This study is grand. If you read it you will see it debunks the trans haters talking points of lower bone minerals and the complete shown to be false Cass report.
The guidelines also directly push back against claims in the U.K. Cass Review that puberty blockers affect cognition, revealing that they have “no negative effect” on any measures of intelligence or academic success.
The guidelines even provide a definitive rebuke to the claim that puberty blockers cause lower bone mineral density (BMD) by saying, “Trans youth have an average BMD before the onset of puberty that is lower than that of the general population, regardless of treatment. This is probably related to the consequences of dysphoria: less physical activity, eating disorders, and/or poor dietary balance.” After taking the hormones that align with their gender identity, the guidelines’ authors note that trans patients’ BMD is “comparable to that of the experienced gender.”
The guidelines strongly oppose a beloved tactic among anti-trans activists, dubbed the “wait-and-see” approach, wherein medical providers render no care to see if the patient still desires transitional care — the approach has been likened to conversion therapy. The approach, also known as “gender exploratory therapy,” is swiftly criticized by the guideline’s authors who state that it “does not reduce psychological distress.” Instead, it “increases the risk of committing suicide and can affect psycho-affective and cognitive development.”
Medical professionals in France just came out in strong support of gender-affirming care for transgender minors, according to independent trans journalist Erin Reed.
The French Society of Pediatric Endocrinology and Diabetology released a set of guidelines that can be considered the first consensus to come out of France for gender-affirming care. The guidelines were thoroughly conducted: Each section of the review is broken up up into separate categories evaluated by smaller groups of study authors who incorporated input from external experts. The final guidelines were also refined by the broader group of authors.
Trans youth in states that enacted anti-trans laws had up to a 72% increase in suicide attempts.
The authors and studies in the report unequivocally support gender-affirming care, backing puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy for trans minors. The approach to care they suggest is individualized and evidence-based, promoting the right of trans youth to explore their gender identity and find where they fit in on their own time. By allowing youth to transition early, some elect to skip future surgeries entirely, the study said.
The guidelines strongly oppose a beloved tactic among anti-trans activists, dubbed the “wait-and-see” approach, wherein medical providers render no care to see if the patient still desires transitional care — the approach has been likened to conversion therapy. The approach, also known as “gender exploratory therapy,” is swiftly criticized by the guideline’s authors who state that it “does not reduce psychological distress.” Instead, it “increases the risk of committing suicide and can affect psycho-affective and cognitive development.”
A study published in September shows that anti-trans laws increase the likelihood of suicide by upwards of 72%, suggesting that attempts at implementing these bans on care and advocacy for the “wait-and-see” approach are only harming transgender individuals.
The guidelines even provide a definitive rebuke to the claim that puberty blockers cause lower bone mineral density (BMD) by saying, “Trans youth have an average BMD before the onset of puberty that is lower than that of the general population, regardless of treatment. This is probably related to the consequences of dysphoria: less physical activity, eating disorders, and/or poor dietary balance.” After taking the hormones that align with their gender identity, the guidelines’ authors note that trans patients’ BMD is “comparable to that of the experienced gender.”
The guidelines also directly push back against claims in the U.K. Cass Review that puberty blockers affect cognition, revealing that they have “no negative effect” on any measures of intelligence or academic success.
The French guidelines are especially detailed in that they contain information on how trans youth can alleviate dysphoria as well. They discuss binding techniques, how transfeminine people can tuck, and how to best treat youth in varying stages of their transition.
Editor’s note: If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. The Trans Lifeline (1-877-565-8860) is staffed by trans people and will not contact law enforcement. The Trevor Project provides a safe, judgement-free place to talk for youth via chat, text (678-678), or phone (1-866-488-7386). Help is available at all three resources in English and Spanish.
