Feb. 9, 2024 ❧ Peter Thiel's steroid Olympics, "de-trans" debunked, and Biden's melting brain
Plus: a skyscraper covered in graffiti, King Charles' cancer crankery, how a lie is being used to starve Gaza, Indiana's anti-woke snitch line, and an accused Chinese spy pigeon is exonerated
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STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
IT’S OFFICIAL: TRANSPHOBIA IS DANGEROUS NONSENSE
This week, the National Center for Transgender Equality released the preliminary results of its 2022 U.S. Trans Survey—one of the largest questionnaires for transgender and nonbinary people ever undertaken, with 92,329 respondents from across the United States. There are a number of important findings in the survey data, which is worth looking over in detail, but they fall into two broad categories: how widespread, systemic, and institutionalized anti-trans prejudice has become in the U.S., and how ridiculous its ideological underpinnings are.
First, the obvious: the survey has confirmed that transphobia is a huge problem and that it manifests in many forms. Of the people surveyed, 11 percent said they had lost their job “because of their gender identity or expression,” and 30 percent had been verbally harassed in public because of their gender, while 39 percent had been harassed online. Contrary to the bigoted myth that trans and nonbinary people are likely to harass others in public restrooms, the study found that 6 percent had been the victims of violence there, having been “verbally harassed, physically attacked, or experienced unwanted sexual contact.” The police are implicated in all this, with 47 percent of respondents saying they felt “very uncomfortable” about the idea of asking a cop for help. And, as you might expect, certain conservative-leaning states are hotspots for discrimination, with 47 percent of survey participants saying they’d seriously considered moving to a different state because of anti-trans legislation.
The real blockbuster statistic, though, is “Life Satisfaction Since Transitioning Gender.” When asked about this, a staggering 94 percent of respondents said that changing genders had been a positive experience for them, with 79 percent saying they were “a lot more satisfied” with their lives post-transition, and 15 percent saying they were “a little more satisfied.” Only 3 percent reported a negative outcome. This can be broken down further by the type of transition: among people who received “hormone treatment,” only 1 percent were dissatisfied, while that figure was 3 percent for people who had “gender-affirming surgery.” For reference, the rate of dissatisfaction with routine hip surgery is between 7 and 20 percent, meaning that trans medical care is no more dangerous, and every bit as legitimate.
This is remarkable because there’s been a pervasive media narrative that claims the exact opposite. In the press, endless attention has been given to “de-transitioners”—people who regret making a change in their gender identity and return to the gender they were labeled with at birth. New York Times columnist Pamela Paul recently devoted a long feature to such people, noting with approval that one man who de-transitioned “no longer believes anyone under 25 should socially, medically or surgically transition without exploratory psychotherapy first.” It’s an ugly article, sneakily implying that great swathes of the trans community are really just confused or delusional, but it’s not the worst example of its genre. That would be Abigail Shrier’s 2020 book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, which claims that many teenagers “under social media influence and peer pressure” transition with “virtually no medical oversight” and later regret it. But as the new survey proves, there’s no factual basis for any of this! Although it’s perfectly valid to “de-transition,” it’s also incredibly rare. (And for that matter, transgender medical care is often very difficult to get, and certainly not something you can just do on a whim.) Maybe now that the overwhelming weight of evidence is against them, pundits like Paul and Shrier will stop peddling this harmful nonsense. If they care about facts at all, that is.
PAST AFFAIRS
For a more detailed debunking of Irreversible Damage, see the Current Affairs article “Why the Panic Over Trans Kids?” by Nathan J. Robinson, from April 2021
PETER THIEL IS FUNDING THE STEROID OLYMPICS… IT ACTUALLY MAY NOT BE A TERRIBLE IDEA!
Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire, Republican megadonor, and aspiring democracy abolitionist, will not be putting any money behind the 2024 election cycle. Instead, he’s doing something even grander: trying to start a version of the Olympics with steroids. Thiel reportedly threw $6.2 billion behind an event called “The Enhanced Games,” a multisport competition in which the use of performance-enhancing drugs, is not only allowed, but encouraged.
