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On Wednesday, Netflix released a new documentary looking at how Pornhub came to be and the controversies (and lawsuits) that ensued. Directed by Suzanne Hillinger, Money Shot: The Pornhub Story features interviews with both porn stars reliant on platforms like Pornhub and Onlyfans for income, as well as with the anti-trafficking activists who sought to stop the rampant exploitation, rape, and non-consensual imagery (including videos of minors) on the site.
The film begins with a cutesy complilation of porn stars sharing their first experiences with porn. A number of these stories are pre-internet, meaning they do sound quaint in comparison to what kids see now, at ever younger ages, online. We’re talking 80s Playboys and fairy tale-themed “erotic movies” on Cinemax. Even I found such things confusing and disturbing when I accidentally encountered them as a kid, but apparently people think this stuff is cute and kitschy nowadays — ah the fond childhood memories of adult sex. A young woman named Noelle Perdue, though, grew up in the internet age, and describes going onto Pornhub at 11 years old, where she discovered “an eight person geriatric gangbang” — more fitting of the modern day norm.
Perdue worked in the porn industry for a number of years — namely, she worked as a writer, producer, and talent acquirer at MindGeek. Despite this apparent conflict of interest, she served as a “consultant” on the Money Shot. Perdue appears not to be the only industry representative to have had input.
Though the documentary can claim to show “both sides,” the narrative is shaped by industry advocates disguised as “independent sex workers.” One interviewee, Asa Akira, is in fact Pornhub’s spokeperson and brand ambassador. The other porn performers interviewed may not literally have that job title, but are reliant on these kinds of sites for their income and are invested in ensuring their industry and the sites they profit from don’t get a bad rep or get shut down entirely.
While including industry voices in a documentary purporting to expose or at least delve into accusations of serious criminal activity and sexual exploitation is reasonable, allowing those invested in ensuring the industry is not shut down or that profit is not restricted in any way (say, by blocking consumers from using their credit cards on porn sites) to control the narrative is going to compromise the final result. No one working directly for Pornhub is going to admit the company and the industry as a whole profits from trafficking, exploitation, rape, and child porn.
Missing from the film are women who have left the porn industry, now free to tell the truth about their experiences; researchers who might offer data and insight into who goes into porn and why, mental health, STDs, and addiction in the industry; psychological or physical impacts on the women involved; and trafficking victims themselves. Even porn producers, as evidenced by Exodus Cry founder Benjamin Nolot’s series, Beyond Fantasy (in particular, the third episode in the series, “Hardcore,” which drops March 23), can offer insight into the manipulation, coercion, and sadism behind the scenes claimed as “consensual,” provided you ask the right questions. The producers could have asked the “consenting sex workers” featured about their pasts and experiences — how and why they ended up in porn, and what’s happened to them in the industry — but they chose not to.
The primary voices featured in the documentary who offer a critical view of the industry are connected to the anti-trafficking groups going after PornHub — namely Exodus Cry (founded by Nolot) and NCOSE — who are dismissed as Christian fundamentalists with ulterior motives.
Like many debates, the porn debate is treated as two-sided: there are the “sex workers” fighting for the right to sell sex legally, free from “censorship” (the little guy), and then there are the moralistic, anti-sex, religious conservatives who wish to repress sexuality and are campaigning against the little guy’s freedom.
We are offered “choice” or “no choice.” “Freedom” or “North Korea.” Pro-sex or anti-sex.
But this is not the story. It’s not even a story. In truth, porn is a multi billion dollar industry that uses a few “happy hookers” as politically convenient representatives to speak on their behalf, disguising the dark truth behind the sex trade.
There are many reasons to oppose the sex industry — including impact on users’ brains, mental health, and relationships, as well as impact on the women and girls in porn — yet most the critical are framed as “hating women’s bodies,” “trying to control women’s sexualities,” or “ being prudish/anti-sex.” Dismissing critics as religious extremists is always popular, as it scares off liberals and progressives from engaging with anti-porn arguments. Including voices like mine — a free speech and civil liberties advocate who comes from a leftist and feminist background and is far from “anti-sex” — complicates the narrative. Broadening context to include women’s stories about their pasts and experiences in the industry disrupts the simplified “consenting adult” narrative. Talking about men’s choices to consume abusive and dehumanizing pornography, or porn that sexualizes “teens” or childern is almost always left out of the conversation.
