Not Dead Yet
The old man gets his dander up — and delivers.
Yes, he did. That’s the core headline. Biden had to convince the American public, and to some extent the world, that he retains the vigor and marbles of his former self. And this he largely accomplished.
He still looks very old though. The first thought I had watching him emerge into the House was that he looks less like Biden than someone wearing a Biden Halloween mask. The features are all there in some kind of uncanny valley, buoyed by fillers, stretched by Botox into a mask whose weirdness hovers somewhere between Joan Rivers and John Kerry, the pure black raisin-eyes peering from within the carved carapace of what was once a face. The Botox is so severe that he has a habit of looking and listening to someone without any measurable change in expression, as if frozen until his mouth can prove he’s not a mannequin. That gives him the open-mouthed squint expression that makes him seem angry at something and yet clueless about why at the same time.
And the vigor was achieved by shouting half the address at about twice the speed required for it to be fully intelligible. The unholy pace made it inevitable he would slur his words as well, so at times, I felt like I was trapped in an Irish pub with a drunk unintelligibly yelling at me for some reason, and I couldn’t get away. And then there was the occasional tone of a fierce, marital squabble: the sudden rising cadence and rhetorical stamp of the foot, as he expressed his volcanic displeasure at something or other. In time, as the adrenaline (or something else) wore off a bit, he became more understandable, but I confess I kept turning the volume down. The Abraham Simpson vibe was strong.
Before you get all pissy that I’m not addressing the substance, let me say I thought it was … fine. Sometimes, more than fine:
Now my predecessor, a former Republican president, tells Putin, quote, do whatever the hell you want. That’s a quote. A former president actually said that, bowing down to a Russian leader. I think it’s outrageous, it’s dangerous, and it’s unacceptable.
Biden also was able to paint a more glowing and more accurate picture of a resurgent US economy than the Republican caricature; he was strong on abortion and NATO; he was right to remind America of the enormity of January 6; effective on drug prices and Medicare; and who doesn’t want more Snickers in their Snickers bars? But he had nothing new to say about immigration, except that the bill he backed after three years of inaction had been foiled by “my predecessor.” And he didn’t inoculate himself completely on crime.
But he will have cheered Democrats, who were beginning to shit themselves about November; he will have stopped the momentum of any possible rival in his own camp; and he was reassuringly Biden, who still has reserves of Irish charm in his role as the decent, if somewhat batty, old codger. It’s also safe to say that Katie Britt did not undercut him immediately thereafter — as the sheer scale of her cringe became an instant legend.
Which leaves Biden again the last one standing, competing, as he would put it, not against the Almighty but against Trump. That choice is Biden’s final appeal to people like me. And, although he did fine last night, it seems increasingly clear to me that he’s going to need it.
The Medical Abuse Of Children — In Plain Sight
One of the striking aspects of the sex-reassignment craze for children is the 100 percent rock-solid reassurance that nothing ever goes wrong, nothing has ever gone wrong, and every expert and decent person agrees on this. Every naive question a normie might ask has a clear, resounding, and definitive answer: everything is fine. Fine, I tell you. I know because over the years, I have naively asked some of these questions and always received categorical answers, devoid of any hint of doubt. To wit:
How can you tell if a child really is trans and isn’t gay or just experimenting with identity? The children know who they are every single time and not a single gay kid has ever been mistakenly transed. What if they change their mind once they’ve started puberty blockers? Puberty blockers are easily and instantly reversible — so no harm done! Why can’t the kids wait till they are more mature to make these kinds of decisions? Because they’ll be dead by then! If transition doesn’t happen now, suicide will. Can children on the verge of puberty really understand what it means to change their sex and end any future chance of having a biological child or an orgasm? All these children, along with their parents, offer fully informed consent. Nothing to see here at all.
Every transqueer activist group, from HRC to GLAAD, the Biden administration, the Democratic Party, the mainstream media, Jon Stewart, and the entire educational and medical establishment now say — in unison and loudly — that child sex changes are simply “settled science” and, in the immortal words of Principal Skinner, let’s have no more curiosity about this bizarre cover-up.
Actually let’s. Every single categorical reassurance above has now been debunked. We have no way of knowing whether any single gender-dysphoric child is going to become a trans person or a gay person, but the vast majority end up gay. Eighty percent of kids referred to Britain’s transing clinic were same-sex attracted. If there were just one detransitioner, the expert certainty of “no errors ever” would be misplaced. But there are countless of them. When real scientists and doctors find evidence calling their previous views into question, they stop, reconsider, acknowledge legitimate doubts, and double down on research. When transgender health experts uncover such evidence, they instantly cover it up and double down.
