Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By H. Christopher Frey, Professor of Environmental Engineering, North Carolina State University

For decades, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has relied on an independent scientific program to answer two basic questions when chemicals come up for review: Does the chemical pose a threat to human health? If so, how much exposure is necessary before it becomes a problem?

The scientists involved in that program, known as the Integrated Risk Information System, or IRIS, served as neutral scientific referees.

Now, the Trump administration is dismantling the program and moving the scientific assessment role to policy offices, opening the door for political pressure. The administration is also making it easier for past IRIS assessments to be revisited or overturned.

This change is not merely bureaucratic: It reshapes whether future assessments of chemical dangers will be ignored, delayed by time-consuming legal fights, or understated by the federal government, potentially with real consequences for public health.

Numerous chemicals are hazardous to human health. For example, ethylene oxide is used to sterilize medical equipment. However, studies show ethylene oxide poses elevated cancer risks to people who live near facilities that release it. Chromium‑VI, used as a corrosion inhibitor and for metal finishing, can contaminate drinking water. Made famous by the Erin Brockovich case, it has been linked to cancer and other adverse health effects. Formaldehyde, found in building materials and household products, has long raised concerns about cancer and respiratory disease.

EPA scientists assessed each of these chemicals through the IRIS program. Now, the IRIS program itself, as well as many of its formal assessments of over 550 chemicals developed over four decades, is being challenged under the Trump administration.

What IRIS did – and what it didn’t do

In any high‑stakes game, the referee enforces the rules so the outcome rests on the facts, not on who shouts the loudest or has the most at stake.

IRIS played that role for chemical safety. It was part of the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, which was recently dismantled by the Trump administration. Its scientists assessed whether chemicals cause harm and weighed how health risks changed with a person’s increasing exposure to the chemical. These scientists did not estimate real‑world exposures, decide acceptable risk or make regulatory choices. Those functions were handled in policy offices.

I have worked with IRIS assessments from multiple perspectives — as a professor of environmental engineering, as a reviewer for the National Academies and EPA science advisory processes, and as assistant administrator of EPA’s Office of Research and Development from 2022 to 2024, where I oversaw the IRIS program.

IRIS assessments were written by EPA scientists and rigorously reviewed by independent external peer reviewers with experience in each specific chemical. The assessments have been used across EPA programs and by states, local governments and tribes, and internationally. Industry representatives, environmental groups, other federal agencies and members of the public all had opportunities to comment on the drafts of assessments before they were finalized.

When disagreements arose over IRIS assessments, independent scientific experts were asked to weigh the evidence and advise the EPA on how to move forward. That process, relying on scientists, not stakeholders, was meant to ensure that scientific judgments were grounded in evidence, not in policy preferences or financial interests.

The actual policy decisions to regulate chemicals were made elsewhere, by EPA officials and, in some cases, by states or other jurisdictions. IRIS provided the scientific foundation so those decisions could be informed by an evidence‑based understanding of chemical hazards.

IRIS assessments effectively set the standard for assessing chemical hazards internationally. Other agencies and countries rely on IRIS assessments precisely because they are comprehensive, transparent and independently reviewed.

Why critics wanted IRIS dismantled

That track record matters.

Some industry‑aligned organizations have argued that IRIS assessments are flawed or biased and have called for eliminating the program.

However, independent scientific reviews have repeatedly examined these concerns and found that IRIS methods reflect the current state of the science and have strengthened in rigor, transparency and consistency over time.

It’s true that IRIS assessments often took years to complete, but that was because extensive interagency review and limited staffing slowed the pace at which assessments could inform regulatory decisions. Delay is not the same as poor science.

What changes when the referee disappears?

With IRIS eliminated as an independent program, chemical hazard assessments will be overseen by regulatory offices that also weigh economic impacts, legal risk and policy priorities.

When scientific assessments are developed within offices responsible for policy decisions, it becomes harder to maintain a clear separation between evaluating evidence and weighing its regulatory consequences. That separation has historically helped ensure that scientific conclusions are grounded in evidence alone.

Courts generally give weight to agency expertise when decisions are supported by a clear and well‑documented scientific record. However, when agencies fail to clearly explain how the evidence supports their decisions, including when agencies depart from their own scientific assessments, courts can block those decisions under the Administrative Procedure Act or other laws, such as the Clean Air Act.

