Anna Phylaxis

Alarming, though sadly unsurprising reporting here. Just as important as the “Armageddon” talk is the focus on the personnel filing complaints. One complainant: these remarks “destroy morale and unit cohesion and are in violation of the oaths we swore to support the [C]onstitution.”

I mean, you know why, of course, though. The editor agreed with the premise and the masthead wanted to push the idea.

Activists attempt to impose social costs on people who voice reasonable misgivings about youth gender medicine. Someone added me to an online blacklist, so now when someone Googles me, one of the first hits is a page titled, “Ben Appel vs. Transgender People.” It includes personal details not only about me but also about my family members. It states falsely that I’m associated with an “anti-trans hate group.” To support my writing, I work in sales. At my former job, someone who disagreed with me on pediatric gender medicine contacted my employer’s CEO to report my journalistic work. This wasn’t a great way to meet the boss, but thankfully, my antagonist failed to get me fired.

Ben Appel is the author of Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic.

And of course we get the obligatory whining about how trans people are mean. Gee I wonder why they think you don't like them, Ben!

These steps toward caution are wise, but an underlying problem remains: Society still has an irrational fear of effeminate boys, who should be free to live their life without altering anything about themselves. Gender-nonconforming children continue to get the strong impression from censorious peers and well-meaning adults alike that they’d be better off if they became something other than what they are.

My childhood experiences make me skeptical about pediatric gender medicine today. In many kids who grow up to be gay, gender nonconformity manifests long before overt same-sex attraction does. Yet from peers, from social media, and even from some school districts’ teaching material, kids learn simplistic lessons that equate gender nonconformity with gender dysphoria—in essence, If you act and dress like a girl, you are one. In recent years, many doctors and hospitals have been willing to provide puberty blockers and gender-related hormone treatments to minors after only the briefest evaluation of each patient’s circumstances, and LGBTQ activists have cheered the lack of gatekeeping.

Where? How? These people have been pooping this stupid myth back and forth for so long that they don't even bother to provide basic evidence anymore.

It's the *premise* of the article, how did an editor not ask for specific numbers and peer-reviewed studies on this alleged phenomenon?

It was in those spaces, in the late 2010s, that I realized that the fundamentalist Christians I’d grown up with weren’t the only people enforcing rigid ideas about how others should think. After arriving in New York with mainstream Democratic views, I took classes heavy on critical theories that fixated on identity categories and reflexively decried capitalism and the West. Within influential LGBTQ organizations, gay rights had given way to radical queer politics, and academic theories about sex and gender had hardened into doctrine. Widespread revulsion toward Donald Trump had narrowed the boundaries of permissible discussion on the left. The more Trump and his followers opposed something, the more we were supposed to support it. The prevailing view was that any debate within our side would become ammunition for the right.

For a long time, I feared that if I didn’t keep my thoughts to myself, I would lose the only community I’d ever really belonged in. As controversy flared up nationally about pediatric gender medicine, though, I started voicing concerns, rooted in my own experiences, over what looked to me like a rush to medical treatment. For all the sloganeering about protecting trans kids, I heard no discussion about protecting effeminate gay boys from unnecessary medicalization. When I and others asked whether progressive norms might be nudging effeminate gay boys to think of themselves as girls, no one wanted to hear it. Instead of answers, we were given the LGBTQ community’s official line. “Gender identity and sexual orientation are two different things,” the Human Rights Campaign asserts. But the confidence with which people claim that the two have nothing to do with each other is hard to square with research findings: According to data collected mostly before the recent surge in pediatric-dysphoria diagnoses, most prepubescent children who experienced gender distress went on to experience same-sex attraction and ultimately did not pursue a gender transition. Of 70 adolescents whom Dutch clinicians subjected to puberty suppression from 2000 to 2008, the overwhelming majority were attracted exclusively to people of their biological sex.

Straightforward right-wing agitprop. The idea that thousands of kids were pushed into gender-affirming surgeries because the left shuts down debate is a laughable conspiracy theory. The overwhelming social pressure is to be cis, not trans!

This has been part of the trans-kids moral panic for years, gay adults going "If I grew up now, they'd convince me I'm trans."

