Debunking Myths About Transgender Meds for Kids
Plus, America's polarization and thinking well about sin.
Welcome to Three Things.
This is our main monthly issue of three items to help you engage with God, neighbor, and culture.
Transgender Meds for Kids?
Rebecca McLaughlin and others on the Cass Review
Four years ago, the National Health Service of the United Kingdom commissioned Dr Hilary Cass, a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, to conduct “the most extensive and thoroughgoing evidence-based review of treatment for children experiencing gender distress ever undertaken.” Last month, in a 388-page report, the Cass Review was released to the public.
The result is, in the words The Economist, a “damning of practices that were commonplace in England until recently and remain widespread in other countries, notably America.” The articles linked above from secular news sources offer lucid summaries. You can also listen to Dr. Cass discuss her findings in this recent interview for NPR’s On Point.
Over at The Keller Center, Rebecca McLaughlin shows how the Cass Review uses reason and evidence to discredit four widely believed claims. Here they are, each followed by a quotation from the final report:
Adolescent gender dysphoria does not predict adult identification. Gender dysphoria in childhood “is not reliably predictive of whether that young person will have longstanding gender incongruence in the future, or whether medical intervention will be the best option for them” (29).
Puberty blockers don’t merely ‘buy time to think.’ On the contrary, the review found that “bone density is compromised during puberty suppression” and that there was “insufficient/inconsistent evidence about the effects of puberty suppression on psychological or psychosocial wellbeing, cognitive development, cardio-metabolic risk or fertility” (32).
Puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones are not ‘life-saving’ medicines. The review draws from multiple studies to show that even though “the suicide rate in the gender-referred youth was higher than in the general population, this difference leveled out when specialist-level mental health treatment was taken into account” (96).
The exponential rise in trans identity is not explained by greater societal acceptance. Echoing many of Jonathan Haidt’s findings in The Anxious Generation, the Cass Review says, “The increase in presentations to gender clinics has to some degree paralleled this deterioration in child and adolescent mental health” that began between 2009-2014 (111).
Read Transgender Meds for Kids? 4 Findings from New Report over at The Keller Center.
Not All Sins Are Equal
Myles Werntz on how particular wrongs require particular remedies
Christianity is full of paradoxes. One of the more difficult tensions to hold, writes ethicist Myles Werntz, is this one: “All sins ruin us, and yet not all sins ruin us equally.” Here’s an on-the-ground example:
There is a great deal of energy currently devoted to the matter of sexism in American churches. We should not hide the fact that the sin of sexism has done real damage within the church, but how we name that damage makes a great deal of difference.
As the accounting for these wrongs has begun, many discussions have bundled very different sins, lumping together anything from sexually abusive ministers to interpersonal biases. Every sin causes damage and requires repair, but common sense alone tells us these sins are meaningfully different.
If we’re able to hold the tension—that all sins ruin us, and yet not all sins ruin us equally—we will be in a better place to understand the truth that “God knows each of us by name, knows our particular sins, and knows the particular virtues we need to recover from those sins.”
Read Particular Wrongs Need Particular Remedies over at Christianity Today. It’s the fruit of much reflection by Myles Werntz on how Christians should conceptualise and categorise harm. See the longer treatment here (part 1), here (part 2), and here (part 3) at Christian Ethics in the Wild.
Why America Can’t Come Together
James Davison Hunter on democracy and solidarity
There are countless explanations on offer for how the United States came to a place where it is known primarily for its political polarisation, outrage, anger, and authoritarian power grabs. But when the sociologist who coined the term “culture war” in 1991 offers his own explanation, it’s time to listen in.
James Davison Hunter recently published Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis. From his longstanding perch at the University of Virginia, Hunter suggests that the deepest problems for America are cultural, not political. Crisis will not be averted through “political will and smart public policy.” What we need is solidarity.
Solidarity isn’t about the willingness to come together, Hunter says. It’s about the possibility of coming together. America simply does not have the cultural resources right now to make coming together possible. Hunter explains it like this:
The United States has experienced periods of deep antagonism. From the beginning, there was a fierce debate between Federalists and Republican Democrats, and then during the Jacksonian era, the 1850s and the Civil War. But the protagonists shared an agreement on the implicit order of things. … After the great recession of 2008-2009, this is no longer the case. On both the left and the right, it is now heard that the Enlightenment philosophy, which served as the basis for dealing democratically with differences, must be rejected. It is replaced by an alternative cultural logic, fundamentally Nietzschean, which is at the heart of identity politics: it is rooted in the narratives of wounds that feed it, and which invariably lead to a kind of revenge ethic. This leads to a competing will to power that makes it impossible to talk to one’s opponent. The other side becomes the representative of another disgusting culture: its members are not even American.
What does this mean for the future of America? Hunter’s prediction is grim but realistic:
Formal democracy will endure, but it will mask a confrontation punctuated by acts of violence. If we can no longer talk to each other, and if solidarity cannot be generated organically, it will be imposed undemocratically, because no social order can function without some notion of a shared understanding of what binds people together. The potential for violence is present on all sides. Because the progressives have the advantage in the long run, we will see it more on the side of the conservatives, who are the losers, but the will is there on both sides.
Read more in this interview. For a brief summary of Democracy and Solidarity from a Christian point of view, check out this review. The book is published by Yale University Press, which is running a 50% off with free shipping sale until May 17 if you use the code Y24SAVE50.