Real bad start. Saying that gender affirming care saves lives, as is the medical consensus and obviously true if you've spoken to trans people, is crazy? That's the equivalent opposite position to "the queer agenda is coming for your children" for you?

But I thought she was not-stupid on this so I'll hear her out.

e, live reaction:

• nice, hinting at the possibility of intersex conditions, but then dismissing them as irrelevant to the conversation with a dumb joke

• begins by delineating a difference between sex and gender, then explains that some trans people instead refer to "assigned gender at birth" as if it's a difference in terminology rather than a serious challenge to the notion of "biological sex" as it's commonly understood. i get why she would have trouble with this concept but i think it's a bad framing that doesn't help cis people understand what exactly is goin on here

• nice words that being trans is as normal as anything is, and not a recent development, acknowledgments of gendered cultural practices outside the western binary and the prevalence and real harm of transphobia. way better than i'd expect from the median transphobe.

• 9 minutes in we get to the Littman ROGD paper! Sabine is rightly questioning the methodology and findings of it, and I think it's worth pointing out that Lisa Littman herself, while not disavowing it entirely, believes it's been widely misappropriated by transphobes... and then she gets to the study in the Journal of Pediatrics disputing the existence of ROGD and her criticisms of that paper come from Jesse Fucking Singal, the dickhead who has remade his career around scaring suburbanites that their daughters are being stolen away by the ROGD monster in the closet. Controversy!

• Getting into describing gender affirming care, she describes "top surgery" and "bottom surgery" (both of which refer to a wide variety of procedures) as "innocent sounding euphemisms" for "cutting off parts of the anatomy that are never coming back." (Yeah at that price I sure hope they're never coming back!) Points out that "some people are making a lot of money with this" as if that's not just what medicine is under capitalism. You gonna start telling people to take horse dewormer for their COVID next?

• lots of concerned noises about puberty blockers. it's true that their use in trans teens is relatively new and more research is always good, so why not just say this instead of mentioning (but not citing) inconclusive studies that you admit have small sample sizes? Then she goes on to hormone therapy, which, in contrast, is fairly well researched, so it's absolutely bizarre that she tears into a single recent 2 year study which has problems but showed a small benefit to HRT instead of the overwhelming body of evidence that it does in fact help trans peoples' mental health.

• A second Jesse Singal citation, mentioning him by name. Why, Sabine? He's not a scientist! He's a journalist, and even that's being generous! His job is advocating for extermination, you should not be giving this idiot the time of day!

• God she keeps talking about small sample sizes and no control groups but like, yeah! Trans people are a very tiny segment of the population, and the barriers to getting medical care are enormous! Of course that's going to make scientific research difficult, but it's not indicative of systematic incompetence in the field like she seems to imply.

• She considers the eminently reasonable argument that more people are trans now because being trans is something more people are allowed to be, but dismisses it because it doesn't explain the changing ratio between trans men and trans women. But like, could it be, perhaps, I don't know, under patriarchy, it's a lot harder to actively choose to be a woman, along with being openly transgender? Could it be that dysphoria is worse for trans women because the constraints placed on what a "real woman" is are much more restrictive than those placed on men? Are we even allowed to ask these questions, or are they too psychological and sociological for your hard-scientific lens?

• The "both sides" conclusion that I should have been expecting. Yes, more kids are trans because more kids are trans, but also maybe some of them "erroneously believe" they're trans. But like what does that even mean? That they're wrong about how they feel now? That they can't be relied upon to give testimony of their own experiences? What if it's fine to be "wrong"? What if we don't worry about it too much and just let them be trans without telling them they might be delusional up until the point they change their minds?

Christ I guess it wasn't as bad as it could have been (she pinned a very good comment), but she gives way too much credence to transphobic scum like Singal and their pearl clutching about how scary and sinister all this Gender Stuff is.