Dumbing Down America

If you had set out to produce animosity between the races, you could not do better than this. You can do what numerous schools across the country are doing-- eliminating honors classes, thus dumbing down classroom instruction-- because the makeup of the classes is insufficiently diverse.

This means, to be very clear about it, that these schools are going to punish the best students because the worst students cannot keep up. When the worst fail to keep up, this makes them feel bad and the fools who run these schools believe that making them feel better by allowing them to undermine the educational prospects of those who do better will solve some great social problem.

Among the problems is solves is this--  more and more children are being removed from public high schools, either to be enrolled in private schools or homeschooled.

The rebellion against educrats has been roiling the nation for months now. With good reason. The children whose education is being sacrificed on the altar of equity are unlikely to have warm, fuzzy feelings about members of different races. If your chance at Harvard or MIT is being compromised because you are not allowed to take Honors math, or calculus, in the eleventh grade, you are not going to become a fearless social justice warrior.

The Wall Street Journal has the story:

A group of parents stepped to the lectern Tuesday night at a school board meeting in this middle-class, Los Angeles-area city to push back against a racial-equity initiative. The high school, they argued, should reinstate honors English classes that were eliminated because they didn’t enroll enough Black and Latino students.

The district earlier this school year replaced the honors classes at Culver City High School with uniform courses that officials say will ensure students of all races receive an equal, rigorous education. 

If the goal had been to produce equal, rigorous education that school administrators would have improved the quality of teaching in the non-honors courses. 

The situation in Culver City is hardly unique:

The parental pushback in Culver City mirrors resistance that has taken place in Wisconsin, Rhode Island and elsewhere in California over the last year in response to schools stripping away the honors designation on some high school classes.

School districts doing away with honors classes argue students who don’t take those classes from a young age start to see themselves in a different tier, and come to think they aren’t capable of enrolling in Advanced Placement classes that help with college admissions. Black and Latino students are underrepresented in AP enrollment in the majority of states, according to the Education Trust, a nonprofit that studies equity in education. 

Again, students who do not take AP courses suffer. They lose out on the chance to attend the best schools, because their minds are being compromised by inferior teaching and by classes filled with students who cannot keep up and who undermine everyone else.

The statistics are clear:

Culver City English teachers presented data at a board meeting last year showing Latino students made up 13% of those in 12th-grade Advanced Placement English, compared with 37% of the student body. Asian students were 34% of the advanced class, compared with 10% of students. Black students represented 14% of AP English, versus 15% of the student body.

What does the new regime look like?

His ninth-grade daughter, Emma Frigola, said she was surprised and a little confused by the decision to remove honors, which she had wanted to take. She said her English teacher, who used to teach the honors class, is trying to maintain a higher standard, but that it doesn’t always seem to be working.

“There are some people who slow down the pace because they don’t really do anything and aren’t looking to try harder,” Emma said. “I don’t think you can force that into people.”

Naturally, there has been a blowback. Some schools have scrapped their equity initiatives when faced with parental opposition:

Several school districts have scaled back plans to eliminate honors classes after community opposition. San Diego’s Patrick Henry High School planned to eliminate 11th-grade honors American literature and U.S. history last year, but reinstated both after listening to students and families, a district spokeswoman said. 

At the least, we know that students who take honors courses profit from them. Punishing said students will do little more than produce a climate of racial animus.

Those who support cutting honors classes point out that the curriculum of honors courses often doesn’t differ substantially from regular classes. Honors classes often move at a faster pace and the students complete more assignments. Some can boost grade-point averages or give students an advantage when applying for college. 

What Happened to the Girls?

Some three score years  ago Betty Friedan launched the modern version of feminism by declaring that women were suffering from a problem that had no name. She proposed that feminism, the kind that freed women from societal expectations, would solve this problem. They would no longer suffer the indignity of being wives and mothers, but would march forth into the business world, to make their marks. And that meant, modern liberated women would not be suffering from this modern version of neurosis. They would no longer depend on men and would no longer seek to be protected by male family members.

So, today’s women, and especially today’s girls, repugn the notion that they will grow up to become wives and mothers. They want to have careers. They want to be equal to their men. They often do not even want to deal with men. They are sexually liberated, seeking and finding pleasure where they will.

I think it fair to ask whether this new way of life, a way of life prescribed by feminism, has produced an outburst of mental health. Has it solved the problem that has no name?

Within this context we examine a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control. The report tells us that things are decidedly not alright with America’s teenagers, especially America’s teenage girls.