“Backed by the world’s top venture capitalists, the Enhanced Games is the Olympics of the future,” the group’s website boasts. The website is heavily critical of the strict regime of drug testing that athletes are required to undergo to satisfy the World Anti-Doping Agency’s measures. It cites research from 2011 which says that more than 43 percent of elite athletes still use PEDs anyway and do so without the proper health screenings. For a Thiel-backed project, the Enhanced Games are surprisingly woke. It acknowledges the history of doping accusations being leveled disproportionately to diminish the accomplishments of Black athletes. It also points out the pitiful salaries earned by most Olympians and promises that all competitors, not just medalists will receive a base salary.
The philosophy of the Enhanced Games’ drug-tolerant approach sounds similar to the argument for drug legalization in general: People are always going to use drugs and stopping them by using criminal punishment is futile and needlessly cruel, so why not legalize them and regulate their usage to ensure that those who choose to use drugs do it safely rather than driving them into the shadows? This is, admittedly, quite compelling. Many athletes suffer debilitating injuries with long recovery times. The use of banned anabolic steroids could help them heal more quickly if they were allowed.
There are, of course, many ways to abuse steroids and their overuse can cause health issues. But this is another reason why having league-sanctioned professionals to help them do it safely would be of value, so athletes with little knowledge of the science aren’t juicing without knowing the risks. According to the Enhanced Games website, “In order to keep our athletes safe during competition, we are introducing a mandated pre-competition full-system medical screening protocol, which will help monitor cardiac risks, and other health markers.” There is also the question of fairness, which is the main reason why athletes are banned from using PEDs in the first place. The Enhanced Games says it is more concerned with “elevating humanity to its full potential,” supporting the use of performance enhancements to break world records.
There is, of course, good reason to be skeptical of any start-up that makes such big promises. New sports leagues pop up and flame out all the time, often in spectacular fashion (Remember when WWE founder Vince McMahon tried to create an NFL competitor, the XFL, which collapsed after a single season?) Venture capitalists are also notoriously flighty when things get rough and are willing to fund the most slapdash operations if they become profitable (see Eliza Levinson’s Current Affairs article on the collapse of WeWork). We should be doubly skeptical of anything funded by Peter Thiel. We can’t forget, the man is a literal vampire who famously injects himself with the blood of the young in hopes of extending his own life. He should be kept away from anything that involves artificial enhancements to the body.
That said, we’d much prefer to see him spend his money doing the Steroid Olympics than trying to get the next Blake Masters elected. And, if executed well, this idea actually may have the potential to make life easier for a lot of athletes. Hopefully, we don’t end up eating those words when the first reports of figure-skating mutants and tennis-playing cyborgs begin to emerge. But, on second thought, that might also be pretty cool.
AROUND THE STATES
❧ Indiana’s attorney general Todd Rokita announced on Monday that the state would begin using a public tip-line for people to report “political ideology” in public school classrooms and the Indiana University School of Medicine. The “Eyes on Education” portal listed examples of unacceptable content, which includes materials that include “critical race theory,” discussions of gender, or employ the dreaded “social-emotional learning” (a form of education that focuses on building children’s social awareness, relationship skills, and decision-making, but which right-wingers believe is a Trojan horse for Marxism).
In practice, the portal has been used as a snitch line for any town crank to report any instance in which students are taught about racism or sexuality, or to report on faculty for their political beliefs. In Franklin, a school social worker was reported for posting in support of Black Lives Matter. In Marion County, a pamphlet for parents titled “Talking with Our Children About Racism” was reported for including books by Ibram X. Kendi on its reading list for high schoolers. A teacher in Kokomo was reported merely for displaying a pride flag in their classroom. One list of high-school level books that was reported for “sexually sensitive content” included George Orwell’s 1984, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Elie Weisel’s Night (a story from the perspective of a Holocaust survivor), and Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone (a harrowing memoir by a former child soldier in Sierra Leone).