The result can be prolonged litigation and delays in developing or implementing regulations, with consequences for public health.

How communities are affected

Industries have long challenged scientific findings that show their products can cause harm – from tobacco smoke to particulate air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.

When public health is at stake, I believe independent referees are essential to ensure that facts are determined by evidence, not by the industries that would benefit. Shifting away from independent scientific review risks undermining that foundation.

I served as Deputy Assistant Administrator for Science Policy at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from 2021 to 2022, and as Assistant Administrator for Research and Development at the U.S. EPA from 2022 to 2024.

– ref. EPA is sidelining its independent chemical referee – and that endangers public health – https://theconversation.com/epa-is-sidelining-its-independent-chemical-referee-and-that-endangers-public-health-283120

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Scott Shackelford, Professor of Business Law and Ethics, Indiana University

With the 2026 midterms less than six months away, the Election Security Group would normally be busy helping prepare the nation’s election infrastructure. The federal task force typically briefs Congress on upcoming threats and engages with state and local leaders to game out scenarios ranging from ransomware to critical infrastructure attacks on Election Day.

But Gen. Joshua Rudd, director of the National Security Agency and commander of the U.S. Cyber Command – the two agencies that jointly run the Election Security Group – told the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 28, 2026, that he didn’t know whether the group had been set up yet. The Election Security Group has worked every federal election cycle since 2018, but, as of mid-May, there is no public indication it has been activated.

This pending Election Security Group activation follows the Trump administration’s 2025 decision to defund the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, the threat-sharing hub that helped make 2024 the most cyber-secure election in U.S. history, according to the Center for Internet Security, a nonprofit focused on protecting against digital threats. A White House spokesperson said of the cuts at the time that EI-ISAC’s work no longer effectuated the priorities of the Department of Homeland Security.

These losses – and the disbanding of other federal offices that counter foreign influence operations – make it harder for local officials to learn of threats to election infrastructure, like AI-enabled targeting of voting tabulation systems or deepfakes of candidates. Little is known about whether the proactive cyber deterrence that has defined U.S. elections for much of the past decade remains in place in any other form.

I’m a scholar of global efforts to secure democracy, and I co-edited a book called “Securing Democracies” about cyberattacks and disinformation worldwide. I can attest to the importance of guarding against foreign efforts to undermine trust in U.S. elections and believe that, without groups like the EI-ISAC and the Election Security Group in place, the 2026 midterms could mark a milestone: For the first time in perhaps a decade, the next election may be less secure than the last.

A decade of election defense

The Russian-backed Internet Research Agency began targeting the U.S. political system to sow divisions in 2014. Thanks to Internet Research Agency troll farms – organized groups paid to flood social media platforms with fake or divisive content – disinformation proliferated through the 2016 election. At the same time, Russia’s GRU – its military intelligence agency – homed in on the Democratic National Committee and probed all 50 state election systems. It breached Hillary Clinton’s campaign and compromised election systems in Illinois.

Though there is no evidence that votes were altered as a result, Russian influence exposed the country’s election vulnerabilities and set the stage for extensive investigations and hearings questioning how the U.S. government should respond. It left lasting damage in its wake, like lower trust in electoral processes and widened political divides.

In the final weeks of the Obama administration, the Department of Homeland Security designated election infrastructure as critical, akin to water and electricity. The first Trump administration built on that designation and created the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a component of the Department of Homeland Security, in 2018. That same year, the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command – the military nerve center for cybersecurity – partnered to launch what was initially called the Russia Small Group, a task force to guard U.S. election infrastructure against Russian interference.

Since at least the Obama administration, the U.S. had been largely focused on defensive measures to protect elections, like multifactor authentication and encryption, which make it harder to compromise systems in the first place. The Trump administration wanted to be more proactive, to put adversaries on notice and deter future attacks. This approach is known as defending forward, or persistent engagement.

