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Interacting with folks on Bluesky over the past couple days has been an interesting experience I see some folks who seeing commentary, immediately making assumptions, and stating what they believe are truths based on these assumptions I also others who are scared because of harms done by academics

Did I say "harms done by academics"? Yup. There are a lot of great academics who highlight and attempt to address disparities, who aim to understand gender development among trans adolescents and adults, who center their work in the trans community. There are also some who perpetrate harm

We see this in the work that focused on "desistance," much of which attempted to legitimize the idea that therapy could stop people from being transgender. My colleagues and I sought to push back against that in a recent work: psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

There is harm in claims about "transexual typologies" pathologizes trans identities (often framing trans identities as a paraphilia). This has been pushed back against. Moser did an excellent job years ago with this www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1... www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

And theories about "social contagion," which have been pushed back against by numerous academics like @floralashes.bsky.social and others journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

And then there is the Cass Review, the US version of the Cass Review (like the Cass Review, but somehow worse?), calls for therapeutic methods that prioritize "making people comfortable with their 'biological sex'", reports that apparently "demonstrate" that supporting trans people make you violent

That last one came out of a well-known, conservative social psychologists lab. Those of us in the field know who it is. There have been, and are, harms that are being done to the trans community. These harms also extend to the folks who support the trans community

Some of these folks are still tenured professors. Some have retired but still manage to do damage. This isn't even getting into the potential damage that has been done by recent journalism. It's no wonder people immediately assume the worst

I don't know if I will change people's minds. I don't know if I will convince anyone to chill a sec the next time they see new research or the next time they see a "Study says" headline. But maybe one or two people think, "Well damn. Cat was decent, so maybe we give this next person a little grace"

And maybe we, as academics, can start the long and difficult process of rebuilding trust with a community that sees these bad actors (who actually got highlighted by @splcenter.org and @theabigailthorn.bsky.social) and thinks that *all* academics are, at best, suspect

Credit where credit is due: @ghawinriver.bsky.social (Q. McLamore) was one of the main people on the SPLC report