The BMJ reports gender dysphoria in young people is rising—and so is professional disagreement.

In a new report from The BMJ Investigations Unit, Jennifer Block, investigations reporter, looks into the evidence base behind this surge in treatment.

More adolescents with no history of gender dysphoria are presenting at gender clinics. For example, a recent analysis of insurance claims found that nearly 18,000 US minors began taking puberty blockers or hormones from 2017 to 2021, the number rising each year.

Meanwhile, the number of US private clinics focused on providing hormones and surgeries have grown from just a few a decade ago to more than 100 today.

It could be that there was a huge underserved population of adolescents suffering from gender dysphoria and getting no help, or it could be that a huge population of unhappy adolescents has latched on to “gender dysphoria” as the source and meaning of their unhappiness. It could also be a mix of both. But I think one thing we can say is: it seems very unlikely that the explosion in attention to “gender dysphoria” has done nothing at all to nudge unhappy adolescents into latching on to it.

In short the BMJ is wondering if the spike in adolescents taking blockers or hormones and the spike in the number of clinics might have something to do with social contagion.

Ya think?

American medical professional groups are aligned in support of “gender affirming care” for gender dysphoria, which may include hormone treatment to suppress puberty and promote secondary sex characteristics, and surgical removal or augmentation of breasts, genitals, and other physical features.

And that fact is sad and alarming and baffling. “Hello Jane/John, nice to meet you, you’re unhappy in your body? Well let’s get you started on puberty blockers. Next month we’ll talk about lopping off those tits/that dick. See you then!”

Three organisations in particular have had a major role in shaping the US approach to gender dysphoria care: The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Endocrine Society, all of which have guidelines or policies that support early medical treatment for gender dysphoria in young people.

All because…what? I don’t know. What the reason for this stampede is I don’t know. These aren’t kids on Twitter, these are adult medial professionals, yet here we are. One answer could be “Because they’re right and you’re wrong,” but sadly another could be that the profession is subject to lurches into recklessness sometimes. Lobotomy is the go-to example.

These endorsements are often cited to suggest that medical treatment is both uncontroversial and backed by rigorous science, but governing bodies around the world have come to different conclusions regarding the safety and efficacy of certain treatments, notes Block. 

For example, Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare, which sets guidelines for care, determined earlier this year that the risks of puberty blockers and treatment with hormones “currently outweigh the possible benefits” for minors.

And NHS England, which is in the midst of an independent review of gender identity services, recently stated that there is “scarce and inconclusive evidence to support clinical decision-making” for minors with gender dysphoria, and that for most who present before puberty it will be a “transient phase,” requiring clinicians to focus on psychological support and to be “mindful” of the risks of even social transition. 

Pause pause pause.

Flood insurance in Florida was always going to be a disaster waiting to happen. It’s happening.

During the insurance claims process, it’s standard for field adjusters, who are trained to assess damaged homes, to collaborate with those back in the office to make minor edits, discuss aspects of the claim and alter line items if, for example, the carrier has evidence that damage was from a prior event, according to adjusters and insurance industry experts. That is how the system is supposed to work.

But that’s not what has been happening in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, Lee and others said.

Insurers are motivated to find every way they can to reduce the payout, but they’re not supposed to just erase most of what the adjuster reports.

Instead, Lee and other adjusters contracted by regional insurance carriers say that managers have been changing their work by lowering totals, rewriting descriptions of damage and deleting accompanying photos without their approval. These actions to devalue damage are the latest example of the insurance crisis in Florida.

See, you don’t want to be a flood insurance company in Florida. Global warming is going to swamp Florida, and the process is already well under way.

After years of more frequent and intense storms, national carriers have pulled back from the market and smaller, regional carriers with smaller financial reserves jumped in.

Why? Are they stupid? Why would anyone Jump In on that?

In the wake of Hurricane Ian, those companies have been aggressively seeking to limit payouts to policyholders by altering the work of licensed adjusters, according to a Washington Post investigation. As a result, homeowners are left footing much of the bill for repairs, exposing an untenable gap between the cost of storm damage and what insurers are willing to pay to fix it.