The test for this new, more activist policy came during the 2018 midterms, as the Internet Research Agency again tried to widen divisions in U.S. society through hundreds of thousands of manufactured tweets and posts that made divisive views appear more widely shared than they were on both sides of hot-button issues. This time, however, the Russia Small Group took the Internet Research Agency offline during and immediately after the election. Although the details are classified, public reporting indicates that Cyber Command temporarily disrupted the Internet Research Agency’s internet access and sent direct messages to operatives warning them against such activities and instructing them to not interfere in U.S. elections.

The Election Security Group

By the 2020 presidential election, the Russia Small Group had been renamed the Election Security Group, and its scope expanded beyond Russia to include China, Iran, North Korea and nonstate actors. It worked to “disrupt, deter and degrade foreign adversaries’ ability to interfere with and influence how U.S. citizens vote and how those votes are counted.”

The Election Security Group does this through detailed information-sharing across agencies and with local officials and the private sector. If, for instance, a foreign influence campaign falsely claims that polling places have closed early in a swing state, the Election Security Group can alert election officials, platforms and distributed cybersecurity teams before the claim goes viral. In true “defend forward” spirit, it can also help cut off foreign trolls and state-backed hackers from what’s needed to run an influence operation, like internet access, servers and accounts.

Typically, it is active during election years, serving as a vital coordination hub and turning intelligence about foreign election threats into warnings, defensive measures and offensive operations.

The Election Security Group’s absence comes at a time when both threats and technological vulnerabilities are multiplying.

The 2026 midterms

The current election cycle, in many ways, is more prone to targeting than previous ones because of the Iran war, AI-powered cyberattacks, nation state–sponsored attacks against U.S. election infrastructure, and the firing of key Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency personnel who worked with tech companies to spot election-related deepfakes and inaccurate or misleading content.

These challenges – combined with losing the EI-ISAC and, possibly, the Election Security Group – could leave the U.S. less prepared this November. Local and state election officials have fewer places to turn for the latest intelligence, and Congress is less informed about pressing threats – all while global U.S. standing is slipping and foreign adversaries could feel emboldened.

The Election Security Group, which was created by the first Trump administration – alongside both the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency – has been an important weapon in the U.S. arsenal to defend vulnerable election systems. What fills these gaps remains unclear. One outlet has reported that plans to revive the Election Security Group are beginning to move through senior intelligence and defense channels, weeks after Rudd’s testimony. Even if the group is activated immediately, it will have less than six months to do what it has historically done across a full election year. With early voting beginning in some states even sooner, the clock is ticking.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

– ref. For the first time in a decade, the next election could be less secure than the one preceding it – https://theconversation.com/for-the-first-time-in-a-decade-the-next-election-could-be-less-secure-than-the-one-preceding-it-282107

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Matthew Jordan, Professor of Media Studies, Penn State

When CBS Radio News goes silent on May 22, 2026, Americans will lose access to news programming they’ve tuned into from their living rooms, kitchens and cars for nearly a century.

The once-bipartisan idea that the nation’s media should exist to serve democracy continues to fade with it, too.

As a media historian, I think the story of CBS Radio News’ rise and fall cannot be told without telling another parallel story: the story of how the U.S. stopped demanding that media serve the public interest.

When CBS was born in 1927, radio was ascendant, and this new form of mass communication was spurring vibrant discussions about how media could better serve democracy.

Americans had already seen how concentrated wealth during the Gilded Age had tilted the news ecosystem by overemphasizing the concerns of the rich while glossing over inequality, graft and corruption. World War I further demonstrated the power of mass media to shape public opinion through propaganda, reinforcing calls for democratic oversight of broadcasting.

Just how to regulate radio was up for debate. But there was broad consensus across party lines that government could play a role in protecting the public from concentrated media power and, with it, foreign misinformation, bad-faith special interest messaging or fraudulent advertising.

The formative years

CBS radio traces its origins to the United Independent Broadcasters, a network of 16 local stations founded by music manager Arthur L. Judson. When Columbia Records bought a stake, it was renamed the Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System.

Early broadcasts simply involved announcers reading short breaking-news dispatches distributed by the United Press wire service. Within months, Columbia sold its share to investors including William S. Paley, who streamlined the name to CBS.

Paley was no public media crusader. He was a businessman who wanted radio to turn a profit. But his management reflected a belief that radio could serve two masters: the public interest and advertisers.

He hired journalist Paul J. White to run the news division and created a regular news segment called “Something for Everyone.”