Rokita says that the Attorney General’s office plans to “investigate” all instances reported through the portal, but administrators say that many of the documents published are out of date and that they were unaware that any complaints had been made. After the tip line was made public, however, its opponents have done their best to gum it up by sending hilarious memes and fake reports. Independent journalist Erin Reed has cataloged some of the best, which include:
Indiana Jones slapping a Nazi
A report of a famous picture of Trump next to Rudy Giuliani in drag
Multiple reports citing the Bible for teenage pregnancy
A confession purporting to be from Breaking Bad character Walter White
The script for Eurotrip, with a note not to tell Scotty
❧ New York’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, helped to water down a transparency bill that would have cracked down on money laundering by real estate companies. It just so happens that she proposed these changes shortly after receiving massive donations from the real estate lobby. New York is currently dominated by corporate landlords that use shell corporations to launder money, commit financial crimes, and avoid responsibility for alleged abuses of tenants. According to Kathryn Brenzel of The Real Deal in July 2023, the initial version of the bill…
require[d] companies to provide the state with basic, but often elusive, information about the people behind LLCs, including their names and the addresses of their businesses. The database, maintained by the Department of State, would also collect historical information about the LLC, including any name changes…
Put more succinctly, Brenzel said, it would “get a lot easier to figure out who owns what in New York.” That database was originally intended to be public, but following a generous $2.2 million donation from New York’s powerful real-estate interests, Governor Hochul proposed language that made it visible only to government and law enforcement agencies. As a result, Helen Santoro reports in Jacobin,
Information about the shadowy corporate landlords that control a wide swath of Manhattan real estate remains inaccessible to the public. These property owners have been associated with money laundering and other financial crimes, and Hochul’s move means tenants and workers abused by the system continue to have limited ways to seek justice.
❧ Graffiti artists in Los Angeles have tagged nearly every floor of an abandoned skyscraper. The building, Oceanwide Plaza, is technically an unfinished construction project. It’s been sitting empty since 2019, when the Chinese real-estate company Oceanwide Holdings (not the most creative name) ran into financial trouble. Really, it’s surprising that it’s taken this long for graffiti artists to use the skyscraper as a canvas—but they’ve made up for lost time, tagging at least 27 floors with their nicknames in giant neon letters. For their trouble, at least six artists have been arrested for trespassing and vandalism so far. But really, “vandalism” is the wrong word; if anything, the graffitists have improved the building. Before they arrived, Oceanwide Plaza was just another high-rise for people with more money than taste—a featureless gray rectangle, like a hundred others in LA. Now, it’s a completely unique cultural artifact. The real crime isn’t a little spray-paint, but the fact that an enormous building was allowed to sit empty for so long, when so many people in Los Angeles are homeless and desperate for a place to stay. The graffitists understand that buildings are things for human beings to use and enjoy, not just line-items in the portfolio of some multinational investment company. Our society needs more acts of rebellion and creativity like theirs, and fewer faceless financial institutions like Oceanwide Holdings.
THIS WEEK IN EVIL: It’s actually good that you can’t afford your meds!
The patent-pending Bad Take Machine at the Wall Street Journal has spit out another gem this week, with an op-ed by David R. Henderson and Charles L. Hooper called “Be Thankful for High Drug Prices.” It’s not clear why it took two writers to crank this piece out, since it just recycles an age-old argument: that sky-high corporate revenues are necessary to fund Innovation™, since medical research is expensive and companies won’t pursue it unless it’s profitable. “If we pay, we get new lifesaving medicines,” Henderson and Hooper write. “If we don’t, we don’t.”
Of course, this logic—which amounts to the old highway robber’s threat, “your money or your life!”—is deranged for multiple reasons. In the first place, a lot of the Innovation(™) in the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t come from private companies at all, but from the U.S. government. In a 2020 study, researchers with the Institute for New Economic Thinking found that “taxpayers have been footing the bill for every new drug approved between 2010 and 2019” either directly or indirectly, with $230 billion in funding from the National Institutes of Health alone. The vaccines for COVID-19 were an extreme example of this pattern, since their development was heavily subsidized by the NIH—remember “Operation Warp Speed”? —and the vaccines were only later monetized by private companies, who jacked up the prices as soon as they were allowed to. At best, these companies are an unnecessary and inefficient middleman, because every dollar that goes into corporate profits is a dollar that’s not spent on actual healthcare. At worst, they’re simply profiteers.
