Linkage

Dr. Maggie Carpenter was indicted today on charges of “criminal abortion by means of abortion-inducing drugs,” a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison. If Dr. Carpenter’s name sounds familiar, it’s because she was also recently targeted by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

[…]

But Louisiana district attorney Tony Clayton didn’t just bring charges against Carpenter—he also arrested and indicted the patient’s mother, who obtained the pills. Clayton claims the woman coerced her daughter into having an abortion, but as the Louisiana Illuminator points out, “coerced abortion” was not cited in the indictment.

[…]

This case really does have precisely what conservatives have been looking for—and everything I’ve warned about since Roe was overturned. I started raising the alarm over anti-abortion messaging around ‘coercion,’ for example, in 2023. That’s when the Charlotte Lozier Institute started to suggest Republicans use ‘coercion’ in their policies and cases because “no one is openly in favor of coerced abortions.” The tactic has only grown since.

Similarly, Republicans have been especially eager to restrict teenagers’ access to abortion: Both Tennessee and Idaho passed laws recently that made it a crime to help a teen obtain an abortion in any way. And when three Republican AGs brought their most recent case against the FDA over mifepristone, they focused in on revoking access for teens, out of supposed fear for their “developing reproductive systems.”

Finally, Republican AGs have been on the lookout for a case with an unsympathetic defendant. A mother who coerced her daughter into an abortion is a perfect victim for conservatives’ anti-abortion agenda. (Whether she actually coerced the teen or not.) We also saw this tactic in Idaho, when the state brought its first ‘abortion trafficking’ charges against a mother and son who had coerced the son’s girlfriend into an out-of-state abortion.

In short: The Louisiana AG clearly thinks she has found a winner of a case that she can bring to the Supreme Court to target out-of-state abortion providers. And I think if we do a little bit of digging, we’ll find that it isn’t just Murrill behind this move—but a national anti-abortion strategy backed by extremist billionaire dollars. 

It is impossible to say why this book is currently going viral at this moment in time and why it may feel particularly relevant to a workforce of millions of people who have suddenly been asked to agree to be “loyal” and work under the quasi leadership of the world’s richest man, have been asked to take a buyout that may or may not exist, have had their jobs repeatedly denigrated and threatened, have suddenly been required to return to office, have been prevented from spending money, have had to turn off critical functions that help people, and have been asked to destroy years worth of work and to rid their workplaces of DEI programs. Maybe it's worth wondering why the most popular post in a subreddit for federal workers is titled “To my fellow Feds, especially veterans: we’re at war.” 

Republicans for years have tried to legislate their personal beliefs about life beginning at conception. They’ve introduced versions of a bill called the Life at Conception Act 13 times since 2011. These efforts have almost certainly influenced the “conception” language in Trump’s latest executive action.

Dr. Richard Bribiescas, an anthropology professor at Yale University and the president of the Human Biology Association, said the order’s definitions of “sex” and “gender” ignore all kinds of variations that take place in human development.

“Woman/man, boy/girl are gender identities that do not necessarily align with biological characteristics of sex,” he said in an email. “Genders are components of human variation that are influenced by culture, identity, and many other non-biological factors. To illustrate the difference between sex and gender, we can talk about male/female chimpanzees (our closest evolutionary relative) but it would be non-sensical to discuss chimpanzee women, men, boys or girls.”

Trump’s definitions of “female” and “male” are also flawed, said Bribiescas, because he is tying them to something called “anisogamy” in biology, or the observation that females of some species, including humans, tend to produce larger gametes (the reproductive cells that come from germ cells) compared to males.

Anisogamy is not a universal rule in biology, he said. But Trump’s executive order defines females as people belonging to the sex that produces “the large reproductive cell” and males belonging to the sex that produces “the small reproductive cell.”

The size of a person’s gametes is “just one characteristic among many (ie., genetic, hormonal, developmental, physical) that is used to describe sex,” Bribiescas said. “Clearly, this order is not fully informed by current biological science.”

In short:

The Queensland government has announced a review into the evidence for stage one and two hormone therapies for children with gender dysphoria.

While the review is underway, a pause will be placed on new patients under the age of 18 from receiving hormone therapy in the state's health system.

What's next?

Health Minister Tim Nicholls says the pause will remain in effect until the government considers and acts on the outcomes of the review.

[last updated 23/01/25]

Wednesday 10 April 2024 saw the long-awaited publication of the final report of the Cass Review. This report was commissioned by NHS England, and provides a review of evidence plus recommendations regarding gender identity services for children and young people.

On publication, the Cass Review’s findings and recommendations were welcomed by the majority of UK media outlets, NHS England, the Editor-in-Chief of medical journal the BMJ, conversion therapy proponents such as SEGM, Sex Matters and Transgender Trend, plus spokespeople for the Conservative and Labour parties, who promised to ensure it will be “fully implemented”.

Conversely, the Review has been extensively criticised by trans community organisations, medical practitioners, plus scholars working in fields including transgender medicine, epidemiology, neuroscience, psychology, women’s studies, feminist theory, and gender studies. They have highlighted problems with the Cass Review that include substandard and inconsistent use of evidence, non-evidenced claims, unethical recommendations, overt prejudice, pathologisation, and the intentional exclusion of service users and trans healthcare experts from the Review process.

This post provides a round-up of links to written commentary and evidence regarding problems with the Cass Review, plus quotes pulled from each. In light of these, I believe that it would be extremely harmful to implement the Review’s findings in full. 

From the authors of "People Who Don't Understand Magic Trick More Likely To Be Impressed By It".

