#National Opinion Research Center

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Young women are more likely to identify as liberal now than at any time in the past two decades, a trend that puts them squarely at odds with young men.

44% of young women counted themselves liberal in 2021, compared to 25% of young men, according to Gallup Poll data analyzed by the Survey Center on American Life. The gender gap is the largest recorded in 24 years of polling. The finding culminates years of rising liberalism among women ages 18 to 29, without any increase among their male peers.

Several societal forces have conspired to push young women to the left in recent years, including the #MeToo movement, former President Trump, rising LGBTQ identification and, most recently, abortion policy. Slower-cooking trends in marital status and educational attainment have also nudged the needle.

“I think there is a big generational shift that happened with Generation Z women who were really coming of age in the last five years,” said Kelsy Kretschmer, a sociologist at Oregon State University who studies gender politics.

The rift between young men and women may widen further. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a precedent that had protected abortion as a constitutional right for nearly half a century. The ruling has energized young women. New survey data, released this week, shows that 61% of young women consider abortion a critical issue, compared with 36% of all Americans.

“I would always choose a candidate that’s pro-abortion,” said Rose Merjos, 21, a government major at Wesleyan University in Connecticut who is an avowed liberal. “Almost everyone either knows someone who has had an abortion or has had one themselves. This is something everyone can relate to.”

The share of men who identify as liberal has held fairly steady for almost 25 years, according to annual Gallup surveys. Roughly one-quarter of men ages 18 to 29 term themselves liberal, year after year.

Meanwhile, among young women, liberalism has exploded. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, fewer than 30% of women identified as liberal. The liberal camp grew through the second term of former President George W. Bush. It expanded further during the tenure of former President Obama. It reached 39% in 2017 with the inauguration of Trump. In the last two years, liberalism surged anew.

“Young women today are much more liberal than young men,” Daniel Cox wrote in a June newsletter of the Survey Center on American Life, a project of the American Enterprise Institute. His work documents “a growing political rift” between young women and men.

Merjos attends a university long associated with both liberalism and activism. These days, though, she senses more of both among the women.

“In all of my government classes, there are probably two men out of 18 people,” she said. “ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union], that’s mostly women. I’m wondering if women are maybe just more inclined to be involved in the community, engaged in the community. And that liberalizes them.”

Ezra Meyer, 22, is a senior at the George Washington (GW) University who leads the College Republicans. He is a conservative on a campus that is overwhelmingly liberal and largely female. In conversations with classmates about politics, he treads lightly.

“My metric for deciding if I’m going to be friends with someone really does not come down to what their politics are,” he said. “It comes down to how tolerant they are.”

Meyer doesn’t know whether the men at GW skew more liberal or conservative than the women. But he has noticed a distinct trend among campus conservatives this fall.

“We’ve been doing a lot of recruiting of freshmen on campus,” he said. “And I would say, overwhelmingly, it has been male. The conservative females that do get involved, there’s fewer of them, but they tend to be way more passionate and way more involved.”

Several factors have liberalized the nation’s 20-something women. The most recent, and perhaps the most powerful, is #MeToo, an uprising against sexual assault, abuse and harassment that caught fire in 2017, empowering millions of women to come forward and seek justice.

The inauguration of Trump in the same year pushed more young women into the liberal column. The 45th president battled his own #MeToo allegations and proved uniquely unpopular among young, female voters. Polling in 2016 showed that only 25% of women ages 18 to 34 favored Trump, compared with 40% of same-aged men.

The rise of liberalism among young women has also marched apace with a dramatic increase in young people identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer. In a recent survey, 56% of young women reported exclusive attraction to men, while three-quarters of young men said they were solely attracted to women. Prior research suggests LGBTQ Americans of all ages trend toward liberalism.

Several longer-term trends have fed the liberalization of young women as well. One is marriage. The share of women ages 18-29 who are married has fallen by half in twenty years, from 31% in 2000 to 15% in 2021, according to the National Opinion Research Center.

The growing ranks of single, 20-something women feel a sense of “linked fate,” researchers say. They gravitate toward female friends in political views, whereas married women more often mirror the politics of their spouses.

“The correlation between women’s sense of linked fate and liberal political preferences suggests that the Democratic Party will benefit” from declining marriage rates among young women, Kretschmer and two co-authors wrote in a 2017 paper for the journal Political Research Quarterly. They noted that “women make up the majority of the population and vote at high rates.”

Women also outpace men in educational attainment, a trend that dates to the 1980s. The ratio of women to men in college enrollment now stands at roughly 60 to 40, and it continues to grow. Americans who complete college are more liberal than those who do not.

“Putting off marriage, going to college, entering the workforce, women are doing that at much higher rates than they used to,” said Marc Hetherington, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “And all of those things are going to make conservatism and the Republicans significantly less attractive to women.”

In 1998, the first year of data collected by Gallup in its Social Series surveys, 28% of young men and 29% of young women identified as liberal. The gender gap in liberalism grew steadily wider in the 2000s, wider still in the 2010s. The 2021 poll yielded a 19-point spread between young men and young women, the largest on record.

“I do have some male friends that are moderate,” said Luci Paczkowski, 20, a California liberal. “And it annoys the hell out of me.”

What bothers Paczkowski about her nonliberal friends is not their centrism but her suspicion that they “do not have any clue why they are moderate. They just do not want to pick a side and, therefore, they are apathetic.”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The surveillance advertising to financial fraud pipeline

Monday (October 2), I'll be in Boise to host an event with VE Schwab. On October 7–8, I'm in Milan to keynote Wired Nextfest.

Being watched sucks. Of all the parenting mistakes I've made, none haunt me more than the times my daughter caught me watching her while she was learning to do something, discovered she was being observed in a vulnerable moment, and abandoned her attempt:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2014/may/09/cybersecurity-begins-with-integrity-not-surveillance

It's hard to be your authentic self while you're under surveillance. For that reason alone, the rise and rise of the surveillance industry – an unholy public-private partnership between cops, spooks, and ad-tech scum – is a plague on humanity and a scourge on the Earth:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does

But beyond the psychic damage surveillance metes out, there are immediate, concrete ways in which surveillance brings us to harm. Ad-tech follows us into abortion clinics and then sells the info to the cops back home in the forced birth states run by Handmaid's Tale LARPers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/29/no-i-in-uter-us/#egged-on

And even if you have the good fortune to live in a state whose motto isn't "There's no 'I" in uter-US," ad-tech also lets anti-abortion propagandists trick you into visiting fake "clinics" who defraud you into giving birth by running out the clock on terminating your pregnancy:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/15/paid-medical-disinformation/#crisis-pregnancy-centers

The commercial surveillance industry fuels SWATting, where sociopaths who don't like your internet opinions or are steamed because you beat them at Call of Duty trick the cops into thinking that there's an "active shooter" at your house, provoking the kind of American policing autoimmune reaction that can get you killed:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/14/us/swatting-sentence-casey-viner/index.html

There's just a lot of ways that compiling deep, nonconsensual, population-scale surveillance dossiers can bring safety and financial harm to the unwilling subjects of our experiment in digital spying. The wave of "business email compromises" (the infosec term for impersonating your boss to you and tricking you into cleaning out the company bank accounts)? They start with spear phishing, a phishing attack that uses personal information – bought from commercial sources or ganked from leaks – to craft a virtual Big Store con:

https://www.fbi.gov/how-we-can-help-you/safety-resources/scams-and-safety/common-scams-and-crimes/business-email-compromise

It's not just spear-phishers. There are plenty of financial predators who run petty grifts – stock swindles, identity theft, and other petty cons. These scams depend on commercial surveillance, both to target victims (e.g. buying Facebook ads targeting people struggling with medical debt and worried about losing their homes) and to run the con itself (by getting the information needed to pull of a successful identity theft).

