E-Pluribus | February 6, 2024

Balancing child safety, parental rights, and liberty; silencing dissent in healthcare; and 'defund the police' becomes 'demoralize the police.'

Feb 06, 2024

A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:

Jessica Melugin: Let Parents, Not Politicians, Keep Kids Safe Online

Does it take a village to raise a child? A government? Parents? While the answer could be “all of the above,” Jessica Melugin writes at The Dispatch that the latter is most important. If we want to preserve freedom more broadly, Melugin argues, parents must take the primary responsibility for guarding their children from potential online threats. [Note: We’ll excerpt an alternative point of view tomorrow, also from The Dispatch. ]

Many parents today are rightly concerned about what their kids see on social media and how much time they spend online. And politicians have noticed. In fact, there are so many parents with those concerns that the political juice was worth the squeeze for members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to drag tech executives to a hearing on Wednesday for questioning. Or, more accurately, to be berated by members in diatribes loosely styled as questions—questions which the executives then weren’t allowed to answer before being cut off by the next harangue.
[. . .]
With apologies to my fellow exhausted parents, this one’s on us. Like healthy eating, physical safety from “stranger danger,” binge drinking, and unwanted pregnancies, the dangers of the digital lives of children are best patrolled by parents rather than the government. We will do a better job—if you can believe it—than the politicians who craft one-size-fits-all laws, well-intentioned as they may be. That’s because every kid is different and ready for things at a different age. So, families need to have varying thresholds for acceptable content and time spent online.
Advocates of government intervention point to kids’ social media regulations as an issue that (finally!) both the political left and right can agree on. But widespread agreement on a problem shouldn’t mean additional regulation is necessarily the solution. More productively, the consensus that there’s an issue points to an enticing opportunity for already established companies and entrepreneurs. A marketplace properly imbued with a healthy profit motive won’t ignore a need like that for long.
[. . .]
Age verification laws currently in circulation would also mean the end of anonymous speech online. While “trolls” can be irritating, no doubt, anonymous speech has played a critical role in our country. The framers who advocated the ratification of our Constitution signed the Federalist Papers as “Publius,” not as Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison. Since then, the Supreme Court has many times affirmed that anonymous speech is protected by the First Amendment. Those protections are as critical in the era of cancel culture as they ever have been. It is a hallmark of a free society that the most unpopular and controversial speech is protected, guarding minority opinions against the tyranny of the majority.
First Amendment protections are already proving problematic for efforts by state’s around the country to restrict kids online. Courts have halted laws in California, Arkansas, and Ohio, finding that the measures are unlikely to survive free speech scrutiny. Utah officials are so convinced their law won’t be found constitutional that they stopped its implementation themselves. Federal proposals discussed at this week’s Senate hearing—like the EARN IT Act and the Kids Online Safety Act—are riddled with their own constitutional problems.
Perhaps Americans are prepared to sacrifice parental authority, privacy, and anonymous speech so that kids can have a safer space online. But we should be very confident that social media is the driver of increased youth depression rates before taking these steps.
The problem is, we’re not.

Read it all.

Tamara Pietzke: I Was Told to Approve All Teen Gender Transitions. I Refused.

In general, the most influential voices in medicine have enthusiastically embraced the transgender movement and argued that the patient is always right, regardless of age. Child therapist Tamara Pietzke is not one of those voices. However, The Free Press has given Pietzke a chance to tell her story and relate a warning about so-called “affirmative care.”

