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The Supreme Court Goes Full TERF (Patreon)

Published:
2025-06-30 09:00:08
Imported:
2026-06

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Content

Michael and Peter discuss how a moral panic about trans people manifested in United States v. Skrmetti, a Supreme Court case upholding bans on gender affirming care for minors.

You can play this episode directly through Patreon or use our RSS feed to add it to your podcast app. Here are the instructions from Patreon.

As always, leave your suggestions for bonus episodes in the comments!

Comments

Mountain Dew Or Crab Juice

This is America, you're free to do absolutely anything you want with your life; unless it makes me personally feel icky.

Ryan

Re: the Zinger, that podcast exists! It's called Strict Scrutiny, and the lawyers that host it are awesome

Matt

Everyone is vulnerable to mirror imaging (a well known logical fallacy kinda similar to projection) but it’s incredible how much of conservatism is just a bunch of hateful sociopathic Christian lunatics who think everyone else is the same kind of fucked up weirdos they are. Y’know, like how many anti-LGBT conservatives are extremely closeted and how many of the “save the children” types are child rapists, or obviously inhibited people incapable of admitting who they actually are and who take out their issues on their partners, like that Moms for Liberty cofounder who was in a throuple with her husband and another woman, and then there were DV charges.

Lynsey Hanratty

Peter's zinger already has me giggling!!

elias majchrzak

as a trans person who began physical transition as a teen and got top surgery for my 18th (because my surgeon literally would not operate on minors) i fully LOLed at the cost segment you played - admittedly this was about a decade ago, but my surgery out of the state university hospital was 20,000 and i paid 1,200 out of pocket. my friend who saw a private surgeon at the same time paid in full - but only 8k. thanks for your continued outrage and coverage of this ❤️

Bryan White

Also Peter's other podcast is called 5-4 and their tagline is "A podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks."

Ceruleania

“Skeeting” means cumming, you guys might want to use a different word 😭

Ty

About 27 minutes in: I love Peter basically shaking Michael down for not paying the 5-4 Patreon

Ezra Miller

Oh I think Mike knows that 😆

Grace Friedman

Excellent Calvin Ball reference, Hobbes

Kristy Moore

That's such a great podcast, and now I have that opening drumbeat stuck in my head.

Ceruleania

I know but also bluesky is the least sexy platform imaginable so it’s just not fitting. But that’s not really the point, thank you for doing this episode guys!!!

Melissa Elgersma

When I read the description, my brain fully processed this as a 5-4 bonus episode.

Laura Parent

i am a canadian flying thru LA to get back home to Canada from Australia in aug. should i delete this podcast from my phone when going through customs? (im kidding but also not)

Harley

i love yall, thank you

Pablo Barría Urenda

I don't know Michael, can you really prove that wanting to kill one self is a causal factor in killing one self? Seems like you're reaching...

Olivia Hodgson

As an intersex person, it is UNBELIEVABLY frustrating that the right is so focused on pretend "harms" of gender affirming care for trans kids when intersex kids are literally being forced into sterilizing surgeries and hormones without proper consent and assessment (https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/07/25/i-want-be-nature-made-me/medically-unnecessary-surgeries-intersex-children-us). Many of these surgeries have significant, lifelong consequences and are done on actual infants. I was put on hormones as a teenager without any assessment, which made me really, really sick, in an attempt to make my body more typical. I'm also pretty lucky as an intersex person, because I had a provider do the bare minimum of ordering an MRI before doing exploratory surgery. Genital surgeries and hormone therapies can be super problematic, but not in the ways that they're being utilized to help trans kids and trans adults. As with so many things, the issue isn't the procedures themselves, it's the lack of informed consent for those receiving said procedures.

Erin Franklin

Dicks out at the DMV merch please! I don’t have a dick and I live in Australia but I need this, please.

Amanda Deardoff

Also, why does it matter that a majority of people don’t want trans people playing sports? So? There was a long time where the majority thought women shouldn’t have their own sports teams, or even that women shouldn’t even ride bikes. Like why does I care what the majority wants? Just bc of that doesn’t make it a good idea.

heathermama7

I've got two trans kids. One is a full on adult now and she transitioned years ago and easily got on meds. But my son is only 14 and other than period blocks and social changes (name, correct gendering, clothing) we are stuck until he is 19 fucking years old or shit changes in the next couple years. It's bullshit

Meggy Parsec

As a gen x enby- can I, like, stop paying taxes now? Stop supporting this administration and it's minions that want me not to exist? Seems fair.

Emily Cicora

100% we want to listen to the same thing over and over again. After the MP episode on Belle Gibson, I absolutely listened to that same story rehashed 10 times on other podcasts. Maybe I’d learn one new piece of information. Maybe not.

Rebecca Riley

Thank you for covering the dumpster fire of anti trans legislation and how it impacts trans people. As a trans, I wish I had my trans buddy to listen to this episode together so we could scream about reality five seconds before y'all say it.

Rebecca Riley

Also - great code switch episode out there that brings voices of trans elders to the yout - so if you are trans and need a trans buddy after listening to this you might enjoy that pod too. Take care 😘

Joy

Michael, this is your sign that the people crave episodes over an hour!!

Taylor Childs

I need this episode on your main feed so I can share it with my mother!

