Crystal Kile

Librarian & Americanist studying the public life of knowledge

CAITBC — College of the Alien Information Theory Book Club

Go Visitors!

[Crystal Kile @crystalkile]

Sex, Sexuality, and Gender Peace Talks

Genspect response to the post-BJP/Hecox decision NYT opinion piece by Masha Gessen

It’s notable this column is getting syndicated with headline intact. Are you seeing it in your local paper?

[Genspect @genspect]

This new NYT op-ed frames the Supreme Court’s decision as a clash over whose stories matter more in sport, but that framing misses the central issue: sport isn’t structured around competing narratives, it’s structured around fair categories.

It repeatedly asks us to empathize with one child, and we should. But empathy can’t stop there. Girls who lose roster spots, records, scholarships, and opportunities are also children, and their experiences matter just as much.

The piece suggests that if a boy is struggling or physically vulnerable competing against other boys, the solution is to move him into the girls’ category. That doesn’t follow. If an individual cannot safely or successfully compete in one category, it doesn’t automatically justify dismantling the protections that make the other category meaningful in the first place.

It also implies that a gender-distressed child’s happiness depends on institutions changing sex-based rules around them. That’s a heavy burden to place on a child, especially when their care already involves complex medical pathways—like puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones—that carry ongoing uncertainties and potential long-term effects on development and athletic performance. Concern and compassion for that young person doesn’t require reorganizing competitive sport around those interventions.

The article asks who deserves protection. The answer is everyone.

Girls deserve fair, sex-based competition. Gender-distressed young people deserve dignity, support, and careful medical and psychological care—but not the expectation that society must redefine sex categories to accommodate individual distress. We can affirm a child’s worth without abandoning the objective basis that makes women’s sport possible.

[Crystal Kile @crystalkile]

Cinémathèque

College of the Alien Information Theory Book Club 

Joint Study Group America at 250 presents a program of cinema

“P. Edgar Nixon” 

Welcome, Visitors from VBS Pro-democracy Picnic!

This program is rated R. 

Patton (1970)
Nixon (1995)
J. Edgar (2011)

[Crystal Kile @crystalkile]

Poptart Show | Sat 30 May 
https://t.co/jNFPZ2bj5y

[Crystal Kile @crystalkile]

Sex, Sexuality, and Gender Peace Talks

Feminist consciousness-raising circle

Ayad, S. (Host). (2026, May 21). How prevalent is social gender dysphoria?—Sasha responds (Episode of The Metaphor of Gender) [Video podcast episode]. YouTube. https://t.co/Tru5MOaR4e

[Crystal Kile @crystalkile]

Sex, Sexuality, and The Gender Troubles Studies & Peace Talks

Let’s debate

Cambridge Union. (2026, May 14). This house believes modern LGBTQ+ activism fails its community (B. Angel, A. Boff, A. David, & H. Webberley, speakers) [Video]. YouTube. https://t.co/3StsoZwFre

[Crystal Kile @crystalkile]

Poptart Show | 02 May 2026

https://t.co/SnQ7T6E1oI

[Crystal Kile @crystalkile]

Sex, Sexuality, and Gender Studies

The gender unicorn peace talks

Sasha Ayad (The Metaphor of Gender) re the recent US Supreme Court decision re “conversion therapy.”

The topic is

What Is Conversion Therapy and Am I A Conversion Therapist?

https://t.co/P6nC9qJ0Pq

[Crystal Kile @crystalkile]

Poptart Show | Fri 03 Apr 2026

Recommended audio for retrieval of Jesus from the labyrinth near you.