And yet, when Derek Thompson outlines the findings in an Atlantic newsletter, not once does he mention feminism. Children are suffering from the internet, from social media, from global warming-- but not a word about feminism or even about broken homes. If I recall correctly, America leads the world in broken homes, in familial dysfunction.

Thompson reports the statistics:

The Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which is published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is the gold standard for measuring the state of teen behavior and mental health. From 2011 to 2021, the survey found, the share of teenage girls who say they experience “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” increased from 36 to 57 percent, with the highest jump coming during the coronavirus pandemic. The share of girls who said they’ve contemplated suicide increased 50 percent in the decade. (For teenage boys, the increase was smaller.)

You might imagine that all of the feminist talk about careers, the talk about sexual liberation, the effort to ensure that women were thoroughly equal to men-- improved women’s lives, because it made them feel like persons.

And yet, since girls can no longer define themselves socially by an aspiration toward wifedom and motherhood, they are effectively lost. They are going for the sexual gusto, indiscriminately, and cannot understand why men do not respect them in the morning. The reason might be that they are acting as though they do not respect themselves, but that is perhaps for another day.

Among the horrors in the CDC report is this: more and more young women are being forced to have sex when they do not want to do so. So much for #MeToo. So much for the daffy nation that enhanced awareness of sexual harassment was going to produce less sexual harassment. In the end, it produces more.

Of course, America has currently decided that it ought to display sex on the public square. It has accepted that everyone advertises his sex life, either on social media or in front of a class of six-year-olds.

How is that one working out? Apparently, not very well:

Life is worse for LGBQ teenagers in almost every respect measured by the survey. (The YRBS did not ask about trans identity.) Compared with heterosexual teens, they are more likely to experience poor mental health; more likely to experience unstable housing or homelessness; more likely to be threatened or injured by a weapon in school; more likely to miss school for safety reasons; less likely to feel close to people at school; more likely to be raped; twice as likely to be bullied; almost three times more likely to have recently misused prescription opioids; three times more likely to have considered suicide, made a suicide plan, or attempted suicide; and seven times more likely to be injured in a suicide attempt.

The situation is probably worse for trans children. One does not, in the current national conversation, understand that many trans children are rejected by their parents and friends, and that this is all the more tragic when they have been induced to think of themselves as trans by teachers and counselors.

Does this all not tell us that the old fashioned effort to retain a barrier between public and private, not to advertise one’s sexuality but to husband it, might have had a rationale. And does it not tell us that when you remove women’s social moorings, they are not just lost-- they become prey.

We all thrill to the notion that women no longer define themselves by roles within the family. Heck, they often do not even define themselves by their sex. And yet, being totally individuated means being alone, separated from the herd, outside of the protection that males have traditionally accorded to females. 

The Semiconductor Wars

On occasion I like to remind everyone that the current political and media propaganda about America’s ability to compete against China in world markets is not to be believed. 

Politicians and the media report breathlessly on a new Foxconn factory in Wisconsin and on a pharmaceutical plant in Rochester-- but then we do not hear much about them.

We have high self-esteem and think the world of ourselves, but we cannot compete in the semiconductor wars. Of course, Congress just passed a new Chips act, dedicating $50 billion to research and development. Are we now going to dethrone Taiwan and South Korea in the world of high end chips? 

According to Morris Chang, not hardly?

Interestingly, no one has paid much attention to what Morris Chang told Nancy Pelosi on her latest trip to Taiwan. It does not fit the narrative, so we ignored it. And yet, Chang undoubtedly knows more about semiconductor manufacturing than just about anyone. He founded and grew Taiwan Semiconductor. 

According to Chang, $50 billion is a good start. Politico has the story:

With Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, looking on, the billionaire entrepreneur pressed Pelosi with sobering questions about the CHIPS law — and whether the policy represented a genuine commitment to supporting advanced industry or an impulsive attempt by the United States to seize a piece of a lucrative global market.

Chang said he was pleased that his company could benefit from the subsidies; TSMC already had a major development project underway in Arizona. But did the United States really think it could buy itself a powerhouse chipmaking industry, just like that?

That very question now hangs over the Biden administration as it prepares to implement the semiconductor spending in the CHIPS and Science Act. The next phase is due to begin this month with the unveiling by the Commerce Department of a detailed process for awarding subsidies. The law already looks like a useful political trophy for Biden, claiming a prominent spot in his State of the Union Address.