Kat W

nyt: we're all trying to find the guy who did this

Daria Lebedeva

I would like 2 hour episodes but only of this podcast

Avocado Mistress

Thank you for this episode! Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan is back in the New York Times saying the same bullshit he has literally said for decades about how the queer left is ruining everything for the respectable days like him. 🙄🙄🙄

Alex Potanos

WORST! ZINGER! YET!!!! Keep it up!

Jessica Kirsner

I would like to push back a little on something Peter said: in youth sports, its actually really easy to make a succinct argument about trans kids participating. Youth sports are about confidence and leadership and having fun with your friends. Everyone should be allowed to participate.

A Shade In Shades

Posting from Hell / TERF Island, I’ve realised there is a real dichotomy in centrist coverage of the left and right based on emphasising either the political aims of the group being covered or how they are conveying their message. Your may have some small political point but your method or the way you speak about the issue is beyond the pale and that is what we should focus on. Maybe some bad things have been done in Gaza, but you were so angry and out of order at the music festival you should have be banned from having any political platform whatsoever. Your means are maybe a bit untoward but your fundamental message is so relevant and powerful we should focus on that. Trying to burn down a hotel full of refugees is a bit uncouth, but Real People have lots of concerns about immigration which politicians are not addressing. Less frequently do you see “what you are saying is correct and you have conveyed it in the right way.” Usually reserved for Tony Blair talking about how we should replace workers with AI or something. Or both your message and how you convey it are not worth any positive consideration, i.e. you are Muslim. (If you wanted to get really red string about it you could call this some kind of vector theory of political media coverage).

Dude McBanger

i can't put into words how furious i was reading the mcbride interview in the nyt. when she put forward as a "compromise" the system that already exists for screening trans athletes and completely failed to mention that it was already in place before the controversy was invented i wanted to scream. i cannot believe that this is the woman i'm supposed to entrust fighting for my rights to.

Charlotte

From a purely messaging perspective, I think good pro-trans activism would look like showing actual photos and video of actual young trans girls who play sports. When you see the girl in this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoB0D2jfAk4), it's so viscerally obvious that she should be playing field hockey with the girls and not the boys that it completely deflates the entire conservative argument. Obviously there are concerns about putting images of this tiny population of kids, who probably do not want to be outed, out into the public media. But I think the conservative strategy, to always call trans girls "boys" and just pretend that sex hormones have no effect on the body, works as well as it does because most people don't have a picture in their mind of a young trans person, so they just picture a teenage boy on a team with teenage girls. People are so visual that I think just giving them an alternate image to picture would have more impact than scientific study results (which clearly are easy to just blatantly ignore).

Charlotte

I had to work pretty hard to dig up that YouTube link because this type of content is mostly just not out there. There's so much content out there talking about trans people as a theoretical concept and so little that actually shows us or lets us speak for ourselves

Andrew Bryson

"DMV" stands for Dick Measurement as a Vocation

Elaine Hall

Thank you for this and for the continued shade on the Cass ‘report’

Gilmartin Fitzpatrick

I work in a job adjacent to a state legislature and I can confirm that most of the state legislators are not particularly smart or good people

H

As a trans person I absolutely love the quantity and quality of attention you all have been giving our issues. I do have a minor complaint about the "doctern of self identity" vs "gender recognition certificate" and how the process of changing a gender marker on government issued ID works in the US. I wish I could have just declared my gender for my IDs. It would have saved me a lot of time. What they actually do the US is verify your gender with prior government documents. If you need to change your gender marker, it's a patchwork system with every State having its own rules, and federal systems also having their own rules. My own experience looked like this: To update my records with the Social Security Administration I had to provide my amended birth certificate. To update my birth certificate I had to fill out a form and give them $25. If I had the misfortune of being born in a less chill state this may have required providing medical verification, and possibly going to court to get a court order. The state I lived in would let me self declare for my driver's license, but states I lived in previously would have required an amended BC, passport, or court order. Updating my passport required a memorandum from a medical doctor declaring I met the criteria to be considered "biologically male," and that was back in 2021 when the State Department was considered "more trans friendly." I was active duty military at the time (technically still am, the ban didn't change the fact that getting kicked out of the military takes a minimum of 6 months). And amending my military records during our "woke" era took: two amended civilian IDs, verification from a medical provider, and approval from my Commanding Officer's, Commanding Officer's, Commanding Officer. I know that last one doesn't apply to most people...but I feel like it is important to bring up. Overall I really appreciate the episode. I think you all just accidentally made the process of updating gender markers on state IDs sound way more straightforward in the US than it actually is.

Alex

Thomas? Concerned about consent? Fascinating 🤨

Sophia

Oh dear

Taylor Flora

“The first people to use their pronouns in their email signatures were people with gender neutral names.” This is why I did it! Age-group-wise, Taylor was a more common name for boys in the decades before it became common for girls, so when I was first starting my career, a lot of people seemed to assume they were emailing someone older than 22 and therefore a man. After several emails addressed to “Mr.”, I put my pronouns in my signature. I also now work at a large university with diverse employees, and I am not immediately aware of the typical gender of many names I encounter. Pronouns help!

zekleinhammer

‘A question of medical ethics that states must decide for themselves’ is an excellent phrase

Mamie

not to split hairs, but is "TERF" an accurate term to use on the right? that implies a feminist pedagogy, which is nowhere near close to how the right operates. i don't care for a feminism that excludes trans people regardless, but i'm curious why it's being characterized as TERF and not just "anti-trans"??

