Mia Hughes Presentation At Stanford

Stanford University Sees Fit to Preserve a Kernel of Free Speech

Several of my network are Stanford alums or worked at the University. My high school was a prep school for the University. Many companies in Silicon Valley were started by Stanford students, some of them such as the founders of Yahoo, not even waiting to graduate before launching their business. A replica of the landmark garage in nearby Palo Alto, where Stanford students Hewlett and Packard tinkered, sits in the engineering department. The main quad surrounding the non-denominational Memorial Church is such a landmark and architectural jewel of Romanesque and Byzantine flavor that it is a popular pick for weddings including lesbian alums in my circle. I always try to include the palm tree-lined drive to the church for best effect for visitors. Plus it has its Rodin garden with famed Gates of Hell. 

It wouldn’t be overstating it to say that my community revolves around the University like a splendid sun of our culture-deprived suburban existence. So to have a gender-critical presentation approved for presentation anywhere in its hallowed halls was news. 

Mia Hughes, the researcher who brought us the WPATH Files, gave a presentation that provided such a psychologically interesting context that it knocked my socks off and should seriously challenge any remaining doubts that gender dysphoria is a condition that has real biological roots. That I could frame it as a win for free speech, I hoped would put my people on notice that both free speech and gender-critical views were something worth saving. My write-up did prompt one “like” from a Stanford-affiliated contact central to my circle so I was happy with that. 

I am pleased to see that a handful of professors in dusty, overlooked corners of Stanford have been bold enough to call out the ongoing creep of restricting free speech on university campuses. It was through their Classical Liberalism Seminar, held biweekly at the Graduate School of Business, that a speaker of interest to sex-realist came from Ottowa to give her talk “From Hysteria to Gender Dysphoria: How Culture and Medicine Shape Mental Illness”. Held in a small classroom, it was attended by two sex-realist activists and several more of us on zoom.

Mia Hughes began her talk with a description of a mental disorder that prompted those afflicted to travel compulsively for no particular reason and were known as Fugueurs. Her list of temporary mental compulsions, that occur at certain times in history and fade away, included Charcot’s Hysteria, Multiple Personality Disorder, False Memory Syndrome, Satanic Panic and now Gender Dysphoria. For each disorder she recounted the cultural context in which they occurred that might prompt their sufferers to manifest such a disorder and the physicians who unintentionally spread the contagion by studying it, describing it, giving it a medicalized name and treating the condition with unnecessary medical intervention such as a hysterectomy in the cases of women exhibiting symptoms of hysteria, mostly privileged white women who had to severely repress their emotional life.

The cultural context and possible reasons for each of these conditions, she described, were fascinating.

In the case of gender dysphoria she listed the comorbidities (existing conditions). These included autism, attention deficit disorder, borderline personality disorder, internalized homophobia and trauma. All symptoms we were familiar with from the stories of detransitioners. We also appreciated her assessment that excessive attention is being given to children who hate their bodies during puberty. Puberty is now seen as a problematic condition by medical personnel alerted to look for gender dysphoria to justify treatment with puberty blockers. 

She also mentioned that the current climate of identity crises, induced by the oppressor/oppressed narrative taught in schools, leads children to adopt a glamorized victimhood in order not to be pegged as an oppressor. 

In addition, girls sensitive to the encroaching male gaze as their bodies develop want to opt out of femininity before they’ve even experienced it, while boys may wish to opt out of the toxic masculinity narrative. 

She also warned that even those who do not undergo body alterations do not come out unscathed but are mentally scarred, just as those with recovered false memories still believe in the imaginary harm they experienced under hypnosis to recover such false memories.

Mia Hughes earned her credibility as a researcher by compiling the leaked files from WPATH, the authority on trans medicine, of practitioners voicing their doubts about treating gender dysphoria with hormones and surgeries on patients who so clearly had other mental conditions and were vulnerable to the social conditions she mentioned above. 

During the Q&A, a pediatrician brought up the condition of those born with anomalies of sex development known as intersex and how that might explain these trans identities. She firmly told him that these disorders of sex development have nothing to do with gender dysphoria. Another asked how many children were actually given such drastic treatment. She was searching for her US numbers when Billboard Chris, a well-known activist dad, listed them as follows from the data now being compiled by insurance agents. 50-179 under 12 1/2 have received double mastectomies. 660 under 18 have received phalloplasties, a surgery that strips skin from the forearm to fashion into a tube and is sewn to the body to serve as a penis.

Our sex-realist members also know that in California kids can legally leave their parents and enter the state institutions where they can access treatment if their parents don’t affirm their gender identity. Those who run away from home to come to our pro-trans medical treatment sanctuary state can also access hormones and surgeries without their parent’s consent.

Listening to this talk, that was undisturbed by noisy trans activists or bureaucratic attempts to cancel such sharing of information, prompted me to look into this little pushback from within Stanford University. Interestingly the three academics (all white male) are from the Business School with two professors of finance and one associate professor of accounting who is an immigrant from Chile and has tenure. They held a conference on Academic Freedom two years ago.

The Academic Freedom Declaration of the Classical Liberalism Initiative created by these intrepid professors is well worth reading.