The “let adults do what they like” almost always applies to women, except when framed as “policing people’s sexualities,” which implies a form of thought policing, but conveniently excludes the fact that porn is not relegated to people’s imaginations.
Industry advocates are sure to restrict the discussion of disturbing categories like “teen” to one of “consenting adults” who are free to imagine whatever they like. Perdue claims the “teen” category “doesn’t necessarily refer to teenagers,” and that “it’s more in reference to a body type” — a rather genius defense, because it ignores the fact that sexualizing minors and encouraging men to masturbate to their degradation creates a market for actual teen porn and encourages men to view teen girls as sexual objects.
Siri Dahl, a porn performer featured extensively throughout the film, seems only to be concerned about categories like “teen,” in terms of finding “solutions to tagging” that don’t “police people’s sexualities, which they’re allowed to have because they’re a legal adult.” In other words, it’s not the content itself, it’s that the “teen” category doesn’t sound great on paper. Unfortunately, Pornhub’s customers love it, so what can you do, eh?
Just to hammer in the point, the producers include another performer, Cherie Deville (playing a creepily stepfordesque character), saying:
“We’re providing entertainment within the legal bounds for consenting adults, and within that buffet of pornographic content, that adult, if they choose to consume it, can choose… anything.”
It all felt incredibly rehearsed, as though Pornhub lawyers have fed lines to these women. By carefully presenting performers as “independent, empowered sex workers,” the film’s producers construct a conversation about “free choice,” and are able to avoid the fact porn sells abuse, objectification, and exploitation, regardless of “consent.” And that within that “consent” — those contracts signed, what happens on set involves a hell of a lot of coercion.
When we talk about porn, we aren’t talking about independents — we are talking about a massive, multi-billion dollar industry. Shoving “independent sex workers” to the forefront to pretend as though holding Pornhub execs to account is really an attack on these empowered women, just trying to get by so–please-be-nice-and-stop-talking-about-trafficking-it’s-awkward-for-us is gross.
I don’t know if the makers of Money Shot were simply naive, or if they had biased intentions from the get go, but they buy into the manufactured David and Goliath narrative full force.
The intent behind Money Shot is to argue that porn is a clean, happy industry full of enthusiastically consenting women, and that the “dark side” — child porn, trafficking, and nonconsensual content — is completely separate from that and only a tiny minority of the industry (in fact, they claim it’s not a part of the industry at all) — an accident led by bad actors who are dragging the industry’s reputation down unfairly.
This is not the case. The happy hooker fantasy has always only represented a tiny minority of women, and usually doesn’t tell their whole story anyway. The few stories of exploitation and abuse that make it into the mainstream represent only a sliver. Indeed, even the so-called “consenting” women tell horrific tales once they are free to do so and able to reflect back honestly.
~~~
The documentary does of course acknowledge that a few bad things went down on Pornhub.
MindGeek, the company that owns Pornhub, was sued by numerous plaintiffs who accused them of distributing and profiting from child pornography and nonconsensual sex videos. The company was undoubtedly aware that this content was displayed on Pornhub, as numerous women and teen girls had emailed them, desperate to have their images removed from the site, but the company was not pressed to do anything about it. Nonconsensual videos would stay up for months after complaints were filed, and when they were removed, they would immediately pop up again on the site.
MindGeek claimed it “instituted the most comprehensive safeguards in user-generated platform history,” but until the lawsuits had only 30 human moderators employed to monitor millions of videos on Pornhub and did not have any verification process in place for users uploading content. Even after a verification process was put into place (which women like DeVille and Perdue claimed “sex workers” were begging for, as it would resolve the problem of pesky rape videos popping up on the site), there was still no age or consent verification required for the women featured in the videos. Anyone with an ID could still upload what they liked.
~~~
In an article for Rolling Stone, a DeVille writes, “anti-sex-trafficking campaigns are anti-porn campaigns in disguise.” She complains that the “war on Pornhub is a proxy war to take down the entire legal sex work industry” and that “what they really want is to shut down Porn Valley.”
And honestly she’s right.
