Year Zero with Wesley Yang

We do not know if, when, or how the lemming-like rush to propagate the experimental and non-evidence based practice of pediatric sex trait modification will be brought to heel. But if the United States eventually follows the lead of the Social Democratic nations of northern Europe toward reason and reality — acknowledging that the practice never had a strong evidence base to support it before it was drastically scaled up in response to activist pressure across American institutions — it will be in no small part thanks to the efforts of the woman pictured above. Mason has for five years been virtually alone in doing what we would expect every conscientious medical practitioner to do in the face of a bizarre social contagion — of girls with no prior history of nonconformity suddenly declaring themselves to be “really” “boys” after prolonged exposure to transgender influencers and online communities — that sought her out unbidden in the waiting room of her pediatric office in a suburb of Portland, Oregon. She began asking questions. She exercised her critical faculties. She followed the trail of evidence to where it led — unearthing along the way a medical scandal of shocking proportions. And she seamlessly transformed herself from a workaday pediatrician to an activist within the gates of the institution that bears more direct responsibility than any other single entity for the lemming-like rush to propagate pediatric sex trait modification within American medicine, the American Academy of Pediatrics. I caught up with Mason three weeks ago in the aftermath of a sudden development that may (or may not) demonstrate that this important American institution can pull itself off the precipice upon which it has placed itself: the AAP in early August announced both that it was reaffirming a position it had taken in 2018, in support of pediatric gender medicine, while also undertaking a “comprehensive evidence review” of the science of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and gender affirming surgeries in minors. The decision marks a victory for Mason who for several years running had been subject to irregular parliamentary maneuvers intended to keep resolutions she had authored calling on the AAP to undertake a comprehensive review of the evidence concerning the science of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and gender affirming surgeries in minors. We spoke about the prospects of the AAP undertaking this process with integrity and whether and how the ongoing institutional cascade around this practice will be brought to heel. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wesleyyang.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wesleyyang.substack.comToday's bonus podcast for paid subscribers is the first 40 minutes of my marathon  conversation with Corinna Cohn. Toward the end of that podcast, I referred to the beginning of our conversation as "tense." I don't mean that we were in any way hostile, just that it took a little while for us to fully establish our rapport and for the conversation to bec…

Year Zero is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.This is the audio version of a video interview published earlier. Here is the second in a series of three interviews with Anna Slatz, the founder of Reduxx Magazine. The first hour of this marathon interview told the story of that online publication’s founding for paid subscribers only. The second hour and a half, posted above and available to all, contains the bulk of an interview in which we go over the ten craziest stories covered by Reduxx. This section was interrupted by technical difficulties toward the end. A few days later we recorded another hour and a half in which we wrapped up the last of the ten stories and went on to discuss various other issues that will be featured in the third and final episode of this series next week.A perusal of the Reduxx website on any given day explains the difficulty Slatz had in picking the stories to include in this interview. Reduxx routinely has the most disturbing story you’ve ever heard in your life posted to their website, all generated by the absurdity of defining “woman” as “anyone who says they are a woman,” which the ruling institutions of the Western world have already done or are in the process of doing.Thank you for reading Year Zero. This post is public so feel free to share it.Reduxx is not a site that targets a marginalized minority by associating it with rapists, pedophiles, and murderer. Its subject is not transgender crime per se but rather the bizarre deference that is shown to some of the world’s most depraved perpetrators by criminal justice systems and media outlets throughout the Western world honoring the self-declared gender identities of male rapists and murderers. This prioritization of the feelings of male rapists and murders over the safety of women and children is a continual reductio ad absurdum of the gender identity dogma which our media has made the considered decision to ignore, suppress, or collude with actively, thereby creating the vacuum in public awareness of the macabre Twilight Zone-like unreality into which transgender dogmas too often devolve in practice that Reduxx has emerged to fill.Links to stories referenced: EXCLUSIVE: Trans-Identified Male Coach Used Girls’ Locker Room to Undress Multiple Times, Incidents Kept Quiet by Pennsylvania School DistrictBREAKING: Trans Activist Sent To Women’s Prison To Serve Life Sentence For Slaughter Of California FamilyCANADA: Man Who Raped Infant Quietly Moved to Prison with Mother-Baby Unit After Transgender ClaimEXCLUSIVE: Man Who Beat Two Babies To Death Allegedly Awaiting Breast Implants At California Women’s PrisonTop Academic Behind Fetish Site Hosting Child Sexual Abuse Fantasy, Push To Revise WPATH GuidelinesViolent Child Rapist, Murderer Now a Featured ‘Feminist, LGBTQ Advocate’EXCLUSIVE: Australian Woman Left Disabled Following Attack By Trans ActivistViolent Transgender Killer Completes Sentence for Torture, Murder of 13-Year-Old ChildSorority Members Made to Change Definition of ‘Woman’ to Admit 6’2 Trans-Identified Male This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wesleyyang.substack.com/subscribe