Those companies shouldn’t have jumped in in the first place. What did they think was going to happen? Did they not figure out why the big insurers were getting out of Florida altogether?

It’s a sad sad story.

The Guardian Live on the BBC v Gary Lineker:

What we know so far:

Gary Lineker’s suspension from the BBC has been followed by dozens of presenters, pundits and contributors withdrawing from BBC duties this weekend.

As the corporation attempted to find a replacement host for Match of the Day on Friday, pundits Ian Wright and Alan Shearer announced they were pulling out of the show in solidarity.

Match of the Day is still due to air tonight, but without a presenter, pundits or commentators.

For My Fellow Americans: Gary Lineker is a former footballer turned BBC Match of the Day host; the BBC suspended him for tweets critical of Tory policy on refugees. People are lining up to point out the many examples of people who work for the BBC and say pro-Tory things in public with no murmur from the bosses.

Back to Guardian Live:

Roger Mosey, a former head of BBC TV News, has said the Lineker row highlights how BBC chairman Richard Sharp has damaged the corporation’s credibility and called for him to stand down.

In January, the Sunday Times reported that, before being appointed to the job by former prime minister Boris Johnson, Sharp helped Johnson secure an £800,000 [loan?]. The revelations have led to widespread questions about his suitability for the role.

More “we can do it but you can’t”:

Tom Peck, a columnist for the Independent, points out that Karren Brady, who appears as an adviser to Alan Sugar on BBC show The Apprentice, also sits as a Conservative member of the House of Lords.

Peck says Brady’s votes as a member of the chamber are “arguably of more consequence than a tweet”.

Lineker’s suspension was sparked by a tweet in which he said a government plan to effectively ban anyone who arrives in the UK illegally from claiming asylum had been expressed in “language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s”.

Commenting on Peck’s tweet, Guardian columnist Marina Hyde suggests that every time Brady “votes in favour of their legislation, government ministers should demand she [be] sacked by the BBC”.

The BBC should issue a statement saying it’s coming out as trans so please respect its pronouns.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Would risk a backlash.

Certainly, one might examine certain propositions more carefully because of their provenance, but I hardly think it true or sensible to say that ‘nobody has any reason to believe anything you have to say’ on a particular issue on the grounds that ‘you’ are sadly wrong on other issues.

Yeah, I get that on an intellectual level, but I’m looking at this from the point of view of someone who wants the Green Party (when it actually is green and not pink and baby blue) to do better and have a greater influence on the policy positions of more mainstream parties. In going all in on gender ideology, they’ve wrecked their reputation as advocates of scientific realism when it comes to dealing with environmental issues. It’s not just that they’re wrong or mistaken, they’re wrong and mistaken on an issue that has little to no bearing on environmental concerns; they’ve been fooled, and are passing on the foolishness. They themselves are not being sensible or true. They have turned themselves into a witness whose testimony can be shown to be unreliable on this issue. The fact that it’s outside their supposed core area of expertise and advocacy, and that they’ve gone out of their way to embrace it and promote it, only makes it worse. That shows a failure of judgement that doesn’t inspire confidence in their other positions. Their other policy goals and proposals might be marvelously brilliant, but in this one area, they’re poison. How does one balance one’s support when faced with that sort of dogged irrationality?

It’s also not a very good fit with Green aspirations to be open and transparent in their way of doing politics; the trans and Stonewall ethos and methodology has rubbed off on them without any apparent transfer of means and methods going in the other direction. It’s another instance of “Every organization that embraces trans ideology turns to shit.” Internal Green politics seems to have eagerly taken on the unsavoury bullying and intimidation we see coming from trans activism. Maybe the Greens were already like this and I just hadn’t noticed. But they certainly have not become better for having added trans activism to their laundry list. If elected Green representatives get more worked up about pronoun usage than environmental issues, then that’s a step backwards. Probably several. If one is so easily upset by people being mean, then maybe electoral politics isn’t a good fit ; environmental politics doubly so.