I don’t want to just stop child pornography or trafficking on Pornhub. I don’t want to just see Pornhub shut down on account of isolated incidences of rape and nonconsensual videos found on the site. I want to make it next to impossible to profit from pornography, because I want it to be next to impossible to profit from the exploitation, abuse, and dehumanization of women and girls. I don’t want to simply “take down” the “legal sex industry,” because of course much of what happens in the sex trade is not legal — I actually believe that the porn industry as a whole should be illegal. I do not think it should be legal to pay another person for sex or to profit by coercing another person to engage in sex acts.
Realistically, I don’t believe we can end porn or prostitution entirely. But we could make it impossible for companies like Pornhub to exist, make profiting from porn illegal, and ensure a porn set must comply with labour standards, including health and safety standards and laws against sexual harassment and assault, thereby rendering everything that happens on a porn set illegal.
One of the common threads throughout Money Shot was the one of the empowered independent performer, making her own content happily, from the comfort of her home, under attack by these attempts to go after trafficking and abuse in the industry. And while I feel very badly for women who feel dependent on porn for survival, I don’t feel bad for the women who could choose something else — who have the means, education, options, and privilege — but instead choose to shill for a vile industry responsible for the trauma of countless women and girls around the world. The idea that the horror of the industry should be accepted because one woman managed to buy a house with her earnings is not good enough for me.
Whether they intended to or not, the filmmakers did little more than produce propaganda for an industry that hardly needs a boost.
For further discussion of this film and the debate surrounding the industry, you can watch a conversation between Benji Nolot, Alix Aharon, and myself which aired live on YouTube Thursday, March 16th.
The post Money Shot’s big lie appeared first on Feminist Current.
Proponents of “transgenderism” would have us believe medical transition is the only path for children identifying as “transgender,” but a growing number of detransitioners belies this stance.
On February 18, Panacol Productions released a new documentary about the medical transition of young people on the popular video platform Vimeo. Affirmation Generation: The Lies of Transgender Medicine shines a timely spotlight on a medical scandal in the making. Four days later, after it had been viewed 19,000 times, Vimeo removed the film.
Affirmation Generation’s producer, Vera Linder, told me via email last night that when Vimeo removed her documentary she received an email from the company informing her that her content violated Vimeo’s Terms of Service. She also speculated, “It’s possible that getting 19,000 views in three days generated too much traffic.” Linder said she submitted an appeal.
Today Linder contacted me again to say Vimeo had reinstated her documentary. She believes the about-face is due to the outpouring of support the film received on Twitter.
The one-and-a-half-hour film features interviews with half a dozen detransitioners and desisters, as well as doctors, therapists, and journalists. It is organized into three parts: Dysphoria, The Only Path: Affirmation and Transition, and Detransition.
Like another recently released (and promptly censored) documentary, Dead Name, which shines a light on parents of children who claim to be the opposite sex, Affirmation Generation foregrounds a group neglected by mainstream media: detransitioners.
Affirmation Generation centers on “gender dysphoria,” defined in the film as per a report by Reuters as “a feeling of distress from identifying as a gender different from the one assigned at birth.” According to this document, over 42,000 children aged six to 17 were diagnosed with gender dysphoria in 2021 in the United States alone — a 70% increase from 2020.
Captions inform viewers that in 2011, 0.1 to 0.3% of the U.S. population was estimated to be “transgender. In 2021, a study of 5000 public school teens found 9% claimed a transgender identity.
The detransitioners — three young men (Joel, David, and Abel) and three young women (Cat, Laura, and Michelle) — share their heartbreaking stories, discussing what led them to attempt a medical “transition,” the side effects of the cross-sex hormones they were given, the permanent damage to their bodies, as well as their reasons for detransitioning and regrets.
The detransitioners’ stories and experiences are supplemented by interviews with a number of licensed therapists and medical professionals, including: Stella O’Malley, a psychotherapist from Ireland and author of Bully-Proof Kids and Fragile; Dr. Lisa Littman, the American physician-scientist who coined the term ROGD (Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria) and serves on the advisory boards of GenSpect and Gender Dysphoria Alliance; American endocrinologist Dr. William Malone; Lisa Marchiano, American LCSW, psychoanalyst and author; Sasha Ayad, an American licensed professional counselor, the co-host of Gender: A Wider Lens Podcast (with Stella O’Malley), and a founding board member of several organizations, including the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine; and Stephanie Winn, American LMF therapist and host of the You Must be Some Kind of Therapist podcast.
