Writes a transgender woman, in one of the letters to the NYT responding to the article "They Paused Puberty, but Is There a Cost?/Puberty blockers can ease transgender youths’ anguish and buy time to weigh options. But concerns are growing about long-term physical effects and other consequences" (which we discussed on this blog, here).
Another one of the letters gives a good answer to the question she asks. This is from Marc B. Garnick, a professor at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center:
As one of three academic principal clinical investigators of studies that led to the initial F.D.A. approval of Lupron for the treatment of metastatic prostate cancer — and having studied this class of drugs, which includes puberty blockers, for more than four decades — I can say that physicians are still learning and continue to be concerned about the safety of these agents in adults.
Woefully little safety data are available for the likely more vulnerable younger population. Bone loss in adult men who have been on these agents is significant, and a leading cause of morbidity with long-term administration.
Other safety issues include cognitive, metabolic and cardiovascular effects, still under intense investigation. The prudent and ethical use of such agents in the younger population should demand that every pubertal or pre-pubertal child be part of rigorous clinical research studies that evaluate both the short-term and longer-term effects of these agents to better define the true risks and benefits rather than relying on anecdotal information.
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68 comments:
There are going to be so many lawsuits. Let Progressives pay them. WE Conservatives were against this butchery.
They are just seeing how degenerate they can be and still have their voters support them.
There are not many people who actually support them.
The only thing keeping the regime in power is vote fraud.
I can’t wait to see what comes after transgender!
This topic has become fatally muddy, just as with historical research of gay and lesbian people as resulting from nature versus nurture. Some said gays were "born that way" while others said it was a lifestyle choice. Many timid-by-nature and left-friendly scientists were eager to avoid tough questions or bullied into silence by the activists, while the brave ones were cancelled (denied tenure) or not even admitted to research programs.
The very very big issue surrounding transgenderism (as noted in prior Althouse posts) is that the topic mucks up: (1) aggressive activists who may or may not be independently mentally ill, (2) a medical industry that turns a blind eye to alternative explanations (e.g., psychological counseling) in favor of $$$$$$$$$$ from surgery and medical care, (3) slippery politicians who put their fingers in the air to find trends and fashions to get a few more votes or stick it to Jordan Peterson, and (4) young and inexperienced people who try to stand out, be special, or gain sympathy for their 'disadvantages' in life.
Those prone to suicide were historically considered mentally ill. This is tautologically true under pain of species extinction. However, mental illness has umpteen interrelated causal factors and a person with one issue may well have dozens of problems. Is one's gender perception part of the problem or part of the solution? THERE MAY BE NO WAY TO KNOW! The mentally ill thereby make for terrible examples of rule-by-law-or-logic. Background: A huge issue with brain research is that many people of interest (e.g., those with total amnesia, major workplace injuries, etc.) have such damaged brains that one cannot generalize beyond one individual.
“Gender affirming treatment”?
What a load of shit.
Just like abortion is NOT “reproductive health care”
Weird world I’m leaving my kids…
Adults are free to sabotage their life. But our society protects children, from themselves.
If you are 21 and want to take these drugs and schedule the surgeries, go for it.
It seems the adherents of these treatment regimes, talk adults, and hide the children part of the trans issue.
The problem, youngsters have no idea what they are feeling. Especially surrounding the puberty time frame.
Because these teens could be wrong and the changes to their bodies (e.g. infertility) can be forever.
Not that hard to figure out.
Is this person an idiot?
The suicide risk can be managed with pharma and therapy.
"Why are gender-affirming treatments for trans individuals being singled out as uniquely dangerous and worthy of public scrutiny?"
To ask the question is open a window into the mind of this individual and others like him/her.
To be so self-absorbed, self-centered, and unable or unwilling to consider the bigger picture, ESPECIALLY where children and youth are concerned, is indicative of the victim mentality, the perception of persecution, from which these mentality compromised individuals operate.