People with less knowledge about AI are actually more open to using the technology. We call this difference in adoption propensity the “lower literacy-higher receptivity” link.

This link shows up across different groups, settings and even countries. For instance, our analysis of data from market research company Ipsos spanning 27 countries reveals that people in nations with lower average AI literacy are more receptive towards AI adoption than those in nations with higher literacy.

Similarly, our survey of US undergraduate students finds that those with less understanding of AI are more likely to indicate using it for tasks like academic assignments. 

In this paper we provide an in-depth analysis of Pakistan’s macroeconomic situation.
We argue that although the stabilisation program signed with the IMF in November 2008 could
restore some "macroeconomic stability", it will depress the investment and unemployment
outlook, and it will not create the conditions that Pakistan needs for sustainable long-term
development. We put forward the foundations for a sustainable macroeconomic program for
Pakistan. This contains policy advice that differs markedly from that of the IMF. The essence of
the proposal is the consideration that a government that issues its own currency faces no financial
constraints or solvency risk. This implies that the usual “government budget constraint” has no
economic content. Based on this, we examine the potential role that the country’s fiscal and
monetary policies could play in promoting growth and in generating full employment and price
stability.

I have had the notable displeasure of witnessing the evolution of anti-trans bills and the relentless attacks on transgender rights over the past five years. For much of that time, Republicans, buoyed by anti-trans organizations funded by billionaires and amplified by media outlets like The New York Times, have operated under the guise that their efforts were not “anti-trans.” Instead, they claimed to be “just asking questions,” “questioning the science,” or “engaging in a debate” about transgender people—as if these debates were somehow divorced from the rampant anti-trans animus that is undeniably pervasive in those circles.

They never truly were, of course, but to gain a foothold in American politics, they maintained a façade of concern for the welfare of transgender people. This is why, when reading the original Arkansas trans care ban, you won’t find overt charges that transgender people are lesser human beings who deserve to be erased in the purpose section. Instead, you’ll encounter pseudo-scientific statements like “the risks of gender transition procedures far outweigh any benefits” and “the majority come to identify with their biological sex.” Both are demonstrably false, but carefully crafted to carry a veneer of scientific credibility—providing a shield against accusations that such bans are rooted in hatred toward transgender people.

That all changed yesterday. President Trump, in justifying his transgender military ban, leaned on a new argument for why such an action restricting the rights of transgender people was necessary: that transgender people are lesser human beings, dishonorable liars, and worse.

[…]

This marks a chilling and undeniable shift. The attacks on transgender people are no longer cloaked in the faux respectability of “evidence,” “science,” or “protecting kids.” They never truly were, but now even the pretense has been abandoned. The thin veneer provided by New York Times op-eds, SEGM’s pseudo-scientific “reviews,” and the disingenuous claims of debate is no longer required. Instead, the justification is laid bare in black and white: transgender people are “dishonorable,” “liars,” “false.” The language is stark, deliberate, and unmistakable—it dehumanizes us. This is the very rhetoric historically used to justify atrocity.

So how would anyone know whether an embryo belongs to a sex that produces eggs or sperm at conception?

Anti-abortion rhetoric defines conception as happening at fertilization. [The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the leading US authority on reproductive health, defines “conception” as happening when a fertilized egg implants in the uterus.] We’re not even a multicelled embryo yet at fertilization. At that moment, does an embryo have sexed chromosomes? Yes. Are they knowable with our current technology? No. In IVF, for people who do pre-implantation genetic testing, we typically wait until at least day three, if not day five, until the sex chromosomes are even measurable. And is it a point at which the embryo is even producing gametes? No. That’s still months away.

But the executive order says these definitions should be used to determine which sex marker should go on a passport or whether a prisoner should be incarcerated in a men’s or a women’s prison.

This is what’s so stupid about it, but also what’s so dangerous. What is the enforcement plan? Are we going to test people’s gonads to see what type of gametes they produce? Because if the obsession is at the level of gametes, the tests are much more invasive than a sex chromosome test.

Nor will there be an actual way to logically enforce it, because it’s an illogical order. I think what will happen is it will be basically about punishing people in the worst way possible, treating people as poorly as possible, and creating as much discord and mayhem as possible.

This is mostly going to be around one sex category: the female sex category. They will only be doing this toward anybody who might fall into the woman category or might self-report as being in the woman category. I think Trump, in whatever terrible language is available to him, is trying to control women and control people he perceives to be in the woman category. A lot of this is keeping the category of women “pure”—and also, obviously, about doing immense harm to trans people.

There’s also a very racial, white supremacist thing going on here with this “defending women.” It’s a very old idea—it appears in travelogues, early writings of Europeans, as well as in the United States when they started encountering North American Indigenous folks, and the way that they thought about enslaved peoples. There was this belief that in the “lower races,” men and women were less different, and that in the “higher races,” there were more differences between women and men. This was about saying men and women are differentiated, clear, nonoverlapping categories because that makes us a more evolved people.

Whether it’s Labor working to get transmission lines and offshore wind up and running or the Coalition working to create a nuclear industry from scratch, it will take a strong government with the capacity to articulate a plan, and the legal, financial and human resources to make it a reality.

All of these requirements were met when we constructed the Snowy Mountains Scheme, a decades-long federal government initiative undertaken in cooperation with Victoria and NSW.

Are they still in place? Not yet. Government capacity to act has been eroded over decades of neoliberalism. Particularly at the national level, public service expertise has been hollowed out and replaced by reliance on private consulting firms.

To rebuild the federal government’s capacity to act will require recreating the public service as a career which attracts the best and brightest graduates – many of whom currently end up in the financial sector.