Welcome to the first Fairer Disputations curated round-up: your one-stop shop for the best in sex-realist feminism. Look here for the most thought-provoking new essays, articles, and podcasts, plus an update each week on what one of our Featured Authors is reading.
I Pretended To Be ‘Nonbinary’ To Expose a Medical Scandal at Kaiser Permanente
In our first featured piece this week, Beth Bourne tells her personal story of how easy it is to access “gender-affirming care” in a California medical system—and how many red flags were ignored along the way.
No other medical field operates with this level of carelessness and disregard for patient health and welfare. No other medical field addresses issues of self-perception with surgery and labels it “medically necessary.” No other medical field is this disconnected from the reality of the patients it serves.
bETH BOURNE
I think at least some girls are thinking and writing themselves into a version of “manhood” every bit as fake and inaccurate as the porn-addled version of “womanhood” claimed by some transwomen; a version that says a great deal about the psychology of these girls’ actual sex and betrays a profound ignorance of the realities of the target one.
helen joyce
Joyce Activated, Issue 29
Next, Featured Author Helen Joyce writes about her explorations in the world of “slash” fan fiction. She makes a compelling case that this genre, primarily written and consumed by young women, is fueling the epidemic of girls who begin identifying as trans.
From Boom to Bust: The Truth About Millennial Malaise
Finally, at Align, Featured Author Helen Roy writes a defense—in part—of millennial hesitancy in building families. Scarred by the flippancy with which their parents treated divorce, millennials also lack family and community support that previous generations took for granted. (Note: this piece is paywalled.)
If Millennials want a village, they must build it themselves. The village into which they were born dissolved beneath their feet, at the behest of their elders.All that remains is a terribly thin and tattered social fabric.
helen roy
Rebuilding everything from scratch is a pretty overwhelming prospect for an unprecedentedly mentally ill and lonely generation.
More Great Reads:
- 1-in-3: A Record Share of Young Adults Will Never Marry, Lyman Stone, Institute for Family Studies
- When Therapy Makes Things Worse, Abigail Shrier, Quillette
- My Torment as a Gamer Girl, Poppy Sowerby, UnHerd
- Scarlet Blake is a Man, Jean Hatchet, The Critic
- Relational Peace With Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Catherine, Dear Us
What I’m Reading: Mary Harrington
I’m reading Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elite, Forge Strong Familles and Save Civilisation by Brad Wilcox. A professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and senior fellow at the Institute of Family Studies, Wilcox challenges the “me-first messages” he sees as propagated by elites, policymakers and influencers alike, arguing instead that families that defy these messages are both better-off materially and consistently happier and more likely to flourish. Having myself made the feminist argument for marriage, in Feminism Against Progress, it is powerful to see the supporting sociological case made so comprehensively here.
