Free speech and multiple perspectives

Free speech and multiple perspectives

Brown University has censored one of its researchers who did a study on rapid-onset gender dysphoria.  The study's author is Lisa Littman, an assistant professor in behavioral sciences.

Littman noted that teen friend groups sometimes suddenly identify as transgender, all of them at the same time.  Generally, this occurs after the group goes on a spree of watching YouTube videos about transitioning and the kids gorge themselves on social media sites dedicated to the subject.

In the past decade, there has been an increase in visibility, social media, and user-generated online content about transgender issues and transition, which may act as a double-edged sword.  On the one hand, an increase in visibility has given a voice to individuals who would have been under-diagnosed and undertreated in the past.  On the other hand, it is plausible that online content may encourage vulnerable individuals to believe that nonspecific symptoms and vague feelings should be interpreted as gender dysphoria stemming from a transgender condition.

Anyone in marketing knows that effective advertising reaps dividends; million-dollars-per-minute Super Bowl commercials must pay off, or else they would disappear.  Are the creeps who deliberately sow fields of adolescent sexual confusion on YouTube hoping to yield green pastures of pedophilic Parnassus?  The creeps are not stupid; they know how to promote their brand.  They also know where the potential victims hang out.

So I turned and ran, slightly disturbed, to the learned windbag approach utilized by Bess Marcus, dean of Brown's School of Public Health.

"The spirit of free inquiry and scholarly debate is central to academic excellence," she said.  "At the same time, we believe firmly that it is also incumbent on public health researchers to listen to multiple perspectives and to recognize and articulate the limitations of their work."

So Marcus believes in multiple perspectives, just not this specific one of multiple perspectives.  Marcus supports the spirit of free debate but slams the door on existential free debate.

This is what the left does: encourages vulnerable individuals to believe they are oppressed by patriarchies, by racists, by xenophobes, by homophobes, and now by transphobes.  It leaves people, especially young victims, weakened, malleable, and open to suggestion.  

There is a strong bent of pedophilia in this trans movement.  If adults can sexualize children, they may gain the right to have sex with children.  They will call it therapeutic, for the sake of the child, of course.

Too bad Brown University refuses to acknowledge and censure the "perspectives" that are obscene.

Michael James