In "Consumer Surveillance and Financial Fraud," a new National Bureau of Academic Research paper, a trio of business-school profs – Bo Bian (UBC), Michaela Pagel (WUSTL) and Huan Tang (Wharton) quantify the commercial surveillance industry's relationship to finance crimes:

https://www.nber.org/papers/w31692

The authors take advantage of a time-series of ZIP-code-accurate fraud complaint data from the Consumer Finance Protection Board, supplemented by complaints from the FTC, along with Apple's rollout of App Tracking Transparency, a change to app-based tracking on Apple mobile devices that turned of third-party commercial surveillance unless users explicitly opted into being spied on. More than 96% of Apple users blocked spying:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-out-of-app-tracking-in-ios-14-5-analytics-find/

In other words, they were able to see, neighborhood by neighborhood, what happened to financial fraud when users were able to block commercial surveillance.

What happened is, fraud plunged. Deprived of the raw material for committing fraud, criminals were substantially hampered in their ability to steal from internet users.

While this is something that security professionals have understood for years, this study puts some empirical spine into the large corpus of qualitative accounts of the surveillance-to-fraud pipeline.

As the authors note in their conclusion, this analysis is timely. Google has just rolled out a new surveillance system, the deceptively named "Privacy Sandbox," that every Chrome user is being opted in to unless they find and untick three separate preference tickboxes. You should find and untick these boxes:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/09/how-turn-googles-privacy-sandbox-ad-tracking-and-why-you-should

Google has spun, lied and bullied Privacy Sandbox into existence; whenever this program draws enough fire, they rename it (it used to be called FLoC). But as the Apple example showed, no one wants to be spied on – that's why Google makes you find and untick three boxes to opt out of this new form of surveillance.

There is no consensual basis for mass commercial surveillance. The story that "people don't mind ads so long as they're relevant" is a lie. But even if it was true, it wouldn't be enough, because beyond the harms to being our authentic selves that come from the knowledge that we're being observed, surveillance data is a crucial ingredient for all kinds of crime, harassment, and deception.

We can't rely on companies to spy on us responsibly. Apple may have blocked third-party app spying, but they effect nonconsensual, continuous surveillance of every Apple mobile device user, and lie about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

That's why we should ban commercial surveillance. We should outlaw surveillance advertising. Period:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/ban-online-behavioral-advertising

Contrary to the claims of surveillance profiteers, this wouldn't reduce the income to ad-supported news and other media – it would increase their revenues, by letting them place ads without relying on the surveillance troves assembled by the Google/Meta ad-tech duopoly, who take the majority of ad-revenue:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

We're 30 years into the commercial surveillance pandemic and Congress still hasn't passed a federal privacy law with a private right of action. But other agencies aren't waiting for Congress. The FTC and DoJ Antitrust Divsision have proposed new merger guidelines that allow regulators to consider privacy harms when companies merge:

https://www.regulations.gov/comment/FTC-2023-0043-1569

Think here of how Google devoured Fitbit and claimed massive troves of extremely personal data, much of which was collected because employers required workers to wear biometric trackers to get the best deal on health care:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/google-fitbit-merger-would-cement-googles-data-empire

Companies can't be trusted to collect, retain or use our personal data wisely. The right "balance" here is to simply ban that collection, without an explicit opt-in. The way this should work is that companies can't collect private data unless users hunt down and untick three "don't spy on me" boxes. After all, that's the standard that Google has set.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/29/ban-surveillance-ads/#sucker-funnel

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[spacelazarwolf]

if you want to answer (and i totally understand if you dont), who do you think bombed the hospital in gaza? ive seen a lot of different people talking about it and blaming different people & organizations and you seem like you know a lot aboit i/p

IMPORTANT TO NOTE: i am not a news source. i am some guy with access to the internet. please follow the links in this post, as well as doing your own research. please do not use social media posts exclusively as your source of news, and please continuously read and compare several different accredited news sources. keep on top of new sources and evidence that are being put out to ensure that you have the most up-to-date information.

it's not really about who i think did it. i feel like that centers me in a thing that is very much not about me. but i'll give it my best shot.

we still do not have confirmation of how many were killed or who is at fault for the bombing. there are a lot of numbers and opinions floating around online, but as of 4pm on october 19th there has not been a consensus on either of these things from any accredited organizations.

that being said, here are the statements that have been put out as of the time i'm responding to this:

statements about death toll:

the gaza health ministry estimates between 200 and 471 dead

the director of al-shifa hospital where people were brought from al-ahli estimates 250 dead

an assessment from the us director of national intelligence estimates between 100 and 300

an analyst with the center for naval analysis, after viewing photos and video, said the death toll was closer to 50

statements about fault:

(taking these directly from the article)

J Andres Gannon, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University, in the US, says the ground explosions appeared to be small, meaning that the heat generated from the impact may have been caused by leftover rocket fuel rather than an explosion from a warhead. Justin Bronk, senior research fellow at the UK-based Royal United Services Institute, agrees. While it is difficult to be sure at such an early stage, he says, the evidence looks like the explosion was caused by a failed rocket section hitting the car park and causing a fuel and propellant fire. Mr Gannon says it is not possible to determine whether the projectile struck its intended target from the footage he has seen. He adds that the flashes in the sky likely indicate the projectile was a rocket with an engine that overheated and stopped working. Valeria Scuto, lead Middle East analyst at Sibylline, a risk assessment company, notes that Israel has the capacity to carry out other forms of air strike by drone, where they might use Hellfire missiles. These missiles generate a significant amount of heat but would not necessarily leave a large crater. But she says uncorroborated footage shows a pattern of fires at the hospital site that was not consistent with this explanation.

Visual evidence from the blast site The BBC was able to match details of buildings and the layout of the Al-Ahli hospital site with publicly available satellite imagery, to establish the hospital was the scene of the blast. Based on available evidence, it appears the explosion happened in a courtyard which is part of the hospital site. Images of the ground after the blast do not show significant damage to surrounding hospital buildings. What the images do show are scorch marks and burnt-out cars.

where the explosive came from

so far, israel, hamas, and palestinian islamic jihad have all denied responsibility

channel 4 news reported that palestinian islamic jihad had uncovered a warhead but they have not produced it

in a since-deleted tweet, hananya naftali, a social media advisor for netanyahu, claimed that it was an israeli airstrike that hit the hospital. he followed up by stating that he had shared incorrect information based on a reuters headline that refered to an israeli airstrike

tentative conclusion based on sources:

what i gather from what i've read is that the blast was likely caused by a misfired rocket originating somewhere in gaza, and the blast was exacerbated by the fuel in the rocket. BUT, as i stated before, new information is always being put out. there could be evidence released tomorrow that it was an israeli air strike. there has been no conclusive evidence yet.

and perhaps the most important section:

what you can actually do to help

if you are in the us, call your representatives and urge them to support the resolution for a ceasefire

check out this list of verified aid groups (if there is not a ceasefire as soon as possible, it won't matter what aid is sent to them and if they cannot get the supplies into gaza, so refer back to the first bulletpoint)

send a donation to your local synagogue(s) and mosque(s) to help them offset the rising costs of security

take a moment to be a human. don't think about the numbers. don't think about the politics. think about the human beings who lost their lives, and the people who are mourning them. the mothers who will never see their children again, the children who will grow up without parents. what did they have for breakfast? what was their favorite song? when was their birthday? were they afraid? were they in pain? what can we do to ensure this does not happen again?