Of course, this makes us feel good. But it is not reality:

As Chang told Pelosi, there is a long distance between the cutting of government checks and the creation of a self-sustaining chips industry in the United States.

His candid concerns represent a rough guide to the challenges Biden’s semiconductor policy will have to address if it is to succeed, long after the immediate political fanfare has abated — and well past the point that its generous subsidies for big business have run out.

Over lunch, Chang warned that it was terribly naïve of the United States to think that it could rapidly spend its way into one of the most complex electronics-manufacturing markets in the world. The task of making semiconductor chips was almost impossibly complicated, he said, demanding Herculean labors merely to obtain the raw materials involved and requiring microscopic precision in the construction of fabrication plants and then in the assembly of the chips themselves.

It gets worse:

The industry evolves at incredible speed, Chang continued. Even if the United States managed to build some high-quality factories with the spending Pelosi championed, it would have to keep investing more and more to keep those facilities up to date. Otherwise, he said, Americans would in short order find themselves with tens of billions of dollars’ worth of outdated hardware. A once-in-a-generation infusion of cash would not be enough.

Was America really prepared to keep up?

Now, Taiwan Semiconductor is building a massive plant in Arizona. Yet, Chang is concerned that America does not have the talent to run the plant. One suspects that we can always import it from Taiwan or from China. 

So, temper your enthusiasm. 

Dating as Therapy

The long march of therapy through America’s institutions continues apace. Unfortunately, its invasion of what we call dating has done nothing more than make people into chronic daters. Is it not somewhat indicative when we learn, from Dani Blum’s New York Times article, that her first example has been on dozens of dates in a year. Does that not suggest that dating has become an end in itself. It is no longer a prelude to a relationship or even a marriage.

In any event, Blum wants to highlight a relatively recent phenomenon from dating apps. Namely, that more and more people are judging their prospective dates on the basis of criteria that derive from therapy. If that does not scare you, nothing will. One regrets that Blum insists on using grammatically incorrect pronouns, thus turning her own prose into an incoherent hash.

In the meantime, Blum is correct to notice that the language of therapy has become lingua franca in the dating scene.

Becca Love, a 40-year-old clothing designer and dance teacher in Montreal who uses the pronouns they and them, often asks dating app matches, What does connection look like to you? Around the third date, they initiate discussions about their prospective partner’s “attachment style,” a tidy summation of childhood trauma.

This terminology isn’t unusual. Therapy-related words and phrases have trickled into workplaces, surfaced at schools and galvanized people online. But the proliferation of these terms among daters represents a distinct shift. “In the ’50s, or even the ’80s, it would be hard to imagine that saying ‘I see my therapist regularly’ would have status,” said Eli Finkel, a psychology professor at Northwestern University and the author of “The All-or-Nothing Marriage.” But now, he said, taking care of one’s mental health carries social currency in some spheres.

It’s a sad state of affairs, though apparently today’s liberated women can only deal with men who make a public display of their vulnerability:

And therapeutic lingo may be just another tool daters use to try to distinguish themselves to prospective matches.

“This is part of the competitive advantage,” said Paul Eastwick, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, who researches romantic relationships. “Instead of being like, ‘I’m 5-11, and I can bench press some large amount,’ it’s like, ‘I have grappled with the challenges of my childhood, and I’ve thought deeply about my issues,’” he said.

People who have thought deeply about their issues are not the best relationship or marriage prospects. They are self-involved and narcissistic. If they are male, they might just be saying what women want to hear, to make it easier to get laid.

In recent years, though, the signaling has switched. A growing number of people now broadcast intimate, specific details, including proclamations about their mental health, Dr. Carbino said. It’s a technique used both to signal your values and to weed people out, she said — if therapy is essential to you, for example, you might not want to date someone who’s never been.

Witness the research performed by Dr. Helen Fisher:

In 2022, Dr. Fisher was stunned by one finding. She asked participants to rank what they were looking for in a prospective partner, expecting the usual answers: sexual attractiveness, trustworthiness, humor and similar interests. This time, however, another characteristic made the top five list. Respondents wanted matches with emotional maturity, the ability to process and grapple with one’s feelings.

So, all of this therapy talk tells women that men have dealt with their emotions and are in touch with their feelings. This might make them suitable eunuchs at the court of the mother goddess, but it will certainly be a disadvantage in the business world. And why would a woman want to marry a man who did not know how to compete in the arena.