Guest Corinna Cohn, a software developer, shares their experience as one of the first teenagers to undergo cross-sex hormones and vaginoplasty. They discuss the challenges of finding long-term partners, critique the minority stress model, explore the impact of increasing visibility of transgender stories, and delve into complications of sex change surgery. They also touch on being a heterodox figure in a marginalized community, the rise of the no gatekeeping model in medical transition, challenges in finding proper care for transgender individuals, and limitations on freedom of speech.

Discussion on the parallels between the opioid epidemic and pediatric gender medicine, challenges in pediatric gender medicine, withholding information and parental rights, contradictions and questions in pediatric gender medicine, challenges of using judicial venue, challenges and influences in pediatric gender medicine, consequences and costs of pediatric gender medicine, the power of individualism and apathy in American politics, CDC recommendation controversy, tribalism and the politicization of trans medicine, the role of psychologists in gender-affirming care, controversy and perspectives in pediatric gender medicine, prevalence of mastectomies and genital surgeries on minors, dishonesty in pediatric gender medicine, and the prospects and controversies of pediatric gender medicine.

Year Zero is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Michael Biggs is Associate Professor of Sociology at Oxford University and the author of a series of important studies of pediatric gender medicine in the UK. The studies created much of the evidentiary foundation now on the academic record about the still very young field of pediatric gender medicine today. The publicity surrounding his research in turn served as the impetus for the governmental inquiry into that country’s only pediatric gender clinic, culminating in the issuance of an order shuttering the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service in July of 2022. Biggs’ studies revealed, among other things, that a longitudinal study launched by the Tavistock into the effects of puberty blockers on gender dysphoric youth had resulted in increasing levels of depression and suicidality in those whose psychic distress the drugs were ostensibly being used to relieve. The service hid the results that proved that the ongoing practice was harmful on balance and continued undeterred by evidence with the dramatic expansion of the practice outside of the research context that was its initial pretext to be permitted at all. In other words, Biggs had proven that the Tavistock knew it was doing harm when it practiced “gender affirming care.” Thank you for reading Year Zero. This post is public so feel free to share it.Biggs began his investigations into gender ideology soon after being admonished by an American student in a graduate seminar he led that featured discussion of a Guardian article on the rising number of transgender identified youth. “Things were said in that discussion that should not have been have been said,” Biggs recalled the student warning him. “That was first my encounter with this kind of student woke activism, saying that we shouldn’t discuss things… As somebody whose job is to look into things and look into truth and look into reality, it's my job to probe that. If you tell me I can't look into something, that’s when I want to look into it.” It did not take long for Biggs to discover what was being hidden behind the demands not to look — a vast complex of spurious dogma and corrupted research that did not survive reasoned scrutiny. He has swiftly set about dismantling this corpus in dryly understated but ruthlessly unsparing prose. I met with Biggs at the Genspect: the Bigger Picture conference in Killarney, Ireland in April, where he gave a presentation on his puberty blocker research. I had a wide-ranging conversation with him about the trajectory that brought him into the gender issue and the wider sea change in attitudes enabling the ongoing takeover of academia by acolytes of the ongoing non-electoral politics of institutional capture that we refer to at Year Zero as the Successor Ideology.As always, a full transcript will be made available to paid subscribers. I’ll also be turning this interview, along with close readings of some of his key papers into a feature story, and posting an abridged video version of this interview to both the Substack and my YouTube channel for the visual leaners in the audience… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wesleyyang.substack.com/subscribe

Year Zero is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Back in 2018, Adam Mortara repeatedly told Massachusetts District Court Judge Allison Burroughs that the case he was arguing sought to prove that Harvard had discriminated against Asian Americans, not to end the use of racial preferences in college admissions. Last week, a 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court made scant reference to the underlying district court case in the course of ruling that the use of race as a factor in college admissions was constitutionally impermissible. The landmark ruling in Students for Fair Admissions vs Harvard University provides an authoritative declaration by the highest court in the land that the United States has a colorblind constitution. The declaration arrives at the very moment when the critique of colorblindness has obtained hegemony within our educational and cultural apparatuses, serving as the predicate for a cascade of increasingly brazen violations of civil rights law undertaken by schools, governments, hospitals, and major corporations. I talk to Mortara about how we got from the original district court case to the end of affirmative action and whether the powerful elite consensus generative of so much lawless action in recent years will be brought to heel by this ruling. Thank you for reading Year Zero. This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wesleyyang.substack.com/subscribe