And I'm sorry, but I'd be willing to bet he/she is a huge proponent of universal health care. Really? Society should shoulder yet again the cumulative, likely exorbitant expenses associated with your self imposed, life-long, catastrophic body degradation experimentation?
I'm so done with the willful suspension of reality to which these ill individuals and their enablers are subjecting young, impressionable children. Maim and cripple yourself quickly then slowly and inevitably but leave the children out of it, damn it! And pay for your own care.
okay, i'll bite!
WHAT are the suicide rates for "blocked" trannies?
WHAT are the suicide rates for unblocked trannies?
What are the suicide rates for children that weren't TOLD that they were trannies?
IF we are going to talk about suicide.. Lets TALK about suicide
"Cut off my balls or I'll kill myself."
I would think your average doctor could avoid a sleepless night by recognizing emotional manipulation when he hears it. Pretty sure this was covered in an Andy Griffith episode when Opie tried to hold his breath until he turned blue.
Personally I think the castrating docs ought to worry about the high suicide rates of people after they have had the surgery.
Note also how the suicide rates suggest that we are talking about a possible mental disorder, and not a physical disorder.
Of course there are people who are born with physically defective genitalia. And doctors should try their best to cure those physical defects, if at all possible.
But a normal human body is not a physical defect!
(See also the question of whether pregnancy is a "disease" and whether abortion is a "cure").
Countries that have long histories of performing sexual reassignment, such as Sweden, have been reassessing their approach to treatment of gender dysphoria.
https://segm.org/segm-summary-sweden-prioritizes-therapy-curbs-hormones-for-gender-dysphoric-youth
Why are gender-affirming treatments for trans individuals being singled out as uniquely dangerous and worthy of public scrutiny?
Where's the evidence that they are? Are there other treatments being given to children that are similarly untested in that population, that we're all just super cool with?
Furthermore - maybe the risk of infertility and loss of bone density isn't important to this particular individual, but why does she talk as though she believes she speaks for all trans people?
In a nutshell, as the responder implies but kindly doesn't come right out and say, your belief may not be the same as reality, and more rigor than your strong feelings is necessary before allowing children to take a risk they can't possibly know how to weigh against the adult concerns of whether they'll ever be able to conceive a child or whether they'll break a hip by tripping over a curb.
They can't even weigh the immediate benefits they believe they'll receive against the very good chance that either the distress they feel isn't being caused by gender dysphoria but by some other thing that points up how they don't "fit in," or the very good chance that they'll change their minds down the line about what they feel they are. Every kid believes she is capable of mature judgment in all things, and every kid is wrong.
On the plus side you get singers for music requiring castrati on the original instrument.
The doctor is correct but anecdotal data is preferred by proponents of transmania. Data I’ve seen shows no change in rates of suicide post-surgery and I question if anyone has tracked that closely enough to identify trends among a control group that avoids surgery. It would seem that doing less harm overall would be a worthy goal and counseling until majority age of 21 should be mandatory as a rule. Children should be an exception that should be based on better medical practices. First do no harm.
The skyrocketing number of fluid people in our youngest generation suggest the "cure" is actually causing the disease.
Sequence of events
1. Doctors discover how to surgically make a woman look like a man, or vice versa.
2. The number of people who sign up for this goes up and up until it reaches a tipping point of a huge number of people signing up for the surgery.
Sex-change surgery isn't "curing a disease." It's causing it.
"risk of suicide". There is woefully little evidence that the risk of suicide declines because of these treatments. And there will be little evidence, because it is impossible to do real science in such a politicized environment.
The construct of "give me what I think I want or I'll kill myself" is an odd one.
People like this are mentally ill. Is the right treatment to mutilate them with quackish surgeries or harmful drugs?
The Europeans are going in another direction.
Keep in mind that the 1st thing that gender disphorics are taught is to "SAY" that they are suicidal
ARE THEY? well, they MENTIONED it.. DID THEY?