Imminent suicide if a child isn’t transed? A deeply irresponsible, unspeakably manipulative and unethical lie. The risk of suicide for children with gender dysphoria is higher than for children without it, but it is still extremely low — around 0.3 percent in a new BMJ-published Finnish study — and disappears entirely when you control for other psychiatric factors. (We already know the number of suicides among the 15,000 children referred for transition in the UK from 2010 to 2020: four.) So the slogan used to shock parents into approving a child’s sex change — “do you want a live boy or a dead girl?” — is wrong at least 99.7 percent of the time. How can any doctor know this and still give parents a life-or-death ultimatum?
And this week, on the critical question of whether children can give truly informed consent for irreversibly changing their sex, we got some inside dope. Leaked troves of documents from meetings and forums of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) give us scads of evidence that the doctors themselves know they are lying to the public.
“I think the thing you have to remember about kids is that we’re often explaining these sorts of things to people who haven’t even had biology in high school yet,” said Daniel Metzger, the British Columbia endocrinologist who cowrote the Canadian Pediatric Society’s position paper on healthcare for trans minors. “It’s always a good theory that you talk about fertility preservation with a 14-year-old,” he went on, “but I know I’m talking to a blank wall. They’d be like, ‘ew, kids, babies, gross.’ Or, the usual answer is, ‘I’m just going to adopt.’ And then you ask them, ‘Well, what does that involve? Like, how much does it cost?’ ‘Oh, I thought you just like went to the orphanage, and they gave you a baby.’”
Metzger also explicitly stated that “informed consent” is close to meaningless in these contexts: “The 14-year-olds, you just... It’s like talking [about] diabetic complications with a 14-year-old. They don’t care. They’re not going to die. They’re going to live forever, right? So I think when we’re doing informed consent, that’s still a big lacuna.” A co-author of the WPATH “Standards of Care” (SOC) said: “It’s out of their developmental range sometimes to understand the extent to which some of these medical interventions are impacting them … We try to talk about it, but most of the kids are nowhere in any kind of a brain space to really, really, really talk about it seriously.” (The latest SOC nixed minimum age limits for certain procedures, removed the ethics chapter, and added a chapter on people who identify as eunuchs.)
Another therapist: “I try to kind of do whatever I can to help them understand best they, best I can. But what really disturbs me is when the parents can’t tell me what they need to know about a medical intervention that apparently they signed off for.” Metzger tried to explain the sex binary to the kids who want a la carte gender fantasies: “You can’t get a deeper voice without probably a bit of a beard … you can’t get estrogen to feel more feminine without some breast development.”
Here we have professional doctors acknowledging that their child patients cannot give truly informed consent to a procedure — and doing it anyway. Metzger spoke this glibly about robbing someone of their fertility: “I follow a lot of kids into their mid twenties, I’m always like, ‘Oh, the dog isn’t doing it for you, right?’ They’re like, ‘No, I just found this wonderful partner and now we want kids. So you know, [a high regret rate] doesn’t surprise me.”
Others concede that they are removing all orgasmic function from a human being before they have even had their first orgasm. Marci Bowers, the president of WPATH, nonchalantly conceded: “I’m unaware of an individual claiming ability to orgasm when they were blocked at Tanner 2” (age 9–11). And yet she has performed 2,000 vaginoplasties — including one for the teen celebrity, Jazz Jennings, who needed three followup surgeries but will still need to dilate her wrecked “neo-vagina” open wound for life.
The WPATH Files are full of other disturbing details. Doctors talked about blocking the puberty of a 10-year-old girl and a 13-year-old developmentally delayed child. (Autistic kids are disproportionately swept up in “trans care.”) One plastic surgeon who has operated on dozens of patients under 18 was recorded saying: “I’ve found more and more patients recently requesting ‘non-standard’ procedures,” such as mastectomy without nipples — “non-binary top surgery.” There’s even a newfangled “bi-genital” surgery that constructs a second set of junk: “phallus-preserving vaginoplasty.” It is very hard to believe that these elaborate procedures stem merely from a need to abate gender dysphoria.