Joseph Burgo is a psychoanalyst and author and a co-director of Genspect, an organization representing thousands of parents of children caught up in the ongoing transgender social contagion. The organizatioin now seeks to supplant the World Professional Association of Transgender Health as an authoritative source of guidance for how to deal with gender dysphoric youth. Burgo gave a talk at the Genspect: the Bigger Picture conference in April, held concurrently and in the same city as the annual gathering of the European branch of WPATH, titled Autogynephilia, and the Sexualization of Shame which I published at this Substack last month. We had a conversation presented here in podcast form, soon to be posted at the Year Zero YouTube channel, which I encourage everyone to follow, as I’ll be posting videos there more regularly. As always, full transcripts of audio interviews are available to paid subscribers. Year Zero is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Some excerpts: Wesley YangLet’s talk about the standard definition of what autogynephilia is. How did we come to know that this was a condition at all and what is it?Joseph BurgoIt's very simple, it's men's sexual arousal at the idea or image of themselves as a woman. They are what we used to think as fetishistic cross-dressers — men who dress up in women's clothes and get off on it sexually. We know this from Ray Blanchard, who came up with the two types of transsexuals, the homosexual transsexual and the autogynephilic transsexual. Mike Bailey wrote about it, and Anne Lawrence did an exhaustive study on autogynephilia. What I find really frustrating is that these histories are really accounts of a fetish. I think of what Anne Lawrence wrote as the account of a fetish. It’s all about the fetish — the history of the fetish, when it appeared, how it affects their sex life and their relationships, with no sense that it means something. I mentioned in my paper that Anne Lawrence had collected all this data, and then deleted the lengthy family histories of these guys, as if it were peripheral to her study. I find it enormously frustrating. But I do think that's the way the mental health profession is these days. The idea that symptoms have meaning, that they might have an unconscious significance that can be sorted out; that it's a way of resolving internal conflict, or it represents some defensive compromise. People don't think that way anymore, I do feel kind of like a dinosaur these days.Wesley YangIn liberal enclaves like this, especially in ones that are surrounded by red hinterlands, they just accept the next new thing immediately. They don't question them. “Yeah, being born in the wrong body? That makes perfect sense to us.”Were you already in tension and crisis with peers and with the school administration as a result?Joseph BurgoWe didn't have much to do with the school administration. I was set back, and I didn't really know how to cope with this. I approached the people that I thought would help. I think I speak for parents all over America who are having exactly this experience: the mental health professionals will tell you that you need to affirm your child's identity, and you're a bigot. We consulted with the endocrinologist just to get an idea of what the reality was of these drugs. I said to her, just in passing, that it's kind of frustrating that I can't find anybody who's willing to look at the mental health aspects of this, what else might be going on. She looked at me with utter contempt, and said, “You’re not going to find that.” Like, “What an outlandish idea that there's a meaning to these symptoms.” It was really humiliating and awful.Wesley YangIncredible. You're a credentialed medical professional within this field, a colleague, and you have standing within that community. The consensus had coalesced to the point where your reflexive belief that, “of course, no one is born in the wrong body,” had already made you a pariah.Joseph BurgoTotally. This has a chilling effect on the profession. A number of people at the conference talked about this, and I know lots of people who won't go anywhere near gender because it's just too fraught. Or they've jumped on the affirmative bandwagon and have built practices affirming children, which is unconscionable to me, but they do it.Wesley YangThere are many states that have bans, I guess North Carolina doesn’t, on what they call conversion therapy. Meaning if you help a child be comfortable in their own body, you are converting them from this fleeting psychological sense that they might be a member of the opposite sex, which we're going to reify and entrench as if it's their true identity and any deviation from it is a crime.Joseph BurgoWhich is an absolutely insane position. It’s actually the opposite of what's true. One of the things I'm very upset about is that a lot of these gender nonconforming kids who would grow up to be gay or lesbian are being converted to trans. That's the real conversion therapy. I used to sit on the board of directors and was an officer and friends with everybody at my LGBT center where I live. When I dove into this space, I gave them an article I'd written and I said, “Do you want me to step down?” These are my friends and they said, “Yes, please go away.” They’d all jumped on board with the trans thing. It's the LGBT Center but now everything is trans. This was my big question: what if they're gay and not trans. And I'm treated like, “Go away.”Wesley YangYou’re still able to practice. They didn't cancel and destroy you, or they didn’t try to, or they didn’t succeed at it.Joseph BurgoThe fortunate thing is that I'm at a point in my career where I have enough money. I’m in private practice. They can't really cancel me. What are they going do to me?Joseph BurgoAnd it justifies any kind of violence on your behalf, coming from you. The book I want to write next is really an update of Lasch. He diagnosed America famously as suffering from a narcissistic disorder. I think what we've got now is a culture that suffers from borderline personality disorder. My most recent essay, Living In An As If World, looks at the way this kind of detachment from reality, this “as if” existence that we're living where you can just make it up as you go along, is leading to detachment from reality, but also, increasingly, borderline behavior where borderline rage, vicious assaults, attempts to destroy people, which is kind of what borderlines are like, is widespread. It dominates Twitter, for sure. Twitter is like nonstop borderline rage all the time. I do think there's a cultural pathology that's gotten much, much worse. Even though I say the tide has turned, I think, “Can we really pull out? Can we pull back when the society is this ill?” I don't know.Wesley YangWhat is borderline personality disorder and how do you see it manifesting in the culture?Joseph BurgoThe personality disorders, particularly borderline personality disorder, are characterized by an unstable sense of self that vacillates back and forth between feeling like you’re superior and feeling like you're trash. It’s unstable emotional states, frequent outbursts of rage, when you are challenged or when you aren't validated. These people are prone to various kinds of addictions. They have a hard time forming realistic and lasting relationships. They tend to blow up their friendships and family relationships. These features sound, to me, a lot like the way trans rights activists behave. They really are the embodiment of a cluster B personality disorder, particularly borderline personality disorder. If you take it just on the way people respond to one another in space, the way people will be enraged about nothing and take other people down. They will feel slighted and go off in an explosive way. I think social media really is characterized by borderline kinds of communication. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wesleyyang.substack.com/subscribe

