It's worth comparing "gender-affirming care" with frontal lobotomy. The researching surgeon who developed frontal lobotomy as a pioneer in psychosurgery was awarded the Nobel prize in Medicine in 1949. Naturally, we are now aghast at the barbarity of this treatment. Let's hope society can remove "gender affirming care" from our medical vocabulary, like we have with frontal lobotomy.
As an aside: the detestable term "gender-affirming care" would make George Orwell proud.
Yes - I feel reasonably sure that there are significant financial incentives to persuade relatively large numbers of unsuspecting teens to think they are of the wrong sex. The culprits are surgeons, endocrinologists, MH counsellors, and their employers who all have aligned, but perverse, incentives. The over-diagnosis/over-treatment dynamic is pervasive in the US medicine system, so why would "gender affirming care" be any different?
This explains the contrasting, but rational, policies of other countries listed in the article where the financial incentives are absent, or far reduced.
We know the real reason why this is happening. It has everything to do with creating new markets and selling new products, not establishing any sense of health or justice.
Just like the C19 vaccines, the Alzheimer's drugs (Biogen, now Eisai), climate change, or any of the other decisions that are being made by ideologues either in lieu of facts or with manufactured 'facts' in order to sell us shit that we don't need.
Adolescent sexual identity transition entails ethical considerations of the gravest impact. Astonishingly, various stakeholders -- teachers, school board members, legislators, and the minor patients themselves -- have little or no evident grasp of this. As a physician, the ethics are clear: the vast majority of cases of potential transitioning violates the principle of "First do no harm.".
To allow or encourage a minor to face lifelong iatrogenic endocrinopathy, and surgical and mental health consequences is untenable. This is the perfect trifecta stemming from benighted insight and no foresight.
So you can be charged with neglect, or at least investigated by child protective services, as a parent who leaves any child under 8 years of age alone, but the same child at 5 or 7 years old should be "parented" by school staff to submit to barbaric medical "solutions" to feelings that change every few seconds? I've asked the teachers I know if they feel competent to assess the mental health needs of their students. None of them have advanced education/certification that would qualify them to do this and none of them feel they should be doing this. So WHO are the teachers who are involving themselves in a very inappropriate way with students? Perhaps those teachers should have to answer for their "intervention". There are many adults at present who consider themselves and their perceptions as equal and the same as children, as if the children are adults. These people are unstable and should have no position of influence over children in any setting, though they are drawn to these positions because of their own issues rather than a sincere desire to teach and help children develop a love for learning. They surely won't be around when parents are struggling and desperate when the children who've received the "help" are suicidal.
Thanks for discussing the elephant in the room, err, school. Not a fun topic to take on in this political climate, but absolutely needed.
With SEL permeating schools, why do schools teach kids to love OTHER kids no matter what they look like - their race, their gender, their background, their disabilities - but not themselves? Why aren't schools teaching kids to love their OWN bodies no matter what they're like?
One thing I've learned from having a child with an incurable medical issue is that you have to learn to accept and love your body no matter what. And that no matter what may not be an easy future. Life can be tough, and you can't wish away many many medical issues. A child with an incurable disease or disability or cancer can't simply believe they don't have a medical issue - they must learn to accept themselves and live with their body and to love their body because your body is the only thing that goes with you in life.
The increase in suicide rates of transgender people should come as no surprise. First, they've rejected their bodies, and second, after drugs and surgeries, they've mutilated their bodies, sterilized them, and are dependent on hormones the rest of their lives. If it didn't fix the emotional issues they had in the first place, it's no wonder they're more depressed than before and might consider suicide.
I have no doubt that people will look back on this century as one of the most barbaric centuries medically.
It’s not just cough drops. I’ve seen schools refuse to allow teens to carry their own bleeping epipens. Have a life threatening allergic reaction and hope the nurse office is open… I am told this is for legal reasons, they don’t want unauthorized medicine use on the grounds. Yet they’ll enthusiastically end your reproductive future in secret. They’re not protecting kids, they’re harming them out of adherence to ideology. (The allergist I worked with just told the families to smuggle in the epipen and not tell the school.)
Ps contra the italicized intro, there is plenty of doubt about transitioning! As I wrote elsewhere, it is literally incoherent:
Development doesn’t just magically happen overnight, you have to go through a developmental process. The process itself changes you, mind and body, for the two are deeply connected. Of course a caterpillar doesn’t feel like a butterfly; that’s what the chrysalis is for. To avoid a process that changes you from A to B on the grounds that you don’t already feel like B going into it is incoherent. Getting you to feel like B is the whole point of going through the process! For a girl to say “I don’t want to go through puberty because I don’t feel like a woman” is, no offense, a profoundly uninformed statement. That’s not her fault, she’s a young child, she hasn’t mastered the trivium yet. For adults to encourage such puberty-blocking, however, is inexcusable.