Like most Wall Street Journal writers, Henderson and Hooper take capitalism, profit, and markets as articles of faith, and refuse to entertain the idea of alternative systems. But those alternatives exist, and they’re just as capable of Innovation(™), if not more so. Famously, communist Cuba has produced revolutionary new forms of medicine—including treatments for Parkinson’s disease and a vaccine for lung cancer—that the United States is still struggling to catch up with, despite being a vastly wealthier nation and spending vastly more. And in Cuba, healthcare is free at the point of use. So not only are “high drug prices” not the only way of getting new drugs, as the WSJ argues—there’s reason to believe they’re actually the worst way.
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ An expert on the British royal family has suggested that Charles Windsor, sometimes known as the “King of England,” may use “herbs and potions” to treat his recently diagnosed cancer. Windsor’s diagnosis was announced on Monday, and CBS correspondent Julian Payne praised him for taking the “bold step” of publicly acknowledging his treatment, speculating that it “may be due to a desire to encourage others to get themselves checked.” If that was where the story ended, Payne’s assessment would be fair enough; although we’re no great fans of kings at Current Affairs, everybody deserves the best possible medical care when they fall ill, and more awareness about public health is always good. Unfortunately, though, Charles’ ideas about health are a bit strange, and they may actually be dangerous to the British public. In an interview with the right-wing TV network GB News, royal biographer Tom Bower reminds us that Charles is “a promoter of alternative medicine… a great believer in natural herbs and potions and things like that,” and may choose those “alternative” methods over chemotherapy. This is all too true. In the past, Charles has set up an entire charity that promoted fraudulent pseudo-medicines like “detox tinctures,” and he’s even sent memos to members of Parliament urging them to use public funds for homeopathy. Now, online antivax influencers are seizing on his pseudoscientific track record, and Bowers’ comment about “herbs and potions,” to promote their own nonsense. There’s a long history of extremely rich people falling for absurd scams when it comes to their health; among others, Steve Jobs might have lived a lot longer if he’d used actual medicine for his own cancer, and not things like “fruit juice therapy.” But at least he wasn’t the nominal head of state for several countries, with an audience to match. Charles’ case is a sad reminder that the rich and powerful are ultimately just people, who share all the frailties and foolishness the rest of us are vulnerable to. That’s an argument against monarchy as a social arrangement, if ever there was one.
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⚜ VIDEO: Two weeks ago, the United States and several other Western nations withdrew funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees—a critical lifeline that provides life-saving aid to millions of people in the besieged Gaza Strip—after Israel accused twelve of its members of involvement in the Oct. 7 attack Hamas launched against Israel. At the time of this news, we argued that it was unconscionable to defund such a critical organization, especially without the evidence being made public or being independently investigated. It turns out that we were too generous to Israel to assume they provided “evidence” at all. Channel 4 News, a British outlet, got its hands on the confidential six-page document that served as the basis for the allegations and found that Israel provided nothing to support its salacious claim, which is now being used as a justification to further starve the people of Gaza:
⚜ LONG READ: After the US helped to depose Pakistan’s former president Imran Khan, the new military-backed regime is undermining democracy. In The Intercept, Ryan Grim describes eight ways in which the new government is subverting the nation’s election to undermine its opponents at the polls:
As Pakistan prepares to determine its next government in a general election on Thursday, concerns are intensifying about electoral irregularities. A growing body of evidence points to election manipulation and political interference by the Pakistani military.
Pakistan was supposed to go to polls last year. The country’s constitution has five-year terms for both the national and provincial assemblies as well as for the post of the prime minister. When the former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s government was toppled in a parliamentary coup backed by the Pakistani military and the U.S. State Department in 2022, it was only in its fourth year.