[papasmoke]

current exmormon, born and raised Mormon, my ancestors like… founded the church, literally couldn’t be more Mormon heritage wise… but WHAT do you mean FBI agents. I need an excess of details sources and info ASAP. this is the first I’m ever hearing of this and I’d love all the dirty laundry if you’re willing to share

The FBI and a bunch of other federal agencies have been recruiting heavily from Mormon communities for the better part of a hundred years. Every article I've read about it always claims that that desirability stems from a lot of Mormons speaking multiple languages due their missionary work in other countries, or their aversion to alcohol and drugs, and general lack of vices that intelligence agencies try to avoid in recruits. In my opinion though they overlook a major factor, which is Mormonism's borderline deification of the US.

Mormonism wouldn't exist without the settler violence exhibited against the natives with the backing of the US government, it was founded by settlers on lands violently stolen from its former inhabitants, and the literal demonization of the indigenous peoples of the US is - to my understanding - a cornerstone belief of Mormonism. So Mormonism is in effect a formal adoption of Manifest Destiny as religious and cultural doctrine on a level that even evangelicals don't envision it to be.

Like, the colonization of the Americas obviously turned all settlers into agents of genocide, subjugation, and displacement. Every Christian denomination incorporated every violent excess of the frontier into its preaching and practice in some way or other, but Mormonism took that violence and made it sacrosanct, made it a bedrock belief in its theology. So, if you believe that the violence enacted by the US on your behalf was and is Mandated By God, then you might feel compelled to join an extension of the state, to become an instrument of that continued holy violence.

[txttletale]

i mean i can guess at a lot of it - maybe all of it - but could we hear the sid meier's civilization opinions you have so hinted at?

fuck yeah you can. alright so an easy one off the bat is that sometimes it is just manifestly racist in pretty obvious, surface-level ways. like, i think kongo's civ ability in civ vi (that they are preternaturally good at getting religiously converted) is a pretty good example of what i mean--that and a bunch of stuff from the older entries.

but (as ever) that sort of thing is significantly less interesting to me than the broader assumptions about reality baked into the game's core premises. so let's talk about some of those!

first of all, there is (unsurprisingly, it's a pretty loaded term) so much ideology packed into what 'civilization' considers 'a civilization'. like, let's talk about some of the things that are true about 'civilizations' in sid meier's civilization:

they settle cities

they each consist of one culture which is contiguous both geographically and temporally across thousands of years

each of these cultures is represented by one continuous state with complete top-down control

they 'progress' through a linear set of 'eras', with corresponding 'advances' in technological development & aesthetics

over the course of these eras, they expand territorially to exploit natural resources

they have standing armies

they have innate & deterministic competencies (unique units & buildings in earlier games, civ abilities in V onward)

other than the aforementioned unique units, they develop a certain set of universal technologies and institutions (ie, all civilizations will have access to and build a 'bank' or 'library' building)

they have 'hard' (rigidly defined, mutually exclusive, militarily enforced) borders

so--! off the bat, looking at the very first point--what about the mongols? what about the shoshone? what about the scythians? there is a clear normative ideological implication to say that in order for these historically nomadic peoples to be depicted as a 'civilization' they must be depicted as settling urban population centers--and it is the same normative implication that the rest of these points have, which is a very narrow view of what a 'civilization' is, a colonialist (at best) view of what lies outside 'civilization'

#2 and #3 have unfortunate synchrony with a lot of real-world national myths that obscure vast amounts of violence and destruction of culture in order to create a national identity--the idea of one coherent 'ancient greek' culture, for example, would have come as a very great surprise to the spartans and athenians. the idea of 'france' having a shared set of cultural traits would have definitely not been welcome to the bretons, normans, occitans, or any of the other regional identities that were violently suppressed over centuries to create the modern french nation-state.

#4--especially as combined with #7 and #8--really lays bare a lot of the colonialist assumptions at the core of the game. for example, if you play as the inca in any civ game, you'll have to research 'writing' and 'the wheel', technologies that the incan empire never relied upon, in order to 'advance'. this 'advancement' follows (a pop-history version of, obviously) chiefly the technological development of Europe and later the USA--this is falsely universalised out. and the idea of linear progression through levels of technological 'advancement' is very very explicitly a colonialist one--the idea that the peoples of subsaharan africa, the americas, australia, etc. were 'less advanced' than europeans was a key ideological pillar of colonialism!

it also very much plays into the 'Vanishing Indian' myth. for example, the aztecs get their unique unit in vi (the jaguar warrior) at the start of the game, in the 'ancient era'--at the same time that the gauls get theirs, the 'gaesetae'--and replacing the same unit! now in real life, the 'gaesetae' and the aztec triple alliance were well over a thousand years apart -- the jaguar warrior is more contemporaneous with the real-world basis of the 'conquistador' unit than it is with the gaesetae! in civilization vi, the major cultural innovations of 'the aztecs' are over and done with long before the innovations of 'rome' are--which must be a very great surprise to the millions of nahua people living in mexico now--and moreover is part of the mythologization of indigenous peoples as 'of the past', as precursors who vanished to make way for settlement, rather than people who were violently suppressed and still very much exist in the present day!

#5, #6, and #9 all fall under the same umbrella of both backdating and universalizing the model of the Western capitalist nation-state to all of history and the world. 'national borders' as they're currently understood didn't exist for most of human history--standing armies especially were an extreme historical rarity until the last couple of centuries--Western capitalism is certainly not the first social model to result in colonialism and extractionism but the particular attitudes and manifestations of this are certainly, again, unique to a specific part of the world in the last couple centuries. all these things are universalized out to apply to every single civilization in the game from the moment of their existence, something which some of the people depicted in these games have complained about!

ultimately this is all downstream of the concept of 'civilization', developed as it was as an intentional imperial project of 19th-century anthropology and history! and especially as formulated in samuel huntington's very bad and racist book 'the clash of civilization', which seems to have had a pretty major impact on the civ game's outlook on history (see edward said's critique of it)

and of course, once we get out of that, there's a lot to talk about--how the world of civilization is filled with indiscriminately violent 'barbarians' (!) who, unlike your fellow 'civilizations' have no technology or culture of their own, existing only to be massacred--how the game is structured around the assumption that one civilization will eventually 'win'--but this post is already long enough, so i'll leave those deeper critiques as an excercise to the reader.

oh, and--because a lot of people misinterpreted me on my silly little minecraft post and argued against a much stronger and less justified position that i did not in fact take--i do not think that sid meiere's civilization causes colonialism or imperialism!

in fact, i do not even think that 'colonialist ideology' causes colonialism. the order of operations (as it always does) flows down from historical and material conditions: it is economically advantageous to engage in colonial and imperialist exploitation -> ideological justifications are developed; the exploitation is narrativized and mythologized -> these narratives and mythologies embed themselves in the cultural imaginary and are replicated in media objects produced from that culture. i am never making the opposite case--if you argue with me as if i am you are shadowboxing.