Cough drop waivers…. oh jeez. Yes, parents need to be involved. Lacking any robust or unbiased data, these gender clinics should at least be operating under an IRB study with parental consent and patient assent, using validated quality of life instruments, tracking long-term outcomes and complications, and all the other things we do in the face of medical uncertainty. I don’t understand the field enough to comment that any particular practice is right or wrong. Let’s at least get good data. I could be fired if I studied the effects of toddlers drinking a 4oz glass of water in my clinic if done without going through an IRB.
Please. Professionals take that oath "Do no harm". Given the huge unknowable factors why would anybody accept a child's notion that their discomfort comes from gender dysphoria without suitable professionals performing an assessment? Even with that assessment do the parents still not play an important part? There may be mental health issues for both the child and the parent.
In our efforts to accept and tolerate various differences among people, we may be trying to create those differences.
I expect to see a lot of comments here. I’m all for anyone who truly wants to make the outside feel like the inside WHATEVER that is but absolutely NOT for children. Would we be doing breast enhancement surgery that is completely acceptable for an adult on a 5 year old? I would surely hope not. I’m frankly stunned that anyone in the medical community would even consider any type of “gender affirming” surgery on a child. Maybe I’m old school, or don’t understand - but scientific data cherry picking has shown itself brightly over the pandemic and looks like it is here, too. Imagine in 50 years how humanity will look at these types of surgeries - likely not unlike any permanent life altering procedures of the past that are today considered barbaric.
“There is no way for teachers, or even medical professionals, to be certain that a child’s unhappiness with their gender, termed gender dysphoria, reflects a true transgender identity.” Pray tell me what is the difference? Does a schizophrenic who thinks he hears voices any different than one who swears they do? Gender dysphoria, transgenderism or whatever you call it are synonyms of a mental illness that should be treated as such and not trying to validate someone’s delusions with puberty blockers, cross sex hormones and mutilating surgeries. As far as I know you can’t cure a mental illness with surgery. That was tried with prefrontal lobotomies. It should be noted that the charlatan who developed that procedure got a Nobel Prize in Medicine before the horror was realized!
It's worth comparing "gender-affirming care" with frontal lobotomy. The researching surgeon who developed frontal lobotomy as a pioneer in psychosurgery was awarded the Nobel prize in Medicine in 1949. Naturally, we are now aghast at the barbarity of this treatment. Let's hope society can remove "gender affirming care" from our medical vocabulary, like we have with frontal lobotomy.
As an aside: the detestable term "gender-affirming care" would make George Orwell proud.
Yes - I feel reasonably sure that there are significant financial incentives to persuade relatively large numbers of unsuspecting teens to think they are of the wrong sex. The culprits are surgeons, endocrinologists, MH counsellors, and their employers who all have aligned, but perverse, incentives. The over-diagnosis/over-treatment dynamic is pervasive in the US medicine system, so why would "gender affirming care" be any different?
This explains the contrasting, but rational, policies of other countries listed in the article where the financial incentives are absent, or far reduced.
We know the real reason why this is happening. It has everything to do with creating new markets and selling new products, not establishing any sense of health or justice.
Just like the C19 vaccines, the Alzheimer's drugs (Biogen, now Eisai), climate change, or any of the other decisions that are being made by ideologues either in lieu of facts or with manufactured 'facts' in order to sell us shit that we don't need.
Dr Cerundolo - Excellent commentary!
Adolescent sexual identity transition entails ethical considerations of the gravest impact. Astonishingly, various stakeholders -- teachers, school board members, legislators, and the minor patients themselves -- have little or no evident grasp of this. As a physician, the ethics are clear: the vast majority of cases of potential transitioning violates the principle of "First do no harm.".
To allow or encourage a minor to face lifelong iatrogenic endocrinopathy, and surgical and mental health consequences is untenable. This is the perfect trifecta stemming from benighted insight and no foresight.
So you can be charged with neglect, or at least investigated by child protective services, as a parent who leaves any child under 8 years of age alone, but the same child at 5 or 7 years old should be "parented" by school staff to submit to barbaric medical "solutions" to feelings that change every few seconds? I've asked the teachers I know if they feel competent to assess the mental health needs of their students. None of them have advanced education/certification that would qualify them to do this and none of them feel they should be doing this. So WHO are the teachers who are involving themselves in a very inappropriate way with students? Perhaps those teachers should have to answer for their "intervention". There are many adults at present who consider themselves and their perceptions as equal and the same as children, as if the children are adults. These people are unstable and should have no position of influence over children in any setting, though they are drawn to these positions because of their own issues rather than a sincere desire to teach and help children develop a love for learning. They surely won't be around when parents are struggling and desperate when the children who've received the "help" are suicidal.