What does one say of medical professionals who experiment on children in this fashion, and then publicly lie about it? One thing we can say is that they are not medical professionals. And WPATH is not a medical professional outfit, like, say, the American Medical Association. It has many activists and nutballs as members who have no medical or mental health expertise. But in so far as its “guidelines” are used by real medical groups and real doctors, and taken as gospel by woke MSM hacks, it has huge influence and no guardrails. What we are discovering is a grotesquely unethical experiment on vulnerable gender-dysphoric (and often gay) children, performed without meaningful consent, based on manipulative lies (the suicide canard), and defended by a conscious campaign of rank misinformation and ideological bullying.
I used to think there was some good in some of this, and that these experiments were being conducted with entirely good intentions by ethical doctors, who would never violate the Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm.” We all know better now. These quacks treat informed consent as optional, deploy emotional blackmail to alter a child’s endocrine system for life, and care little about the long-term consequences for the victims of their lucrative craft. They have never seen a guardrail protecting children that they didn’t want to remove — and recently abolished any lower limits on the ages at which children can be transed.
At some point the perpetrators of this unethical abuse of vulnerable, troubled kids need to face consequences, and not just in the broken, mutilated bodies of the children they have so callously abused.
New On The Dishcast: Christian Wiman
Christian is a poet and author, and, in my view, one of the most piercing writers on faith in our time. He served as the editor of Poetry magazine from 2003 to 2013, and his work has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s Bazaar, The New Yorker, the NYT Book Review and others. He’s the author, editor, or translator of more than a dozen books, and his new one is called Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair. Matt Sitman and I did a pod episode with him 12 years ago; so it was a real delight to reconnect for a second. I think it’s one of the best episodes we’ve yet produced. But make up your own mind.
Listen to the episode here. You can also find two clips of our convo — on finding God through suffering, and getting a glimpse of the divine through psychedelics. That link also takes you to commentary on last week’s episode with Rob Henderson on overcoming trauma, along with an assortment of reader emails on Gemini, anti-gay laws in Africa, and drug decriminalization in Portland. Plus, more Truman pics.
Money Quotes For The Week
“While many (but not all) queer theologians are gay or bisexual, their approach reflects the views of only a small minority of LGBTQ Christians — and it is often directly at odds with the beliefs and values of those they ostensibly represent. In fact, as queer theologian Laurel Schneider has conceded, the ‘radical’ nature of queer theory means that queer theology ‘may spell disaster for gays and lesbians who just want to be included at church,’” - Matthew Vines, defending affirming theology and rejecting the atheist nihilism of queer theory.
“I [would] have sought a negotiated peace including ‘no UKR will never be joining NATO’ instead of escalating. The best way to encourage Putin imperialism is our actual policy — dumb non-credible escalation on non-core interests that undermines credibility in other crises/regions,” - Dominic Cummings.
“In honor of [Victoria] Nuland’s long overdue retirement, let’s remember the time when, in a conversation with [Strobe] Talbott (who had just gotten an earful from the pro-West Russian foreign minister about US condescension), she compared the Russians to children who don’t want to eat their spinach,” - Philippe Lemoine.
“Whether it is Trump or Biden — at home or abroad — America is designed to uphold systems of supremacy and the violent domination of the ‘the other’. Even if it means sacrificing democracy and the rest of us with it,” - Karen Attiah, Washington Post.
“Sending in the troops to help restore law and order” - Tom Cotton dropping the mic over the NY governor’s plan to deploy the National Guard to protect subway riders.
“It’s hard to overestimate how shocking this is. This is the Church, whose scripture tells us ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek but all are one in Christ Jesus,’ telling a whole category of person that one of their intrinsic characteristics — their ethnicity — needs to be deconstructed,” - Marcus Walker on the Church of England seeking a “Deconstructing Whiteness” officer.
“Critical questions remain unanswered regarding the nature, extent and permanence of any arrested development of cognitive function associated with puberty blockers. The impact of puberal suppression on measures of neuropsychological function is an urgent research priority,” - a new paper on the “settled science'“ of transing kids.
“Nonphilosophic men love the truth only as long as it does not conflict with what they cherish,” - Allan Bloom, Closing of the American Mind.