[coochiequeens]

Common sense is returning.

James Crisp, EUROPE EDITOR 13 April 2024

Dr Hilary Cass said children who think they are transgender should not be given any hormone drugs at all until at least 18 CREDIT: Yui Mok

Belgium and the Netherlands have become the latest countries to question the use of puberty blockers on children after the Cass Review warned of a lack of research on the gender treatment’s long-term effects.

Britain has become the fifth European nation to restrict the use of the drug to those under 18 after initially making them part of their gender treatments.

Their use was based on the “Dutch protocol” - the term used for the practice pioneered in the Netherlands in 1998 and copied around the world, of treating gender dysphoric youth using puberty blockers.

The NHS stopped prescribing the drug, which is meant to curb the trauma of a body maturing into a gender that the patient does not identify with this month.

In Belgium, doctors have called for gender treatment rules to be changed.

Research into impact

“In our opinion, Belgium must reform gender care in children and adolescents following the example of Sweden and Finland, where hormones are regarded as the last resort,” the report by three paediatricians and psychiatrists in Leuven said.

Figures from the Netherlands and the United Kingdom show that more than 95 per cent of individuals who initiated puberty inhibition continue with gender-affirming treatments,” the report by P Vankrunkelsven P, K Casteels K and J De Vleminck said.

“However, when young people with gender dysphoria go through their natural puberty, these feelings will only persist in about 15 per cent.”

The report was published after a 60 per cent rise in the number of Belgium teenagers taking the blockers to stop the development of their bodies. In 2022, 684 people between the ages of nine and 17 were prescribed the drug compared to 432 in 2019, the De Morgen newspaper reported in 2019.

Pressure is also building in the neighbouring Netherlands to look again at their use. The parliament has ordered research into the impact of puberty blockers on adolescent’s physical and mental health.

Dutch protocol

The Telegraph understands that the Amsterdam Center of Expertise on Gender Dysphoria, where the protocol originated, is set to make a statement on the use of puberty blockers next week.

“I too thought that the Dutch gender care was very careful and evidence-based. But now I don’t think that any more,” Jilles Smids, a postdoctoral researcher in medical ethics at Erasmus University in the Netherlands, told The Atlantic.

Attitudes in the Netherlands have hardened against trans rights, with a bill to make it easier for people to legally change their gender being held up in parliament.

The Cass Review said that the NHS had moved away from the restrictions of the original Dutch protocol, and researchers in Belgium have also demanded those restrictions be reintroduced.

Belgium is regarded as one of the most trans-friendly countries in Europe. A minister in the government is transgender and people have been able to legally change their gender without a medical certificate for the past five years.

But the hard-Right Vlaams Belang party is currently leading the polls ahead of national and European elections in June.

It has called for “hormone therapy and sex surgery to be halted for underage patients until clear and concrete research has been carried out.”

‘Greatest ethical scandals’

In March, a report in France described sex reassignment in minors as potentially “one of the greatest ethical scandals in the history of medicine”.

Conservative French senators plan to introduce a bill to ban gender transition treatments for under-18s.

On Monday, the Vatican’s doctrine office published a report that branded gender surgery a grave violation of human dignity on a par with euthanasia and abortion.

Finland was one of the first countries to adopt the Dutch protocol but realised many of its patients did not meet the Protocol’s strict eligibility requirements for the drugs.

It restricted the treatment in 2020 and recommended psychotherapy as the primary care.

Sweden restricted hormone treatments to “exceptional cases” two years later. In December, Norwegian authorities designated the medicine as “under trial”, which means they will only be prescribed to adolescents in clinical trials.

Denmark is finalising new guidelines limiting hormone treatments to teenagers who have had dysphoria since early childhood.

In 2020, Hungary passed a law banning gender changes on legal documents.

“The import and the use of these hormone products are not banned, but subject to case by case approval, however, it is certain that no authority would approve such an application for people under 18,“ a spokesperson told The Telegraph.

In August, Russia criminalised all gender reassignment surgery and hormone treatments.

[ivan-fyodorovich-k]

I will be curious to read the vituperative denials of the validity of this article's analysis, which is pasted below the cutoff:

“Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” That question, first posed by Ronald Reagan in a 1980 presidential-campaign debate with Jimmy Carter, has become the quintessential political question about the economy. And most Americans today, it seems, would say their answer is no. In a new survey by Bankrate published on Wednesday, only 21 percent of those surveyed said their financial situation had improved since Joe Biden was elected president in 2020, against 50 percent who said it had gotten worse. That echoed the results of an ABC News/Washington Post poll from September, in which 44 percent of those surveyed said they were worse off financially since Biden’s election. And in a New York Times/Siena College poll released last week, 53 percent of registered voters said that Biden’s policies had hurt them personally.

As has been much commented on (including by me), this gloom is striking when contrasted with the actual performance of the U.S. economy, which grew at an annual rate of 4.9 percent in the most recent quarter, and which has seen unemployment holding below 4 percent for more than 18 months. But the downbeat mood is perhaps even more striking when contrasted with the picture offered by the Federal Reserve’s recently released Survey of Consumer

The survey provides an in-depth analysis of the financial condition of American households, conducted for the Fed by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. Published every three years, it’s the proverbial gold standard of household research. The latest survey looked at Americans’ net worth as of mid-to-late 2022 and Americans’ income in 2021, comparing them with equivalent data from three years earlier. It found that despite the severe disruption to the economy caused by the pandemic and the recovery from it, Americans across the spectrum saw their incomes and wealth rise over the survey period.

The rise in median household net worth was the most notable improvement: It jumped by 37 percent from 2019 to 2022, rising to $192,000. (All numbers are adjusted for inflation.) Americans in every income bracket saw substantial gains, with the biggest gains registered by people in the middle and upper-middle brackets, which suggests that a slight narrowing of wealth inequality occurred during this time. In particular, Black and Latino households saw their median net worth rise faster than white households did—though the racial wealth gap is so wide that it narrowed only slightly as a result of this change.

A big driver of this increase was the rising value of people’s homes—and a higher percentage of Americans owned homes in 2022 than did in 2019. But households’ financial position improved in other ways too. The amount of money that the median household had in bank accounts and retirement accounts rose substantially. The percentage of Americans owning stocks directly (that is, not in retirement accounts) jumped by more than a third, from about 15 to 21 percent. The percentage of Americans with retirement accounts went from 50.5 to 54.3 percent, a notable improvement. And a fifth of Americans reported owning a business, the highest proportion since the survey began in its current form (in 1989).

Americans also reduced their debt loads during the pandemic. The median credit-card balance dropped by 14 percent, and the share of people with car loans fell. More significantly still, Americans’ median debt-to-asset, debt-to-income, and debt-payment-to-income ratios all fell, meaning that U.S. households had lower debt burdens, on average, in 2022 than they’d had three years earlier.

The gains in real income (in this case, measured from 2018 to 2021) were small—median household income rose 3 percent, with every income bracket seeing gains. But that was better than one might have expected, given that this period included a pandemic-induced recession and only a single year of recovery.

The picture the survey paints, then, is one of American households not only weathering the pandemic in surprisingly good shape, but ultimately also emerging from it in better financial shape than they were going in. And that, in turn, points to the effect of the U.S. policy response to the crisis: Stimulus payments, enhanced unemployment benefits, the child-care tax credit, and the moratorium on student-loan payments boosted household income and balance sheets, helping people pay down debt and increase their savings. In the process, these policies mildly narrowed inequality.