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I suspect many of you are also feeling too much of the darkness of the world, which can be especially dangerous for those who already stand too close to the edge of the abyss. It can be easy to burn with anger at hypocrisy and hate and chaos, but here is what I have learned…and what I keep telling myself:
You can use that heat as fuel to create change, to promote kindness, to protect yourself and those who are most vulnerable…to keep you warm when the world seems too cold. But, that burning anger can also be dangerous. It can exhaust you. It can pull the oxygen from the room. It can cause you to lash out in fear at those who want to help. The smoke obscures how much good and joy is out there. And those who thrive on turmoil and hate are so happy to see you lost in it…to see your precious energy drained putting out the fires they scatter about just to keep you too busy to live.
Don’t let the world burn you to ashes.
Protecting your fragile heart can be an act of rebellion. Don’t be afraid to love and laugh and find joy and silliness even in the hard times.
Especially in the hard times.
Don’t underestimate the beautiful works of love and kindness and help that you put out into the world. You may do them loudly or you may do them quietly, but they are invaluable in ways you may never see.
Today’s doodle is inspired by one of my favorite Czech artists, Alphonse Mucha, who came from the same land that my father’s family immigrated from.
“NOT. GIVING. UP.”
Most people know Mucha from his flowy art-nouveau posters and cigarette ads but my favorites of his came at the end of his life, when he used his art to explore both the pain and the beauty of life. This one, Woman With a Burning Candle, stays with me:
It was painted during the rise of Nazism…a slavic woman tending to a candle…keeping the light in the dark going, but watching as it slowly burns down…unsure as to what would come next but still focused on the glowing illumination. He painted about enlightenment, love and knowledge in a time when all that seemed to be threatened and was an act of revolution. The day after Prague was stormed by Nazi’s, Mucha was arrested and while in custody he contracted the pneumonia that would kill him. He never lived to see the victory over the darkness, but even in that darkness and uncertainty he created light that we can still see today. He still found beauty and joy. He found a way to celebrate life and enlightenment and humanity in his own way.
He didn’t give up.
I’m not going to either.
I super-crazy love you.
~ Jenny
PS. If you ever want to feel bad about your doodles you should follow one up with a painting by an actual master because…wow. Lesson learned. (snip)
Probably the taxes, too. There is a sense that they’re about to decide to try yet another Brownback ‘grand experiment’ while not addressing their work on funding the state. It’s a thing everyone with a state legislature has to do, though; monitor and lobby.
Big fights on issues like transgender health care access will be repeated again this session as Republicans lead with a stronger majority.
Property tax cuts and access to care for young, transgender people are likely to be top issues in the Kansas Statehouse this year.
Top Kansas Republicans said they’ll look at amending the state constitution to put a cap on appraised values used to determine property taxes.
“People see these rapid appraisal increases, which turn into rapid tax increases,” Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson said. “Our hand in that is really giving the people the choice (as) to whether or not they want to have a cap.”
Masterson and Republican House Speaker Dan Hawkins spoke to KCUR’s Up to Date about their priorities heading into the 2025 legislative session. They said they want to eliminate the small chunk of property taxes that go towards the state’s construction and maintenance fund.
There are 21.5 mills levied for statewide property taxes. One-and-a-half mills go to the state; the rest goes to local governments.
Meanwhile, Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly is advising caution as the Legislature considers more tax cuts. The state has a budget surplus, but Kelly argues too many cuts at once could negatively impact state infrastructure like schools and roads.
Kelly vetoed several attempts at tax cuts last year that she said would be too costly for the state in the future. She wants to wait a year before pursuing further property tax cuts.
Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, however, said they would be open to some cuts this session, as long as they’re sustainable and benefit low-income Kansans.
“If we’re just talking about homeowners, and not helping our renters, that’s not going to be fair,” Democratic Senate Minority Leader Dinah Sykes said.
To help renters, they want the state to consider limiting rent increases and reinstating a tax credit for renters that was eliminated under then-Gov. Sam Brownback, a Republican.
Republicans also said they plan to pursue a ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors.
Advocates for gender-affirming care say an early transition can reduce the risk of suicide in transgender teens. But critics say it amounts to mutilation.
