The Bluestocking 375: Evita, Skrmetti, Wolfe

Not bam bam bam bam bam bam, but bama bampa barama bam bammity bam bam bammity barampa

Happy Friday!

This week was the final Strong Message Here before the series regenerates in the autumn, and it’s a report card for Keir Starmer’s first year in office.

Also, I went to the new production of Evita, and it was Peak Jamie Lloyd: confetti cannons, fake blood, men in their scanties, a bit where someone gets filmed backstage like in Sunset Boulevard, Romeo & Juliet and Much Ado.

pls note the chap in his pants covered in paint for no reason

Would I recommend it? Not unless you already know the story of Eva Peron, because things like “plot” and “characterisation” are not what Big Jamie is all about. But if you like people twerking in monochrome smocks while Tim Rice grapples to find a rhyme for “crossword”—he’s got you covered.

Helen

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The Liberal Misinformation Bubble About Youth Gender Medicine (The Atlantic, gift link)

At first, Strangio dodged the question, saying that research shows that blockers and hormones reduce “depression, anxiety, and suicidality”—that is, suicidal thoughts. (Even that is debatable, according to reviews of the research literature.) But when Alito referenced a systematic review conducted for the Cass report in England, Strangio conceded the point. “There is no evidence in some—in the studies that this treatment reduces completed suicide,” he said. “And the reason for that is completed suicide, thankfully and admittedly, is rare, and we’re talking about a very small population of individuals with studies that don’t necessarily have completed suicides within them.”

Here was the trans-rights movement’s greatest legal brain, speaking in front of the nation’s highest court. And what he was saying was that the strongest argument for a hotly debated treatment was, in fact, not supported by the evidence.

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I decided, after the Skrmetti judgement—which essentially upheld Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers and hormones for children with gender dysphoria—that it was time to write on this topic again. I was interested in what that case (and a similar one in Alabama that didn’t reach the Supreme Court) revealed about the way that US campaign groups and medical bodies have strayed from the evidence on youth gender medicine.

As an addendum to this piece, if you’re interested in this subject and want to be shocked, read James Cantor’s unsealed report on internal discussions inside WPATH, the body that drew up guidelines on the standards of care for under-18s. Behind the scenes, people there were talking about “opportunism by inexperienced and sometimes dangerous providers”; “how the door has swung away from more rigorous assessments in general over time”; and how “there is no agreement on this within pediatric endocrinologists”.

And then, from their colleagues, comes the politicised pushback: “I am concerned about language such as ‘insufficient evidence,’ ‘limited data,’ etc…I say this from the perspective of current legal challenges in the US.” In other words, we can’t admit the lack of evidence for this treatments or red states will use that to support bans on it.

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From a personal perspective, the reaction to this piece was pretty revealing about the incentives in the modern media environment—i.e., the push towards taking a trenchant, tribal position and using that to dunk on your political enemies. On Bluesky I was accused of having blood on my hands, of being a liar, the instrument of a genocide, an obsessive freak etc.

On Twitter, meanwhile, I had Jordan Peterson telling me that I was very late to realising the lies of the left and should go to a nunnery and repent. (His denunciation ended with “you and your poisoned apples”, which I’m guessing was a reference to Eve rather than Charli XCX.) An extraordinary number of people appeared to think this was the first time I had written on this topic, and therefore was not as brave as Peterson, JK Rowling, Helen Joyce etc etc etc. (I wrote my first pieces on child gender medicine in 2016.) There was a similar tone on Mumsnet, where my writing was deemed to be insufficiently brave: “on the fence”, “ineffectual and slightly weaksauce”, “annoyingly wishy washy”.

This is a microcosm of the problem of working in the mainstream, now. You’re not fiery enough for either side, and some people try to destroy your career for covering an issue at all. Is it any wonder so many writers and podcasters succumb to audience capture?

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Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash

Bluestocking recommends: James Marriot did a rather good list of perfect holiday novels in his last newsletter, so I thought I would recommend three books I think are the perfect accompaniment to a swimming pool or long plane ride. Mine are significantly lowerbrow than James’s because that’s how I roll.

The Darling Buds of May series. Clearly, Britain loves characters like Pop Larkin—he’s very similar to Delboy Trotter and Rooster from Jerusalem. The geezer, the wheeler-dealer, the spiv who doesn’t pay taxes but is endlessly kind to his neighbours. The books are filthier than the TV series: from memory, one of them begins with a startling sex scene in which Ma Larkin’s breasts are compared, favorably, to fresh loaves of bread. (Quite startingly for Pop, too, since he promptly has a heart attack.)

The Little World of Don Camillo. Normally I would run a mile from a book that had actual Jesus as a character. But I have always loved these stories of an Italian priest and his rival, the Communist mayor Peppone. The one where Peppone wins the lottery and is terribly embarrassed because he supposedly doesn’t believe in private property is a hoot.

Hons and Rebels. You think you’ve been bored in the holidays? You’ve never been as bored as the Mitford girls, who invented a game that consisted only of pinching each other, harder and harder. Anything was better than watching the clock in their Oxfordshire mansion. No wonder so many of them became political extremists.

Gaudy Night. I love the Peter Wimsey detective stories so much I’ve just finished all four of the continuation novels written by Jill Paton Walsh (who may even, I have to say, be better at writing a Dorothy L. Sayers novel than Dorothy L. Sayers was). This one is from the middle of the series, but I wouldn’t worry about that, because it’s set in Oxford and it’s inexpressibly romantic.

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Quick Links

1. “When startled by a sudden movement or loud noise, they reacted with dramatic involuntary responses, such as leaping into the air, screaming, repeating words, or instantly obeying shouted commands.” When I first read about the Jumping Lumberjacks of Maine—thanks to the Browser—I assumed the condition was probably a mass psychogenic illness (previously known as mass hysteria). But there’s another possible explanation (Amusing Planet).

2. “In practical terms it’s like the government slapped a document in OneDrive called ‘HS2 Design.docx’ and gave edit rights to thousands of people across hundreds of organisations.” Martin Robbins on the HS2 reset (Substack).

3. The screenwriter Tony Tost points out that the tagline for Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is “defy the gods,” because we can’t really conceive of a hero who is following a rigid social order. Everyone has to be a rebel. Like I say in The Genius Myth, I think you can draw a link between this as a dominant pop culture narrative and, say, anti-vaxx sentiment.

4. “Writers on assignment were encouraged to FedEx luggage to their destination, rather than schlep it on the plane. A Vanity Fair writer, reporting a story in London, lived for a month with her husband and children at the Dorchester, the prestigious hotel overlooking Hyde Park; a separate room was reserved for their nanny on the Newhouse dime. . . . For its first issue, Portfolio paid Tom Wolfe a rumored $12 a word for an essay about hedge funders. Its first sentence read as follows: “Not bam bam bam bam bam bam, but bama bampa barama bam bammity bam bam bammity barampa.”” A new entry in my personal Damn I Got Into Journalism Too Late list (NYT, gift link).

5. The payoff at the end of that article is that the entire Conde empire is now underwritten by the IPO of Reddit, which is worth several billion.

See you next time!

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