Does “Gender-Affirming Care” For Trans Kids Actually Prevent Suicide? Here’s What The Data Say
In a new study, 30 percent of transgender youth report a history of at least one suicide attempt, and nearly 42 percent report a history of self-injury, such as cutting.
"There are no large-scale studies examining mental health among transgender and nonbinary youth who receive gender-affirming hormone therapy (GAHT),” The Trevor Project announced in its press release.
In other words, it is possible that the much higher rate of attempted suicide among female-to-male, nonbinary, and questioning transgender youth has more to do with factors relating to their biological sex (i.e. being a girl) than it does with anything related to gender identity.
They say more research needs to be done to “comprehensively examine the factors (e.g. gender minority stress) that explain why transgender adolescents experience higher odds of suicide behavior.” Thus, they rule out from the start the possibility that the actual transition from female to male might play a role in aggravating stress and provoking one to suicide.
The largest and most rigorous study to examine the rates of suicide for adults following their medical gender transition was conducted in Sweden, an LGBT-affirming country. The study followed participants for 30 years after their transition and found that the suicide rate was 19 times higher among transgender adults than among the non-transgender population.
surprisingly, Crazy people are More Likely to be Crazy; and exhibit Crazy behaviors like suicide
No individual at the age of puberty has ANY idea about their sexuality. No surgery or drugs before 18.
"Infertility...(is a) minuscule price to pay..."
Large numbers of children have been brainwashed to believe that humanity is poisoning the earth, and human reproduction is bad and needs to be controlled.
Later a "fad" develops where these indoctrinated children go fluid.
We can hide the bodies of our aborted babies. God knows our Pravda media has been doing that shit for decades.
But you corrupt medical doctors will not be able to hide these new atrocities.
It is fucking child abuse to castrate a 6-year-old. Like it's a homicide to stab a baby with Down's syndrome in the middle of birth.
You doctors are damaging people, not healing them.
Always play the suicide card eh? Funny how that doesn't work for anything else, like getting the oxycodone Rx refilled.
I'm not sure there's even much evidence showing that blockers are successful in reducing the suicide rate, or that people who transition through blockers are ultimately happier or better adjusted than people who transition without. Going through puberty at age 19, long after one's peers, must be really awkward.
I'm waiting for what Frank-N-Furter has to say about all this.
“Anatomy is destiny.” Thomas Dougherty, PhD, Chairman U of Utah Department of Anatomy said during my first day in gross anatomy, 1969
We are allowing so many young people to be mutilated and most if not all face horrific future lives that can never be reversed that I predict something equally horrible will happen. Most mass shooters in the future America will be people maimed as youth. Indulging the mentally ill has brought nothing but chaos to us so far.
This is thematically of a piece with the Balenciaga campaign. Children must be exposed to all adult options in life -- bdsm, body-altering chemicals, sexual knowledge. Hopefully the pendulum swings back soon toward innocence.
"gender-affirming treatment"
Gender affirming? How does a puberty blocker affirm your gender?
The suicide threat is emotional blackmail and is (of course) a lie. But the people making money from this trot it out when it suits them, over and over again. "Would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son?" Truthfully, neither, thank you - why don't you people do your jobs and give these young people the counseling they so desperately need? I read recently that there are over 40,000 people on the "detransition" subrebbit - and the stories I see online of people like Sinead Watson and Chloe Cole are heartbreaking. This medical transition garbage needs to stop; there is no such thing as "gender affirming" treatment. It's physical mutilation to treat mental and emotional problems, and just about as scientific as a lobotomy.
The fact that this stuff is even up for consideration makes me think my more Evangelical friends are right, and that these are the "End Times". Would that they were, in some respects. Come Lord Jesus (as they say), indeed. Personally I hope He brings a flamethrower with Him.
Dr. Garnick’s remarks seem appropriately cautioning. This is powerful stuff: intentionally powerful. It represents a trade-off. Do you want to die of cancer or do you want to suffer possibly crippling damage to your bones? If it is given, it is part of a larger regimen of monitoring and management by specialists with decades of experience handling many such cases of mortal struggle; a process exemplifying how medical science adds to our stock of useful knowledge in an ethically sound way.
