Ben Sears

The evidence base for medical transition sits somewhere between homeopathy and lobotomy. I’ve been writing this piece in my mind ever since 2017 as I became aghast at the shoddy, badly designed studies propping up these irreversible interventions. I studied for a masters and then a PhD to make sure I fully understood the issue. It turns out that I did; there is no robust replicable evidence base for medical transition, whether for children or adults. gript.ie/finnish-study-…

THE LIMITS OF BODILY AUTONOMY, by Kathleen Stock (@Docstockk) Infanticide should be fully decriminalised for mothers. Cases like those of Constance Marten — whose dead baby was found in a shed, placed in a plastic bag — should never come to court. Only a tiny number of mothers kill their infants each year. Those that do are inevitably vulnerable and gravely traumatised. Putting these women through police investigation and prosecution simply damages them further. Much like the old defence of domestic violence, the police should just stay out of it. Replace the general term ‘babies’ with ‘babies still in the womb’, and this was the underwhelming shape of an argument offered by the abortion provider, the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) this week, defending the parliamentary reform that recently decriminalised late term abortion for women, right up until birth. On this approach, the death of a baby is only ever something that happens to a woman and never something she does. Yet how can women seeking late-term abortions for healthy babies both be disempowered, traumatised wrecks, but also clear-sighted rational actors whose decisions society should respect? Read more below ⬇️ buff.ly/g4tUJXW

HOW LOUIS THEROUX OUTMANNED THE MANOSPHERE, by Kathleen Stock (@DocStockk) For people who talk endlessly about escaping ‘the matrix’ — meaning the 9-5 grind, labouring away fruitlessly for the benefit of shadowy elites — manosphere influencers, ironically, are almost entirely made up of other people’s projections. They pine desperately for public attention, and are constantly conjuring up ways of getting more. In Louis Theroux’s latest documentary, everyone is trapped in degrading roles, passive in the face of their own limbic systems — the streamers themselves; the half-naked OnlyFans girls straddling them for the camera; the liberal feminists and fat-positive influencers wheeled on to be horribly insulted; the viewers doing the slack-jawed scroll in their bedrooms, dreaming of having big channels one day too. This urge to be famous starts young. For every massive streamer account, there are thousands of unknown ones made by children, where pre-pubescent wannabes film themselves gaming or reacting to videos. In a parallel universe, boys like this grow up to have happily ordinary lives, unnoticed by the all-devouring algorithm. In this one, though, they get caught up in a freak show, dutifully becoming pitiful monsters. Read more below ⬇️ buff.ly/M4mpqgJ

Just finished the @louistheroux manosphere doc. He definitely made them look silly at times (which isn’t hard tbf). But ultimately these guys don’t care how they come across. The clicks and attention are all they care about. What the doc never really interrogates is whether their “influence” is actually as large as people assume. My intuition is that their content is just slop for low IQ teenagers and not really that influential.

My latest for Reality's Last Stand. open.substack.com/pub/colinwrigh…

‘The idea that “gender dysphoria” represents a genuine mismatch between biological sex and “gender” has gone unchallenged for far too long.’ @polblonde 👇 buff.ly/ViI924o

THE FEMINISATION OF AUTISM, by Kathleen Stock (@Docstockk) For decades, the developmental psychologist Uta Frith endorsed the idea of an autistic spectrum in her celebrated work on the condition. But in a new interview, she says that ‘the spectrum has collapsed’. Too many people with importantly varying characteristics are being included, and the concept is no longer a useful clinical tool. She proposes ejecting a large subgroup of people from the autism club: those diagnosed during teens or later, without clear intellectual or communicative impairments, but who exhibit ‘hypersensitivity’ and ‘feel highly anxious in social situations’. Most of these, perhaps needless to say, are female. The most recent wave of expansion of the autism category has been towards conditions emerging in female adolescents that bear scarcely any similarity to the original archetype at all. This was the great feminisation of autism, and it really hasn’t helped. Read more below ⬇️ buff.ly/ENx3fZu