by spitting Darjeeling all over the pages of the New York Times magazine. The cause of alarm? A lengthy, nuanced, meaty analysis of gender therapy had found its way into the paper of record. In Pride month, no less! Feature writer Emily Bazelon spent eight months reporting out the story, speaking to “more than sixty clinicians, researchers, activists and historians, as well as more than two dozen young people and about the same number of parents.” Her over-10,000-word article is framed around the forthcoming release of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s new Standards of Care guidelines, which are likely to prove controversial among both the pro- and anti-trans lobbies. It’s well worth a read.

Testosterone is having a moment. At once a molecular vector for toxic masculinity and a health-optimizing supplement for middle-aged tycoons eager to project vigor, “T” is perhaps the most discussed hormone around. I blame Jeff Bezos, who has apparently aged in reverse since founding Amazon. After a tight-shirted appearance at the 2017 Sun Valley conference, his transformation from dweeby online-book-salesman to Vin Diesel-clone-with-alpha-swagger was unmistakable. Was he getting some hormonal help? Fast-forward a few years and he has acquired a hot Latina girlfriend and blasted himself into space in a giant metal penis. This left little room for doubt: surely he was marinated to a T, in T.

Who should be the custodians of science? For centuries, scientists themselves have been. Now, their custodianship is under threat. Science has long operated as a sort of guild, with the guild managing its own practice and traditions. This holds for the guild’s continuity: admission of aspiring members to the guild is controlled by the guild itself. For the sciences, aspiring members must clear a competitive series of hurdles: apprenticeship (graduate school), journeyman (post-doctoral fellow and assistant professor), then full membership (tenured professor). For the past few decades, science’s stewardship has been shifting into the hands of an arriviste managerial class with no idea what science is or any real respect for it.

Over New Year’s, I came down with the Omicron. Or as I put it to my wife, civilization as I knew it almost came crashing down around me. Why are men so bad at being sick? I ask that fully aware that even saying the word “men” is enough these days to get you tossed off a college campus by a mob of tots screaming about how they identify as Chevy Impalas. The fun and flirty battle of the sexes has given way to an assault on the very concept of sex itself. And patriarchal oppressors versus birthing people just doesn’t have that same snappy “Summer Nights” ring to it. Yet even allowing for the ongoing abolition of gender, the difference between how men and women get sick is one of the few sex distinctions we’re still allowed to notice.

Last week, the Lancet medical journal became briefly internet-famous when it published the following sentence on its Twitter account: ‘Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected.’ The sentence is a pullquote from a bigger article, but boy does it capture the imagination on its own. Like a Hieronymous Bosch painting, you can return to it again and again, always finding something new and surprising to appreciate. There’s the musicality of it, all those four- and five-syllable words that roll pleasantly off the tongue. There’s the faintly macabre invocation of ‘bodies’, followed by ‘with vaginas’, suggesting a collection of corpses accessorized with (but not necessarily attached to) a bunch of birth canals.

Two things can be true at the same time. First, the Republican-backed state laws banning medical gender-transition treatment for youth — one has already passed in Arkansas — are a very bad idea. Second, there is a serious dearth of solid evidence in this area of medicine — and some reasons to be genuinely concerned about these treatments. If you’re a consumer of mainstream American media, you’ve likely received a heaping dose of the first message. But the second, if you’ve encountered it at all, has probably been presented to you as a deeply unscientific, bigoted talking point. This is a problem. It’s impossible to unpack what’s going on here without summarizing the recent history of youth medical transition.

The tech sector, we are forever being told, has a gender problem. Recently, for example, Women in Technology International reported that only a quarter of US information technology workers are women – something which it was quick to claim was a result of ‘unconscious bias’. How else, it invited us to ask ourselves, can the proportion of women in technology be so low when women receive 57 percent of college degrees and nearly half of professional degrees in law, medicine, and the physical sciences? Worse, we are led to think, the bias is inbred in the machines themselves.