The U.S. government’s aggressive response to the pandemic, including Biden’s stimulus spending, also helped the job market recover all its pandemic-related losses—and add millions of jobs on top. The resulting tight labor market has been a huge boon to lower-wage workers. In fact, because the Fed survey’s income data end in 2021, it understates the income gains for the bottom half of the workforce, and the shrinking income inequality they’ve produced.

Hourly wages for production and nonsupervisory workers (who make up about 80 percent of the American workforce) rose 4.4 percent year-on-year in the third quarter of 2023, for instance, ahead of the pace of inflation. And this was not anomalous: Arindrajit Dube, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, crunched the numbers and found that real wages for that same sector of workers are not just higher than they were in 2019, but are now roughly where they would have been if we’d continued on the upward pre-pandemic trend.

The reason for this is simple: Low unemployment has translated into higher wages. As a recent working paper by Dube, David Autor, and Annie McGrew shows, the tight labor markets of the past few years have given lower-wage workers more bargaining power than in the past, leading to a compression in the wage gap between higher-paid and lower-paid workers. Of course, that gap is still immense, but the three scholars found that the wage gains for lower-paid workers have rolled back about a quarter of the rise in inequality that has occurred since the 1980s.

So what should we take away from the Survey of Consumer Finances data, and from Dube, Autor, and McGrew’s work? Not that everything is fine, but that public policy and macroeconomic management matter a lot. Enhanced unemployment benefits, the child-care tax credit, the stimulus payments—these things materially improved the lives of Americans and helped set the economy up for a strong recovery. If the policy response had been less aggressive, the U.S. economy would be in worse shape now. This is something you can see by looking at Europe, where economies are growing far more slowly and unemployment is higher, while inflation is no lower.

Key to this story is the fact that lower-wage workers in particular would be worse off, because they have been among the chief beneficiaries of the low unemployment created by the robust recovery. It’s a useful reminder that stagnant wages are not an inevitable result of American capitalism: When labor markets are tight, and employers have to compete with one another for employees, workers get paid more.

So, even allowing for the high inflation we saw in 2022, no one could really look at the U.S. economy today and say that the policy choices of the past three years made us poorer. Yet that, of course, is precisely how many Americans feel.

Although that pessimism does not bode well for Biden’s reelection prospects, the real problem with it is even more far-reaching: If voters think that policies that helped them actually hurt them, that makes it much less likely that politicians will embrace similar policies in the future. The U.S. got a lot right in its macroeconomic approach over the past three years. Too bad that voters think it got so much wrong.

[beardedmrbean]

WASHINGTON (AP) — Americans view college campuses as far friendlier to liberals than to conservatives when it comes to free speech, with adults across the political spectrum seeing less tolerance for those on the right, according to a new poll.

Overall, 47% of adults say liberals have “a lot” of freedom to express their views on college campuses, while just 20% said the same of conservatives, according to polling from the The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the University of Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression.

Republicans perceive a stronger bias on campuses against conservatives, but Democrats see a difference too — about 4 in 10 Democrats say liberals can speak their minds freely on campuses, while about 3 in 10 Democrats say conservatives can do so.

“If you’re a Republican or lean Republican, you’re unabashedly wrong, they shut you down,” said Rhonda Baker, 60, of Goldsboro, North Carolina, who voted for former President Donald Trump and has a son in college. “If they hold a rally, it’s: ‘The MAGA’s coming through.’ It’s: ‘The KKK is coming through.’”

Debates over First Amendment rights have occasionally flared on college campuses in recent years, with conflicts arising over guest speakers who express polarizing views, often from the political right.

Stanford University became a flashpoint this year when students shouted down a conservative judge who was invited to speak. More recently, a conservative Princeton University professor was drowned out while discussing free speech at Washington College, a small school in Maryland.

At the same time, Republican lawmakers in dozens of states have proposed bills aiming to limit public colleges from teaching topics considered divisive or liberal. Just 30% of Americans say states should be able to restrict what professors at state universities teach, the poll found, though support was higher among Republicans.

Overall, Republicans see a clear double standard on college campuses. Just 9% said conservatives can speak their minds, while 58% said liberals have that freedom, according to the polling. They were also slightly less likely than Americans overall to see campuses as respectful and inclusive places for conservatives.

Chris Gauvin, a Republican who has done construction work on campuses, believes conservative voices are stifled. While working at Yale University, he was once stopped by pro-LGBTQ+ activists who asked for his opinion, he said.

“They asked me how I felt, so I figured I’d tell them. I spoke in a normal tone, I didn’t get excited or upset,” said Gauvin, 58, of Manchester, Connecticut. “But it proceeded with 18 to 20 people who were suddenly very irritated and agitated. It just exploded.”

He took a lesson from the experience: “I learned to be very quiet there.”

Republicans in Congress have raised alarms, with a recent House report warning of “the long-standing and pervasive degradation of First Amendment rights” at U.S. colleges. Some in the GOP have called for federal legislation requiring colleges to protect free speech and punish those who infringe on others’ rights.

Nicholas Fleisher, who chairs an academic freedom committee for the American Association of University Professors, said public perception is skewed by the infrequent cases when protesters go too far.

“The reality is that there’s free speech for everyone on college campuses,” said Fleisher, a linguistics professor at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. “In conversations within classrooms, people are free to speak their minds. And they do.”

Officials at PEN America, a free speech group, say most students welcome diverse views. But as the nation has become more politically divided, so have college campuses, said Kristen Shahverdian, senior manager for education at PEN.

“There’s this polarization that just continues to grow and build across our country, and colleges and universities are a part of that ecosystem,” she said.

Morgan Ashford, a Democrat in an online graduate program at Troy University in Alabama, said she thinks people can express themselves freely on campus regardless of politics or skin color. Still, she sees a lack of tolerance for the LGBTQ+ community in her Republican state where the governor has passed anti-LGBTQ legislation.

“I think there have to be guidelines” around hate speech, said Ashford. “Because some people can go overboard.”

When it comes to protesting speakers, most Americans say it should be peaceful. About 8 in 10 say it’s acceptable to engage in peaceful, non-disruptive protest at a campus event, while just 15% say it’s OK to prevent a speaker from communicating with the audience, the poll found.

“If they don’t like it, they can get up and walk out,” said Linda Woodward, 71, a Democrat in Hot Springs Village, Arkansas.

Mike Darlington, a real estate appraiser who votes Republican, said drowning out speakers violates the virtues of a free society.

“It seems to me a very, very selfish attitude that makes students think, ‘If you don’t think the way I do, then your thoughts are unacceptable,’” said Darlington, 58, of Chesterfield County, Virginia.

The protest at Stanford was one of six campus speeches across the U.S. that ended in significant disruption this year, with another 11 last year, according to a database by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech group.

Those cases, while troubling, are one symptom of a broader problem, said Ilya Shapiro, a conservative legal scholar who was shouted down during a speech last year at the University of California’s law school. He says colleges have drifted away from the classic ideal of academia as a place for free inquiry.

An even bigger problem than speakers being disrupted by protesters is “students and faculty feeling that they can’t be open in their views. They can’t even discuss certain subjects,” said Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute think tank.