Thanks for discussing the elephant in the room, err, school. Not a fun topic to take on in this political climate, but absolutely needed.
With SEL permeating schools, why do schools teach kids to love OTHER kids no matter what they look like - their race, their gender, their background, their disabilities - but not themselves? Why aren't schools teaching kids to love their OWN bodies no matter what they're like?
One thing I've learned from having a child with an incurable medical issue is that you have to learn to accept and love your body no matter what. And that no matter what may not be an easy future. Life can be tough, and you can't wish away many many medical issues. A child with an incurable disease or disability or cancer can't simply believe they don't have a medical issue - they must learn to accept themselves and live with their body and to love their body because your body is the only thing that goes with you in life.
The increase in suicide rates of transgender people should come as no surprise. First, they've rejected their bodies, and second, after drugs and surgeries, they've mutilated their bodies, sterilized them, and are dependent on hormones the rest of their lives. If it didn't fix the emotional issues they had in the first place, it's no wonder they're more depressed than before and might consider suicide.
I have no doubt that people will look back on this century as one of the most barbaric centuries medically.
It’s not just cough drops. I’ve seen schools refuse to allow teens to carry their own bleeping epipens. Have a life threatening allergic reaction and hope the nurse office is open… I am told this is for legal reasons, they don’t want unauthorized medicine use on the grounds. Yet they’ll enthusiastically end your reproductive future in secret. They’re not protecting kids, they’re harming them out of adherence to ideology. (The allergist I worked with just told the families to smuggle in the epipen and not tell the school.)
Ps contra the italicized intro, there is plenty of doubt about transitioning! As I wrote elsewhere, it is literally incoherent:
Development doesn’t just magically happen overnight, you have to go through a developmental process. The process itself changes you, mind and body, for the two are deeply connected. Of course a caterpillar doesn’t feel like a butterfly; that’s what the chrysalis is for. To avoid a process that changes you from A to B on the grounds that you don’t already feel like B going into it is incoherent. Getting you to feel like B is the whole point of going through the process! For a girl to say “I don’t want to go through puberty because I don’t feel like a woman” is, no offense, a profoundly uninformed statement. That’s not her fault, she’s a young child, she hasn’t mastered the trivium yet. For adults to encourage such puberty-blocking, however, is inexcusable.
https://gaty.substack.com/p/what-is-a-woman-review
Cough drop waivers…. oh jeez. Yes, parents need to be involved. Lacking any robust or unbiased data, these gender clinics should at least be operating under an IRB study with parental consent and patient assent, using validated quality of life instruments, tracking long-term outcomes and complications, and all the other things we do in the face of medical uncertainty. I don’t understand the field enough to comment that any particular practice is right or wrong. Let’s at least get good data. I could be fired if I studied the effects of toddlers drinking a 4oz glass of water in my clinic if done without going through an IRB.
Please. Professionals take that oath "Do no harm". Given the huge unknowable factors why would anybody accept a child's notion that their discomfort comes from gender dysphoria without suitable professionals performing an assessment? Even with that assessment do the parents still not play an important part? There may be mental health issues for both the child and the parent.
In our efforts to accept and tolerate various differences among people, we may be trying to create those differences.
I expect to see a lot of comments here. I’m all for anyone who truly wants to make the outside feel like the inside WHATEVER that is but absolutely NOT for children. Would we be doing breast enhancement surgery that is completely acceptable for an adult on a 5 year old? I would surely hope not. I’m frankly stunned that anyone in the medical community would even consider any type of “gender affirming” surgery on a child. Maybe I’m old school, or don’t understand - but scientific data cherry picking has shown itself brightly over the pandemic and looks like it is here, too. Imagine in 50 years how humanity will look at these types of surgeries - likely not unlike any permanent life altering procedures of the past that are today considered barbaric.
“There is no way for teachers, or even medical professionals, to be certain that a child’s unhappiness with their gender, termed gender dysphoria, reflects a true transgender identity.” Pray tell me what is the difference? Does a schizophrenic who thinks he hears voices any different than one who swears they do? Gender dysphoria, transgenderism or whatever you call it are synonyms of a mental illness that should be treated as such and not trying to validate someone’s delusions with puberty blockers, cross sex hormones and mutilating surgeries. As far as I know you can’t cure a mental illness with surgery. That was tried with prefrontal lobotomies. It should be noted that the charlatan who developed that procedure got a Nobel Prize in Medicine before the horror was realized!