“How the left ended up disbelieving the science”

First of all, happy Pioneer Day!  Or, if nothing else, happy Twenty-Fourth of July!

It being Thursday, the Interpreter Foundation has just published another item in its reprint series, which — please recall — is distinct from its series of new journal articles, which always appear on Friday:  Seek Ye Words of Wisdom: “The Lord Works from the Inside Out: “Cleanse the Inner Vessel,” written by Camille Fronk Olson:

Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article originally appeared in Seek Ye Words of Wisdom: Studies of the Book of Mormon, Bible, and Temple in Honor of Stephen D. Ricks, edited by Donald W. Parry, Gaye Strathearn, and Shon D. Hopkin. For more information, go to https://interpreterfoundation.org/books/seek-ye-words-of-wisdom/.

“The Book of Mormon contains meaningful patterns that are echoed by various authors in the book. One such pattern is the prerequisite to purify and strengthen the center, core, or heart of a matter rather than the visible exterior in order to receive the Lord’s peace and victory. When the inner vessel is cleansed, according to the pattern, it will then take care of the concentric circles of challenges that surround the core. Its corollary is also true: if we place our focus on outward appearances and ignore the center, the whole will gradually erode and become toxic. In this paper I will examine several examples where this pattern is evident in the Book of Mormon and explore suggestions for how it may inform our priorities and concerns today.”

Last night, I read a remarkable article in a place where I wouldn’t have expected to find it.  Entitled “The Liberal Misinformation Bubble About Youth Gender Medicine: How the left ended up disbelieving the science,” it appeared on 29 June 2025 in The Atlantic.  I don’t how many of you, if any, will be able to access it — if nothing else, it’s probably available in hardcopy in your local college or public library — but it’s well worth reading if you have any interest in the topic and in the controversy surrounding it.

The author of the essay, Helen Lewis, is British, and a graduate of the University of Oxford.  She is also, pretty plainly, neither a “right-wing hate monger” nor a reflexive “homophobe” nor a dyed-in-the-wool opponent of concepts such as “gender dysphoria”:  Among her recent articles for The Atlantic are such pieces as “MAGA Influencers Don’t Understand What Journalism Is: As the Jeffrey Epstein case shows, right-wing internet personalities prefer “just asking questions” to getting answers” (18 July 2025) and “The Trump Administration’s Nasty Campaign Against Trans People: The president wants to draw out a politically expedient fight, not broker compromises” (9 June 2025) and “When You’re MAGA, They Let You Do It: Why Trumpworld is just fine with Andrew Tate’s violent misogyny” (1 March 2025).

But, of course, Ms. Lewis’s apparent distance from MAGA-World only serves, if anything, to add to the power of what she has to say about puberty blockers and “gender reassignment surgery” and such things.  I hope eventually to read her 18 April 2025 Atlantic essay “Britain Rules on What a Woman Is: The country’s highest court has ruled that under the Equality Act, woman means “biological female.”  In the meantime, though, I share the first five paragraphs from “The Liberal Misinformation Bubble About Youth Gender Medicine,” the article that I read last night:

Allow children to transition, or they will kill themselves. For more than a decade, this has been the strongest argument in favor of youth gender medicine—a scenario so awful that it stifled any doubts or questions about puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

“We often ask parents, ‘Would you rather have a dead son than a live daughter?’” Johanna Olson-Kennedy of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles once explained to ABC News. Variations on the phrase crop up in innumerablemedia articles and public statements by influencers, activists, and LGBTQ groups. The same idea—that the choice is transition or death—appeared in the arguments made by Elizabeth Prelogar, the Biden administration’s solicitor general, before the Supreme Court last year. Tennessee’s law prohibiting the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat minors with gender dysphoria would, she said, “increase the risk of suicide.”

But there is a huge problem with this emotive formulation: It isn’t true. When Justice Samuel Alito challenged the ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio on such claims during oral arguments, Strangio made a startling admission. He conceded that there is no evidence to support the idea that medical transition reduces adolescent suicide rates.

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

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

It’s a powerful article that merits serious reading.

This went up yesterday on the never-changing website of the Interpreter Foundation.  I thought that I had called attention to it yesterday, but apparently I did not:  Interpreter Foundation Come, Follow Me Podcast: July 28 – August 3: “The Power of Godliness”: Doctrine & Covenants 84

For the 8 July 2025 Come, Follow Me segment of the Interpreter Foundation Podcast, Martin Tanner, Brent Schmidt, and Hales Swift discussed the Come, Follow Me Doctrine & Covenants lesson for July 28 – August 3 covering D&C 84.  The Discussion segment of the July 8th podcast can be accessed at https://interpreterfoundation.org/interpreter-podcast-july-8-2025.

For reasons best known to them, by the way, a small handful of the more giddy denizens of the Peterson Obsession Board were considering the possibility last week or so that I had recently engineered the defenestration of Martin Tanner, who managed our Interpreter Radio Show.  As will easily be confirmed by the podcast episode to which I link immediately above, he continues to live.  In fact, he now manages its successor, the Interpreter Foundation Podcast.  As is almost always the case, they were wrong.  Quelle surprise!

Also newly posted yesterday on the completely static and moribund Interpreter Foundation website was another of Jonn Claybaugh’s concise sets of notes for students and teachers of the Come, Follow Me curriculum of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:  “Come, Follow Me — D&C Study and Teaching Helps (2025): Doctrine and Covenants 84: July 28 – August 3: “The Power of Godliness”

Posted from Richmond, Virginia