Kelly successfully vetoed similar bans in years past. But with Republicans gaining seats in the November election, they have better odds of overriding a potential veto.
“I will tell you with 100% certainty that that will be back,” Hawkins told the Kansas News Service. “And we will have votes on it, and (Kelly will) veto it again, and we’ll override that veto.”
House Minority Leader Brandon Woodard said Democratic leaders are willing to negotiate with Republicans on the topic this session.
“This is a much more complex issue than many of the legislators really understand,” he said.
“I think there is a way to hear the concerns without invading parental rights, without inserting ourselves into physician offices, and I know that we are open to having those discussions with leadership,” Woodard added.
January 14, 1601 Roman Catholic church authorities burned sacred Hebrew books in Rome during the papacy of Clement VIII. He had forbidden Jews from reading the Talmud (a collection of centuries of interpretation of Jewish law). He had confirmed Pope Paul III’s relegation of Jews to a Roman ghetto (a walled-in portion of the city), and their banning from residence in papal-controlled states by Pope Pius V. Other papal enemies of Jewish books included Innocent IV (1243-1254), Clement IV (1256-1268), John XXII (1316-1334), Paul IV (1555-1559), and Pius V (1566-1572).
January 14, 1784 The Confederation Congress, meeting in Annapolis, Maryland, ratified the Treaty of Paris with England, ending the Revolutionary War . Signing the Treaty of Paris By its terms, “His Britannic Majesty” was bound to withdraw his armies without “carrying away any Negroes or other property of American inhabitants.” The treaty was negotiated by John Adams, John Jay and Benjamin Franklin for the colonies, and David Hartley representing the King of England, George III.
January 14, 1918 The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the selective service law, affirming all criminal charges arising from non-compliance with the draft during World War I. In Arver v. United States, the Court found that a draft does not violate the 13th Amendment’s prohibition of involuntary servitude.
January 14, 1941 A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union, and widely considered de facto chief spokesperson for the African-American working class, called for a march on Washington, demanding racial integration of the military and equal access to defense-industry jobs. Detail from painting by Betsy G. Reyneau, Asa Philip Randolph “On to Washington, ten thousand black Americans!” Randolph urged. He said in the fight to “stop discrimination in National Defense . . . While conferences have merit, they won’t get desired results by themselves.”
January 14, 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Presidential Proclamation No. 2537, which required aliens from World War II enemy countries – Italy, Germany and Japan – to register with the United States Department of Justice. Registered persons received a “Certificate of Identification for Aliens of Enemy Nationality.” This proclamation facilitated the beginning of large-scale internment of Japanese Americans the following month.
January 14, 1963 George Wallace was sworn in as Governor of Alabama. In his inaugural address he called for “segregation now; segregation tomorrow; segregation forever!” “The true brotherhood of America, of respecting the separateness of others — and uniting in effort — has been so twisted and distorted from its original concept that there is a small wonder that communism is winning the world. We invite the negro citizens of Alabama to work with us from his separate racial station — as we will work with him — to develop, to grow in individual freedom and enrichment. We want jobs and a good future for BOTH races — the tubercular and the infirm. This is the basic heritage of my religion, of which I make full practice — for we are all the handiwork of God.” The entire speech:
January 14, 1966 A march in Atlanta was held to protest the ouster of Julian Bond, an African American, from the Georgia House of Representatives. Members of the General Assembly considered him unfit to serve after he endorsed a statement critical of U.S. involvement in Vietnam issued by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
January 14, 1994 An agreement was signed for Russia and the U.S. to assist newly independent Ukraine in ridding itself of nuclear weapons.Following the break-up of the Soviet Union, Ukraine’s leader Leonid Kravchuk found his country with the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal, including multiple-warhead long-range missiles and bombers, and 3000 tactical (battlefield or short-range) nuclear weapons. former Ukranian missile silo Leonid Kravchuk Kravchuk and his government had decided to eliminate all nuclear weapons from Ukrainian territory. Ukraine was the first country to go non-nuclear.
