Anna Phylaxis

As always

Dasha Burns' style would be 100% better suited for celebrity/entertainment gossip journalism than it is for political coverage of a series of small wars that could ultimately spiral out of control and turn into WWIII, tbh

we came up together in the same facebook groups and twitter groups, when i was a baby trans and rani was coming back to it. i’ll never forget her as long as i live.

damn right. more than slightly, i’d say

Meanwhile, bsky.app/profile/jona...

They don't call for bans on epilepsy surgery: bsky.app/profile/ostr...

No normal medical, legal, or political process has ever gone from saying more evidence of benefit is needed to bans or restrictions. That's supposed to be a conversation patients (or parents) have with doctors. (The conspiracy theory on trans care says docs can't be trusted, again w/ no evidence.)

The reason people are banning or limiting gender affirming care for youth on the basis that the evidence base was weak (which as Greg says is similar to the evidence for many other youth treatments) is entirely about prejudice and wanting to limit the number of trans people.

Banning or restricting treatments in the past has happened when there is evidence of harm. Here, the harm remains entirely speculative on the level of medical evidence (meaning, there are a few individuals claiming to have been harmed, but harms have never been demonstrated in the research).

There's another dynamic going on, which no one in the mainstream press I've seen has touched (though @polgreen.bsky.social got closest), and that's the fact that it is unprecedented to ban or heavily restrict a treatment on the basis that the evidence isn't high quality enough.

I talked about that at length here.

TL/DR, you’d need at LEAST 65 completed suicides to find a HUGE relationship, and closer to 500 to find a smaller, but still significant relationship!

bsky.app/profile/greg...

The reason for that isn’t a secret - there simply aren’t that many adolescent completed suicides - so any test that used that as a measure would need to be prohibitively large. Chase Strangio mentioned this in oral arguments at the Supreme Court, but Jesse and Ben shrugged that off.

They’ll make simple mistakes of logic- like claiming that it’s meaningful that the fact that GAC doesn’t reduce the number of completed suicides. A simple check would have told them that no suicide prevention protocol for adolescents are tested against completed suicides!

And that it would be unethical or prohibitively difficult to get “high quality” evidence and that other medical areas also operate under similar evidence bases. It’s not uncommon.

When they actually get into a “debate” you find their arguments are an inch deep.

They’ll argue, like Jesse did yesterday on the “Central Air” podcast, that the evidence base for GAC is “low quality” but can’t go the next step and realize that’s a result of the low number of trans people …

Last time @evanurquhart.bsky.social reposted one of my posts about Ben and it went big, he complained that everyone had him blocked so he couldn’t reply.

He’d blocked ME, not the other way around. I have blocked almost no one.

Have you noticed how the “debate me” bros go radio-silent when you reply to them with reasoned arguments?

Ben’s screenshotted OTHER people talking about this post, but not this one. He’s likely muted me.

SCOOP: In a January letter to Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL), DHS says 270 DACA recipients have been arrested from January to September 2025. In addition, 174 DACA applicants have been deported, according to ICE records.

Those numbers differ from what was shared with Sen. Dick Durbin in February.

Hello this dropped very late last night but it's definitely worth reading

wow weird how many people at January 6 got convictions for abusing kids huh

strange how much concentration of kid fiddlers there is in die hard trump supporters i wonder what’s up with that

(i do not wonder)

Pretty noteworthy that this platitude does absolutely nothing to placate pro-Israel stalwarts if you, at the same time, acknowledge the reality of what actually existing Israel does to Palestinians.

A spokesperson for Newsom: he “believes in Israel’s right to exist." I am fed up with politicians thinking that proclaiming belief in an established state's right to exist is noteworthy. Do they say that about any other state, including recently created ones, e.g. Pakistan? Quote Gabby Deutch @GSDeutch · 22h I combed through Gavin Newsom's past comments on Israel & saw just how rapidly he's moved left in the past few months — as he starts seeking more attention on the national stage @J_Insider https://jewishinsider.com/2026/03/gavin-newsom-israel-shift-left-pod-save/ 7:41 AM · Mar 5, 2026 · 49.9K Views

At the same time that Israel's public image among Democrats and liberals is in total free-fall, Deborah Lipstadt says it's actually not enough to proclaim belief in Israel's right to exist. You have to go further.

House versions of RIDOT audit bills being heard tomorrow by the State Government and Elections Committee, so I’ve now started my folder of 2026 state legislation testimony folder 😤

"If you think Claude Code is a better social scientist than you, then you’re probably right. But that means, at some point, you stopped trying to answer interesting/puzzling questions and started trying to win the publish-the-most-articles race. That isn’t a game worth saving."

great stuff by @davekarpf.bsky.social

"Journal articles aren’t social science. They’re just a unit of measurement. They’re how we keep score. Producing journal articles isn’t what we are actually meant to be doing — we’re supposed to be learning meaningful things about people, power, and society."

@ellisjrosen.bsky.social

More people should know how fucking cool she was. More people should know how fucking strong she was.

Man, sometimes I think about Rani Baker and then I start missing her all over again.

The day we got the news, I went out and planted a bunch of seeds, telling them Rani’s name. We moved after, but I hope those seeds took root.

I hope they’re growing strong, knowing her name every day they live.

U.S. Catholic Bishops Launch Attack on Trans Healthcare; It’s Time To Fight Back While headlines were giving the Catholic church hierarchy plaudits for symbolic gestures in support of immigrants and a papal lunch with trans people, American bishops passed a major ban on trans heal...

Before praising the current papacy, remember that late last year the Catholic Church imposed one of the most sweeping bans on trans healthcare yet, cutting off life-saving care throughout its sprawling U.S. hospital networks:

The biggest threats we face aren't from those who openly seek the destruction of trans lives — dangerous as they are — but from the many, many more who will readily carry out whatever they say.

Every cis person needs to ask themselves that question.

Would you do that? Will you?