Haydn, Mahalia Jackson, Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Bob Marley, Diamanda Galás, Robyn Hitchcock, Beachwood Sparks, Cub, Sun Ra.

https://t.co/FPrlyI7X8V

[Crystal Kile @crystalkile]

Chapel

Mode

Jesus as weekend houseguest

[Westminster Abbey @wabbey]

Today is #HolySaturday, a day of stillness to reflect on the reality of Jesus' death before we celebrate the resurrection on Easter Day tomorrow. Find out how we mark the day in Westminster Abbey ⤵️

#HolyWeek2026

[Crystal Kile @crystalkile]

Women’s Studies 

Sex, Sexuality, and Gender Studies 

Joint Study Group America at 250

VBS Inherit the Wind 

Pro-Democracy Picnic

https://t.co/5lzELKUe91

[Crystal Kile @crystalkile]

Joint Study Group America at 250

Women’s Studies 

The Fightin’ Historians after-action report on #NoKings III

Freeman, J., & Cox Richardson, H. (2026, March 28). What the heck just happened? [Video]. YouTube. https://t.co/4eK5K3v46G

[Crystal Kile @crystalkile]

Sex, Sexuality, and The Gender Troubles Studies

Re Girlguiding UK will ban new transgender girl members and require existing trans youth members to leave by September 2026, reversing its 2018 trans-inclusive policy. This decision follows a Supreme Court ruling defining "woman.”

[Read some Piaget please! @prof_curiosity1]

Girl Guides and the Single Sex Question: What Child Development and Safeguarding Tell Us
(longish post)

Girl Guides exists as a single sex organisation for a reason grounded not in prejudice but in developmental science. The research on adolescent girls consistently shows that dedicated single sex environments support confidence, risk taking, and identity formation in ways that mixed environments do not, particularly during the years when girls are navigating the social pressures of puberty and early adolescence. Removing the single sex character of those spaces does not leave them neutral. It changes them in ways that the developmental evidence suggests are meaningful.

The safeguarding concern is straightforward and does not require any claim about the intentions of individual children. Safeguarding frameworks are designed to manage risk at a population level, not to make judgements about individuals. Single sex overnight environments, changing facilities, and residential trips carry specific safeguarding protocols that depend on the single sex character of the group. When a child who is biologically male is included in those environments on the basis of a self reported gender identity, those protocols are compromised in ways that any competent safeguarding review would flag. The 2025 UK Supreme Court ruling, which confirmed that woman and sex in the Equality Act refer to biological sex, reinforces the legal basis for maintaining those boundaries.

The developmental harm to girls at this stage of their lives is not incidental. It goes to the heart of what single sex provision is for. Adolescence is the period in which girls are forming their understanding of themselves as female, navigating the physical changes of puberty, developing the capacity for intimacy and trust with peers of the same sex, and beginning to construct the adult identity that Erikson describes as the central developmental task of this life stage. The research on single sex environments consistently finds that girls in those settings show greater willingness to take intellectual and social risks, report higher levels of comfort with their own developing bodies, and demonstrate stronger peer relationships built on the specific solidarity of shared female experience. Those benefits depend on the space actually being what it presents itself as being.

When a biologically male child is present in that space, the girls in it are placed in a position that the developmental literature does not support and that safeguarding guidance does not anticipate. They are asked to manage the presence of a biological male in changing rooms, on overnight trips, and in the intimate social environment of a group that exists precisely to give them respite from mixed sex social pressure. They are asked to do this at the developmental moment when bodily privacy, peer trust, and the consolidation of a female identity are most significant. And they are asked to do it without their consent having been sought, and frequently without their parents having been informed. The schema formation argument drawn from Bem's work is relevant here: girls at this stage are actively constructing their understanding of what it means to be female, and an environment that systematically blurs the boundary between female and male does not loosen those schemas in a liberating way. It introduces confusion into a developmental process that requires clarity and safety to proceed well.

There is also a relational dimension that deserves attention. Bowlby and Fonagy establish that the capacity for secure peer attachment depends on environments that are predictable, boundaried, and safe. An environment in which the boundaries of membership are uncertain, in which girls may not know whether a peer is biologically male or female, and in which raising a concern is socially costly, is not an environment that supports secure attachment or genuine peer intimacy. The harm is not dramatic or visible. It is the quieter harm of a developmental environment that has been subtly but significantly altered at a moment when its character matters most.