January 14, 1996 Sixteen protesters were arrested in a winter blockade of the rural Wisconsin site (in the Chequamegon National Forest) of the U.S. Navy’s ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) transmitter, which communicated (one-way) with deeply submerged U.S. submarines. Nearly 400 were arrested in 24 actions opposing ELF between 1991 and 1996.
I was really happy to take these photographs today! I filled the feeders yesterday. By this morning the word had spread! Places full of birds. I’m out of bird food now. It’ll be a week before I can get to Costco. I was hoping the Cardinals would show up when I put the food out yesterday! I love the one in the lower left that’s all puffed up.
Huck!
He has space issues.
Paulo! It’s hard to go wrong taking pictures of him. The trick is to put the Pale Blue Eye of Judgement right in the center of the photograph.
Can you feel him looking into your soul?
This is Fenn pretending she didn’t take a bite of my lemon bar while I went to get a fork.
She was guilty. Guilty as Hell. Her breath smelled like lemon curd.
Sam is obviously quite wise. He’s very much against Bitcoin.
I had the greenhouse to myself this weekend. It was nice! It was snowing pretty hard at sunrise on Saturday. Today was mostly clear when the sun came up. A few clouds to shed some color.
That’s all I got room for – thanks for dropping by! (snip)
January 13, 1874 The depression of 1873-1877 left 3 million people unemployed. The depression began when railroad owner Jay Cooke was found to have issued millions of dollars of worthless stock. Investors panicked and banks closed. The unbalanced, overextended new economy collapsed. In the winter of 1873, 900 people starved to death, and 3,000 deserted their infants on doorsteps. A public meeting was called in New York City’s Tompkins Square Park to lobby for public works projects to provide jobs; the city’s unemployment rate was approaching 25% at the time. The Tompkins Park Massacre The night before, the City secretly voided the permit for the gathering. The next morning, mounted police charged into the crowd of 10,000, indiscriminately clubbing adults and children, leaving hundreds of casualties. Police commissioner Abram Duryee commented, “It was the most glorious sight I have ever seen . . . .” The Tompkins Square event was part of a wave of parades of the unemployed and bread riots across the nation. In Chicago, 20,000 people marched. Even under police attack, workers in New York, Omaha, and Cincinnati refused to disperse.
January 13, 1958 Linus Pauling presented the “Scientists’s Test Ban Petition” to the United Nations, signed by over 11,000 scientists (including 36 Nobel laureates) from 49 countries. It called for an end to nuclear weapons testing for its detrimental health, especially genetic, and ecological effects, among other reasons. In reaction to his efforts, Pauling was forced to resign as Chairman of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Caltech (California Institute of Technology) after having served in that role for 22 years. The petition Background – Linus Pauling & The Bomb
January 13, 1962 One hundred fifty members of the Scottish Committee of 100 (an anti-nuclear group) began a sit-down protest at the U.S. consulate in Glasgow, Scotland.
January 13, 1993 A vigil was held opposing the arrival of a ship bringing nearly two metric tons of plutonium for a pilot fuel reprocessing plant in Tokai, Japan. The specially constructed ship, the Akatsuki Maru, had carried it 25,000 km (15,500 miles) from Cherbourg, France. Akatsuki Maru The Voyage Of The Akatsuki Maru by Mario Uribe Many objected to the maritime transport of the highly radioactive material due to the risk of sinking, hijacking and the resultant risk of further nuclear proliferation. The original plan called for air transport over the United States. The Hottest Import To Hit Japan
We live in a world where right-wing nationalism is on the rise and many governments, including the incoming Trump administration, are promising mass deportations. Trump in particular has discussed building camps as part of mass deportations. This question used to feel more hypothetical than it does today.
Faced with this reality, it’s worth asking: who would stand by you if this kind of authoritarianism took hold in your life?
You can break allyship down into several key areas of life:
Who in your personal life is an ally? (Your friends, acquaintances, and extended family.)