About three in five Americans (62%) say that a major purpose of higher education is to support the free exchange and debate of different ideas and values. Even more U.S. adults say college’s main purpose is to teach students specific skills (82%), advance knowledge and ideas (78%) or teach students to be critical thinkers (76%). Also, 66% said a major purpose is to create a respectful and inclusive learning environment.

“I believe it should be solely to prepare you to enter the workforce,” said Gene VanZandt, 40, a Republican who works in shipbuilding in Hampton, Virginia. “I think our colleges have gone too far off the path of what their function was.”

The poll finds that majorities of Americans think students and professors, respectively, should not be allowed to express racist, sexist or anti-LGBTQ views on campus, with slightly more Republicans than Democrats saying those types of views should be allowed. There was slightly more tolerance for students expressing those views than for professors.

About 4 in 10 said students should be permitted to invite academic speakers accused of using offensive speech, with 55% saying they should not. There was a similar split when asked whether professors should be allowed to invite those speakers.

Darlington believes students and professors should be able to discuss controversial topics, but there are limits.

“Over-the-top, overtly racist, hateful stuff — no. You shouldn’t be allowed to do that freely,” he said.

___

The poll of 1,095 adults was conducted Sept. 7-11, 2023, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4 percentage points.

[everythingaboutbiotech]

Which search engine is best for academic research? Hint: It's not Wikipedia

PubMed

PubMed is a free resource supporting the search and retrieval of biomedical and life sciences literature with the aim of improving health–both globally and personally.

The PubMed database contains more than 34 million citations and abstracts of biomedical literature. It does not include full-text journal articles; however, links to the full text are often present when available from other sources, such as the publisher's website or PubMed Central (PMC).

Available to the public online since 1996, PubMed was developed and is maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), located at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Google Scholar

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts, and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities, and other websites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.

Semantic Scholar

Semantic Scholar provides free, AI-driven search and discovery tools, and open resources for the global research community. With Semantic Scholar, researchers can understand a paper at a glance. Our system extracts meaning and identifies connections from within papers, then surfaces these insights to help Scholars discover and understand research.

Connected Papers

Connected Papers is a unique, visual tool to help researchers and applied scientists find and explore papers relevant to their field of work.

Research Rabbit

Research Rabbit is starting with our Discovery app which unlocks a completely novel way to search for papers and authors, monitor new literature, visualize research landscapes, and collaborate with colleagues.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

By Anthony Dimaggio

Allegations of media bias are ubiquitous among Republicans. When Donald Trump was asked in June about the federal prosecution against him for illegally retaining classified government documents, he attacked the "fake news" media for their "continuation of the witch hunt" against him "that's been going on for literally seven years."

Such attacks are hardly new for Trump, who in May reportedly became angry with questions from NBC News reporter Vaughn Hillyard about Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's criminal investigation, tried to grab Hillyard's phone and then told aides to "get him outta here."

The assault on press freedom is also nothing new for the Republican Party. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, now a presidential candidate, recently endorsed a legislative effort to curtail press freedom by designating anonymous news sources as "false" for legal purposes in defamation cases and eliminating the "journalist's privilege" protection, which shields reporters from having to identify anonymous sources in defamation lawsuits.

Not to be outdone, Trump weighed in on the question of how to punish journalists, suggesting that reporters who published the leaked Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade should be prosecuted, incarcerated and then raped in prison.

These developments are part of a larger right-wing assault on media freedom and the right of journalists to critically report the news. These attacks are driven by the assumption that the media has a liberal bias, and is responsible for routinely purveying "fake news" and systematically manipulating the public as a result.

The response from much of the public, including the GOP base, is what one would expect, with rising distrust of the news media. Recent polling finds a majority of Americans agree that "the news media fuels political division," with 61% of Republicans, 36% of independents and 23% of Democrats agreeing that the media are "hurting democracy." Half of Americans think that national news outlets "intend to mislead, misinform, or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting."

These narratives warning of media manipulation and pernicious liberal bias can create a separate reality for much of the public, independent of whether there is evidence of any such pervasive bias in media content and effects. As a scholar of political communication, I've spent the last 20 years studying the question of media bias in politics. My own scholarly work, looking at decades of reporting on various public policy issues, has uncovered little evidence historically of a pervasive liberal or pro-Democratic bias in the news.

As reporters themselves acknowledge, and as I find in my research, it is more accurate to speak of a pro-official bias in the news, in which reporters privilege whatever party is in power in Washington at a given time. None of this evidence necessarily matters, however, when the prevailing narrative in American political culture — particularly among Republican officials, right-wing pundits and much of the public — is that the media is purveying biased "fake news."

Independent of this heated and incendiary rhetoric, it's worth looking at the facts. For example, in my own research examining more than 160 polling questions between the mid-2000s and the mid-2010s, I found virtually no evidence of liberal media effects for consumption of various outlets such as CNN and MSNBC, which are commonly attacked for their purported bias.

Consumption of news MSNBC only had a significant association with liberal political attitudes on various questions 15% of the time, and this was true just 10% of the time for CNN. Rather, the primary culprit when it came to indoctrination effects was Fox News, with consumption of that channel's news significantly associated with holding right-wing beliefs 60% of the time, even after controlling for respondents' partisanship and ideology, among other factors.

These findings undermine claims about a pro-Democratic or liberal media bias in the years before Trump. But what about the period since he was first elected, which has generally been associated with more extreme partisan polarization? I updated my polling analysis to include the years of Trump's presidency — and the findings largely reinforce my previous research. Although there is certainly evidence of increasing polarization "on both sides," such polarization is still primarily a right-wing phenomenon, testifying to highly asymmetrical media effects that appear to favor GOP indoctrination efforts.

Examining polling from September 2019 and September 2020 from the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center (NORC) and the Pew Research Center, I looked at consumption of various media, in relation to public opinion on political questions during the Trump era. I utilized statistical analysis to track how often consumption of CNN, MSNBC and Fox News is associated with respondents forming liberal and conservative political attitudes, after accounting for various factors, including respondents' ideology, partisanship, age, education, race, gender and income.

First of all, there is definitely reason for concern about "both sides" when it comes to the rise of echo chambers in American media. Clearly, liberals and Democrats are gravitating toward certain news sources, and conservatives and Republicans toward others. In the NORC survey, Democrats were significantly more likely to say they consumed CNN and MSNBC regularly, while Republicans were more likely to say they relied heavily on Fox News. 29% of Democrats said they relied "a lot" on MSNBC for their news, compared to just 3% of Republicans. Similarly, 36% of Democrats relied a lot on CNN, compared to 6% of Republicans. Alternatively, 44% of Republicans relied a lot on Fox News, compared to just 7% of Democrats. None of these trends are encouraging in a country that considers itself a democracy — at least if democracy requires an informed citizenry willing to consider different sources of information and views contrary to those they already hold.

Beyond the echo-chamber question, there's the matter of whether consuming these venues has an indoctrination effect on viewers. Here, the evidence suggests that Americans should primarily be concerned about the power of right-wing outlets like Fox News. Looking at both the NORC and Pew polls, I analyzed media consumption in relation to a battery of political questions. For the Pew poll, I examined attitudes about how well Trump responded to the COVID-19 crisis; opinions about how truthful Trump was in relation to conveying information about COVID; attitudes about the pro-Trump extremist movement QAnon; and attitudes about alleged mass voter fraud in U.S. elections.