In contrast we have a partisan amateur, posing a false choice between “just a little infertility” and threats of suicide made by hysterical children under the influence of an internet cult, offering a handful of anecdotes wrapped in airy assurance. Who to believe?
That doc sounds a bit too conservative/cautious. Let's just do it -- for the children!!
There used to be an old and honored expression in the medical profession, now apparently forgotten: primum non nocere, first do no harm.
Those “miniscule prices to pay” will morph into grounds for class action lawsuits as soon as confused, troubled youth realize that inhabiting a different gender didn’t solve all their many, many problems.
Finally, gender-affirming care is being normalized and is increasingly available. So suicide rates are plummeting, right?
First do no harm? Not anymore. First do not harm my revenue stream.
Evidence suggests that 85% of gender confused children eventually 'figure out' that their 'assigned at birth' gender is actually the correct one. However, once started down the path of drugs and surgery, there's no turning back without permanent injuries, both mental and physical. It's medical malpractice for doctors to treat a 'disease' that cures itself 85% of the time.
A child who threatens suicide at 10 because you won't buy them a pony is no reason to start building a barn.
When the brat (gender neutral term) is 18 then the brat can do what it wants with its own money...
'I can’t wait to see what comes after transgender!'
Transhumanism?
Little Johnny can get a chip in his head so he can play video games in his mind...
The threat by transgenders to kill themselfs if you do not do what they want reminds me of this scene from Blazing Saddles
"Woefully little safety data are available for the likely more vulnerable younger population . . . Other safety issues include cognitive, metabolic and cardiovascular effects, still under intense investigation. The prudent and ethical use of such agents in the younger population should demand that every pubertal or pre-pubertal child be part of rigorous clinical research studies"
Wait, so if you want to follow the science, you have to oppose prog trans activism? Confusing!
But when in doubt, ditch the science.
Same as the mRNA shots. As long as the woke totalitarian agenda and big pockets are filled, who cares about the long term consequences.
More trannie porn for you people's titillating tantalizing topic of entertainment.
I have broken my ribs twice now due to that combination of 'Long Term Lupron' and just lifting stuff. I am careful in every step I take because I fear a fall might be fatal. They are choosing death.
I've been a fairly close watcher of various news for well over two decades at this point, and I just don't recall anything about an epidemic of suicides among teens or younger children related to being the "wrong" gender. It sounds like a talking point someone came up with but where's the evidence? I haven't seen anything commonly cited either...and you would think it would be an issue in other countries as well? So it's not like a US media blackout of some sort.
None of this would be happening if we weren't indoctrinating our children.
Part of it is earth worship and "humanity bad" and "CO2 bad" and the "the world is in danger!" That's the eco-mad part of the indoctrination. One time I was walking in a primary school hallway (I think I was voting) and all the posters the kids had drawn on the walls was a drawing of Gaia.
We made a dinosaur when I was in fourth grade, a big ol' T-Rex. That was cool. And all those earth drawings may be harmless, but it's also part of a political indoctrination. Liberals see this earth-love as harmless and free of consequences.
But the unintended side-effect was a generation of children taught that the earth is in trouble, we are the cause, and we need to stop breathing (implicitly) and reproducing (explicitly).
And that brings me to the second form of indoctrination of the young: sex education.
Saint Croix said...
"Infertility...(is a) minuscule price to pay..."
Large numbers of children have been brainwashed to believe that humanity is poisoning the earth, and human reproduction is bad and needs to be controlled.
Later a "fad" develops where these indoctrinated children go fluid.
We can hide the bodies of our aborted babies. God knows our Pravda media has been doing that shit for decades.
But you corrupt medical doctors will not be able to hide these new atrocities.
It is fucking child abuse to castrate a 6-year-old. Like it's a homicide to stab a baby with Down's syndrome in the middle of birth.