Naomi Wolf: Mugged by the Left

Feminist firebrand and public intellectual Naomi Wolf was mugged by the new American left. She was banned from Twitter and stigmatized for purveying misinformation and is justly in a rage about it.

Worse yet, in the world of betrayal, Wolf’s leftist fellow travelers have refused to stand up for her against Twitter censorship. Conservative Congresspeople have filled in the gap, as defenders of free speech. 

Wolf’s cri de coeur puts a human face on the cancel culture. It is an ugly face, a distorted, contorted face, possessed by mindless bureaucrats exercising something that resembles power.

Last week, the Twitter censors appeared before a Congressional committee. Wolf is horrified and enraged:

So I finally am seeing them — up close, in real life, in person. I am finally able to look at the faces of the heretofore faceless technocrats who took it upon themselves to try to destroy my life and ruin my name.

I am witnessing, as I see them seated primly in rows in a Congressional hearing room, the very faces — the somber, ill-cut but costly blue suits, the bad wire-rimmed glasses, the judgmental expressions — of those who were personally responsible for the misery, trauma, reputational damage, shattered dreams, and loss of income, in my one life, over the course of last two and a half years.

Here at last are the very people who took it upon themselves, or who oversaw their colleagues, to single me out, to collude with the White House, and with Carol Crawford of CDC, and with DHS perhaps, to suspend me — following an accurate tweet of mine that warned women of menstrual harms following mRNA injection.

The ultimate indignity is that these people are on the political left. They belong to Wolf’s tribe, the one she has served for decades now:

These are the people — “my”people, paradoxically; people educated like me, people who shared my political views until 2020; these are people who vacationed where I used to vacation, who hang out with people I know — who were the agents behind full- on Stalinist-type persecution of innocent Americans; of me; these are the people who ruined my life, or sought to do so, and destroyed my career, or sought to do so. These emotionally ugly, these nasty, self-satisfied folks, so sure that they are right, so very, very wrong; are here at last; right here on C-Span.

Once the veil is removed and you get to see the people face-to-face, they become smaller and smaller, Wolf’s descriptions are classics of the genre:

These nothing people in front of me, these hacks, these people of zero cognitive distinction, these essentially trivial-minded humans, used their unearned, thuglike, intellectually meaningless power — the intellectually two-dimensional power of a social media platform — to announce to the world that I was crazy, unhinged; to present what appears to have been a file, to the BBC, to NPR, to The New York Times - to my own former colleagues — seeking to re-present me, a lifelong writer of heavily annotated bestselling nonfiction, as not credible.

It is incredible to me, as someone who was raised in an American meritocracy, and who has until very recently believed in American meritocracy, that a group of nonentities in Twitter, in collusion with nonentities at CDC (hi there, Carol Crawford), the White House and the US Dept. of the Census — were able thus so simply, and at such immediate, nuclear scale, to destroy the reputation of someone identified since 1990 as a major American voice.

One ought to underscore the point that if Twitter was doing the bidding of government agencies it was not acting as a private company.

As for the people themselves, begin with Yoel Roth:

There, onscreen, present at last, is Yoel Roth, “Former Twitter Head of Trust & Safety” - with that oddly prim, pursed mouth that these technocrats all seem to have; with those fingertips touching each other, presenting himself as if he is the moderator of reality itself, and as if he finds himself in the presence of something that smells bad. There are his glazed defiant blue eyes, his slightly balding pate; the costly haircut; there is the sneering downward cast of his mouth. I try not ever to make critical personal remarks, but the ugliness, sorrow, loss, isolation and pain I sustained, and still sustain every day, at the hands of these until-now-faceless, self-righteous people, tend to make me see them aversively; or perhaps I see the moral ugliness of their decisions, as if manifested in their faces and body language.

And also:

There is Anika Collier Navaroli, “Former US Safety Policy Team Senior Expert,” talking about “dangerous speech”. There is her pale-gray jacket, her earnest if not bullying posture, as she leans forward, passionately describing the terrifying nature of freedom of speech. 

To which Wolf:

It was never Ms Navaroli’s role to decide if “dogwhistles” would lead to violence; that is the role of police and of the FBI. Why is she claiming that a social media platform is supposed to take on the role of maintaining physical public safety, that belongs to law enforcement?

How much reputational damage did they cause?

It is unlikely, too, that I will ever recoup the six figure investments that investors withdrew from my company when Twitter, colluding with the government, was orchestrating the shredding of my reputation. It is unlikely that a 35 years career and legacy online of what had been seen until very recently as a life of significant accomplishment, can ever be re-established.