Other interviewees include Joey Brite, an American desister and activist; journalist Lisa Selin Davis, the author of Tomboy; and Jennifer Bilek, the investigative journalist behind The 11th Hour Blog.
The film opens with footage of rallies, protests, and media clips addressing the medical transition of children. In a televised address to the American nation, Joe Biden says, “To everyone celebrating Transgender Day of Visibility, I want you to know that your President sees you.” In another clip, Abigail Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage; The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, asks an important question: “So the puzzle is, why, out of nowhere, in the last decade, have we seen a sudden and sharp spike of teenage girls, who have no childhood history of gender dysphoria, suddenly deciding they’re trans — often with their girlfriends?”
Cat, Laura, and Michelle provide some answers.
Cat, who appears to be in her twenties, recalls dressing up in her father’s clothes as a child. Her problems with “gender dysphoria,” however, only began when she reached puberty. Then, she says, “I just started to feel very uncomfortable in my body — very uncomfortable with the changes that were happening.” She recalls browsing the internet at 13, and coming across a forum for FTM (female to male) people:
“… It had tips on how to pass. It had people telling their stories of transitioning and saying that they’d had chest surgery, that they used to have female genitals and now they had male genitals. And just the way they were talking about it, they made it sound like it was entirely possible to change sex.”
Cat’s parents brought her to see a gender therapist. “He affirmed my trans-identity within two appointments — really the first appointment — and I think it was the third appointment that he suggested I start testosterone,” she said.
Cat started hormone therapy, and initially enjoyed the changes happening to her body. However, after a few months she noticed concerning side-effects: almost daily heart palpitations, frequent nausea, weight gain (she gained 20 lbs.), edema, as well as discomfort speaking and singing. Cat, a singer, was also binding her chest.
Cat reflects on the reasons she began to feel so uncomfortable with her body at puberty, explaining, “I think that being sexually assaulted absolutely contributed to my gender dysphoria getting stronger and wanting to be a woman even less.” She also notes that before “transitioning” she had had an eating disorder and a suicide attempt.
Laura had a history of depression, anxiety, and autism before her medical transition, which included hormone therapy and a double mastectomy. When she was 15, she was introduced to the concept of “gender identities” on Tumblr and at school in the gay-straight alliance club. She adopted labels like “androgynous” and “gender-queer” at first, before becoming convinced “transitioning” into a gay man would mean being loved and accepted. In truth, she says:
“The transition didn’t help. It actually made things worse for me, physically, mentally, and socially. Testosterone really worsened my mental health: depression, mood swings, anger issues, social issues. I lost a lot of friends because I was in a bad mental state.”
Eventually, Laura discovered the work of radical feminists who were challenging gender identity ideology, and began to understand the link between trauma and trans-identification:
“I started talking to detransitioners — this very small group — and I realized that it was all due to trauma and nothing had changed and I wasn’t really any different and I wasn’t any better off. The worst part is that I sort of learned that I could have just dealt with it.”
Laura says her double mastectomy was “one of the worst mistakes that I’ve made.”
Echoing the experiences of other detransitioners interviewed in the film, Laura says she turned to professionals, but was “ushered along very mindlessly,” adding, “I have permanent damage because of it.”
Michelle, now in her thirties, says Tumblr and her peers also played a role in introducing her to the concept of gender identity.
Though she had been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, borderline personality disorder, and PTSD, it was “gender dysphoria” that made sense to her:
“It answered the question: Why am I being bullied when I was in elementary school? Oh, it must have been because I was transgender. Why didn’t I like dresses? Why didn’t I want to wear makeup… Oh, all of this is because I’m transgender. Like, so many of my friends are starting to identify as transgender and are starting to transition. It feels like something that is really catching fire.”
She joined TransFam Support Group, for people considering “transitioning,” run by two trans-identified therapists. One day they told her a clinic nearby was looking for transgender patients. “They want experience with transgender patients,” they told Michelle. We learn that one of the clinic’s therapists wrote her a letter recommending testosterone after seeing her for approximately one hour.