Certainly claims, statements, and policies should be examined on their own merits on a case by case basis, and sometimes you have to take the bad with the not quite as bad. In Canada, the only federal parties I’m ever likely to vote for have all gone for genderism at the expense of the rights of women and girls, and needlessly so. Even though the Conservatives would, on the whole, be worse for women (and everyone else), and I would only vote for them if all my other choices were further to the right, it still feels like a betrayal of women to support parties that spout such blatant lies on this one issue. These parties will support this bullshit until it costs them electoraly, and they may do so afterwards, depending on their blindness and commitment. They will blame defeat on any number of other things if they’re unable or unwilling to admit that espousing trans “rights” is a political liability. Unless and until the demand for trans “rights” is seen as the dangerous, anti-progressive, misogynistic garbage that it is, parties seduced by twitter activism will be inordinately eager to signal their “virtue,” even in the face of reality. If there was some way to bring this realization about, to rub their noses in it without handing right-wing parties governing power, forcing misguided leftists to do their soul-searching in the political wilderness, I’d be all for it. I hate having to hold my nose when I vote, but I see little choice for the time being.

Don’t mention the war climate disaster.

The BBC has decided not to broadcast an episode of David Sir Attenborough’s flagship new series on British wildlife because of fears its themes of the destruction of nature would risk a backlash from Tory politicians and the rightwing press, the Guardian has been told.

The BBC says not true, not true, they never planned to broadcast that episode. But…

Senior sources at the BBC told the Guardian that the decision not to show the sixth episode was made to fend off potential critique from the political right. This week the Telegraph newspaper attacked the BBC for creating the series and for taking funding from “two charities previously criticised for their political lobbying” – the WWF and RSPB.

The BBC should just kick back and watch the planet burn.

Laura Howard, who produced the programme and used to work at the BBC’s Natural History Unit, said she did not believe its messages to be political.

She told the Guardian: “I think the facts speak for themselves. You know, we’ve worked really closely with the RSPB in particular who are able to factcheck all of our scripts and provide us with detailed scientific data and information about the loss of wildlife in this country. And it is undeniable, we are incredibly nature-depleted. And I don’t think that that is political, I think it’s just facts.”

But you can make it political by screaming and complaining and kicking up a fuss because you want to keep doing what you’re doing and let the future people deal with the mess we’ve made.

Caroline Lucas, the Green party MP for Brighton Pavilion, said: “For the BBC to censor of one of the nation’s most informed and trusted voices on the nature and climate emergencies is nothing short of an unforgivable dereliction of its duty to public service broadcasting. This government has taken a wrecking ball to our environment – putting over 1,700 pieces of environmental legislation at risk, setting an air pollution target which is a decade too late, and neglecting the scandal of our sewage-filled waterways – which cannot go unexamined and unchallenged by the public.

“BBC bosses must not be cowed by antagonistic, culture war-stoking government ministers, putting populist and petty political games above delivering serious action to protect and restore our natural world. This episode simply must be televised.”

Sorry, would love to chat but have a plane to catch.

Mike Haubrich on being a Democrat and a gender skeptic:

I am the local party unit secretary in Minnesota for the DFL, which is an anachronistic reference to a 1940’s merger of the Democrats and the Farmer-Labor parties. Very few farmers in Minnesota belong to the DFL anymore as Minnesota is as reflective as the rest of the country in the rural-urban divide between Democrats and Republicans. Most labor unions work with the DFL, but I think that fewer members of the rank and file follow along with it. There are conflicts between environmentalists and labor, especially up on the Iron Range, as many people depend on iron ore extraction and refining for their livelihood.

Nothing is absolute, of course, and as someone who grew up in the rural northwestern part of Minnesota I witnessed much cooperation among people who vehemently disagreed on politics. Among the Blue-Green (labor-environmentalists) Alliance there were people who worked together to find solutions to both needs, those of jobs and protecting the environment. Nobody was called a laborphobe and kicked out of the party for hating mining. There may have been some angry words, and even drunken fist-fights near Silver Bay in the 1970’s, but Democrats remained Democrats even when they called each other crazy.