Though they differed on how best to achieve it, Democrats and Republicans agreed that radio ought to serve the public interest. In other words, because the airwaves belonged to all Americans, broadcasters had obligations beyond profit. They needed to provide reliable information, platform diverse viewpoints and cover matters of public concern.

In the 1920s, then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover was charged with formulating federal radio policy. Though he was a staunch, pro-business conservative, Hoover was also an engineer who thought that the radio system should be “free of monopoly” and, like any machine, could be gradually improved so it would better serve democracy.

“The ether is a public medium, and its use must be for the public benefit,” he said in November 1925.

Republican President Calvin Coolidge signed the Radio Act of 1927 into law. Passed with overwhelming support, it required radio stations to demonstrate a commitment to “public interest, convenience and necessity” in order to receive a license.

Forging the public’s trust

By the time the 1934 Communications Act created the Federal Communications Commission, a regulatory agency tasked with licensing broadcasters and enforcing ownership rules, the idea that radio should serve the public had been normalized.

In 1935, Paley made Edward R. Murrow – the man most associated with CBS Radio’s public service mission – head of news programming.

With fascism threatening democracy across Europe, Murrow launched “World News Roundup” in 1938. The longest-running news program in American media, it featured live reports transmitted by shortwave from locations around the world. American audiences huddled around their radios nightly to hear CBS’ reports, which showed how live news could unite a nation and cultivate a richer information ecosystem than the uniform propaganda of Europe’s fascist strongmen.

CBS’ gripping coverage of World War II solidified its importance as an American institution. Murrow’s signature tag lines – “this is London” and, later, “good night and good luck” – helped forge the public’s trust in CBS’ reliable and informative programming.

The dangers of delusion and amusement

After the war, television challenged radio’s dominance. Paley understood that Murrow had built a deep trust among listeners, and he put him in charge of CBS News as the network expanded its programming to TV.

Yet Murrow grew uneasy with shifts in the network’s coverage, which, in his view, increasingly served the economic interests of its owners.

Speaking to the Radio Television News Directors Association in 1958, Murrow lamented how radio and television had forgotten “to operate in the public interest.” He worried that “we have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information” and saw mass media increasingly “being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us.”

Without serious reporting and civic responsibility as their animating principles, radio and television were losing their democratic utility, becoming mere “wires and lights in a box.”

Corporations gain the upper hand

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, many of the rules dating from when CBS Radio News was born, like ownership restrictions and requirements for educational programming, remained on the books.

But during this period, media companies started spending enormous sums of money on donations to legislators who could do their bidding – and capturing the regulatory bodies that were supposed to be holding them accountable. The spirited debates about how radio could better serve democracy largely disappeared. Instead, the conversation shifted to whether government should have any role at all in regulating the media.

Principles that once had broad public support – producing public interest news as a quid pro quo for licensing, limits on foreign ownership and fairness rules that required stations to give equal time to both sides of an issue – faded away.

Any societal obligation outside of earning profit started being described as a threat to the American way of life. Those arguing that media should be regulated like a public utility in a pluralistic democracy were effectively ignored.

After President Bill Clinton signed the 1996 Telecommunication Act, critics argued that industry lobbying had helped dismantle much of the public interest framework that had long governed American broadcasting. The legislation relaxed ownership caps and cross-ownership rules, allowing a small number of large corporations to acquire far more stations and weakening the older public interest obligations tied to broadcast licensing.

Before the act, corporations were limited to owning 40 radio stations. Now, conglomerates like iHeartMedia and Audacy can own thousands.

‘The tube is flickering’

Through it all, CBS Radio News’ top-of-the-hour bulletins remained on the air, a reminder of its original public mission.

Yet increasingly, the deregulated radio ecosystem failed to perform that function.

Back in the 1920s, you could hear editorials arguing that the radio should not be given over to “propagandists, religious zealots and unprincipled persons to grind their own axes.” By the early 2000s, divisive shock jocks and hosts feeding on partisan anger dominated the radio dial.