You doctors are damaging people, not healing them.
11/29/22, 7:34 AM
THIS...100% THIS^^^^^^
I'm going to kill myself if I don't get my way.
Anyone know the long term statistics on how happy women who get the gender affirming surgery of breast enhancement are? Isn't it the same, sorta? My life will be so much better once I go from C to a DD cup. But one wonders.
We do not teach our children sex education. That is a fallacy.
If we taught our children all about sex, we would show them films of people having sex. There are any number of academic, scientific sex films out there. I saw several at UGA when I took Psychology of Sex/Sexual Deviation. They were boring and I don't remember any lust at all.
But we have no interest in really educating kids about actual sex. There's no political party that wants to show porn to children, or thinks it's a good idea. We all instinctively understand it's a horrible idea to show sex to children.
My sex education class (6th grade) was incredibly boring and we had to memorize parts of human anatomy. Where are the fallopian tubes? Is that the vulva? We were like a sixth grade class trying to learn Medical School 101. Mostly I remember a drawing of a human body and a lot of blanks I had to fill in.
Technically I think that is sex education, what I had, but a very boring and safe sex education for kids. You perhaps could more accurately call it reproduction education, or basic human biology. (This documentary, in my opinion, is a little more edgy and exciting than what I had, but it also would fall under teaching facts about human reproduction).
Other kids -- millions of kids -- were indoctrinated into using birth control in the public schools. "You need to control birth and plan your pregnancy." That is a political view, and millions of us were indoctrinated to think this way. Many of our authorities think human reproduction should be limited and insist on teaching children that it should be so.
Now we have a whole society of indoctrinated people who have divorced sex from baby-making in our minds. That's the explicit indoctrination. The implicit part of the indoctrination is that baby-making is dangerous and not to be trusted. That's why we call it birth control.
I understand we all like birth control, because we like sex and orgasms and fucking as much as we want. But I also understand that indoctrinating children is dangerous and there can be unintended consequences to indoctrinating kids into believing a political platform.
I think this wave of gender fluidity and "reproduction is no big deal" and people putting off marriage and reproduction is a consequence of many of us being indoctrinated by liberals when we were young.
(I suspect a lot of this post was inspired by Aldous Huxley).
Minuscule?. Puberty is a profound biochemical and structural change to the body. How can there not be long term deleterious effects? The hubris of these people is astounding.
The most recent update for treatment of gender dysphoria just came out in recent weeks. It differentiates between treatments for pre & post puberty patients. First update in years due to Covid delaying lotsa psychiatric updates. Perhaps everyone should take a gander at those, to garner authoritative guidelines for treating kiddies with psych problems.
The most recent update for treatment of gender dysphoria just came out in recent weeks. It differentiates between treatments for pre & post puberty patients. First update in years due to Covid delaying lotsa psychiatric updates. Perhaps everyone should take a gander at those, to garner authoritative guidelines for treating kiddies with psych problems.
"More trannie porn for you people's titillating tantalizing topic of entertainment."
You are right, Howard. We should just let this go on unremarked. Those performing these "medical practices" are "experts", right? It is no skin off your nose. These kids are just getting what they deserve, right?
Do you honor Dr. Mengele for his contributions to "science"?
For liberals who disagree with what I said at 9:36, a quick question...
Do you think it would be indoctrination to teach children that when they grow up, they should get married and have a baby?
Suicide, as they say, is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
For most of these kids the treatments being prescribed are also permanent solutions to the temporary problem of gender confusion during a developmental phase of their lives.
risk of suicide for trans patients who are blocked by doctors, parents or legislators from accessing gender-affirming treatment
The first problem with that "argument" is that there isn't the slightest bit of scientific proof behind it, despite MANY attempts by the butchers to find such justification.
The "Seattle Study" exposed by Jesse Single is a good example. I can get into the details
They spent 18 months digging through their records, trying to come up with ANY way of looking at them that would justify the medical abuse.