I know from firsthand experience what hard times are. Though I had a happy childhood, raised as the middle child by working-class parents in Washington State, my mom died of ovarian cancer when I was 22.
After that, my family fell apart. I felt lost and alone.
I decided to become a therapist because I didn’t want anyone to go through what I had, feeling like no one on this planet cares about them. At least they can say their therapist does.
[. . .]
[I]n the past year I noticed a concerning new trend in my field. I was getting the message from my supervisors that when a young person I was seeing expressed discomfort with their gender—the diagnostic term is gender dysphoria—I should throw out all my training. No matter the patient’s history or other mental health conditions that could be complicating the situation, I was simply to affirm that the patient was transgender, and even approve the start of a medical transition.
I believe this rise of “affirmative care” for young people with gender dysphoria challenges the very fundamentals of what therapy is supposed to provide.
[. . .]
Last spring, I started seeing a new client, who at 13 years old had one of the most extreme and heartbreaking life stories I’ve ever heard. (For the sake of clarity, I am referring to all patients by their biological sex.)
[. . .]
When she started seeing me, she had recently threatened to “blow up the school,” which resulted in her expulsion.
I knew I couldn’t solve all of her problems, or make her feel better in just a few therapy sessions. My initial goal was to make her feel comfortable opening up to me, to make the therapy room a place where she was heard and felt safe. I also wanted to try to protect her from falling prey to outside influences from social media, her peers, or even the adults in her life.
With a patient like this, with so many intersecting and overwhelming problems, and with such a tragic history of abuse, it took our first three sessions to get her feeling more comfortable to even talk to me, and to understand the dimensions of her problems. But when I called her guardian last fall to schedule a fourth appointment, he asked me to write her a letter of recommendation for cross-sex hormone treatment. That is, at age 13, she was to start taking testosterone. Such a letter from me begins the process of medical transition for a patient.
In Washington State, that’s all it takes—a few visits with a therapist and a letter, often written using a template provided by one’s superiors—for minors to undergo the irreversible treatments that patients must take for a lifetime.
I was scared for this patient. She had so many overlapping problems that needed addressing it seemed like malpractice to abruptly begin her on a medical gender transition that could quickly produce permanent changes.
[. . .]
I emailed a program manager in my department at MultiCare and outlined my concerns. She wrote back that my client’s trauma history has no bearing on whether or not she should receive hormone treatment.
“There is not valid, evidenced-based, peer-reviewed research that would indicate that gender dysphoria arises from anything other than gender (including trauma, autism, other mental health conditions, etc.),” she wrote.
She also warned that “there is the potential in causing harm to a client’s mental health when restricting access to gender-affirming care” and suggested I “examine [my] personal beliefs and biases about trans kids.”
When Tamara outlined her concerns about giving a patient testosterone to her manager at MultiCare, she was told to “examine your personal beliefs and biases about trans kids.”
She then reported me to MultiCare’s risk management team, who removed my client from my care and placed her with a new therapist.

Read it all here.

Heather Mac Donald: The Decadence of Identity Politics

“Defund the police” seemed to lose much of its influence as the movement’s implications became clear to the public. At City Journal, however, Heather Mac Donald writes that, at least in some cases, the campaign has simply changed its rhetoric without abandoning its goals.

On January 30, the New York City Council passed the How Many Stops Act, over the veto of Mayor Eric Adams. The law requires New York police officers to fill out a form nearly every time they interact with a civilian. If, for example, an officer asks a potential bystander to a shooting if he had witnessed that shooting, the officer will have to complete a form listing the bystander’s race, sex, and age. Are there other potential witnesses in the area who urgently need to be contacted before they disperse? Too bad. Identity-based paperwork comes first. (If an officer waits to the end of his shift to finish filling out the forms, he will still likely need to have made some contemporaneous record of his encounters.)
[. . .]
The How Many Stops Act is innocuous, however, compared with California’s data-collection requirements for police officers. New reporting obligations under the Racial & Identity Profiling Act require California officers to fill out an eight-page form (up from four pages last year) with nearly 200 fields when they make what is known as a custodial stop (meaning the civilian is not free to walk away).
The form, generated by the California Department of Justice, comes straight from race- and gender-studies classrooms. The officer first documents whether he, the officer, is a “cisgender man, cisgender woman, transgender man, transgender woman, or nonbinary person.” To avoid placing a retrogressive “gender” straitjacket on the state’s public servants, the form allows an officer to check both “Nonbinary person” and one of the other categories, such as “Cisgender woman.” “N/A” is not an option; the officer must list a sexual identity. Naturally, there is also an extensive “Officer race or ethnicity” section, asking whether the officer is “Asian, Hispanic/Latine(X), Black/African, Native American, Middle Eastern or South Asian, Pacific Islander, White,” or a combination of the above.
[. . .]
California and New York remain racked by carjackings, looting, and gang shootings. Under the phony charge of racism, officers in both states have cut back on proactive policing, however essential such self-initiated activity is to solving crime. They will do even less proactive policing now, if any such discretionary activity saddles them with insultingly irrelevant forms. Police rushing from one call for help to another are not concerned with the hothouse niceties of distinguishing “nonbinary” from “cisgender.”

Read the whole thing.