Ode to the Asch Conformity Experiment

The U.S. Supreme Court just ruled that states can decide whether genital mutilation of minors can be banned — but conformist California can't see the truth that it should be.

If you haven’t heard of the Asch Conformity Experiment, don’t worry, you already know what it is. You just lived through it. It goes something like this: a dupe is set up in a room with a bunch of actors, and a teacher-type shows them a series of lines of differing sizes. The teacher type asks which lines match. It’s a simple question with an obvious answer. But when all of the others — the actors — assert the wrong answer (that the long line matches the short line, say), the poor guy who’s being experimented on goes ahead and agrees, instead of standing out and looking like a dummy (i.e., standing up for what he knows).

It all changes, however, when a single other person in the room speaks the truth. The dupe gains the courage to speak truth, too.

Was that “truth,” though — or just “his truth”?

Hello 2020!

Were you one of the ones who called out “The Emperor has no clothes!” Did you lose your job, your friends, and your family while doing it?

So many ideas seemed to come right out of the blue in the spring and summer of 2020, when we were told we were never going to return to The Way Things Were, and we should begin loving the “New Normal.” We were supposed to get ready for the Greeaaattttt Reeeeeeee-set! (They wanted us to hear that in the voice of Michael Buffer — “Let’s get ready to ruuuuuumble!” But for some of us, it came out in the Dr. Strangelovean tones of Klaus Schwab — “You vill own nothing und be happy.”)

I was walking with a woman I thought of as one of my most “normal” friends, and she was speaking at me through a mask as we ascended a hill in San Francisco. In high school, this woman would have been a prom queen, a class president, a volleyball team captain — or all three. Today, she worked for the local school system and was an advocate for things like the Genderbread Person, which teaches kids as young as 5 years old the idea that you can choose your gender (whatever it is they want to mean by that word) — no matter your chromosomes.

I had a hard time understanding how, in the course of a few months, this friend of mine had transitioned from someone who might share a picture of a chicken entree on Facebook to a person advocating for genital mutilation of minors. It took me a minute to realize she was not a “normal” friend after all, but a “new normal” one. I was shocked, but as the conversation took turns that got crazier and crazier, I stood my ground. As you might imagine, I haven’t heard from her since.

What I have heard, since, are the increasing numbers of friends with daughters who suddenly transitioned to sons, and even one other mom-friend who herself “transitioned” to a man. These were all people I knew. In a city like this one, with one of the highest densities of LGB’s in the world, I had long known T’s as well. They were people, who, as adults, were a minority of the population exercising their free will. Go them!

But what was happening circa 2020 was something altogether different. It was at a completely different scale in a completely different demographic. When the holidays came around in 2021, 22 and 23, the pictures of happy families increasingly featured not just one child with blue hair, but whole sets of siblings with alternate gender identities. I was hearing in Christmas newsletter humble brag about how many had undergone surgeries. And the mother who was to become a father — I talked with her in person. She was about to undergo the change and said her therapist — I am not making this up — was the one who suggested she transition. Depressed as she was, she just went for it. Next I saw, there was a Facebook post with an announcement that read like an SLA hostage statement from Patty Hearst. “They are treating me well.”

I decide my jacket, not you!

So, no, I wasn’t surprised, a few years later, to hear so many other stories from the “de-transitioners,” who — having undergone chemical treatments and surgeries in teen years — were facing their own abject horror about the decision to permanently remove vital body parts and give up their fertility. I was surprised that these very harrowing stories were somehow not believed by the professionals who should be caring for them. I was also learning that some of the key players in this field were in my own hometown. Youth who weren’t permitted to drive or drink alcohol were being persuaded by the health clinic next door (or, worse, housed in their school) — even encouraged by these people — to make decisions that they would truly regret, but that these professionals would be generously paid for.

So back to the Asch Conformity Experiment. Remember not all the others had to agree to a thing for the person to change his mind to speak the truth — in at least some cases, only one of them had to. One person. One commentator. One state. It started that way with this issue. But now one court, the highest court in the land? Wow. It doesn’t matter if the New York Times is still calling it “gender affirming care,” even while they admit its effects are irreversible. It doesn’t matter that the Wall Street Journal uses the word “setback” to describe the ruling.

The Supreme Court just gave us permission with United States vs. Skrmetti. So many flavors of permission, as Jeff Childers breaks it down in Coffee & Covid, with the Majority and Concurring Supreme Court Justice write-ups.

☕️ POLITICAL WHIMS ☙ Thursday, June 19, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Matt Taibbi, at the Racket, covers it from the freeing of speech perspective.

The Great Disappearing Trans Freakout

And Sasha Stone hits the tone perfectly, both dirgelike and celebratory, with a podcast review of the heroes — especially Christian conservatives, of which she herself is not — who got us to this point where the Supreme Court could open the door to sanity.

A Christian Conservative SCOTUS Was Once My Greatest Fear

It’s not about “kindness,” as is often asserted with forced language around pronouns. It’s about brutality and it’s about bodies, specifically, in the case of the June 18th ruling by the Supreme Court, the bodies of minors being forever maimed. The Supreme Court ruled that states can decide whether “chemical castration” and “genital mutilation” of minors can be banned.

Was it ever transgender “care”? Some states — mine, aggravatingly — continue to think so and will continue to practice barbarism. The Supreme Court hasn’t shut that door on crazy California. It’s up to us to bring the harms to light. But, hey, it’s Pride month, the perfect time for truth itself to come out of the closet.