Michelle remembers finding the changes to her body interesting at first. She then got a double mastectomy. A video she made afterwards shows her bare-chested and breastless. Looking stunned, she says, “I don’t know what to say, really.”
Eventually, Michelle came to the realization that the childhood bullying she suffered was due to her autism, not because she was “transgender.” But not before undergoing an elective hysterectomy — “the worst thing” she did as part of her attempt to transition. “Even before I detransitioned there was a part of me thinking, ‘Actually, I do want children now.’”
Michelle’s detransition began with her roommate, who had detransitioned and encouraged her to read online posts by other detransitioners. Initially she refused, believing these kinds of posts were written by bigots simply trying to take away “trans healthcare.” However, Michelle eventually realized she was “chasing something that ultimately I was never going to be able to achieve.” She explains:
“If you live as someone who has transitioned, you’re spending the rest of your life either denying your own material reality or trying to convince other people that they need to deny your material reality in order for you to be comfortable in society.”
David, a gay man, began noticing the stigma surrounding homosexuality when he was a child: “I recognized the guilting [and the] the shaming of same-sex attraction within society and culture.” He decided he would be happier as a woman and began calling himself Paige, taking estrogen, and wearing women’s clothing and make-up. He also got silicone implants.
David says the estrogen he was taking led to severe bone loss — initially osteopenia, which turned into osteoporosis, causing him to become hunched over, needing a walker.
David went to New York City to get castrated, and spoke with two transvestites who had undergone complete sex-reassignment surgery, and who dissuaded him from undergoing the procedures himself. David recalls that one of them told him:
“Don’t do it… All of my life I thought that if I could just become a woman I would find peace and joy and happiness… now that I am legally and medically a woman, I’m more miserable now than I was my entire life. I think about taking my life every day.”
The other man also told him he thought about killing himself “several times a day, every day.”
David recounts experiencing severe unhappiness after his transition — feelings he kept hidden even from his friends:
“Everyone that knew me, they would have argued with anybody that ‘Paige’ was content and secure and happy and just being the person she was meant to be and none of them had a clue that I was depressed, that I was bitter, that I hated myself, that I attempted to take my life quite a few times… I recognize that I didn’t just live a lie, I became the lie. I was the lie.”
Joel is a soft-spoken, thin young man who now sports a beard. He developed anorexia at the age of 11, which led to body dysmorphia and eventually a belief that he was “transgender.”
Joel lives in Indiana and says it is incredibly easy to obtain hormone treatments if you live in an area that has adopted the “informed consent model.” He made an appointment with a doctor in Chicago, and just two weeks later received estrogen. He describes his initial honeymoon phase with hormone therapy, saying, “Everything felt great. My body felt great… I was also becoming an internet influencer pretty quickly.”
Joel had developed a large following on TikTok — in one clip, we see Joel celebrating six months of estrogen injections. He is clean-shaven, heavily made-up, and holding a syringe up to the camera.
Three months later, Joel made another video. He now has a beard and mustache and says his medical transition just made him “more dysphoric.” He explains, “The more that happened to my body, the [more scared] I got, and I came to the realization that I don’t feel like I’m actually transgender.” Joel stayed on hormone therapy for less than a year.
Joel realized that hormone therapy was not having a satisfactory effect on his health, but his desire to stop the treatments was hindered by his social media following. Joel recalls:
“… I had a lot of social media followers, people that looked up to me and made me feel like I was important to them. I felt like I couldn’t go back and that the only option was to just keep pushing forward.”
As a result, Joel became depressed and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital.
Abel is a young bearded man whose medical transition included hormone therapy and breast implants. The sadness and defeat in his voice as he tells his story are palpable. And yet, he says that when he decided to transition he was nearly 100% certain he would never regret it. In the end, Abel had his breast implants removed.
Abel, too, speaks of how easy it is for young people to access wrong-sex hormones. He had just one session with a therapist and was given a letter to transition right away.
Pediatrician Julia Mason reveals that, in many states, young people can walk into a Planned Parenthood and leave with hormones. She explains that Planned Parenthood operates on the “informed consent model” Joel mentioned, and that if youth “sign a piece of paper saying that they acknowledge the risks then they can be given these powerful hormones with irreversible side-effects.”