AliceH

I'm starting every rant with, "buckle up chucklefucks, here's a thread", from now on, lol

sarah lapré

Michael I DMed you a couple years ago on twitter to thank you for your coverage on this issue (you were very sweet & gracious in your reply ). My youngest daughter is trans and basically was able to peacefully transition in the sort of Golden Years of acceptance (like starting in 2014). Hearing the way people discuss trans youth now is so depressing. Thank you guys again for not letting up on this.

Carman Romano

I agree with you. It’s misleading to say that the Supreme Court is any kind of radically feminist anything. The reasons for anti-trans sentiment in feminist ideology is coming from a different place than in ultra-right ideology.

Shalma Movassaghi

There are feminists on the right. Yes, they bastardize the theories for their own twisted use, but feminism sadly doesn’t just mean left. JK Rowling, as we know, is a TERF on the right. I agree with you that feminism can’t be practiced in good faith on the right, but technically, they do exist. Often, they’re co-opting feminism specifically FOR transphobic purposes (we see this happen the most with women in sports, feigning concern for women’s safety in bathrooms, etc.).

Charlotte

I think it's fair to say that JK Rowling is coming from a place of twisted feminism. (Probably a bit less true of Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas though lol.) I confess to not having read it but there is a book on my to-read list called "Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses" by Sophie Lewis about this topic so spreading the word on that!

Gwynedh Van Allan

I will say that I'm in a pretty progressive state and there is a substantial movement that collects footage of trans kinds in sports (or at school or doing normal things) and posts them and doxxs the kids in an effort to get trans protections revoked. We now have 7 school districts with trans athlete bans despite it being in violation of state law. These people are vicious. Which I think is part of the messaging problem on the left too. Cause what works is showing them we are regular humans. But that means being vulnerable with people who want us dead. And I for one have very limited ability to engage with someone to get them to see me as human while they tell me I'm basically schizophrenic and should be put down and removed from society. Let alone my child.

Gwynedh Van Allan

And *many* schools don't have gendered teams anyway, either for lack of enough students or because that isn't the point, so why should it matter if there are trans kids on some teams??

Gwynedh Van Allan

I'm 37 and my doctor took away my mental health meds when I asked for HrT. I had to spend months finding another doctor. I live in a progressive state.

Gwynedh Van Allan

Thank you for this episode. I'm getting more and more freaked about the anti-trans movement in my state (west coast) as a trans person with a nonbinary kiddo. And I know it's not technically a book but can you guys do an episode on how the Telepathy Tapes are bullshit conservative propaganda? The way they are structured and the junk science and fucked othering. They are full on granola fascist pipeline garbage.

Alexander Franjie

If you've ever worked at a large company with diverse cultures/ backgrounds, it's also really helpful

James Hultgren

“Dicks out at the DMV” is the summer dance anthem we deserve

Dani Henion

Most qualified for dick checks at the DMV? The village homosexual.

Leda J

I suspect that the argument re: “not discriminating based on sex and only discriminating based on medical condition” (the medical condition being gender dysphoria) must have trickled up from some asshat law review article or other similar source, because that same argument has been coming up in other suits connected to bans on healthcare for trans minors for several years now

Rithya Kunnawalkam Elayavalli

This was a doozy of an episode. I'm a faculty at Vanderbilt and obvs trans and I was on campus when vumc and vu (famously different entities for the purpose for blame shifts) when this law and the previous drag law passed

Rithya Kunnawalkam Elayavalli

This was incredibly hard to do day to day jobs since we would hear about fucking nazies on campus and around Nashville and where to avoid for safety

Rithya Kunnawalkam Elayavalli

We are never told by via an email or on-paper by VU on taking down our flags and where we can exist publicly. It's pathetic pre-compliance overall

Zack

I've been to a number of DMV locations in a number of states and I believe they've all had the counter at chest height, and I'm just now realizing that might be so people DON'T whip it out in front of the hapless bureaucrats

Lúnasa Acres

THANK YOU: The point of a lot of science IS to inform policy!!Ohio's own SB-1 just went into effect, targeting higher education. My university (Ohio State) issued guidance that researchers should avoid using language that connects their research to "controversial political issues". So we aren't supposed to say anything about why our research matters? It's all so absurd

Julia Nazarenko

TERF Weaponized Pedantry Brigade would be a great punk band name

Julia Nazarenko

Conspirituality did a great episode about the telepathy tapes back in January! If you haven’t listened to them, they’re a great pod that explores all the problematic aspects of wellness and spirituality spaces

Steph Gaines

Thank you thank you thank you for making this episode. You hit on every point I've been hearing and enraged about with clarity and humor, albeit dark humor. Could you please make this episode or a version of it public? That way I can direct people away from the New York Times', "The Protocol" and to your episode so more people aren't brainwashed into thinking we don't have enough evidence to support trans rights?

ryo

Because even liberals have internalized bias. The actual amount of radical feminists who hate trans people is miniscule compared to all the other people who hate both women and trans people, but if there’s a chance to make women the villains society will take jt.

ryo

Like this comment if you’re a lesbian enjoying the LOTR joke

Thomas Croitoru

Please release this to the Spotify. I want to send it to my friend who's kind of borderline transphobic and is skeptical of the medical evidence supporting gender affirming care. Seeing how dodgy the supreme court finding is, and how under siege from bad faith attacks the medical industry is, would really help shift his opinion and the opinion of others on the fence.