In a 1938 radio address on CBS’ ethical commitments, Paley argued that “broadcasting as an instrument of American democracy must forever be wholly, honestly and militantly non-partisan.” By 2016, CEO Les Moonves defended CBS’ decision to increase its coverage of President Donald Trump’s spectacularly divisive politics to juice ratings: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” Four years later, Trump awarded one of radio’s most polarizing partisan propagandists, Rush Limbaugh, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In his second term, Trump has abused his power over the media ecosystem. In 2025, the Trump administration’s FCC approved the merger of Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS, with Skydance Media. But it only did so after Paramount Global settled a lawsuit Trump had filed against CBS for $16 million.

Though many talented journalists and producers remain, CBS News’ recently hired editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, has worked to make the network more friendly to the Trump administration. She temporarily shelved a “60 Minutes” segment critical of Trump’s use of El Salvador’s CECOT prison and promoted a friendly town hall with conservative commentator Erika Kirk, the widow of assassinated political activist Charlie Kirk. Ratings at the network have collapsed.

Though Paramount Skydance is using its enormous debt load to justify taking CBS Radio News off the air, the conglomerate is trying to purchase CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, in a move that would only further the monopolization of the news media.

Americans can’t say Murrow didn’t warn them.

“The tube is flickering,” he said in 1958. And unless Americans reclaim their right to information not colored by profit motive and special interests, “we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.”

Matthew Jordan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. As goes CBS Radio News, so goes the idea that news media should serve the public interest – https://theconversation.com/as-goes-cbs-radio-news-so-goes-the-idea-that-news-media-should-serve-the-public-interest-281718

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Susan Radzilowski, Lecturer in Social Work, University of Michigan

Imagine this scenario: In late 2025, a social worker sits down with a transgender teenager and his parents. The family is trying to decide whether, and when, to begin gender-affirming hormone treatment.

No one in the family was questioning this young person’s gender identity. The teen had been living as a boy for years. By all accounts, he was thriving: emotionally, academically and socially.

He felt ready for this next step, and so did his parents – at first.

What gave them pause was not a wavering in the parents’ support of their child’s identity, or a change in the teen’s needs. Instead, they felt unsure whether starting hormone therapy was still legal – or even safe.

As a clinical social worker who works extensively with children and families navigating gender‑affirming care – and as someone whose trans child is now an adult – I have encountered several families facing similar questions about their options. These concerns have grown in recent years, especially as more states have moved to restrict gender-affirming care for minors.

In states like Michigan, gender-affirming care for minors remains legal as of May 2026. Yet news coverage and political rhetoric have left many families uncertain about what care doctors are still permitted to offer.

In response to evolving federal legal and regulatory pressures, several Michigan health systems have limited or discontinued certain forms of gender-affirming medical care for minors. This includes puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormone therapy. These limitations have increased confusion among families about what care remains available.

Families are flooded with disinformation and misinformation suggesting the science on gender-affirming care has changed. It has not. But a growing gap exists between what the law permits and what families believe possible, shaping how parents make medical decisions for their children.

What the law says – and what families hear

As of May 2026, gender-affirming care for minors remains legal in 23 states, with shield laws that protect against prosecution in other states. Around 27 states have enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth.

Regardless of legality, gender-affirming care is endorsed by every major medical association, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society.

In states where gender‑affirming care is banned, the effects on youth and families are often immediate and far‑reaching. Patients may be forced to stop care, and these unplanned treatment disruptions can negatively affect mental health. Research shows that transgender youth experience increased anxiety, depression and suicidality when they’re exposed to restrictive policies, and a majority have reported that these policies have negatively affected their well‑being.

When care is banned, families shoulder added burdens. They must take time away from work and school and travel long distances – sometimes crossing state lines – to access care. One national study found that more than 1 in 4 transgender youth were living over four hours from the nearest clinic after state legislators enacted restrictions. Many faced even longer travel times. For young people, having to retell their story to a new care team can feel exhausting and traumatizing.

Even in states where care is legal, there are longer wait times and reduced access as providers and families pivot to navigate evolving legal risks. These pressures compound the emotional, logistical and financial toll on families trying to maintain stable care. Parents and young people are also concerned that their care may be abruptly withdrawn once started.

Additionally, parents worry that supporting their child’s gender transition could bring unwanted government scrutiny. In July 2025, the Department of Justice issued subpoenas to doctors and clinics to obtain the private medical records of transgender minors as part of an effort to end pediatric gender-affirming care.

