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Activists Are Trying to Cancel My Book. Why Is Silicon Valley Helping Them?
- tptacek 6y agoThe day after I tweeted about the ongoing attempts to block sales of my book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters Here I stopped reading and went looking for the activists. Maybe they have a donation link.
- musingsole 6y agoOf course, nothing of value could be in a book with that type of cover! Activists must be right!
- tptacek 6y agoYou get me.
- rubidium 6y agoYou probably should have read just a little further: " I wrote specifically about the sudden, severe spike in transgender identification among adolescent girls. I fully support medical transition for mature adults. And I have no desire to be a provocateur. (I dislike pointless provocation, in part because I think provocateurs often have a good argument—one they’re too lazy or inept to make). Nor do I have any prurient interest in others’ social lives. What I aim to do, as a journalist, is to investigate cultural phenomena, and here was one worth investigating: Between 2016 and 2017, the number of females seeking gender surgery quadrupled in the United States. Thousands of teen girls across the Western world are not only self-diagnosing with a real dysphoric condition they likely do not have; in many cases, they are obtaining hormones and surgeries following the most cursory diagnostic processes. Schoolteachers, therapists, doctors, surgeons, and medical-accreditation organizations are all rubber-stamping these transitions, often out of fear that doing otherwise will be reported as a sign of “transphobia”—despite growing evidence that most young people who present as trans will eventually desist, and so these interventions will do more harm than good." You effectively reacted in the way the journalist said: "fear that doing otherwise will be reported as a sign of 'transphobia' ".
- Simulacra 6y agoIMO the transgender craze mirrors some of what happened in the 80s with regards to Attention Deficit Disorder, and Ritalin. Teachers, principals, and school counselors with zero training in medicine, psychology, or pharmacology, self-diagnosed children with ADD and was a driving force for pushing the dramatic increase in the usage of such medications. From a personal perspective, when I was but a wee young girl in elementary school, a bit hyperactive, the school made it clear that as far as they were concerned I had ADD, and I must be put on medication before they would allow me to return to the classroom. Forgetting for a moment that a school cannot do this legally, my parents were summarily cowed enough to put me on medication to appease the education establishment. The author of the aforementioned article makes a very good point but I don't think they stated the conclusion in loud enough terms: People are self-diagnosing, then demanding medical care they don't need, while claiming any resistance is discriminatory. Out of fear, I think doctors and therapists are getting intimidated and going along with it.
- DenisM 6y ago> my parents were summarily cowed enough to put me on medication Sorry to hear that. How did that turn out for you? Any lasting damage?
- JJMcJ 6y agoMany districts had (and may still have) pet psychiatrists who are 100% sure to make the diagnosis and prescribe. In some districts it doesn't work that way and never did but there are others where it does. Teachers love docile students and will do a lot of harm to ensure that's what they have.
- lukev 6y agoThis is disingenuous. If she had "no desire to be a provocateur", she would have given the book a different, non-transphobic title.
- the_only_law 6y agoYeah honestly given the title of the book, I expected much different content than what was described in the article.
- DenisM 6y agoThat's just the problem, don't you think? Had you kept reading you might have found something worth engaging with.
- tptacek 6y agoNo, I don't feel any need to hunt for engagement with people operating in bad faith. It is reasonable to draw a conclusion from the evidence. Jesse Singal this is not. Surprised that you don't immediately see the distinction here; it's unlike you.
- underseacables 6y agoDon't be snarky https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- verroq 6y agoThe irony that you don’t understand that you are the problem
- lawnchair_larry 6y agoWay to demonstrate everything that’s wrong with cancel culture. Try hearing what people actually have to say. As with most of your snap judgments on people engaging in social issues, you got this one very wrong. She’s not operating in bad faith, but you certainly are.
- Simulacra 6y agoIf it offends you, then obviously you must demean it, trash it, and cancel it until it makes you feel better. /sarcasm
- thesausageking 6y agoI don't understand why she's blaming Silicon Valley. She got a huge boost in visibility from the Joe Rogan interview which is hosted on YouTube and Spotify, neither of which removed the episode. She may have received a lot of criticism on Twitter and Reddit, but it was far from one-sided. If you read the threads on /r/joerogan, they're mostly positive and I have no doubt a lot of Redditers bought her book after seeing it there. She has 42k followers on twitter, has a pinned Tweet that links to her book, and I don't see any evidence that Twitter is stopping her from posting. It actually seems like a great example of tech allowing a creator to reach audience even if they're shunned by main stream media and retailers.
- verroq 6y agoSV gets the blame because they control the platforms (e.g. Twitter, Facebook) and have no problem with doing whatever they want to further their agendas.
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- lawnchair_larry 6y agoShe addressed that specifically - did you read the whole article?
- jgwil2 6y agoFrom the guidelines: > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
- lukev 6y agoHow come it's bad for activists to try to "cancel" her book, when the thesis of her book is to "cancel" trans folks? Or maybe "cancel" is just a word people use to try to claim the moral high ground when they are criticized?
- lawnchair_larry 6y agoThat isn’t the thesis of her book. It focuses on irreversible damage to entire friend groups of children who spontaneously decide together that they want to change their gender. The school is required to support them in this without informing the parents, and as young as 13 in some states, they can get hormone therapy and undergo gender reassignment procedures without parental consent and without any visits to a therapist. Call me old fashioned, but if my 13 year old girl thinks getting permanently sterilized and getting a double mastectomy is a reasonable thing to decide to do along with her group of friends, and schools and surgeons will do it without anybody telling me, I’m going to be very upset. Unsurprisingly, kids often regret this later, and nothing can be done. And worst of all, this _increases_ suicide rates. Nobody is trying to “cancel trans folks”.
- notaspecialist 6y agoThe per-country banned-booklist (if you can find it) is quite long.