Alex Neal

While obviously I agree with all of the pro-trans rhetoric and as a trans person I certainly appreciate prominent cis writers championing trans rights, I want to push back a little bit on the argument that I often see (here, to an extent) that the low numbers of patients at trans clinics are an accurate or indicative number of how many trans people there are. Numbers at these clinics, or numbers of trans girls in sports, etc, are kept artificially low *because* of social stigma and discriminatory policy. To argue using these numbers without question gives credence to the idea that the gatekeepers are, in some way, correct, and I think that that line of thinking could use further interrogation.

E

Ugh — I’m really sorry that you have to work (and live!) in such a hostile environment.

heathermama7

I'm so sorry! That doesn't even make sense. My daughter was lucky, I guess, she got to stay on her antidepressant.

justine

Maybe because that's where everyone debating this gets their 'evidence' from: the TERFS

E

I was born with a tumor wrapped around my pituitary gland. I didn’t see overt symptoms until I was a teen, the main one being I never had a period. I started taking hormone replacement medication when I was 18 and I will have to take multiple medications daily for the rest of my life. I wonder about other kids who need hormone replacement treatment for non-transitioning reasons — is this making things more complicated for them? The entire situation is fucked.

Astraea

I prefer to think of it as a Punnett square, but instead of giving you probabilities it gives you case-specific excuses for bigotry.

Jon

You know who you need at the DMV checking dicks? The village homosexual.

desdinova

You can download the episode and share it.

Rosie Redford

Michael has described in 5-4 how the Supreme Court is always willing to accept the "expertise" of prison officials and cops. You know, the dumbest and second dumbest people you went to high school with. But the American Medical Association are untrustworthy "so-called experts." 🤦

Blake

I’ve honestly lost so much trust in Michael over his coverage of these issues. It’s very weird to defend Johanna Olson-Kennedy’s holding of her findings studies. She freely admitted she didn’t publish them because she felt they would be “weaponized.” Since when is it okay to withhold scientific findings because they don’t support your political opinions? This study was funded by NIH, the public deserved to know the findings.

Adam

another absolutely infuriating episode, great work gentlemen

Taylor Tracy

Can we have a “If books could brainwash” episode where you two read the books from Mahmoud v. Taylor to explore how fucking stupid it is that parents want to opt out of a book called PRIDE PUPPY?

Tori

vomit on his sweater already / jon skrmetti

Hannah

Hiiii can you guys pretty please have Vera Papisova (@verapapisova) on a bonus ep about Let Them?

Becca Dair

Uggghhh my fam left TN last summer bc of this bullshit. I spent HOURS at the Capitol speaking with legislators & showing up to committees over this ban. Had a Republican legislator tell me his daughter is on blockers for precocious puberty & he knows they’re safe & reversible and thought my family should be able to make those medical decisions for our kid…. But that it wasn’t worth it to him to stick his neck out for us because of how intense the GOP leadership’s chokehold is on their entire party in the state. The leader of the house (William Lamberth - human hedgehog, look him up) compared me seeking GAC for my kid to a parent letting their kid smoke cigarettes, TO MY FACE. And Jeremy Faison, famous for pantsing a ref at a youth basketball game, has told me in person & via text how disgusting of a person he thinks gender-affirming parents are. It’s AWFUL in Tennessee - they all know they’re discriminating & they’re perfectly happy to do so. I’ve heard Lamberth lie publicly saying he’s not heard from any parents who actually want this care for their kids - when he has had conversations with me in his office! The whole party is full of liars & frauds. Half of them are under investigation. It’s honestly insane. So many families like mine are fleeing the state. It’s really sad & depressing. Thanks for shedding light on what’s going on. My sibling-in-law’s roommate worked at the gender clinic when the Walsh shit went down, and they had literally received bomb threats! My Vanderbilt pediatrician is who recommended we leave the state, like not just for GAC access but for our literal safety. It’s bad. I needed to vent, apparently. Thanks to anyone who actually read that 😝

Elaina B

As a teacher, the protections for teachers who don’t use the preferred pronouns and names for trans and nonbinary students is baffling to me. I teach middle school. There are dozens of students who go by nicknames or names that differ from their birth names. Some kids go by their middle name, or a shorted version of their name, some kids go by their initials, or sometimes they just pick a name they think sounds cool and ask teachers to call them that. We do it all the time for cis kids, but when the student is nonbinary or trans, suddenly there’s an issue with that? It’s just discrimination.

H.

Agreed -- hard to believe Clarence Thomas et al. have any sort of feminist bone in their body. TERFs obviously belong in the same circle of hell but it's useful to distinguish between the rhetoric of the two (makes the intersection btwn "radical feminism" and "paternalistic conservative" all the more damning). Don't be afraid to call the spade just transphobic!