This heightened scrutiny has had a chilling effect on patients and providers, undermining patient privacy and trust in care.

What gender-affirming care actually involves

Much of the pushback concerning gender‑affirming care arises from misunderstandings about what it actually involves.

Gender-affirming care is an individualized approach to supporting young people whose gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth. It includes social support, mental health assessment and, for some patients, medical treatment.

Care begins with a comprehensive, thorough assessment of the patient, including their mental and physical health and social relationships. Clinicians interview patients about significant aspects of their life, including their gender identity, trauma history, educational status and overall well-being. The parents’ perspectives are incorporated into the assessment as well, along with religious or cultural barriers to care.

To initiate any medical care, consent from the parent and assent from the patient is required. Each patient’s plan is grounded in a full understanding of the child’s needs, and this may or may not involve medical transition.

Access to gender‑affirming care has been consistently associated with improved mental health outcomes, including reductions in depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts among transgender youth. While some research has reported regret after transitioning, many of these studies tend to discount positive outcomes, minimize the harms of restricting care or apply standards of evidence unevenly for transgender and cisgender children.

For example, the National Health Service England’s 2020 Cass Review has influenced public discourse about gender-affirming care in the U.S. and the U.K. It concluded that there is limited and uncertain evidence supporting medical interventions for transgender youth and recommended a more cautious approach to care. However, scholars across medicine, mental health and law have criticized the Cass Review’s methodology and conclusions, noting that the authors misused or misrepresented parts of the available data and applied inconsistent standards when evaluating research.

Critics caution against applying the review’s findings to patient care. Doing so risks harming young patients by treating transgender identities as a disease and making blanket recommendations against care.

Even where care is legal, accessing it is harder

Together, misinformation, legal threats and evolving policies have made accessing evidence‑based care more difficult. This has resulted in the weakening of the safeguards supporting comprehensive care and ongoing monitoring of young patients’ physical and mental health. Some families have been forced to navigate fragmented access to care, rely on less experienced providers or attempt to piece together care on their own.

Some politicians frame restrictive policies as protecting young people. But these restrictions in fact have the opposite effect by limiting access to care and destabilizing established treatment plans.

When care is delayed or interrupted, the resulting distress that a young patient experiences stems not from a change in their gender identity, but from uncertainty about what comes next.

Research has shown that this instability can increase a young person’s risk of anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation.

How parents can support their trans child

When medical care is inaccessible, there are still tangible ways parents can support their children.

For one, parents can affirm their child’s gender by using their chosen name and pronouns, and asking other family members to do the same. They can also support their child by allowing them to explore their gender expression, welcoming their child’s trans friends into family activities and creating spaces where their identity is respected.

Parents can monitor changes in their child’s mood or behavior and use those moments as opportunities to check in. When concerns arise, they can consider connecting their child with a gender‑affirming therapist.

Parents can also advocate for their child at home and at school. They can work with schools to develop a gender support plan that proactively addresses potential challenges, including name and pronouns, access to restrooms and activities, and identifying adult allies.

Parental support remains one of the strongest protective factors for the mental health and overall well-being of their child. For some parents, this parallel process involves letting go of expectations or assumptions about who their child would be, and fully loving and seeing the child in front of them. That shift can provide a sense of direction and open the door to deeper, more genuine intimacy.

My experience has shown me, time and again, that when a child transitions, the whole family transitions alongside them. Consistent parental support helps young people tolerate uncertainty in an unpredictable legal and political climate. More importantly, steady, affirming support from adults helps transgender youth maintain connection, safety and hope for the future, even when access to care becomes unstable.

Susan Radzilowski does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Transgender youth and their families struggle to find gender-affirming care – even in states where it’s still legal – https://theconversation.com/transgender-youth-and-their-families-struggle-to-find-gender-affirming-care-even-in-states-where-its-still-legal-281492

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Olga Lazareva, Professor of Psychology, Drake University

Imagine taking out a 12-inch ruler and finding that the number 12 is on the left side and the number 1 is on the right side. For most native English speakers, this would be disorienting. We are used to seeing the numbers move from smallest to largest, from left to right. When this layout flips, people struggle because the numbers are now in the “wrong” place.