The developmental concern for the boys themselves is less often discussed and deserves equal attention. Erikson and Marcia show that identity formation is a developmental achievement of adolescence requiring a genuine period of exploration and moratorium. A boy who is socially affirmed in a cross sex identity from an early age, placed in environments that reinforce that identity, and supported by institutional structures that treat the identity as settled, is a child whose developmental moratorium has been foreclosed before it properly began. The desistance literature, reporting resolution rates of sixty to ninety percent in pre-affirmation era cohorts depending on cohort and methodology, suggests that the majority of children expressing cross sex identification would, given time and space, arrive at a different understanding of themselves. Institutional social affirmation in single sex spaces of the other sex is not a neutral accommodation. It is an active intervention in a developmental process that the evidence suggests should not be foreclosed.

There is also the Winnicottian dimension, and it deserves more than a passing reference. Winnicott's account of the False Self describes a developmental pattern in which a child, faced with an environment that makes belonging conditional on performing a particular identity, learns to present that identity fluently and consistently. The performance does not feel like performance. It feels entirely authentic, because the child has no access to the True Self that the compliance dynamic has suppressed. The False Self is not a mask the child knowingly wears. It is a structure the child has built in order to survive an environment that could not tolerate what lay beneath.

The boy who joins Girl Guides as a girl is in precisely that environment. His belonging is conditional. It depends on the sustained presentation of a "female identity", affirmed by the institution, reinforced by every interaction within it, and socially costly to question or relinquish. The longer that environment persists, and the more significant the attachments formed within it, the more firmly the False Self structure is consolidated. The child is not being helped to discover who he is. He is being helped to become more fluent in a presentation that the institution requires.

What makes this particularly serious from a developmental perspective is that the harm is invisible from the outside and unfelt from the inside, at least while the compliance dynamic holds. The boy will report that he is comfortable, that he belongs, that the identity is real. That is exactly what Winnicott's model predicts. The False Self is a successful adaptation. It works. The cost is paid later, when the True Self, having been suppressed through the years in which identity formation should have been occurring, eventually reasserts itself, often in the form of the acute distress that characterises detransition accounts. Those accounts, which describe not simply a change of mind but a profound sense of having been absent from one's own development, map with considerable precision onto the clinical picture Winnicott describes.

None of this requires hostility toward any individual child. The appropriate response to a boy experiencing gender related distress is compassionate, thorough clinical assessment, careful attention to the possibility of underlying anxiety, attachment difficulties, or social factors, and the kind of watchful, patient support that allows development to proceed at its own pace.

Placing that child in a single sex environment organised around an affirmed female identity does not provide that support. It provides the conditions in which a False Self consolidates, development forecloses, and the reckoning is deferred to a point when it will be considerably harder to bear.

[Crystal Kile @crystalkile]

Joint Study Group America at 250

America Held Hostage
Day 432

The emergency appears to be self-inflicted.

#NoKings

Suggested reading:

Kellner, D. (2025). Media spectacle in the 21st century: From the stolen election of 2000 to the Trump MAGA horror show. Springer VS.

[Crystal Kile @crystalkile]

Poptart Show | Fri 27 Mar 2026

https://t.co/fubqzcd6gL

This week’s Poptart Show stages the machine of interpretation and proposes ways to resist its flattening effects.

[Crystal Kile @crystalkile]

Joint Study Group America at 250

Team Civis vs The GVs

The Daily Beast. (2026, March 16). I know how Epstein groomed America’s corrupt elite | The Daily Beast podcast (feat. Anand Giridharadas; hosted by Joanna Coles) [Video podcast episode]. YouTube. https://t.co/JcMKIA4Kgc

[Crystal Kile @crystalkile]

Joint Study Group America at 250

The past 100 years

Camelot Algorithim (Egg) at rest post r/johnandcarolyn first interface

[Crystal Kile @crystalkile]

Joint Study Group America at 250

Object Title: The Dream of the System That Learned to Heal Itself (Protean Egg)

WunnieCat Index (LCC): BF697.5.S65 L53 1993

Date: March 17, 2026
Dedication: Tulane Book Fest 2026
Status: In circulation

Full record : https://t.co/riVE7EdSmL

[Crystal Kile @crystalkile]

Women’s Studies

Sex, Sexuality, and Gender Studies

Do women enjoy human rights? Discuss using current data local to you.