Gender, however, has created a whole new dynamic.

Read on.

News from the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine:

The UKOM report asserts that future guidelines must rely on a systematic review of evidence rather than cherry-picking studies, and that all hormonal and surgical interventions must be restricted to research settings to ensure clear protocols, safeguarding & adequate follow-up./2

The existing Norwegian treatment guidelines for gender-dysphoric youth, based on a 2015 report ”The Right to the Right Sex,” closely mirror WPATH SOC7 “gender-affirming” model. Medical gender affirmation is widely available to youth, with no psychological assessments required. /3

Under the current Norwegian guidelines, youth may receive puberty blockers at tanner stage 2, cross-sex-hormones at 16, and surgeries at 18. The report noted that these widely available interventions are irreversible, carry many risks, and rest on insufficient evidence. /4

The report criticized Norway’s current “gender-affirmative” guidelines as inadequate, noting a lack of specificity regarding assessment & determination of medical necessity of risky and irreversible interventions provided to youth whose identities are still forming. /5

The Norwegian Healthcare Investigation Board noted several worrying trends: the rapid rise of gender dysphoria in adolescents (esp. females), the high burden of mental illness (75%) & a high prevalence of neurocognitive conditions (ADHD/autism, Tourette) in the affected youth. /6

The recommendations by the Norwegian Healthcare Investigation Board (NHIB/UKOM) align Norway with the changes among the growing number of European countries (Sweden, Finland, England) which aim to safeguard youth from harm by sharply restricting youth gender transitions. /7

However, unlike Sweden, Finland and England, Norway explicitly calls out the group of young adults whose development is still ongoing and who are at risk for erroneously undertaking gender transitions. The report notes that the age of consent for sterilization in Norway is 25. /8

NHIB/UKOM notes that the right to medical care does not include the right to experimental treatments. As an experimental intervention, gender transitions will be subject to heightened scrutiny around informed consent, eligibility criteria, and outcomes evaluation./9

Norway’s proposed model appears to resemble the model of care outlined in the Cass review. Gender dysphoric youth will receive care for their distress in local primary care settings with multidisciplinary support. Youth gender transitions will be an exception, not the rule. /10

The Board also comments on the highly polarized & unbalanced nature of the discussions surrounding care for gender-dysphoric youth, which stifles scientific debate. The Board calls on all parties to treat each other with professionalism, empathy and respect. /11

Slow down the fad for sterilizing children. Sounds like a good idea.

The net might be tightening around Trump. Then again they might all chicken out again.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office recently signaled to Donald J. Trump’s lawyers that he could face criminal charges for his role in the payment of hush money to a porn star, the strongest indication yet that prosecutors are nearing an indictment of the former president, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.

The prosecutors offered Mr. Trump the chance to testify next week before the grand jury that has been hearing evidence in the potential case, the people said. Such offers almost always indicate an indictment is close; it would be unusual for the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, to notify a potential defendant without ultimately seeking charges against him.

…

Any case would mark the first indictment of a former American president, and could upend the 2024 presidential race in which Mr. Trump remains a leading contender.

Nixon should have been indicted but wasn’t. Celebrity unindicted co-conspirator.

Mr. Trump has previously said that the prosecutors are engaged in a “witch hunt” against him that began before he became president, and has called Mr. Bragg, a Democrat who is Black, a politically motivated “racist.”

Sigh. Talk about darvo…

Gaby Hinsliff reviews Time to Think for the Guardian, very very cautiously and queasily, and laced with questionable assumptions.

BBC journalist Hannah Barnes’s densely reported account of events inside the Tavistock Centre’s Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) in London, the country’s only specialist clinic for transgender children…

The book traces Gids’s evolution from its foundation in 1989 – offering a non-judgmental therapeutic approach to exploring gender identity…

The first two paragraphs and already we can see the assumptions doing their work – there definitely is such a thing as “transgender children” and there also definitely is such a thing as “gender identity” and we all know what they are and that they are definitely real. It’s called reification, and it’s very deceptive. It deceives the people who use it as well as the people who hear or read it.

