Free Republic

One secret of column-writing: Offer platoons of facts that give readers the delight of discovery.It is tempting but mistaken to say that the current administration of the universe is defective because people are not required to read op-ed columns. That thought is too adjacent to progressivism, which, a critic has said, does not care what people do as long as it is compulsory. Besides, a smaller readership can be superior to a bigger one. Most people do not read newspapers; most who do skip the op-ed page. This means that the few, the happy few, who do read columns do...

A paper published last month in the Archives of Sexual Behavior makes an important point about the environment in which “gender-affirming” drugs and surgeries are offered to minors. Positive outcomes from hormonal interventions, argues psychiatrist Alison Clayton, the article’s author, may be attributable to placebo effects generated by clinical encounters and the social context in which they take place, rather than to the underlying psychotropic effects of the drugs themselves. Clayton’s basic intuition makes sense. If you take a teenager in emotional distress and tell her that drug X will solve her problems, while treatment Y will make them worse,...