According to the documentary’s captions, the informed consent model “allows clients to access hormone treatments and surgical interventions without a mental health evaluation or referral from a mental health specialist.”
Stella O’Malley explains:
“I’ve met way too many people — way too many detransitioners — who said: ‘I was constantly trying to fight against the onslaught of nature. I was always fighting against it with the hormones I was taking.’ As somebody said, ‘It’s like putting diesel in the petrol tank.’”
Dr. Malone challenges the claim that puberty blockers are reversible, saying this is “disingenuous on multiple levels.” He says 95% of children who take puberty blockers go on to take cross-sex hormones and that puberty blockers cannot be considered a stand-alone intervention. Moreover, Dr. Malone points out that studies show most children (somewhere between roughly 65% and 98%, depending on which study you look at) who develop gender dysphoria will have resolution of that gender dysphoria by the time they reach adulthood. “This fact seems to be forgotten by medicine currently,” he says.
Dr. Malone enumerates the risks of cross-sex hormone therapy. Males who start estrogen treatments risk blood clots, breast cancer, heart disease, stroke, gallstones, and elevated cholesterol. Females who go on testosterone risk thickening of the blood, severe liver dysfunction, heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, and breast or uterine cancer.
Close-ups of documents from the Mayo Clinic reveal other complications linked to feminizing and masculinizing hormone therapies, including infertility. “The fact they’re being offered outside of clinical trials, despite the fact there’s so much unknown about long-term risk, is a scandal, in and of itself,” Dr Malone says.
He says there are psychological impacts as well:
“Something that has not gotten a lot of attention but I think will, in the coming years, is the psychological impact of being told by people in positions of authority — physicians in particular — that these interventions would improve that person’s mental health, then coming to discover that not only did the intervention not improve that person’s mental health, but there actually was no evidence to begin with that it ever would.”
Dr. Lisa Littman was the first to produce a study about how social contagion factors into the trans trend, finding that in around 2013-2014, “one after the next teenager was announcing a trans-identification in numbers that greatly exceeded what would be expected.” She says, “It was apparent that these kids were all from the same friendship group.”
Dr. Malone, too, addresses the increasing number of children claiming a transgender identity:
“This has been documented. Not only at clinics in the United States, but also across Europe, a several thousand percent increase in teenage girls in particular. The ratio now is about 80% girls, 20% boys for gender dysphoria.”
Stephanie Winn explains that the idea of transitioning is “highly contagious” because it “appeal[s] to so many of the things that we long for and provide[s] the kind of illusory hope that there’s a way out of normal human struggles like the discomfort of puberty.”
Winn isn’t just critical of the trans trend, but of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostical and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ (DSM-5) description of the criteria for gender dysphoria:
“It’s really just a list of stereotypes and then someone saying that they don’t fit these stereotypes or that they are uncomfortable in the body that they have. So what’s wrong with that is that you’re recommending some invasive, risky, experimental, and costly medical treatments for something that you’re saying is not a medical condition.”
Sasha Ayad argues that professionals need to “hold space for this being an exploratory thing that teenagers do,” rather than “rubber stamping the identity and encouraging kids to medically transition.” She adds, “This is really the potential of a serious epidemic of medical interventions that are probably going to be inappropriate for many of these kids.”
Oftentimes, discussions of “supporting trans kids” are connected to risk of suicide, should these youths not be encouraged to transition. Winn says “Parents are being intimidated and coerced,” told, “If you don’t affirm right away your kid’s going to commit suicide.” She believes this is incredibly dangerous. “It’s our responsibility to believe in our patient’s capacity for resilience, even and especially when they don’t believe in it themselves.” Winn says:
“We should never tell anyone, under any circumstances, that if you don’t get what you want or if you don’t get what you think is a solution to your problems, you will kill yourself. That’s really damaging. I would call that malpractice.”
Moreover, the data around suicidality in this context is being misrepresented. Ayad explains, “All of the clinicians that are actually tracking current rates of self-harm and suicide will tell you — luckily — the suicide rate is quite, quite, quite low,” adding, “We don’t know medicalizing reduces suicide.”