Last summer, a review commissioned by NHS England recommended Gids should close, with patients seen instead by regional units taking a holistic approach to mental and physical health.

Barnes sidesteps the broader social and political context to this, yet the two seem hard to disentangle. Some trans people saw attacks on Gids as attempts to stop children transitioning at all; some gender-critical campaigners treated its closure as vindication of wider arguments. Once being “for” or “against” the Gids treatment model was deemed synonymous with supporting or attacking trans rights generally, analysis of its clinical practices became incredibly difficult.

But what are “trans people” and how does anyone know? What are trans rights and how does anyone know and what do we do when they violate other people’s rights? How do we know “trans” is not iatrogenic? How do we know it’s not a phantasm created by people talking about it endlessly? How do we know it’s not a deceptively definite word for a particularly acute discomfort with being oneself?

Karen Ingala Smith on reading the names and not getting distracted:

Today, for the eighth year running, in the Parliamentary International Women’s Day debate, MP Jess Phillips read out the names of women in the UK who have been killed since the previous years IWD debate and where a man or men are principal suspects. This year the list contained the names of 107 women, the youngest, Holly Newton was just 15 years old, the oldest, Anne Woodbridge was 92.

I have been collating and commemorating UK women killed by men for 11 years, since the murder of 20-year-old Kirsty Treloar on the 2^nd January 2012.

I am grateful to Jess Phillips for amplifying my work and for doing something that I could not do without her: ensuring that those women’s names are afforded the respect of being recorded in perpetuity in the official parliamentary record. This year and last year, Jess invited members of families of women who have been killed by men, some of them whose names have been read out in previous years, to sit in the House of Commons public gallery to listen. Jess and I are frequently told how much this gesture means to those who knew and loved the women who are commemorated.

This year, following the suggestion of my Femicide Census co-founder and fellow Director, Clarrie O’Callaghan, two weeks ago the Femicide Census wrote to every MP who had one or more constituents whose names were going to be read out.  84 letters were sent and followed up by email. We asked MPs to honour their constituents and act to prevent further femicides. We told them that femicide is a local and national problem occurring within the broader context of men’s violence against women which inhibits women’s ability to enjoy rights and freedoms on a basis of equality with men. Seven MPs acknowledged our letter: Rosie Duffield, Rushanara Ali, Lillian Greenwood, Rachel Reeves, Yvette Cooper, John McDonnell and Andrew Lewer. Others were visible in the parliamentary broadcast. However, like preceding years, the benches were noticeably empty. Whilst each man who chooses to end a woman’s life must be held to account and to justice, the names stand as a roll call of state failure, the government could be doing so much more to end men’s violence against women and girls. The almost empty chamber does not reflect well on political will to address men’s violence against women.

The almost empty chamber – that’s shocking to me.

H/t J.A.

The Telegraph on The Lesbian Project:

“I could never have imagined,” says [Kathleen] Stock, who today is launching – along with [Martina] Navratilova (who[m] she has never met in person) and writer Julie Bindel – the Lesbian Project, a group that intends to champion UK women who are same-sex attracted.

…

[I]ts existence will infuriate those who see her and Bindel, along with their ally – and heterosexual – JK Rowling, as a trio of arch-Terfs (trans exclusionary revolutionary feminists), largely because of the animosity between some trans activists who object to lesbians refusing to have sex with transgender women who have male genitalia.  

The reporter must have been writing in haste. It’s a quartet, not a trio, and I’m pretty sure the three Ls don’t see JKR as “their heterosexual.” Also no, the animosity is about much more than lesbians saying no to sex with men.

The idea that lesbians still need some kind of protective body may seem almost laughably anachronistic, not least since the 2013 same-sex-couples marriage act. But the project isn’t so much battling homophobia as preventing lesbians from being overlooked in favour of newer, more “fashionable” sexualities.

There you go, that’s better.