Isabelle Scholes Young

As a subscriber of both pods I am happy to hear Peter dissect twice 🙏🏻

Blake

The reading of the NYT article is completely bad faith. There were legitimate debates to be had about whether and how to bring this case against state bans. It wouldn’t have been hard to predict how the equal protection argument would fare with this court. Well, now we have this ruling, and we are worse off.

Murphy

Googling " Podcast I listened to the shitty NYT Transphobe podcast, so you don't have to." Recommendations? Thank you for this one.

Corinne Parker

Thanks for sharing! My girlfriend is trans. It's bad out here for adults as well, even in DC. But I'm grateful that you got out of TN

Becca Dair

It’s bad all around :( I have several adult trans friends leaving the south as well. Sending love & strength to you & your gf! Hope y’all stay safe 🩷

Becca Dair

The man has a highly punchable face tbh

Timothy Hopfner

So glad I listened a second time to get the Calvinball reference, which is so apt. Michael, how do you do it? So obscure yet fitting.

Johnny 5

I’m so sorry about that! There isn’t a single elected Republican who doesn’t deserve the death penalty.

Becca Dair

I mean I don’t like them but I also wouldn’t *kill* them, idk

Ema

Hoping you might consider releasing this onto the main feed. Its quite useful and Id like to point people to it.

Johnny 5

Could somebody explain what they meant about the whole “you know what they mean” line toward online trans activists/leftists? I’m not familiar with this stuff.

thiccclizzy

The people that complain that "physical therapy doesn't work" are either going to mill clinics (a huge problem in the field) or they aren't doing their home exercise program 🙃

Mimi Garcia

Ok, it’s an early blip around 10min in, but Plan B is NOT an abortion pill. It’s an important detail.

Astraea

Or - and hear me out here - physical therapy was not actually the right treatment, because someone was misdiagnosed, etc. The number of physical therapists who have blamed me for my pain *when I was actively doing an hour and a half of PT per day* is wild. It's useful for a lot of cases, but it's not fucking magic. And one sort of unexpected consequence of the opioid epidemic is that now everyone's go-to treatment is PT, even if you have a problem that might respond better to surgery, or steroids, or injections, etc. Just because we rightly stopped throwing opioids at everything indiscriminately doesn't mean that throwing PT at everything indiscriminately is somehow better medicine. No this is not a decades-long sore point for me. Not at all....

Blake

You should read the article. She was “making sure they were as factual as possible” for over 2 years.

Astraea

Very off-topic, but I'd like to nominate the forthcoming book "After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People" for coverage on a future episode. I heard an interview about it today on The Indicator and spent ten minutes sassing back to my podcast app. To be very clear: it may actually be a good book whose authors are bad at giving interviews. But, since you covered The Population Bomb, I thought it might be interesting to cover a book (if bad) whose premise is the opposite - that having less than 8 billion people on the planet will doom us all.

Blake

Let’s also not obscure the fact that the study’s findings did not support its hypothesis, which was that these treatments would reduce rates of depression.

Astraea

It's so weird that this is suddenly a virtuous thing. When I was in school, any teacher who refused to call a kid by their preferred name was universally considered to be a dick. And now I'm supposed to consider those dicks a protected class? I think not.

Myles Hochman

Yup, I was coming here to the comments to say pretty much all of this -- I changed all of my documents almost 8 years ago and the amount of medical letters/certification forms/court orders I had to bring to every step of the process was... Overwhelming (and I was living in CA at the time, which was quite progressive as states went at the time). The state department allowed self id of gender on passports without medical certification in mid/late 2021, and various blue states (including now CA) have allowed it for it on varying timelines. Thank you so much for you thorough and passionate coverage; it really means a lot to hear cis folks vocally support trans folks right now <3

Lindsay Willett

I liked Michael’s comment about why people put their pronouns in their signature lines at work - as a female Lindsay who works with people in the South, I absolutely got called Mr. enough times that it became annoying to me, a cis woman. I can’t even imagine how traumatic it would be to be misgendered on a daily basis, especially with a stamp of approval from the law of the land. The lack of empathy is astounding and yet I am still somehow not surprised by this ruling.

schwa431

Stopping not 6 minutes in to comment because I got so incensed: its fucking ridiculous to create a system where you force everyone, including doctors, to use the language of economics to talk about and justify every gd thing in the world and then when they use economics to talk about something that is a NET GOOD to society you go "oh so you only want to do it for economic reasons?" STUPID. STUPID SHIT

Astraea

As someone who is currently stuck in Referee Revision Hell, I can safely say that two years is not an inconceivable amount of time to spend triple-checking your data. It's on the longer end, but I don't even work with human subjects and I would consider one year between first draft and final publication a *blessing.* I am of the firm belief that all publicly-funded data should be published (and all privately-funded data too!). But taking the time to make sure your data, methods, and conclusions are as defensible as possible when you know for certain that your work will be subject to bad-faith attacks and deliberate misinterpretation is not a cover-up. It's responsible. It's possible she could've published sooner (this isn't remotely my field of study, so idk what the usual length of time is), but a lengthy timeline to "make things as factual as possible" when your work has the potential to be used as a weapon to ban medical care for children seems like a pretty good idea to me, tbh.

Astraea

Why would we need to obscure the results? They make sense to me. Gender dysphoria is not the only potential source of depression for trans folk. Living in a wildly transphobic society that is actively taking away your right to make your own medical decisions, exist in public spaces, etc seems like a pretty good source of depression even if you can access all the care you want and have a supportive circle of family and friends. If I were writing that paper (again, not my field) that would be my entire "future work" section.