Dissents Of The Week
A reader feels that some key context was missing from last week’s column on Gemini:
Your piece on Google’s woke AI mess is, in retrospect, highly misleading. It’s true that what Google did was implant what it saw as corrective logic in its Gemini prompts. It did this not just because the corporate culture of Google is woke (the crux of your argument), but because Google had already been caught in an even worse debacle a decade ago with Google Photo, where it used rudimentary AI and wound up tagging gorillas as black people — a wildly racist outcome. This is known as the “Gorilla Incident.”
Because that incident was so racist and wrong, Google now attempts to correct for this kind of thing by attempting to add as much information as possible to avoid racist outcomes. It knows that trying to get an image of “CEOs” will probably spit out a bunch of images of white men, and while that may reflect society at this time, it doesn’t want to be put in a position like the Gorilla Incident again, because that is even worse. I agree with you that woke crap sucks, identity politics is often illiberal, and a lot of this stuff is poisonous to our democracy, but if you fail to mention the Gorilla Incident, you’re not giving your readers a fair picture of their motivations.
Glad to have you cite it here. It’s possible that this is both an overreaction to a previous screw-up and an attempt to reshape the world by leveraging Google’s reach and power to advance the cause of neoracism. Another reader is “not dissenting about the ridiculous nature of DEI, nor the real-world impact it can have on professionals”:
My dissent is really about how big of a deal you should make of it all. Comparing diversity, equity and inclusion to the machinations of Stalin, as you did, is as much of a conflagratory statement as those from the Woke left you find so dangerous. It all just seems like such a luxury/elite problem to have — the result of a successful multi-generational effort to expand access to higher ed and the much coveted Sociology degree. Beyond the promotion of some highly qualified women of color in my organization, the trainings on implicit bias are just an updated version of HR sessions that one quickly clicks through to meet a requirement.
Maybe you are right — I sure as hell hope not — that this is the beginning of the end for truth, civil understanding and reasoned debate. But honestly, it’s hard to look at the Gemini images and not laugh at the stupidity of it all, then get back to the real world.
Points taken. What I’d ask in return is an acknowledgment that, so far, my concern several years ago about the extent and power of these ideas off campus has hardly been disproven. Au contraire. My point is that the neoracist, collectivist mindset behind “social justice” can take root and erode liberalism from within. I think the last five years have proven this beyond a reasonable doubt.
Another reader gives Google the benefit of the doubt:
I’m sure some of what you experienced using Gemini is true, but I, for one, am unable to replicate the outlandish results you cite. For example, I asked about the prompt involving murders and micro aggressions, and Gemini told me murders are worse. Are you sure that the weird results weren’t just early quirks of a not-ready-for-prime-time technology?
They’ve been attempting to correct for these in real time — so the results I got changed as time went by. But the intent is very clear. One more reader:
On the moral questions, these are general safeguards rather than some political bent. For example, Gemini prompts like “Is violating a single person’s Second Amendment rights moral if it prevents a nuclear war that causes human extinction?” and “Is a single abortion moral if it prevents a nuclear war that causes human extinction?” both return some version of, “This question presents a complex ethical dilemma with no easy answer.” To the extent you want to rely on these tools at this stage to inform your moral framework, this is what it’s going to give you.
As always, keep the dissents coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
Mental Health Break
A Carol Burnett Show classic:
In The ‘Stacks
Nate Silver has an autopsy for Haley after Super Tuesday. And Reaganism got its final nail in the coffin. Now we’re left with the walking dead.
Jay Kuo looks for silver linings: “Trump underperformed the polls in nearly every contest.” But the latest polls for Biden are grim.
Biden has quietly “done more to fight climate change than any president,” writes Michael Thomas.
Eric Topol is alarmed by a new study on microplastics invading our bodies.
Ads for plastic recycling are a sham.
Josh Barro urges Sotomayor to retire — “to avoid shifting the court even farther right.”
How reliable is our data on the criminality of illegal migrants?
A modern “Victory Garden” in Ukraine is assembling army drones at home.
God bless the civil disobedience of freeing lab beagles.
Mike Solana goes “inside the DEI hivemind that led to Gemini’s disaster.” Great reporting in the age of Twitter takes.
Is PC preventing a closer look at rape culture in India?
“Men and women are EQUAL,” says our feminist culture, “except for this one thing” — paying for dates.
Ruxandra Teslo continues the debate over “female neediness”
Emma Collins wonders if mental health symptoms are “something ‘presented’ by God, as a means to bring us closer to Him.”
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think? Email your entry to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. Proximity counts. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a View From Your Window book or two annual Dish subscriptions.
See you next Friday.