Who in your professional life is an ally? (People you work with, people in partner organizations, and your industry.)
Who in civic life is an ally? (Your representatives, government workers, individual members of law enforcement, healthcare workers, and so on.)
Which service providers are allies? (The people you depend on for goods and services — including stores, delivery services, and internet services.)
And in turn, can be broken down further:
Who will actively help you evade an authoritarian regime?
Who will refuse to collaborate with a regime’s demands?
These two things are different. There’s also a third option — non-collaboration but non-refusal — which I would argue does not constitute allyship at all. This might look like passively complying with authoritarian demands when legally compelled, without taking steps to resist or protect the vulnerable. While this might not seem overtly harmful, it leaves those at risk exposed. As Naomi Shulman points out, the most dangerous complicity often comes from those who quietly comply. Nice people made the best Nazis.
For the remainder of this post, I will focus on the roles of internet service vendors and protocol authors in shaping allyship and resisting authoritarianism.
For these groups, refusing to collaborate means that you’re not capitulating to active demands by an authoritarian regime, but you might not be actively considering how to help people who are vulnerable. The people who are actively helping, on the other hand, are actively considering how to prevent someone from being tracked, identified, and rounded up by a regime, and are putting preventative measures in place. (These might include implementing encryption at rest, minimizing data collection, and ensuring anonymity in user interactions.)
If we consider an employer, refusing to collaborate means that you won’t actively hand over someone’s details on request. Actively helping might mean aiding someone in hiding or escaping to another jurisdiction.
These questions of allyship apply not just to individuals and organizations, but also to the systems we design and the technologies we champion. Those of us who are involved in movements to liberate social software from centralized corporations need to consider our roles. Is decentralization enough? Should we be allies? What kind of allies?
This responsibility extends beyond individual actions to the frameworks we build and the partnerships we form within open ecosystems. While building an open protocol that makes all content public and allows indefinite tracking of user activity without consent may not amount to collusion, it is also far from allyship. Partnering with companies that collaborate with an authoritarian regime, for example by removing support for specific vulnerable communities and enabling the spread of hate speech, may also not constitute allyship. Even if it furthers your immediate stated technical and business goals to have that partner on board, it may undermine your stated social goals. Short-term compromises for technical or business gains may seem pragmatic but risk undermining the ethics that underpin open and decentralized systems.
Obviously, the point of an open protocol is that anyone can use it. But we should avoid enabling entities that collude with authoritarian regimes to become significant contributors to or influencers of open protocols and platforms. While open protocols can be used by anyone, we must distinguish between passive use and active collaboration. Enabling authoritarian-aligned entities to shape the direction or governance of these protocols undermines their potential for liberation.
In light of Mark Zuckerberg’s clear acquiescence to the incoming Trump administration (for example by rolling back DEI, allowing hate speech, and making a series of bizarre statements designed to placate Trump himself), I now believe Threads should not be allowed to be an active collaborator to open protocols unless it can attest that it will not collude, and that it will protect vulnerable groups using its platforms from harm. I also think Bluesky’s AT Protocol decision to make content and user blocks completely open and discoverable should be revisited. I also believe there should be an ethical bill of rights for users on open social media protocols that authors should sign, which includes the right to privacy, freedom from surveillance, safeguards against hate speech, and strong protections for vulnerable communities.
As builders, users, and advocates of open systems, we must demand transparency, accountability, and ethical commitments from all contributors to open protocols. Without these safeguards, we risk creating tools that enable oppression rather than resisting it. Allyship demands more than neutrality — it demands action.
OK, though, I’ll stop for today after this one. I’m really trying to gather the energy to bake something. It’s supposed to snow some more today, though it is, I’m thankful, warmer today. Maybe a little more reading, then I’ll figure out something to bake. I saw a chocolate graham-looking cooky over on MPS last night, and I’ve been craving chocolate grahams since then.
Jim Benton Cartoons by Jim Benton for January 09, 2025
