Year Zero with Wesley Yang 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.


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Today'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…

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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.

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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 District
BREAKING: Trans Activist Sent To Women’s Prison To Serve Life Sentence For Slaughter Of California Family
CANADA: Man Who Raped Infant Quietly Moved to Prison with Mother-Baby Unit After Transgender Claim
EXCLUSIVE: Man Who Beat Two Babies To Death Allegedly Awaiting Breast Implants At California Women’s Prison
Top Academic Behind Fetish Site Hosting Child Sexual Abuse Fantasy, Push To Revise WPATH Guidelines
Violent Child Rapist, Murderer Now a Featured ‘Feminist, LGBTQ Advocate’
EXCLUSIVE: Australian Woman Left Disabled Following Attack By Trans Activist
Violent Transgender Killer Completes Sentence for Torture, Murder of 13-Year-Old Child
Sorority Members Made to Change Definition of ‘Woman’ to Admit 6’2 Trans-Identified Male



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Corinna Cohn is a software developer living in Indiana who was among the very first teenagers to go on cross-sex hormones in adolescence, at the age of 15 in 1993. He was inducted into a cross-sex identity on the very first transsexual-interest Internet Relay Chat groups in the early 1990’s and underwent vaginoplasty at the age of 19. After decades of attempting to live as a woman, he reached an acknowledgment that he insists every other person who undertakes the same quixotic endeavor will eventually acknowledge to be true: “Their sex is what they were born as. Everybody knows if you're born male, you're always male. If you're born female, you're always female. There's no disputing that.”
Having made irrevocable choices with his body while too young to understand the lifelong consequences that would flow from it, Cohn continues to take estrogen to this day (tied as he is to the medical leash that all those who undergo transgender medical procedures invariably bind themselves), and prefers to be properly sexed, but will humor those who insist on using the cross-sex pronouns that correspond to the gender presentation that attends a lifetime of estrogen intake. He is an eloquent writer and speaker who has extracted all the wisdom there is to derive from the misadventure on the far end of human extremity on which he launched himself while still a callow, impetuous young man. He has watched with dismay as this misadventure has been normalized and marketed to children by the very authorities that should be protecting them from practices that will do them harm.
He has devoted himself to ensuring that no child repeats the mistake he made — one that no child, in his considered judgment, can possibly be competent to make, particularly in the context of a pediatric clinical system that has abandoned all gatekeeping on principle. He has devoted himself to holding at bay the totalitarian overwriting of reality that would have to be executed to make the world safe for such damaged children — a project to which the ruling powers of the Western world have explicitly pledged themselves. We spoke for two and a half hours in July.
—Wesley Yang

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Excerpts:
On the state of pediatric gender medicine under the affirmative care model
“If you'd asked me four years ago, should children be allowed to transition? I would have said, “well, I think that there are some young people, not children, obviously, but young people — maybe 16, maybe even 14, who are so clear that they are so unhappy in their sexed body and have so much dysphoria and have so much dissonance with their bodies, that this might be the best thing for them. I would have said that a few years ago.
I still believe that we might find that there are some diagnostic criteria that give us some confidence that somebody who's a 16 year old might have a better life experience starting this.
But I don't believe that there's a single practicing gender clinician, or gender therapist or gender affirming social worker — I don't believe that there's a single person who's practicing right now…Let me let me put it that way. There might be people here and there. There is nobody who's part of a functioning system anywhere in the United States, where a young person can be exposed to this in a way that centers the needs of that young person. There's not a functioning system anywhere.”

The Moral Obligation that the Affirmative Care Model Shirks
Wesley: Can we muster the authority to say, “No, this isn't good for you. And we're allowed to say that, and that's actually our duty.”
Corinna: It is our duty. That is our duty! We owe others. We have social responsibilities. We owe others. And for these young people, we owe them protection and we owe them the truth. They deserve it.”

What’s Really at Stake
It's so frustrating. It is s

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Leor Sapir is a scholar at the Manhattan Institute who has become a leading figure in the ongoing effort to bring accountability to a medical field that has run off the rails.
In this episode of the Year Zero podcast, which was recorded in July, we discuss the fast evolving state of the legislative bans on child sex trait modification procedures and the wider project to bring an ongoing medical scandal to heel.

Excerpts:
Parallels between the opioid epidemic and pediatric gender medicine
“There are really interesting parallels between the opioid epidemic and the gender medicine issue. In both cases, for example, it started with medical authority, citing very, very low quality studies, claiming that the use of opioids in cancer patients could be scaled at large, and that the same type of risk benefit ratio would would apply to other types of patients — patients who are not, for example, terminally ill, or even patients with a history of addictions and patterns of addictive behavior. And that, of course, turned out not to be the case. The medical associations got involved and also fueled the opioid epidemic, sometimes for good intentions, sometimes, as in the case of the American Pain Society, because they were influenced by Big pharma money. So there, I think in the case of the opioid epidemic, there was just a clear villain, and the villain was Purdue Pharma. And it was a villain that the American Left loves to hate. Big corporate interests that make money off of health care. Here, I wouldn't want to argue that there aren't kind of pharma interests involved in general medicine, of course, there are, it's a big business, and it's growing too. And we have some evidence that clinics and hospitals that do the procedures as opposed to the psychotherapy get a net benefit from them. And they also, of course, boost their scores on the Corporate Equality Index, and, you know, ESG, and all that stuff. So there's definitely a lot of institutional self interest in doing so called gender affirming care. But I wouldn't argue that the financial motives are primary here. I think that they they definitely play a role. But I would say that the ideology is by far and away the most important factor. But in any case, there are strong parallels to the opioid epidemic. And, you know, this is another example of how we don't learn our lessons.

On the capture of American policymaking by the NGO Borg
“The ACLU never has to face voters. It's accountable only to its own funders. And those funders are increasingly a small number of deep pocketed foundations, individuals or corporations that give money. And often these people either don't know what's going on or they are themselves highly ideological and out of tune with what what most Americans agree on.
And so the first problem is that with the ACLU, there's no mechanism of accountability between these interest groups and the general public in a way that there is with political parties in the general public. The second problem is that these interest groups almost by definition, are going to get more and more extreme over time, right? Because they usually they're founded for a certain purpose, they have a strong sense of mission. And that sense of mission tends to attract people who are ideologically aligned with that mission. So if it's the ACLU — first of all civil liberties, then it was civil rights, now it's what you might call — what you have called “Successor Ideology.” If it's environmentalism, who's gonna go work at the Environmental Defense Fund, who is going to go work at at the UN — all these organizations: environmentalists, people who are very, very gung ho about environmentalism, and importantly, people who are willing to impose very costly policies on the public, because the kind of trade offs that they're willing to accept are much

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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.”


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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