The NORC survey fielded other political questions, including opinions about the overturning of Roe v. Wade; about efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act; about laws barring employment discrimination based on sexual orientation; about government financial support for religious schools; about support for Second Amendment gun ownership rights and a ban on semiautomatic rifles; about whether business owners should be able to refuse services to LGBTQ+ individuals for religious (or "free speech") reasons; about whether Trump should have ended DACA protections for unauthorized immigrants; about same-sex marriage; about affirmative action in college admissions; about Trump's travel ban against immigrants from Muslim-majority countries; about private companies denying birth control to employees based on religious objections; about corporations and unions spending unlimited money in U.S. elections; about federal court decisions on partisan gerrymandering disputes; about Trump's job approval rating during the COVID crisis; and about voting preferences between Trump and Joe Biden in the 2020 election. With such a large set of questions, whatever pattern is uncovered should tell us a lot about alleged partisan indoctrination in the media.

What we see here, in fact, is dramatic evidence of partisan indoctrination in the news — and it's primarily a right-wing phenomenon. In just four of the 20 survey questions was consumption of CNN associated with forming liberal political attitudes, after statistically taking into account viewers' partisan and ideological predispositions. The findings are stronger for MSNBC, with consumption associated with holding liberal attitudes for nine of the 20 questions. This is certainly evidence of indoctrination in favor of liberal values, significantly more than I found in the previous decade.

But far and away the strongest evidence of indoctrination is observed among consumers of conservative media. Consumption of Fox News was associated with holding conservative opinions an overwhelming 90% of the time — in 18 of the 20 questions surveyed. This is a far higher rate than during the decade preceding Trump, when Fox News viewership was correlated with forming conservative attitudes 60% of the time. These results tell us that partisan indoctrination has become overwhelmingly asymmetrical in the Trump era.

If we are concerned about ideological and partisan echo chambers, we should reorient the national discussion about media bias to focus first and foremost on the primary culprits: right-wing media outlets such as Fox News. The evidence explored here calls into question Republican claims that the "liberal media" is the leading indoctrination force in American politics and communication today. That role is reserved for the GOP's primary arm of mass communication, Fox News, which is crucial in mobilizing the party base to support conservative political causes.

But we shouldn't only be concerned about indoctrination. There's also the question of rising support for authoritarianism, and of public outrage being stoked against specific media outlets seen as overly critical of Trump. That rising anger is what fuels the Republican attack on press freedom, an assault that should be deeply concerning to anyone with a basic commitment to freedom of expression and constitutional democracy.

[zvaigzdelasas]

Public opinions in 24 countries — mostly rich nations — have grown more favorable of the United States than of China, according to the latest survey by the Washington-based Pew Research Center.[...]

The differences in favorable public opinions of the U.S. and China narrowed in middle-income countries such as Indonesia, South Africa and Mexico, and China overtook the U.S. in favorability in Nigeria, where both countries were highly favored, the report said. Middle-income countries accounted for about one third of the countries surveyed by Pew, and no low-income country was included in the latest study.[...]

In China, the leadership has touted that the country has gained more friends and that friendships have become stronger around the world, typically among developing nations.[...]

In other results, the Pew polls have found: — The surveyed countries were more likely to see the U.S. as interfering in the affairs of other countries than China. — Most countries said the U.S. accounted for their country’s interests more so than China. Israel led the pack with a 65-percentage-point difference.

6 Nov 23

[a-room-of-my-own]

The FDA hasn’t approved them for gender dysphoria, and their effects are serious and permanent.

The fashion for transgenderism has brought with it a new euphemism: “gender-affirming care,” which means surgical and pharmacological interventions designed to make the body look and feel more like that of the opposite sex. Gender-affirming care for children involves the use of “puberty blockers”: one of five powerful synthetic drugs that block the natural production of sex hormones.

The Food and Drug Administration has approved those medications to treat prostate cancer, endometriosis, certain types of infertility and a rare childhood disease caused by a genetic mutation. But it has never approved them for gender dysphoria, the clinical term for the belief that one’s body is the wrong sex.

Thus the drugs, led by AbbVie’s Lupron, are prescribed to minors “off label.” (They are also used off-label for chemical castration of repeat sex offenders.) Off-label dispensing is legal; some half of all prescriptions in the U.S. are for off-label uses. But off-label use circumvents the FDA’s authority to examine drug safety and efficacy, especially when the patients are children. Some U.S. states have eliminated the need for parental consent for teens as young as 15 to start puberty blockers.

Proponents of puberty blockers contend there is little downside. The Department of Health and Human Services claims puberty blockers are “reversible.” It omits the evidence that “by impeding the usual process of sexual orientation and gender identity development,” these drugs “effectively ‘lock in’ children and young people to a treatment pathway,” according to a report by Britain’s National Health Service, which cites studies finding that 96% to 98% of minors prescribed puberty blockers proceed to cross-sex hormones.

Gender advocates also falsely contend that puberty blockers for children and teens have been “used safely since the late 1980s,” as a recent Scientific American article put it. That ignores substantial evidence of harmful long-term side effects.

The Center for Investigative Reporting revealed in 2017 that the FDA had received more than 10,000 adverse event reports from women who were given Lupron off-label as children to help them grow taller. They reported thinning and brittle bones, teeth that shed enamel or cracked, degenerative spinal disks, painful joints, radical mood swings, seizures, migraines and suicidal thoughts. Some developed fibromyalgia. There were reports of fertility problems and cognitive issues.

The FDA in 2016 ordered AbbVie to add a warning that children on Lupron might develop new or intensified psychiatric problems. Transgender children are at least three times as likely as the general population to have anxiety, depression and neurodevelopmental disorders. Last year, the FDA added another warning for children about the risk of brain swelling and vision loss.

The lack of research demonstrating that benefits outweigh the risks has resulted in some noteworthy pushback in the U.S. and abroad. Republican legislatures in a dozen states have curtailed or banned gender-affirming care for minors. Finland, citing concerns about side effects, in 2020 cut back puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors. Sweden followed suit in 2022 and Norway this year. Britain’s National Health Service shuttered the country’s largest youth gender clinic after 35 clinicians resigned over three years, complaining they were pressured to overdiagnose gay, mentally ill, and autistic teens and prescribe medications that made their conditions worse.

Still, the U.S. and most European countries embrace a standard of care that pushes youngsters toward “gender-affirming” treatments. It circumvents “watchful waiting” and talk therapy and diagnoses many children as gender dysphoric when they may simply be going through a phase.

Gender-affirming care for children is undoubtedly a flashpoint in America’s culture wars. It is also a human experiment on children and teens, the most vulnerable patients. Ignoring the long-term dangers posed by unrestricted off-label dispensing of powerful puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, combined with the large overdiagnosis of minors as gender dysphoric, borders on child abuse.

[tomorrowusa]

Republicans are soft on disease control. We all remember the MAGA anti-vaccine hysteria when the COVID-19 vaccines became available.

They are now turning their attention to the polio vaccine which was approved for use in the US on 12 April 1955. The number of polio cases in the US dropped from 57,879 in 1952 to 910 in 1962 and became rare by the early 1970s.

Thanks to anti-vaxxing conspiracy crackpots, polio returned to the US for the first time in three decades in 2022.

New Hampshire Republicans want to weaken vaccination requirements to kowtow to anti-science elements in their state.