Astraea

It's giving very strong "The Civil War was actually about states' rights" vibes. Yes, states' rights to do what, sir? A medical condition based on *what,* John?

Ethan McCormick

A lot of physical therapy treatments mirror natural history and regression to the mean but are still valuable for self efficacy and belief

Ethan McCormick

They did stuff up, by pretending this article deserved any good faith reading whatsoever, it's not your fault that you've never been exposed to any research setting but parroting hit garbage confidently is your fault

To

The part at 1:09:00 about alienating rhetoric? Concrete examples would probably be gender abolition and xenogender stuff maybe. A parallel is 2000s pop feminism about manspreading and things like that. Or really most language policing things, stuff that gets derogatorily labeled as policial correctness. Snarky tumblr/twitter users, "cringe" compilations posted by LibsOfTiktok. All that stuff to varying degrees is what they're gesturing at, especially when it leaks out of leftist spaces.

Monica B.

Would love to see this on the main. I know that’s a big ask but would share the heck out of it. Timely and useful.

Charles Robinson

After listening to this episode and the 5-4 episode, I want Michael and Peter to do Tom Nichols' book _The Death of Expertise_(2017). It would give them a chance to rag more on Justice Thomas about his "expert class" nonsense and also rag on Nichols who deserves a nomination to the reactionary centrist club.

Blake

Why would you say it’s a blessing? Because it’s abnormally long?

Astraea

Because it's short. I don't really write "first drafts" the way most people do - I tend to write my papers as I do the work - but if we start the clock at what most people would call a complete first draft, then one year from first draft to published work is completely normal. You've got your revisions that you make yourself as you write things up, which in my field often includes weeks- to months-long rabbit-holes of additional analysis, literature comparisons, etc. Then you've got revisions as you share that draft with your co-authors more broadly - for my most recent paper, I was at most a week away from submission when we decided to break one paper into 2-3 papers. This added more time before submission, for obvious reasons. Then once you've done that round and round with your co-authors a few times, you've got to submit the actual paper, it gets assigned to an editor who then has to find a referee (or several, depending on the journal), the referee has some amount of time to review (1 week to 1 month is standard in my field), then you have 1 to 6 months to revise, then the referee may have more comments for you, etc. Papers take hella time. Even discounting the referee process, if you're working on a large project, a project that requires a lot of multi-variate interpretation, or even just a project with a long co-author list, a paper can very easily take more than a year to get out the door. If I have a paper that *only* takes a year, that means things have gone about as smoothly as they possibly could. *(There are some circumstances where you can publish more quickly than this, e.g. of you have time-sensitive results. This is not standard and requires a separate, expedited peer review process that most papers do not qualify for, according to the publication rules of the journals in question.)

kyra rathmann

Was also coming here for this! "Self ID" has been a rallying cry here for a long time. In NC, our *reformed* process requires getting cosign from a court or medical provider (there's sometimes a loophole if your birth certificate is registered in a friendlier state) - and that's the result we fought for, fundamentally so much better than many of our neighboring states (some of which require proof of surgery or simply don't allow for updating id).

kyra rathmann

And, tbh, the medical access conversation around self id is maybe bigger for a lot of us? This is a little oversimplified, but the idea of self id is that folks should be able to access trans care by affirming that they are trans (rather than by being diagnosed with a mental illness). In NC, adults can access hormones by affirming to a provider; and in most cases, can access surgery by affirming + providing a letter from a therapist agreeing that surgery would be good for them (that surgery letter does not require a diagnosis, but usually affirming that the person is in a position to understand & make that decision).

Nicole Bonneau

A 5-4 episode on If Books Could Kill? Yes! ❤️❤️❤️

Charlene Boyce

“Why should we compromise when there is nothing on the table.,,” Here in Canada asking that very question about repealing our digital platform tax for the ephemeral opportunity to maybe keep engaging with the White House about tariffs—the same White House whose press rep is out there crowing that we “caved” (to quote Aubrey Gordon, “please fuck ALL THE WAY off”)

Sei B

I mean, I wouldn’t call these schmucks TERFs. The F stands for feminist, and I don’t think the Supreme Court wants to even /pretend/ to support women. This is just transphobia.

sydney

naFARious? come on, peter

Laura Parent

The world is crazy right now! 🥲

Johnny 5

Yes, that was the part. Thank you for putting the timestamp. I would really like some more discussion from the left about stuff like this, because things like manspreading seem inconsequential to me. But yeah, I get what you’re saying, thanks for writing that out!

Connor Harrington-Brandt

+1, i also went through sooooo many hoops, including having to go to court and show medical records, in order to update my birth certificate so that all of my documents were aligned. like yeah, i also benefited from the short self-id window for passports, but much of the rest of the system varies immensely state-by-state and requires much more than self-attestation.

Blake

I don’t understand what you’re saying. Having 2 years to publish would be a blessing because it’s short? How does that make sense?

Ardin

The best comment here. Everyone loves the village homosexual.