Since then, the Pakistani military has ruled from the shadows, trying to delay the inevitable elections while at the same time trying to ensure that the massively popular Khan and his party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI, do not come back to power… The publicly visible instances of election rigging — visible, that is, to all but the Biden administration — are too numerous to articulate in a single article. What follows are the most egregious…
He goes on to list the following examples with brief explanations of how each has been carried out:
Banning the Leading Party’s Symbol
Shutting Down the Internet
Banning and Jailing the Leading Candidate
Hacking the Election Management System
Terrorist Violence
Police Raids
Abducting Candidates and Their Families
Voter Suppression
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ The special counsel report on President Biden is out, and it’s worrying! Last year, the world was shocked, horrified, and amused by the revelation that Donald Trump had been keeping classified military documents—some of them allegedly related to nuclear weapons—in his weirdly luxurious bathroom at Mar-a-Lago. In retaliation for the embarrassment to their Dear Leader, Republicans launched their own investigation into Joe Biden’s own handling of secret material, which special counsel Robert Hur has been conducting for months. Now, the results are in, and they’re officially Not Good for Biden. Although his case isn’t quite as bad as Trump’s—there haven’t been any Saudi officials hanging around his home, and the documents in question don’t seem to be nuclear in nature—the special counsel still found that Biden improperly kept secret files about Afghanistan, storing them “in a badly damaged box in the garage, near a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a Zappos box, an empty bucket, a broken lamp wrapped with duct tape, potting soil, and synthetic firewood.”
Biden’s strongest defense doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, either. Arguing against prosecuting the President, Hur reports that it’s unlikely he intentionally kept the files because he appears to be “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Just how poor? Well, according to Hur’s report, he has “diminished faculties,” and struggles to recall basic facts about his own life:
In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden's memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended ("if it was 2013 - when did I stop being Vice President?"), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began ("in 2009, am I still Vice President?"). He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him.
Since the 2020 election, there’s been a fairly heated debate about Biden’s mental state, with left-wing critics like Chapo Trap House’s Will Menaker claiming that “he’s senile… his brain is not all there,” while others insist that he just has a stutter. It’s worth noting that Robert Hur is not a medical doctor, and the report does contain a rebuttal accusing the special counsel of using “highly prejudicial language” about Biden’s memory. But there are other worrying incidents to consider, like the time Biden mistook Emmanuel Macron for long-dead French President François Mitterrand, or said that Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi was “the president of Mexico.” If it’s really true that he can’t remember what years he was Vice President—and that part of the report is a direct quote!—he definitely shouldn’t be making high-level decisions about things like the war in Ukraine, or trying to run a grueling campaign against Trump. So if you’re reading this, Joe, consider: there’s still time to drop out! And please clean your garage.
TOTAL EXONERATION!
Alleged Chinese “spy pigeon” freed after being detained by India for eight months
India, this week, released a pigeon which it detained on suspicion of spying for the Chinese government. According to The Washington Post, “Police found the pigeon near a port in Mumbai in May with two metal rings tied to its leg and what looked like Chinese writing on the underside of its wings. For eight months, the alleged secret agent was held in custody, first by police and then by the city’s Bai Sakarbai Dinshaw Petit Hospital for Animals, which confirmed local media reports about the pigeon and its origin.”
After what Mumbai police said were “deep and proper inquiry and investigations,” it was revealed that the infiltrator was not, in fact, a devious agent of Red China, but merely a Taiwanese racing bird who’d gotten lost. (Yang Tsung-te, the head of the Taiwanese racing pigeon trading platform Nice Pigeon, says “A racing pigeon can fly for up to 1,000 kilometers [about 620 miles] in a day, but for it to fly to India, it had to make stops.”)
Pigeon racing is a huge deal in China. Once the domain of those without the means to breed racehorses, pigeon racing has morphed into a big business all its own. According to a CNN report from 2019, China has more than 100,000 pigeon breeders. That year, a Belgian racing pigeon named Armando, whom the website Pigeon Paradise calls “the best long-distance pigeon of all time in Belgium, and perhaps even worldwide,” was sold for $1.4 million to a Chinese bidder.
Amazingly, the racing pigeon recently held as a political prisoner in India is not the first to be detained on suspicion of espionage. According to The Post, “A similar incident in 2015 sparked amusement in India and Pakistan, and in 2020, police briefly held a Pakistani fisherman’s pigeon after it flew over the countries’ heavily militarized border.” And while the fears of pigeons as harbingers of Chinese duplicity are certainly symptoms of the age of Sinophobic paranoia we currently live in, there is some precedent for pigeons being used as tools for military purposes. As an early issue of the Current Affairs News Briefing discussed, they were used extensively by the Allies in World War I, with more than 22,000 of them being used as part of a “Pigeon Corps” to carry messages across the Western Front. Perhaps the Indian government should include this book as part of its police training curriculum.
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Fact-checking by Justin Ward. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.
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