New Hampshire could soon beat Florida—known for its anti-vaccine Surgeon General—when it comes to loosening vaccine requirements. A first-in-the-nation bill that’s already passed New Hampshire’s state House, sponsored only by Republican legislators, would end the requirement for parents enrolling kids in childcare to provide documentation of polio and measles vaccination. New Hampshire would be the only state in the US to have such a law, although many states allow religious exemptions to vaccine requirements.  Currently, Republicans control New Hampshire’s state House, Senate and governor’s office—but that isn’t a guarantee that the bill will be signed into law, with GOP Gov. Chris Sununu seemingly flip-flopping when it comes to disease control. Sununu did sign a bill in 2021 allowing people to use public places and services even if they did not receive the Covid-19 vaccine. But the next year, the governor vetoed a bill that would bar schools from implementing mask mandates.  The polio vaccine, first offered in 1955, and the MMR shot, which treats the highly infectious measles, mumps, and rubella viruses, are two very crucial vaccines both in the US and internationally. Since the year 2000 alone, vaccines against measles are estimated to have saved over 55 million lives around the world.  [ ... ] Vaccine hesitancy is rising among parents of young children. A 2023 survey from the Pew Research Center found that around half of parents with kids four or younger thought that not all standard childhood vaccines—a list that also includes hepatitis B, rotavirus, DTaP and chickenpox—may be necessary. Anti-vaccine misinformation plays a role in this phenomenon, which began before the Covid-19 pandemic, but has certainly increased since. In a 2019 UK report, about 50 percent of parents of young kids encountered false information about vaccines on social media. 

Gov. Chris Sununu is a spineless putz. In some ways he's like Lindsey Graham who likes to send smoke signals of independent thinking but always comes crawling home to Daddy Donald.

Sununu campaigned for Nikki Haley and blamed Trump for January 6th. But that hasn't stopped him from endorsing Trump anyway. Instigating a coup d'état does not disqualify somebody from the presidency in Sununu's opinion.

GOP's Chris Sununu tries, fails to defend his Trump endorsement

Sununu may do for polio in New Hampshire what Trump did for COVID in the entire US in 2020.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

However, scholars who use the concept frequently fail to define it or integrate it within broader theorization of masculinity. I surveyed 60 scholarly articles published since 2016 mentioning toxic masculinity. More than half of those did not define it, relying on it to signal disapproval. The book Toxic Geek Masculinity (Salter and Blodgett 2017), for instance, uses the term frequently without definition.

Working With Men, an award-winning UK charity supporting positive male activity and engagement, today released the results of its Future Men 2018 Survey. The survey revealed that UK society has a negative view of the word ‘masculine’, with very few respondents associating masculinity with positive human traits such as care/ kindness (3%), respectfulness (1%), honesty (1%) and supportiveness (1%).

The research, conducted by YouGov, polled a nationally representative sample of 2,058 British adults, highlighting the public’s views on masculinity and what it means “to be a man” in the UK.

By 2017, there were thousands of mentions, mostly in the mainstream media. Harrington points out that the term is almost never defined, even by academics, and is instead used to simply “signal disapproval.” Lacking any coherent or consistent definition, the phrase now refers to any male behavior that the user disapproves of, from the tragic to the trivial. It has been blamed, among other things, for mass shootings, gang violence, rape, online trolling, climate change, the financial crisis, Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and an unwillingness to wear a mask during the COVID-19 pandemic. Lumping together terrorists and delinquents, it ultimately poisons the very idea of masculinity itself. Interviewing dozens of adolescent boys and young men for her book Boys and Sex, Peggy Orenstein always asked them what they liked about being a boy. She says most drew a blank. “That’s interesting,” one college sophomore told her. “I never really thought about that. You hear a lot more about what is wrong with guys.”

Toxic masculinity is a counterproductive term. Very few boys and men are likely to react well to the idea that there is something toxic inside them that needs to be exorcized. This is especially true given that most of them identify quite strongly with their masculinity. Nine in ten men and women describe themselves as either “completely” or “mostly” masculine or feminine. These gender identities are held quite strongly too. Almost half of men (43%) said their sex was “extremely important” to their identity. In another survey by Pew Research Center, a similar proportion of men (46%) said that it was either very or somewhat important for others to see them as “manly or masculine.” (In both surveys, the numbers were even higher for women.) In other words, most people identify pretty strongly as either masculine or feminine. It is a bad idea to send a cultural signal to half the population that there may be something intrinsically wrong with them.

Reactions to contemporary narratives about masculinity: A pilot study

Masculinity is frequently talked about in contemporary Western media as being in crisis, needing reform or even being ‘toxic’. However, no research to date has assessed the impact that this pervasive narrative might be having on people, particularly men themselves. This cross-sectional online pilot survey asked 203 men and 52 women (mean + SD age 46 + 13) their opinions about the terms toxic masculinity, traditional masculinity, and positive masculinity, and how they would feel if their gender was seen as the cause of their relationship or job problems. Most participants thought the term toxic masculinity insulting, probably harmful to boys, and unlikely to help men’s behaviour. Having feminist views, especially being anti-patriarchy, were correlated with more tolerance of the term toxic masculinity. Most participants said they would be unhappy if their masculinity or femininity were blamed for their work or relationship problems. Further analysis using multiple linear regression found that men’s self-esteem was significantly predicted by older age, more education, and a greater acceptance of traditional masculinity. Men’s mental positivity – which is known to be negatively correlated with suicidality – was significantly predicted by older age, a greater acceptance of traditional masculinity, and more education. Implications for the mental health of men and boys are discussed in relation to the narrative around masculinity in the media, social sciences, and in clinical psychology.

[justinssportscorner]

Dennis Dodd at CBS Sports:

Athletes in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) will only be allowed to compete in women's sports if they were assigned the female gender at birth, the national small-college organization announced Monday. 

The NAIA's Council of Presidents approved the policy in a 20-0 vote Monday morning after a December survey indicated widespread support for the move. The association's previous policy only applied to postseason competition. The new directive applies to all NAIA competitions. The NAIA is a national athletic governing body for 249 mostly small colleges across the country that are not part of the NCAA's three divisions of competition. The membership is 80% private schools. This decision does not apply to NCAA competitions. "We know there are a lot of different opinions out there," NAIA president Jim Carr told CBS Sports. "For us, we believed our first responsibility was to create fairness and competition in the NAIA. ... We also think it aligns with the reasons Title IX was created. You're allowed to have separate but equal opportunities for women to compete." The NAIA is believed to be the first national college governing body to mandate that athletes compete according to assigned sex at birth. 

According to Pew Research Center, 1.6% of U.S. adults are transgender or nonbinary. The NAIA has no knowledge of transgender athletes competing in its postseasons to this point, Carr said.  According to the NAIA's new policy (which is included in full below), in addition to ruling out athletes that were assigned male at birth, the policy blocks those who were assigned female but have begun masculinizing hormone therapy to transition to women. All NAIA athletes who are no longer eligible for women's competition could still participate in men's sports, Carr said.  "It's important to know that the male sports are open to anyone," he added.    The policy doesn't apply to team activities like practices, exhibition games and scrimmages. 

The NAIA's decision to ban trans women from competing in women's sports from all its competitions (expanded from a postseason-only ban) is purely about transphobia and zero to do with competitive fairness. The NAIA currently has ZERO trans athletes competing.