What did they come up with? A "study" where there was NO improvement on the side of the kids getting drugged, and among the ones who were NOT drugged, the majority stopped going to the clinic because they realized they weren't actually "trans".
But if they compared the test scores of all the kids who didn't get drugged (including the ones who later dropped out) to the scores of the kids who kept on coming, but didn't get drugged, they were able to get "worse average scores"
Which is roughly equivalent to saying "lack of treatment caused kids to shrink" because they had a group of 20 kids, and then got the 10 tallest to leave.
If our society survives, there will be a massive reckoning for this child abuse.
If our society doesn't survive, this child abuse will be one of the reasons why
mikee said...
The most recent update for treatment of gender dysphoria just came out in recent weeks. It differentiates between treatments for pre & post puberty patients.
That's nice, but it's all bullshit
No drugs or surgery should be given for "gender dysphoria" before the age of 25, at least.
That's the only reasonable "standard of care"
My father was on hormone therapy for prostate cancer. He suffered a vertebral fracture as a result of his bus going over a speed bump. Xrays showed tremendous bone loss. He died in a week.
All of the research that I am aware of shows that there is no significant reduction in suicide attempts after gender re-assignment treatments.
One small sidelight on this topic might be significant. Obamacare radically altered American Medicine. One aspect of this is surgeon's income, which took a big hit. The transgender hysteria has opened a very lucrative window to some surgeons. I remember when weight loss surgery first began to be popular. The first adopters were frequently the worst surgeons.
Prof. Garnick translated: If we're going to conduct ghoulish medical experiments on the kiddos can we a
t least get some good data out of it?
How terribly Mengele-esque.
List of FDA-Approved Prescription Drugs later pulled from the market by the FDA due to dangerous side-affects discovered later. Let me know if you see support for the argument that trans gender-affirming therapies are being singled out.
In Canada, you can get suicide as the medical treatment. If you see yourself as dead, the doctors will “affirm” it for you.
Part of the problem is that idealistic young people are insufficiently disillusioned about medicine. When you're a little kid you think that medicine is magic. You go to the doctor -- poof! -- all better! And then you become a teenager or a young adult and you think essentially the same thing except now you call it "science". Science will fix me! These puberty blockers will do the magic that we want them to! And then maybe later you get a chronic condition or a child with a chronic condition and you watch your doctors making stabs in the dark to try and fix things and you realize that it's not magic and it's not nearly as scientific as you'd like it to be, either.
Sadly, in reality, outside of antibiotics and vaccines, most medicine is just picking the least-bad poison. Everything has a side effect, and a lot of things have REALLY BAD side effects. You have to be clear-eyed about the costs and not just pin all your hopes on the benefits. And you have to not make being clear-eyed an attribute of bigotry.
Trans/simulated gender conversion therapy through medical, surgical, or psychiatric corruption was demonstrated by Johns Hopkins several decades ago to either fail to remedy sex-gender conflation/confusion or to progress self-abortive action in the great majority of cases, particularly the young, notably before informed consent, prodded by social contagion of advocates and activists. It is a Mengele experiment of the first-order.
although dying is arguably worse than being infertile+brittle, we'd have to know the percentages involved to attempt to trade these off.
Humperdink said...
First do no harm? Not anymore. First do not harm my revenue stream
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Plus, the current batch of med students are being taught CRT and DIE in college now to where “Do no harm” comes after giving priorities for treatment after deciding who gets treatment based on CRT / DIE principles which may cause you harm if you don’t fit the politically correct categories in the eyes of the lefties…
Why have we accepted "gender affirming care" that includes altering, inhibiting, and preventing natural bodily functions and growth is the right kind of care? With a physical ailment we give medicine or cut out the cancer. Is removing a healthy body part the same as killing a bacteria or cutting out a cancer? Will the body part's natural path of development ultimately cause the person to die? No? So then leave the naturally functioning body alone! The problem is with the mind, and no physical intervention will heal the mind.
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