“We’ve got a report coming out that will show millions of pounds are going into LGBT but increasingly that funding is going to trans projects, while for lesbian-only projects it’s vanishingly rare,” Stock says.

Which is one major reason the acronym is so poisonous – it simply pulls a veil over this kind of neglect or just plain hostility. Same old sewer water in a shiny new bottle: women don’t matter, it’s men who claim to be women who matter.

Via Mick Hartley

Waterstones says it’s not true it’s not it’s not it’s NOT.

Waterstones has refuted [rejected] accusations made on social media this week that it is failing to stock certain titles about gender, saying the claims are “of course… untrue”. 

Twitter users had claimed that Waterstones branches were refusing to stock Hannah Barnes’ Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children (Swift Press), with similar suggestions made about Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women by Victoria Smith (Fleet). 

Not so much refusing to as failing to. I saw no claims that Watersones staff were stupid enough to say “We refuse to stock it!” when asked. The claims are that it’s extremely difficult to find at branch after branch after branch – that it’s “sold out” or there’s one copy remaining and it’s in a special place somewhere.

A spokesperson confirmed that the retailer was stocking Time to Think, and that the book had performed well in sales. They told The Bookseller: “Quite simply, many of our shops sold out temporarily and we are expecting a fresh delivery which will land on our shelves very soon. Of course, this does happen from time to time with books that sell well. We stock the book sensibly and refute the misrepresentation implicit to these tweets.” 

That could of course be true – but the tweets I’ve seen don’t say the staff say it’s sold out and a large new shipment is on the way. They say staff are evasive or unhelpful.

The Washington Post shares more of Tucker Carlson’s texts that reveal what whoppers he tells on Fox News every night.

Like:

It’s so interesting that Carlson knows that about Trump and that it’s never stopped him helping Trump and harming Trump critics and opponents. What Trump is good at is destroying things so here we are helping him destroy the US, democracy, the climate, the rest of the world…

He knows but does it anyway. What a guy.

Jess Phillips read the list of murdered women in Parliament today but…

You know what comes next.

Brianna Ghey was a trans girl.

Family values:

Anti-abortion Colorado Republican Lauren Boebert has said that her 17-year-old son will make her a grandmother in April.

Isn’t that sweet. She had a baby when she was a teenager and now her son is following her lead.

“There’s something special about rural conservative communities,” Boebert continued. “They value life. If you look at teen pregnancy rates throughout the nation, well, they’re the same, [in] rural and urban areas. However, abortion rates are higher in urban areas. Teen moms’ rates are higher in rural conservative areas, because they understand the preciousness of a life that it’s about to be born.”

Or they’re lower in urban areas because people with better access to schools and libraries and higher education understand that teenagers don’t make the best parents.

A 2019 study published in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) suggested that teen birth rates in rural areas might be higher than in urban areas because teens might be vulnerable to “local conditions that limit unintended pregnancy management options.” Teens living in rural areas often face large geographical barriers to access abortion providers—a difficulty that’s been exacerbated by a proliferation of abortion bans in Republican-led states.

Also teenagers living in rural areas often have parents like Lauren Boebert.

The CDC also reports the impact that teen pregnancies have on the girls’ lives: only 50 percent of teen mothers receive a high school diploma before the age of 22. Among women who don’t give birth in their teens, this number goes up to 90 percent. A 2008 study mentioned by the CDC also studied the impact of teen pregnancies on the children. 

The offspring of teen moms are more likely to have lower school achievement or drop out of school; have more health problems; be incarcerated in their teens; and give birth as teenagers themselves.

Like Lauren Boebert’s son’s babymama.

Boebert was a teen mom herself and had to drop out of high school because of her pregnancy. 

And she’s never caught up.

He’s just loving it.

He’s only twice their size.

And still a man.

Trudeau pretends to express solidarity on International Women’s Day and then promptly says haha fooled you, I don’t mean a word of it.

Hooray for women’s day and also you women sit down and shut up while the men talk for you.

Piss off Justin.

