A reminder:
“Trans” not an actual thing, but is a word that covers a variety of mental illnesses, anxiety disorders, social rebellion, social contagion and paraphilias.
The trans agenda is deeply and essentially misogynistic, asserting that women are better off as men and the best women are men.
The trans agenda mostly benefits the medical and therapeutic establishment. $$$.
“Gender affirmative care” for children (yes, children) and young people is grounded on: administering drugs that block puberty – which of course you must start before puberty begins, which is pretty early these days – and then administer cross-sex hormones that prompt the development of the characteristics of the opposite sex.
For young women, the “gender affirmative care” often – depending on the state and the co-operation of the medical professionals – involves double mastectomies of healthy breasts.
4th Wave Now is a go-to blog on this issue. Here’s the Twitter feed – maybe start with this eye-opening thread. Which, incidentally, also supports my post of last week reminding us all that no, parents don’t always “know best.”
That out the way, some links for this week:
- Abigail Shrier with a barnburner in response to Paski’s declaration that states like Alabama, which yesterday passed a law prohibiting medical professionals from permanently sterilizing children, would be “put on notice:”
Life-saving care? Surely she must mean insulin or antibiotics?
No, she means “gender affirming care” that devilish euphemism for puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and experimental surgeries whose benefits are unproven, but whose risks—permanent sexual dysfunction, infertility, cardiac event and endometrial cancer are a few—ought to nudge any doctor toward soul searching. As I’ve written many times, these treatments are often recklessly administered, of questionable benefit to children, and attended by forbidding risks.
For these reasons, in the last two years, national gender clinics in France, the UK, Sweden and Finland have all reevaluated or curtailed their use. But as Psaki made clear, any legislator who tries to follow suit will face double-barreled legal opposition from the current Administration.
America has essentially become an unlocked medicine cabinet for gender medicine seekers as young as 15. As a result, any family with a kid who announces she is trans —whether encouraged by peers or social media or an activist educator, or accompanied by serious mental health co-morbidities—is hurled into crisis. The only thing parents know for certain is that a quick medical transition will be encouraged by virtually every adult she encounters. Far less certain is whether the family can do anything to stop it.
- Jesse Singal runs a piece on his Substack critiquing the purported conclusions of a study on “gender affirmative” care for kids from a Seattle gender clinic.
It’s a long, technical piece, but the gist is that the study – and press coverage – claim a dramatic mental health benefit for young people put on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones – but a) that’s not what the study itself says and b) the study is statistically flawed. You can go there and read it if you can comprehend such things. If you are like me and you can’t, you can at least grasp this takeaway – that the press coverage does not at all take into account the questions that are being raised about these procedures in other parts of the world:
There isn’t a whiff of any of this in the JAMA Network Open paper, nor in the Science Friday coverage — you’d think there’s simply no debate here whatsoever, that the science is settled, when in fact the controversy has grown so heated that major European healthcare systems have changed their policies on these treatments. Maybe they’re wrong to have done so, but it’s quite surprising to see an outlet like Science Friday completely ignore any of this, and to see clinicians so uninterested in the controversy and so willing to gloss over warning signs in their own data.
It’s similarly surprising that JAMA Network Open would allow researchers to claim that a treatment was correlated with improvement over time in the mental health of a group of young people when it wasn’t.
You don’t think that telling them this lie and planting this seed of doubt exploits their vulnerability and primes them for future insecurity to be preyed upon by pharmaceutical companies that benefit from their lifelong dependence on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones that will render them permanently sterile?
I’m going to pause there and repeat this. Permanently sterile. We are chemically castrating children before they’re even legally old enough to pierce their ears without parental consent. Shouldn’t the wholesale sterilization of children give you pause? It’s a human rights atrocity. And a sexual crime.
It’s well and good to rail against the child abuse at Kanakuk Christian Camps. But how can anyone turn a blind eye to what’s happening here in our own backyards? How can you pooh-pooh this or mock the people trying to fight it?
Guess where these kids are getting their referrals (without parental notification, mind you) for these drugs that will sterilize them? They’re getting them largely from school counselors. One of the grooming components you mentioned, Mr. French, was “trust development and keeping secrets.”
Did you know that these counselors foster the trust of these students, often encouraging them to use alternate names? That they keep this information from the parents? That they convince the students they are more trustworthy than their parents? That the official American School Counselor Association has actually published a guide directing counselors to hide information from parents? Are you seeing the grooming yet?
Do you think sexual violation has to happen at the hands of an individual as opposed to a corporation? We’ve got 13-year-old girls lining up for elective double mastectomies because they’ve been groomed to believe their happiness lies on the other side of self-mutilation.
Let’s end with UK Times columnist Janice Turner:
Who will be on the wrong side of history in the end? Those calling for children (2/3 girls, 1/3 with autism, majority gay) to be rushed onto a medical pathway of wholly unproven treatments. Or those who wish to address therapeutically all their mental issues, traumas & needs?
Welcome Big Pulpit readers! Check out my other posts on this topic.
The last two paragraphs of Jesse Singal’s paper are important:
“I think the political environment is exacerbating things, unfortunately. At the state level, Republicans are seeking out genuinely bad and harmful policies. In Texas, what Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton are trying to do can only be described as state-sanctioned child abduction. It’s horrific. So part of what’s going on is there’s a race to prove just how wrong these politicians are, and to produce evidence showing the treatments work. As Tordoff and her colleagues put it at the end of their paper, ‘Our findings have important policy implications, suggesting that the recent wave of legislation restricting access to gender-affirming care may have significant negative outcomes in the well-being of TNB youths.’ This is, again, a paper that found that kids who went on blockers and hormones did not improve. The science has become completely intertwined with the politics.
But the question of whether the GOP is off the rails on this issue (absolutely) and whether its policies will hurt kids who should go on blockers and/or hormones (absolutely) is different from the question of whether we should maintain vigilance and call out half-baked science when it comes to the literature on youth gender medicine (again: absolutely). Adolescent mental health and suicide research, in particular, is a vitally crucial area of science, and we should hold it to high standards. If we can’t agree that it’s wrong and potentially harmful to distort research on these subjects, what can we agree on?”
If we can’t agree on what a woman is, what can we agree on?