Year Zero is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.A small group of writers attended two conferences on gender held concurrently in Killarney, Ireland in April. One was the annual meeting of the European affiliate of the World Professional Association of Transgender Health, known as EPATH. The other was the first gathering of an upstart organization called Genspect, which declared itself a rival to WPATH by scheduling a conference right down the road. Genspect urges an open-ended and exploratory approach to gender distress that contrasts with the immediate affirmation and push to medicalize that characterizes the WPATH model. Eliza Mondegreen wrote two reports on those conferences. Lisa Selin Davis did the same. Corinna Cohn, who began a course of estrogen at 18 and underwent sex reassignment surgery at 19, is the author of a Washington Post op-ed describing transition regret and has been active in seeking a carefully gatekept diagnostic protocol for gender dysphoric patients. Cohn testified before the Texas State Senate in support of a ban on pediatric gender medicine, telling Texas lawmakers “My heart breaks for the young people who are being lied to by well-meaning enablers, as they will need to learn the same painful lesson that I learned.” The lawmakers that Cohn addressed voted to approve passage of the ban on medically transitioning minors that Cohn had urged them to support. Readers of both Davis’ and Mondegreen’s post on the EPATH conference know they arrived at very different assessments of the event, with Davis finding grounds to be encouraged and hopeful, while Mondegreen came away with a bleaker prospect. I will also be weighing in on what I thought and felt while witnessing the inauguration of a new chapter in the unfolding story of the Twilight Zone-like unreality that has enveloped the Western world. In this chapter, the forces of reason and reality begin to challenge the enormous agglomeration of wealth, power, and influence that has been deployed on behalf of the obscurantism and error that currently masquerades as the vanguard of humanity. Prior to the composition of those pieces, Davis, Mondegreen, Cohn, and I met on the last night of the Genspect conference to debrief and share our impressions. There is a spontaneity and immediacy to these exchanges worth experiencing even for those who have already read Mondegreen’s and Davis’ posts. Audio is free to listen to; paid subscribers have access to a transcript. I’ll also be releasing an abridged version of the exchange on YouTube and Twitter. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wesleyyang.substack.com/subscribe

This is an abridged, 15-minute excerpt of my conversation with Boston College professor of political science Shep Melnick posted for paid subscribers only. Become a paid subscriber to hear the rest of this episode, read the transcript, and maintain access to a growing archive of independent study sessions.This is the fourth episode in the Syllabus series, wherein I do a deep dive into a subject with an academic expert.R. Shep Melnick, Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr. Professor of American Politics at Boston College and co-chair of the Harvard Program on Constitutional Government, has put together a syllabus of readings that we will be working through on the subscriber-only Syllabus podcast series. Every few weeks we’ll do another reading together.This week, we’re discussing Samuel Huntington, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Harvard University Press, 1983), chs. 1-3.Next episode we will be reading: Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, trans. and ed, Delba Winthrop and Harvey C. Mansfield (University of Chicago Press, 2000), Vol. II, Part I, chs. 1-2; Part II, chs. 1-8; Part IV, ch. 6. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wesleyyang.substack.com/subscribe