And, of course, the irony is that those who are at war against free speech are leftists. Wolf has apparently now had a change of heart and mind about her political allegiances:

I cannot believe that “my own”people, my former tribe on the elite left, are joining forces with the government to violate the First Amendment rights of all Americans and then, worse still, to justify having done so. I can’t believe that Democrat after Democrat, liberal after liberal, is on C-Span singing the praises of censorship and inventing imaginary roles for government officials and social media platforms to keep Americans “safe” from the “threats“ of discourse and ideas. 

And I can’t believe that the forces who tore my life apart, temporarily half-destroyed my business, ended any hopes of my realizing my one life’s best dream, and set a match to my reputation, turn out, now that the curtain has been pulled back, as at the end of The Wizard of Oz - to be such small, small, sad, petty, miserable, mediocre people.

I heartily recommend Wolf’s screed to your attention. 

War with China?

I have already offered my views of Robert Kagan’s Wall Street Journal op-ed about a coming conflict with China. In it Kagan argued that America’s enemies had underestimated its resilience and its industrial capacity in two world wars. He added that if China makes the same mistake America will rise from its deliria and become a fearsome fighting machine.

To which Niall Ferguson responds by suggesting that America is not a sleeping giant, but a “comatose geriatric.” He counsels against complacency:

The idea that, in the event of a surprise attack in Taiwan, the United States would dust down the World War II playbook is no doubt comforting to some. But another word that suggests itself is “complacent.” “Today,” wrote Kagan, “the US and its allies and partners (which includes most of Europe, Japan, India, South Korea, Australia and others) produce over 50% of the world’s wealth, while China and Russia together produce a little over 20%.” But if we know one thing about power today, it is surely that it’s not equivalent to GDP. If it were, the war in Ukraine would by now have been won by Russia, which had a pre-war GDP nine times larger.

But then, Ferguson quotes a Rand Corporation analysis. You might consider it an antidote to complacency:

The United States displays some of the characteristics of a once dominant power that has passed its competitive prime: by some important measures, it is complacent, highly bureaucratized, and seeking short-term gains and rents rather than long-term productive breakthroughs. It is socially and politically divided, cognizant of the need for reforms yet unwilling or unable to make them, and suffering a loss of faith in the shared national project that once animated it.

China clearly benefits from a potent national will and ambition, both domestically and internationally, and a unified national identity among much of the population. It has an active state that is pouring resources into human capital, research and development, high technology, and infrastructure.

In the 20th century the United States was unrivaled in its industrial capacity. That has ceased to be true in the past 20 years. As recently as 2004, US manufacturing value-added was two-and-a-half times larger than China’s. But China overtook the US by this measure in 2010. In 2021 Chinese manufacturing value-added was nearly double that of the US. And it’s worth pondering which of the two superpowers has more dual-use manufacturing capacity. Not many dishwasher factories can quickly switch to making precision missiles.

As for industrial production, things do not look much better. Ferguson writes:

In a major regional conflict … the US use of munitions would likely exceed the current stockpiles of the US Department of Defense (DoD), leading to a problem of ‘empty bins.’” In short, “the US defense industrial base — including the munitions industrial base — is not currently equipped to support a protracted conventional war.” It is the reverse of consoling that the situation is even worse for America’s principal European allies.

He continues to expose the deterioration of our military-industrial complex:

... the Russian invasion of Ukraine has laid bare the comparable deterioration of our once mighty military-industrial complex.

Here are some startling examples:

• “The quantities of Javelins transferred to Ukraine through late August 2022 represented seven years of production at fiscal year (FY) 2022 rates before recent reprogramming actions.” (CSIS)

• “As of January 2023, the US military has provided Ukraine with up to 1,074,000 rounds of 155 mm ammunition, significantly shrinking the availability of 155 mm rounds in storage.” (CSIS)

• “Ukraine … [is] firing more than 5,000 artillery rounds every day — equal to a smaller European country’s orders in an entire year in peacetime. (Financial Times)

• “As of January 20, 38 HIMARS [high mobility artillery rocket systems] have been sent to Ukraine. Each system costs around $6.8m. … At the start of last year, Lockheed Martin was producing at a rate of 48 HIMARS a year, and is now up to a rate of 60. But getting to its target rate of 90 will take another 18 to 24 months.”