Lilith Anderson

I keep coming back to this thought, the sheer overwhelming force of transphobia and transmisogyny cannot be overstated. Like even the most progressive leftists struggle with it, even cis gay and lesbian people struggle with it, EVEN TRANS PEOPLE struggle with internalized transphobia, myself included. There is no will to fight for the issue in the left and especially the center because most people fucking hate trannies. Like on a deeply society wide level we are all scared of trans people.

ES

We need a buddy system available for all medical appointments, tbh. Doctors are just cops who can’t shoot you.

ES

This is a crazy long-shot, but I’d feel bad if I didn’t ask. Is Jake your birth/dead name, or your new/chosen name? I’m trying to figure out if you are my most conservative cousin’s child. Said child would be about 18 now.

Lilith Anderson

Its my old name! i honestly havent updated a lot of socials especially freaking patreon like what

Lilith Anderson

also im 31 so no i'm not this person lol

Spencer

My wife thinks that the US needs to start banning hair plugs and cosmetic surgery for CIS folks, as they technically fall under the umbrella of gender affirming care.

Spencer

As a female Spencer, I appreciated the comment as well! As soon as including your pronouns in signatures became a thing, I was fully onboard. I was so sick of walking into job interviews and having them sadly sigh and say “oh, we were expecting a man”. I can’t imagine how horrible those exact interactions would be for a trans person!

Katy

I was a Trans Buddy volunteer pre-Covid!

David

Peter saying it’s time for “dick experts” in the DMV and then didn’t reference the village homosexual

Astraea

Ah. I see the confusion. "Blessing" as in "a sign that things have gone right," not "blessing" in the "someone is doing me a favor" sense.

Astraea

Also, I can't tell from your comment whether this is a source of confusion or not, but just to be super clear: I don't "have" a year to publish (or two years, or whatever). It might *take* a year or two to publish, but there are no legally-required publication timelines in my field, and I'm not aware of them in any other field either. When you get a federal grant you do have to submit a planned publication timeline, and you should stick to it as much as you can, but there are lots of valid reasons that that timeline might change. The enforcement mechanism for publishing on time is that, if you don't, the federal government (NSF, NIH, etc) is less likely to give you a grant in the future. But nobody at NSF has ever emailed me to ask about the status of my papers, etc.

Alien@System

I feel this this has aspects of "newspeak", in that the same rhetoric is treated as benign when coming from approved of actors and as nefarious when coming from vilified actors.

Alien@System

That's because most DMV dick expert positions would be filled by city homosexuals.

Ben Bradley

“The roadkill eaters are not being honest with you.”

Nicole Jenkinson

Yeah also the insurance will force a lot of people to fail physical therapy before allowing them to actually get the treatment they need, especially if you need ortho surgery.

Kate Back

I'm Australian, I live in Australia, and I hate Clarence Thomas and your Supreme Court..is there a more morally corrupt institution in the US? Although these days the pool of contenders is widening daily...

Nicole Jenkinson

Respectfully as a science PhD, I think most people debating this have no idea what goes into publishing an academic paper. We had a paper in our lab on the extremely non- political topic of creatine metabolism (which was funded by an NIH grant) take ~5 years to publish because we kept getting confusing results and wanted to keep doing experiments to make sure our findings were completely accurate. It’s very irresponsible to publish something you suspect may not be entirely accurate or may not hold up to further scrutiny, and the only thing to do in that situation is to keep digging. Doing rigorous and sound science takes a long time, and the COVID lockdown slowed things down enormously in every field. I don’t know anything about this specific paper that everyone’s discussing but I feel like it’s important to tell you that two years is actually a pretty short time for an academic paper.

Greg Pinter

I need to start a book club or a band just so I can name it the "weaponized pedentry brigade."

Blake

But isn’t that the issue here? Her study was NIH funded. She didn’t publish according to the publication timeline, and her given reason was that she was worried the results would be politically weaponized.

Blake

The study itself had taken over 9 years. She knew the results, she was just afraid to publish them because they didn’t conform to her own political beliefs. Feel free to Google it.

Megan Allyse

Ellen Wright Clayton is a well-known bioethicist and she is definitely talking about abortion. Bioethics and medical ethics went through a major pushback against conscientious objection in the 2010s because there is a very narrow carve out for conscientious objection for medical providers and the upshot is that your objection cannot result in harm to the patient that could have been prevented had care been provided. Medical centers are expected to make reasonable accommodations but are also within their rights to say that if you are not prepared to provide guideline-concordant care when necessary it is reasonable to conclude that you are not qualified for the position. Hence, consequences.

🌈🌧️

Wtf does this have to do with feminism? Clarence Thomas isn’t a TERF. He’s just a bigot. I know true TERFs exist, but It’s so weird how women get singled out in this BS when it’s men doing most of the damage

Astraea

I feel like Peter is really trying to start a wider movement of calling the anti-science pro-grift RFK, Jr. types "roadkill eaters," and all I can say about that is that I am HERE FOR IT!

Ciara Maxwell

as someone who works with legislators in montana……..peter is right

Siobhan Green

Some small quibbles - what constitutes sufficient evidence to change a gender marker depends on the state. Some, like Virginia, allows self-ID since 2020. Many states have rules closer to the UK, or - increasingly - do not allow gender changes on state issued id. Also, to get a passport in your updated gender (before this administration), you needed to get your gender markers on your social security number updated. And in order to do that, you need name changes and state id, etc. It is very unnecessarily complicated.