If your movement had real evidence, you wouldn't be pointing to alternative-universe hypotheticals! Child psychologists know the difference between gay kids and trans kids

In Defense of Effeminate Boys If anyone had suggested that I might really be a girl, I don’t know how I would have responded. By Ben Appel

If medical authorities have a rigorous way of distinguishing effeminate boys from transgender kids—or of distinguishing transgender kids from proto-gay kids—they aren’t saying. I have met a number of detransitioned gay men who tried to live as women for a time because they and their families were so averse to homosexuality. According to a 2019 report in The Times of London, staffers at Britain’s foremost gender-identity clinic joked darkly that, as a result of the facility’s work, “there would be no gay people left.” A statement last month by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons noted that there is no validated way to assess whether a child’s gender distress will persist over time or disappear without medical intervention. A lack of good research and recordkeeping means that we may never know how many patients who would have been considered effeminate gay boys not so long ago have undergone medical treatments for gender dysphoria.

Absolute trash. The author did not speak to a single medical professional and the article does not contain a shred of evidence that effeminate gay boys are being bamboozled into thinking they're trans.
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

This is unfiltered John Moneyism - the discredited (at great, horrific cost) idea that a gender identity can be forced upon a person from without.

This is, like, the only way to get the average American to care about other people.

Also everyone talks about how he assaulted a sex worker back in the day. But NO ONE mentions she was a trans sex worker. Making his grift even more transparent.

What’s bonkers to me is how in 2026, there’s people trying to hop on board the internet addiction, culture war grift train like it hasn’t left the station a year ago.

This is so funny because if Buy Yes wins at any time we are immediately transitioning to Fist of the North Star society. So there won’t even be centralized currency anymore. Only bartering for the lucky & constant tests of your willingness to solve your problems with lethal martial arts for the rest

We can’t clean up Washington without restoring integrity to the Supreme Court.

That’s why I believe we should expand the Supreme Court to 13 justices. And then, institute term limits.

Because an appointment to the Supreme Court shouldn’t mean a lifetime lack of accountability.

so we’re just calling it “the war” now?

Out: Vote Blue No Matter Who

In: PRIMARY THAT FUCKER OR YOU'RE A SUCKER

This “it’s not a war but a special military operation” is very Kremlin March 2022. As is the propaganda that we are not starting a war but ending one. As is the confusion of oligarch media as it tries to be faithful in the confusion…

"The CIA conspired to make me less cool than I was when I was 25" is the most succinct Gen X manifesto I've ever heard

computers should be cool

windows 13 will not be an operating system it will be a curse that must be lifted

there were countless industry trends in this game's way, and they all played their part, but internal mismanagement remains undefeated in killing video games

less than two months after release, highguard is shutting down. the usual suspects are chalking up its demise to culture war nonsense when the truth is more mundane: mismanagement sank another project. the video game industry punishes success and failure alike, but hubris most of all

A lot of my former colleagues who deployed to Jerusalem had their USG property laptops and phones taken out of their possession at the airport/border for hours at a time, and had their hotel rooms clearly rifled through when they returned from work.

the trans vibes of the protagonist are off the fucking charts

that show is so fucking good

yeah i was really surprised by how good it was

A dialogue box from Voyageur: Across the Unknown. Janeway asks "Mr. Neelix, do you have any D R U G S ?" Drugs is clearly photoshopped in green comic sans, far too big, and not aligned with anything.

your girl is working on a new piece and wants to be dead

AG Letitia James Just Stood Up For Trans Youth In New York. Now, Will Mayor Mamdani Act? Attorney General Letitia James has demanded NYU Langone restart care for transgender youth. Will NYC Mayor Mamdani act as well?

1. In a major move, AG Letitia James has given NYU Langone 10 days to resume trans youth care, or face legal consequences.

Now many are asking: Will Mayor Mamdani follow suit and take action to protect trans youth from the Trump administration and capitulation?

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Exactly. First you let Platner in the door, then you get Neera Tanden retweeting Nick Fuentes, and then your big tent is a fucking Nazi hangout.

No fucking Nazi shit. Period.

This is a very good point. Naziism being normalized in our party is giving the opposition endless ammo and also a free pass to do more Roman salutes. All you people who got this guy where he is today, congrats.

These increases are notable but they're not synonymous with accommodations, nor are they synonymous with *unfair* accommodations. Elite media is doing another social-contagion panic, this time on disability writ large.