The 70th session of the Commission on the Status of Women is taking place at United Nations HQ in New York through 19 March 2026.

https://t.co/sIes8FQMmr

[Crystal Kile @crystalkile]

Joint Study Group America at 250

The past 100 years

The Southern Rock Opera Seminar

Special to Visitors attending Tulane Book Fest 2026

Be sure to see

A Closer Walk NOLA

https://t.co/F8oyiFFrdr

[Crystal Kile @crystalkile]

Women’s Studies

Sex, Sexuality, and Gender Studies

The detransition wave of 2025-26

[Read some Piaget please! @prof_curiosity1]

The Detransition Wave: What Developmental Psychology Predicted All Along

The rates of detransition - reversing a gender transition and returning to one's biological sex - are growing rapidly, particularly among young women who transitioned in their teens. Forums for detransitioners now number in the tens of thousands.

The phenomenon is not surprising. Five foundational frameworks in developmental psychology effectively predicted it. Their common message: adolescence is characterised by social contagion, conformity pressure, and identity instability. Gender identity ideology both ignored all of this and then exploited it, and young people are paying the price.

Bandura: Social Contagion is Not Self Knowledge
Bandura showed that adolescents construct identity primarily through observing and imitating others, not through genuine introspection. Online communities have created a near perfect reinforcement loop: transition narratives earn affirmation, community membership, and status. Behaviours adopted through social modelling rather than authentic self knowledge are prone to revision when the individual escapes the modelling environment. The documented clustering of transgender identification in female peer groups, consistent with Lisa Littman's research on rapid onset gender dysphoria, is a textbook Bandura phenomenon. Gender identity theory, which treats self report as the sole diagnostic criterion, has no framework for distinguishing real distress from socially transmitted identity.

Kohlberg: Conformity Is Not Conviction
Kohlberg established that adolescents reason at the conventional level, they make decisions to secure peer approval, not from independent reflection. Post conventional reasoning, which involves genuinely autonomous judgement, develops only in late adolescence and adulthood. A teenager immersed in communities that celebrate transition and frame hesitation as bigotry is operating under conditions of maximal conventional pressure. Treating that teenager's self report as a reliable clinical guide is a category error. Gender identity theory conflates conformity with conviction. Kohlberg's fifty years of empirical research show they are categorically different things.

Vygotsky: Ideological Scaffolding Shapes, Then Traps
Vygotsky showed that development is shaped by the interpretive frameworks - the scaffold - provided by one's social environment. A young person whose every expression of distress is channelled through the single lens of gender incongruence, with all alternative explanations excluded, will construct a self understanding built from those tools. This is not support; it is ideological capture. When detransitioners describe how affirmation only environments made it impossible to consider other explanations for their suffering - trauma, autism, depression, homophobia - they are describing Vygotsky's scaffold failure. The language of gender identity does not merely describe inner experience. It constructs it.

Erikson and Marcia: Foreclosure Has Consequences
Erikson identified adolescence as requiring a protected moratorium, a period of identity experimentation before commitment. Marcia operationalised this: identities adopted without prior exploration (foreclosure) are predictably unstable and prone to crisis in adulthood. The gender medicine pathway abolishes the moratorium entirely, moving distressed teenagers toward hormones and surgery as though these were routine interventions. The detransition wave is the deferred moratorium asserting itself in adulthood, the identity work that should have occurred at fifteen happening at twenty five instead, with permanent physical consequences already in place.

Conclusion
These five empirical theories converge on the same verdict: the conditions under which a generation of young people has been encouraged to medically transition are precisely the conditions developmental psychology identifies as most likely to produce regret. Gender identity ideology proceeded as though a century of research on adolescent vulnerability did not exist. The detransition wave is the empirical reply. It will grow larger, and the reckoning - clinical, legal, and ethical - is only beginning.