How institutional consensus and moral certainty replaced evidence in pediatric gender medicine.
From the collapse of a shared American monoculture and the rise of hyper-personalized information streams to the flood of AI-generated content, it has never been harder to separate digital wheat from digital chaff. The promise of shared cultural literacy feels increasingly remote as our information environment grows more complex, while our capacity for comprehension and critical thinking fails to keep pace. Even with access to more knowledge that makes the Library of Alexandria seem almost quaint in comparison, many of us remain lost in an informational hall of mirrors.
This problem is especially acute when it comes to subjects with a genuinely high barrier to entry. Pediatric gender medicine is one such topic. To understand it in any serious, holistic way requires at least a working familiarity with several disciplines that are typically siloed from one another: evidence-based medicine, endocrinology, clinical psychology, bioethics, and sociology, among others. Given that reality, it’s easy to understand the impulse to defer to supposed experts when time, background knowledge, or both are in short supply.
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Joseph Figliolia is a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute.
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