Eva Kurilova on The Man Who Speaks for Canadian Women, Even on International Women’s Day.

Marni Panas, born Marcel Panas, is an Alberta man who claims to be a woman and likes to talk about how authentic he is. Recently, he was also invited to speak on a panel at an International Women’s Day event called “She Is” organized by Discovery House, a Calgary-based women’s charity.

A women’s charity that doesn’t know what a woman is. I remember the days when everyone learned this in very early childhood.

Two real women were invited to join Panas on the panel of “women leaders and change-makers across a variety of sectors”: Mandy Stobo, an “artist, entrepreneur, actor and mother,” and Christy Morgan, an “Indigenous Strategy Lead.” Discovery House also invited Canadian journalist Anna Maria Tremonti to give the keynote speech.

Well that’s nice of them. 75% women – I suppose that’s enough really. We wouldn’t want to be greedy.

Panas himself works as the program manager for Diversity and Inclusion at Alberta Health Services (AHS) and is a Canadian Certified Inclusion Professional (yes, that’s a real certification).

His specialty of course is the “include men as women” brand of inclusiony inclusion.

According to his website, he provides diversity and inclusion services to “health care professional colleges and societies, health centres, municipal and education governments, community services organizations, police services and other first responders, corrections facilities, corporations, and other institutions locally, nationally and internationally.”

I suppose the “services” are finding trans women for health care professional colleges and societies, health centres, municipal and education governments, community services organizations, police services and other first responders, corrections facilities, corporations, and other institutions to include in their inclusionary inclusion. What a saintly man he must be.

Panas made the news again in 2016 as an advocate for Bill 10. The bill mandates that schools can not refuse student requests for “diversity clubs” and that they must allow students who identify as transgender access to the washrooms and changerooms of the opposite sex.

Panas attended an Everyone Can Pee rally at the Alberta Legislature grounds to support the bill, where he clashed with members from a group called Parents for Choice in Education.

While those against the bill expressed concerns about undermining parental choice in education and women and girls losing their single-sex spaces, Panas told CBC that people with such concerns had to “catch up or shut up.”

You can submit or you can shut up; those are the choices.

About this idea that women are attention-hogs while men modestly stand aside and let us blather – Deborah Tannen has written about this misperception:

I do say, in my just-published book about women’s friendships, that women friends, as compared to men, tend to talk more — more often, at greater length and about more personal topics. But that’s private speaking — conversations that negotiate and strengthen personal relationships. Research, my own and others’, has also shown that men tend to talk far more than women in what might be called public speaking — formal business-focused contexts, like meetings. In a now-classic study, Barbara and Gene Eakins recorded seven university faculty meetings.

They found that, with one exception, the men at the meeting spoke more often and, without exception, spoke longer. The longest comment by a woman at all seven gatherings was shorter than the shortest comment by a man. Susan Herring found a similar pattern in online discussions among linguists on professional topics: Messages written by men were, on average, twice as long as those written by women.

One reason women tend to speak less at meetings, in my view, is that they don’t want to come across as talking too much. It’s a verbal analogue to taking up physical space. When choosing a seat at a theater or on a plane, most of us will take a seat next to a woman, if we can, because we know from experience that women are more likely to draw their legs and arms in, less likely to claim the arm rest or splay out their legs, so their elbows and knees invade a neighbor’s space.

While way too many men are all too comfortable doing exactly that.

For similar reasons, when they talk in a formal setting, many women try to take up less verbal space by being more succinct, speaking in a lower voice and speaking in a more tentative way. Women in my classes at Georgetown University have told me that if they talk a lot in class one week, they will intentionally keep silent the next. Psychologist Elizabeth Aries observed a similar pattern in comparing the participation of women and men in college discussion groups. Even Margaret Mead, according to her daughter Mary Catherine Bateson, judiciously chose the issues on which she would speak up, so as not to come across as dominating.

It’s a great lose/lose, isn’t it. Women talk less but get accused of talking more – they lose the benefits of talking more but still get blamed for hogging the discussion. Oh well; suck it up bitches.