Interviewees discuss young transitioners’ other (neglected) conditions, including autism, unresolved past trauma, and internalized homophobia and misogyny. Ayad says that “once a kid identifies as trans or describes gender dysphoria, all of the other conditions that they were struggling with before become attributed to the distress of being trans.” O’Malley points to findings in a study done by Tavistock, the largest gender clinic for children in the world (before it was told to shut down last year after an independent review), showing that 48% of the children seeking to medicalize their gender identity were autistic.
There is also concern over the troubling numbers of gay and lesbian youth identifying as “transgender.” Lisa Marchiano says:
“When you realize that most of the young kids who get gender dysphoria will eventually desist — and what the evidence tells us [is] that most of those who desist will then be lesbian or gay — what we may be doing, actually, is sterilizing and destroying the sexual function of kids who may have grown up to be gay or lesbian.”
Lisa Selin Davis notes that some European countries are reevaluting their approach to medical transitions, as systematic reviews did not find evidence to support the idea that these interventions are either medically necessary or qualify as “life-saving treatment.” She says they have issued “very strict guidelines so that children are very carefully evaluated before medically transitioning.” Some of these countries have even begun urging against social transition, as “it appears from preliminary research that social transition generally leads to medical transition.”
Notably, Sweden and Finland both have backtracked on medicalizing so-called “trans kids,” opposing puberty blockers and hormone treatments for minors. Mason says Sweden, Finland, and England all followed a commissioned, systematic review of the evidence, finding “either no benefits to youth gender transitions or even that the harms outweighed the benefits.”
Despite these U-turns, Davis says both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the World Professional Association of Transgender Health are refusing to do a systematic evidence review.
Dr. Littman discusses her 2021 study, in which she surveyed 100 detransitioners, saying, “The most frequently endorsed reason for detransitioning, in my study, was that their personal definition of male or female changed, so they became comfortable identifying as their natal sex.”
Others expressed concern about medical complications from transitioning, found that their mental health did not improve while transitioning or even worsened with transition, experienced dissatisfaction with the physical results of transition, or discovered that their gender dysphoria was caused by trauma or a mental health condition.
Dr. Littman also comments on the fact that nearly one quarter of survey participants reported internalized homophobia was associated with their gender dysphoria and desire to transition. Accepting themselves as gay, lesbian, or bisexual was related to their detransitioning.
After listening to the six detransitioners’ stories, we are hardly surprised when Marchiano relates something she has heard repeatedly from detransitioners: “I have ruined my life. I’ve ruined my body. I’ve ruined my health. I had a perfectly good body and now it’s ruined.”
Affirmation Generation: The Lies of Transgender Medicine, directed and edited by L. E. Dawes and produced by Vera Linder, is available on Vimeo, free of charge.
Alline Cormier is a Canadian film analyst and retired court interpreter with a B.A. Translation from Université Laval. In her second career she turns the text analysis skills she acquired in university studying translation and literature to film. She makes her home in British Columbia and is currently seeking a publisher for her film guide for women. Alline tweets @ACPicks2.
The post ‘Affirmation Generation’ tells truths about ‘trans youth’ the media won’t touch appeared first on Feminist Current.
Streaming services are now awash with documentaries — more often than not with a murder somewhere in the title. What does this boom mean for the industry? Is this even still journalism? In this measured piece, Reeves Wiedeman brings to light the important questions the industry is now —necessarily — asking itself.
One award-winning investigative filmmaker told me she gets regular notes from her agent — documentary directors didn’t used to have agents — about what streamers are looking for, and they weren’t the kinds of films she was used to making. “I’m getting, ‘Did anybody murder your sister, and do you want to make a film about that?’” she said.
As Beyonce gears up for the monumental world tour for the new album titled Renaissance, where she is expected to make "north of $500 million" from tickets sales alone, and Ticketmaster greedily anticipates the revenue from their "dynamic pricing" scheme, I want to share this post about a little known Hip Hop documentary about women, gender, and power in Hip Hop from Rachel Raimist released in 1999, Nobody Know's My Name. — Read the rest
Alex Gibney's 2007 Oscar-winning documentary, Taxi To the Dark Side, first revealed how the FBI, CIA, and the military, with the knowledge of elected officials and security agents of the state, while also deceiving leaders, kidnapped and tortured innocent people in military prisons and black sites. — Read the rest
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