Science and Our Personal Bodily Freedoms
This piece by Lydia Polgreen on The Strange Report Fueling the War on Trans Kids is so good — straightforward and informative, especially when compared to the incoherent nonsense that the NY Times has run about trans people over the past few years. The piece is about, in Polgreen’s words, “the sneaky effort to use what looks like science to justify broad intrusions in our personal freedom”.
I usually don’t do this, but I’ve excerpted the article’s conclusion here because it just gets right to the heart of an urgent concern: the freedom to control our own bodies.
Imagine that your health care required objective justification, if access to birth control or erectile dysfunction medications required proving that you were having monogamous sex, or good sex, or sex at all. Or if fertility care was provided only if you could prove that becoming a parent would make you happy, or you would be a good parent. Or that abortion would be available only if you could prove that it would improve your life.
In a free society we agree that these are private matters, decided by individuals and their families, with the support of doctors using mainstream medical science as a guide, even when they involve children. We invite politicians and judges into them at great peril to our freedom.
I encourage you to read the whole thing — it’s interesting throughout.
Discussion 2 comments
This is a very informative article, thanks for the link. First, I'd like to say that I think Tim Walz and the Dems are on the right track by using the phrase "Mind your own business" when countering conservatives on any kind of restrictive medical policies, it's an understandable values based approach that even the under-informed voter base can understand.
Secondly, as the parent of daughter who is trans, but came out after puberty, I can see how fraught these discussions have to be about how to handle younger patients who are still developing both mentally and physically yet need supportive care.
Lets hope a Harris presidency is friendly to a medical community that needs resources and time for thorough research to back evidence based treatment modalities for kids who need this care.
Please delete/ignore my previous and incomplete post.
This Opinion piece clearly articulates a pivotal factor in why people have different reactions to the Cass Report, namely, the outcome that should be measured and maximized is NOT agreed upon.
“But the problem with both Meyer and Cass is more fundamental than the scientific facts and evidence. It can be surprisingly hard to know objectively whether medical treatments benefit patients in many areas of medicine, but nowhere more profoundly and controversially than in the care of gender-nonconforming youth. There is, contrary to Aristotle, no universally agreed upon definition of what constitutes a good life. How can we expect medical science to deliver answers to such profound, mysterious and fundamentally subjective questions?”
Should public health expenditures be based upon one-year patient surveys that are of dubious statistical validity because participation is self-selected? Is informed consent necessary and, if so, how is this achieved in the case of minors?
Or, alternatively, should public health policy on gender be grounded like other public health policy, by examining statically significant mortality, morbidity, and similar outcomes over many years, preferably lifetimes?
In other words, do you want vaccination policies determined by the self reported opinions of the anti-vax crowd or by double-blind, longitudinal, randomized, clinical trials?
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