Siobhan Green

Also, to get gender confirmation surgery, the trans person needs at least 2, and often more, attestation from medical professionals that the trans person is really, truly trans.

Siobhan Green

I work internationally, particularly with emerging markets. I really like knowing the pronouns of people I am communicating with when I may be unfamiliar with the common names in a country or language.

Elisabeth Swim

My two favourite dicksperts 😂😅

Cheyenne Weishaar

I understand your point but I think TERF is slowly starting to more broadly mean radical anti-trans bigots. At least, that’s my understanding. Although, I agree that there should be a more general term that doesn’t implicate feminism.

D

Please do a bonus episode (or a regular one) on The Bell Curve.

Jack Wolfe

feel like a IBKK/MP/5-4/etc universe tour needs to happen. the roadkill kills road show or something. just everybody dunking on clarence thomas and RFK for an hour. could come to ohio and make fun of our own shitty SB1! keep up the great work yall

🌈🌧️

Right, like Karen got to be used for anyone acting entitled when it started specifically to mean acting racist, both of which are way more frequently done by men. It’s not an accident.

Brian Smith

They’re certainly Trans Exclusionary but Radical Feminists?

Danielle Grubb

Please do an episode of the 12 hour walk! It seems to be a whole book on just being alone for 12 hours one time

🌈🌧️

Right because movements capitalize on the fact that people are ready to hate women. Mixing in a little misogyny can make other social justice goals more palatable

Michelle Capone

off topic but please please please flame "abudance" by Ezra klein next 😭😭

Aischa

Shaun (on YouTube) has a Video Essay tearing it apart. It is really good, too.

Tony

just listened to the Blink episode but have to comment here because it's not available on Patreon yet 🤔 is Michael's antipathy towards self-promotion ... basically why I'm writing this comment? Com'on guys, post to Patreon at the same damn time! 😭

LC GANG

Loving the new merch! Pleeease consider "Bitch like a man" and "Thinking fast and bro" designs 🙏🙏🙏

lat1170

I would oppose this movement because one of my favorite fictional characters of all time, known to his friends as Skink, eats roadkill for its environmental sustainability.

lat1170

Wow. I feel seen. I so agree. "Physical therapy is not magic."

Amanda Martin Sandino

Anyone else here because they learned there were twenty more minutes from the Blink episode and was otherwise too lazy to check Patreon smh

Lucy Smyth

Holy shit! The Fact Checker™️ is leaving WaPo to write a horny novel set in colonial Indonesia.

Rachelle Stallard

I forgot to say MICHAEL how very dare you bring Calvinball into this!!!😂😂

Patricia Barres

I would be totally down for another Covid episode. It would be useful to talk about actual mistakes that were made, both by the Trump administration and the Biden administration. Biden could have done a lot more to push back against misinformation. He basically got the vaccines out and then was like, hey it’s all better now.

Patricia Barres

The crazy thing is that I believe that the moral panic over trans rights can clearly be traced to the right’s creation of it after gay marriage was legalized and gay rights were no longer something they could successfully flog to whip up the center. Gay marriage was legalized in 2015, DADT ended in 2011…suddenly the right was lacking one of their core issues. Remember how incredibly homophobic GWB’s campaigns were? Anyway, I remember seeing the rhetoric get ratcheted up after that. I remember people like Jordan Peterson popping up in mainstream publications like The New Yorker whining about the crisis of masculinity, blah blah, and they’d always point at transpeople as the cause of it. They spent some time on bathrooms but it wasn’t that successful. But when they landed on kids, and sports, and trans kids in sports, that was a bullseye because Americans are absolutely psychotic about their precious kids and their precious sports. It’s been obvious to me for a long time that this was another far right conspiracy that centrists fell for. This shit gets talked about by bottom feeders, the mainstream picks it up, and democratic strategists start talking about how it’s all our fault for pressing hard on an issue that was manufactured in right wing media and inserted in right wing attack ads. “Left of center people are not very bright. It’s like Lucy with the football.

Rudy Vecchia-Zeitz

Not to mention the same legislators banning gender affirming care for youth protect the fuck out of (unnecessary) forced surgeries on intersex kids. All in the name of the good ole gender binary. Inverse Cowgirl is a great read on the topic.

Rachel Osborne

Isn't a birth certificate confirmation of gender at the dmv...?

Kam

Overall great episode. One note though is that many states do or have historically required medical proof of gender affirming surgery for a trans person to update their gender marker on IDs. So while self ID is common in the US, it isn’t the only way people note or change their gender marker

Andrea

I’m an entire month behind on this episode, but just popping in to say that I think the closest case to SCOTUS’s bullshit here is Geduldig v Aiello—they said that pregnancy discrimination doesn’t count as sex discrimination. Congress stepped in shortly after and passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act to clarify that SCOTUS fucked up. Sadly, we can’t count on them to help trans people now

Aiko

This was the hardest listen in awhile. I always listen to this show at work (helps me with indexing and focusing so I don’t go full round SpongeBob by the end of the day) we got this tho go team

Devin Gallagher

A podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks is an awesome idea. You could call it 6-3 or something.

Mikey

000pp

Robert Wood

I could very easily see it being done by Andy Samberg on SNL, although the politics would be a little edgier than most SNL.