• 
  

The US defense “primes” — the big five defense contractors — are struggling to keep up with Ukraine’s military needs in a relatively small war against a Russian invasion force that has performed dismally in close to a year of conflict. And bear in mind that Russia’s manufacturing value-added is one-tenth that of the United States.

And, let’s not ignore the fact that government bureaucrats and regulations have made it prohibitively expensive to build much of anything:

According to a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) last year, the cost of building the new 12-vessel Columbia class of nuclear-armed submarines has risen by $3.4 billion to a projected $112 billion. It is now $132 billion, and there are doubts that the new subs will be available for deployment in 2031. The GAO identified delays in 17 major programs, including the DDG-1000 destroyer, the MQ-4C Triton surveillance drone, the CH-53K cargo helicopter and the MH-139A Gray Wolf helicopter designed to patrol nuclear missile silos.

You can console yourself with the thought that less manufacturing means a cleaner planet. We are unprepared for war but we are fighting the good fight against the weather:

In our time, by contrast, we have been shrinking our military-industrial base. In 2013 the Environmental Protection Agency shut down the 121-year-old Doe Run lead smelting plant in Herculaneum, MO — the last primary lead smelting plant in the country. And that’s just lead. According to a 2021 report from the Department of Energy, “of the 35 mineral commodities identified as critical … the United States lacks domestic production of 14 and is more than 50% import-reliant for 31.” No doubt great from an ESG perspective. But what about the WWIII perspective?

The Peril of Detransitioning

If you don’t see anything wrong with this, then clearly there is something wrong with you.

Writing in The Federalist Kelsey Bolar tells the sad story of one Prisha Mosley, a woman who was persuaded, by unscrupulous professionals, to transition into manhood. Only, then she discovered the inconvenient truths about transition and decided she wanted to detransition.

She then learned, to her chagrin, that nearly all physicians and counselors refused to treat her. In fairness, she did find one form of psycho therapy that worked, a form of cognitive treatment called dialectical behavioral therapy, but the insurance company refuses to keep paying for it. 

For the record, we heartily approve of most forms of cognitive treatment.

One is horrified to read of the psychological manipulation that caused Prisha to transition in the first place. It was a mix of threats and promises:

“I was under the impression that my doctors, who were transitioning me, loved me. They said they didn’t want me to die, they were saving my life, they were worried about me, and they wanted me to be healthy and happy,” Prisha told me. “Clearly, they don’t love me. As soon as it’s not profitable, they don’t want to help.”

Obviously, these doctors should be in jail. If they could so easily manipulate a vulnerable teenager, imagine what they can do with younger children.

Of course, the doctors do not tell prospective patients of the side effects of systematically mutilating the human body:

Prisha has a slew of medical complications dating back to the more than five years she spent on testosterone and a double mastectomy that a plastic surgeon performed shortly after she turned 18. Many of those complications surround her endocrine system, which encompasses the hormones that regulate nearly every process in the body, from metabolism to growth and development, emotions, mood, sexual function, and sleep.

“I was hoping that if I could get my endocrine system working, I could be on less psychiatric medicine because low testosterone and estrogen will cause depression and anxiety, both of which I’m medicated for and don’t really like being medicated for,” she said.

Prisha also hopes that with estrogen supplements, she’ll experience some muscle and fat redistribution. After years of testosterone broadened her neck and shoulders, she now carries more weight in her upper body, which causes her chronic pain. Her throat is sore, she can no longer sing or raise her voice, and she suffers hair loss, as well as hair growth on her body, which she has to treat with costly laser hair removal sessions.

The horror is redoubled when Prisha discovers that physicians refuse to treat her. Huh?

Hormonal care to fix her endocrine system, she hopes, could help her become more feminine — and perhaps fertile again. But she said every primary care physician, endocrinologist, obstetrician, and gynecologist she’s approached on her insurance list has turned her away or said they can’t help.

Now that our culture has gone raving mad about transitioning, we are seeing an increasing number of young people who want to go back to the beginning, who want to embrace their sexual identity and who are looking to detransition.

Not only is it difficult-- Abigail Shrier called her book, Irreversible Damage-- but doctors no longer want to do it. The profession, especially those who are working in the field of gender medicine, has much to answer for.

Prisha isn’t the only detransitioner who feels abandoned by the medical institutions that pushed her into wrong-sex hormones and surgery. Over the past year, Independent Women’s Forum has documented multiple stories of detransitioners who also report being abandoned by medical and mental health professionals after deciding to detransition.