Psychologists have long known that people in Western cultures tend to associate smaller numbers with the left side of space and larger numbers with the right, a phenomenon called the SNARC effect – short for Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes.

In the lab, researchers like us test this tendency by asking people to press a left or a right button when shown a numerical digit. Native English speakers are generally quicker to press left for small numbers and right for large numbers because these locations match our mental number line.

But here’s the twist: What feels like the “correct” direction depends on where you grew up and where you live. In places with right-to-left languages like Arabic, the pattern often flips: People are faster to press right for small numbers and left for large numbers. Speakers of Farsi, a right-to-left language, who were born in Iran but move to France gradually shift toward a left-to-right mapping the longer they stay.

Even literacy matters. On average, people who never learned to read or count don’t show the effect at all. Researchers aren’t sure why. Maybe these people do not map numbers to space. Or maybe each individual has their own different orientation – left-to-right vs. right-to-left – that wash each other out when investigators average them all together.

Although people in Western cultures are used to seeing numbers increase left to right on keypads, rulers or classroom number lines, the SNARC effect isn’t limited to numbers. In the lab, similar left-to-right patterns appear with other magnitudes, including size, height and brightness.

A key question is the origin of the SNARC effect. Some researchers point to brain lateralization: the differences in how the left and right sides of the brain are wired and used. Others suggest it is a broader cognitive habit: When people line things up, they prefer to sort them in an order that makes sense for them. For example, if you are comparing 5 inches to 9 inches, you might think of 5 on the left and 9 on the right. But if you were comparing 5 o’clock to 9 o’clock, you might think of 5 on the right and 9 on the left, based on the face of an analog clock.

But culture matters, too: Cultural experience learning that “small” is on the left and “large” is on the right results in a stronger SNARC effect. It’s therefore not yet clear where the SNARC effect comes from because in humans, biology and culture are all tangled up.

Do other animals have mental number lines?

Our field of study is comparative cognition. We study how primates and birds make sense of the world: how they think, learn and remember. Animals share many cognitive processes with humans, but lack cultural experiences like reading, writing and counting, making them ideal subjects for investigating this number-line question.

We and other researchers in our field started by developing a SNARC task for nonhuman animals. We showed orangutans and gorillas two sets of dots on a touchscreen, one on the left and the other on the right. If these animals naturally associate “less” with left and “more” with right, then on average they should have been more accurate and faster at picking out the smaller set when it appeared on the left than when it appeared on the right. But that is not what happened.

Looking closer at the individuals, we saw why: Some apes showed a left-to-right pattern and others preferred right-to-left. These individual preferences canceled each other out in our overall averaged results. This split suggested that apes, like humans, do organize magnitudes in space. But without cultural cues like reading or counting direction, each animal developed its own preferred ordering direction.

We and others have since replicated the original study in rhesus monkeys, pigeons and blue jays and our ongoing, not yet peer-reviewed study with chickens. In all of these cases, there’s strong evidence for spatial representation of magnitude, along with clear individual differences in direction.

Number-line direction may not be so clear-cut

Finding so much variability in animals made us think: Might individual people also differ more than the averages suggest? Many SNARC studies report only average scores combining all the people tested, making it hard to see whether individual people vary like other animals do.

So we ran a new study in which native English speakers from the United States judged different magnitudes ranging from Arabic numerals to dot quantities and the brightness of a square. The averages showed the expected left-to-right pattern. But individuals often didn’t.

Nearly a quarter of participants judging dot quantities showed a right-to-left pattern, contradicting their reading and counting history. When judging brightness of a square, the split was almost 50/50, erasing the average effect altogether, just like in animals.

Our results suggest that the SNARC effect isn’t a universal rule etched into human brains by culture. Instead, it looks more like a flexible way of thinking that can vary among individuals, species – or even from task to task in the same person. Some people like arranging things left-to-right, others prefer right-to-left, and the same is true of animals.

By looking beyond averages, we see a richer story: Minds can be flexible and inventive, whether they belong to apes, birds or humans.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How you map numbers in your mind isn’t universal, even among people who read the same language – https://theconversation.com/how-you-map-numbers-in-your-mind-isnt-universal-even-among-people-who-read-the-same-language-261258