February 9, 2023
"I am a 42-year-old St. Louis native, a queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders...."
"I have spent my professional life providing counseling to vulnerable populations: children in foster care, sexual minorities, the poor.
For almost four years, I worked at The Washington University School of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases with teens and young adults who were HIV positive. Many of them were trans or otherwise gender nonconforming, and I could relate: Through childhood and adolescence, I did a lot of gender questioning myself. I’m now married to a transman.... All that led me to a job in 2018 as a case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital.... The center’s working assumption was that the earlier you treat kids with gender dysphoria, the more anguish you can prevent later on. This premise was shared by the center’s doctors and therapists. Given their expertise, I assumed that abundant evidence backed this consensus...."
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52 comments:
I think we are just about at peak trans. The collapse will be nasty. Lots of lawsuits.
Well, I guess it is never too late to gain some sense, but I think she is a tiny minority within her political cohort.
Maybe Chuck can give us all the "Bulwark/Lincoln Project" argument for mutilating children.
Gender dysphoria is a mental disorder. How stupid do you have to be to think it should be encouraged in children?
The answer is apparenty all around us.
Next question: How stupid do you have to be to be a Democrat.
I am hoping this is a sign of the tides finally turning in the right direction.
I don't think AOC is going to be happy to hear this.
. Given their expertise, I assumed that abundant evidence backed this consensus...."
Logical fallacy. Appeal to Authority
Democrats are all in, on appeal to authority. The left have taken over almost all the institutions. It stand to reason, they will skip the free speech of debate. Just go directly to "follow the science"
We now know, PR people like Fauci, hiding behind science to advance their personal power, or the power of their Tribe. Shouting, SHUT UP! I am the SCIENCE! That should have clued in the entire nation, he was hiding the truth.
Removing the breasts of a 12 year old girl. Chemical castration of a 12 year old.
NO, I am not going to blindly believe a MD, without submitting his ideas to free and open debate.
The logical fallacy of, Appeal to Authority
Jeremy Ried, working so in depth in her chosen field, and NOT seeking out dissenting views is 100% on her. How does she answer objections without understanding the objection?
PS
Consensus is the opposite of Science= Questioning, examination, Testing, verifying.
This is tragic for these children and it needs to stop NOW!
Thanks to this woman we are hearing from one location. Looks like there need to be more whistleblowers and hearings in Congress. Though I little hope any Democrat will really listen.
In what sane world is this stuff ok?
I have no words. Actually I have lots of words. If there is a Hell, these people belong there.
And the writer is a very brave woman.
There is a huge support system in this country that encourages and promotes this mental illness. It has become an industry unto itself, with the explicit goal of ruining young people. It is so utterly immoral and vicious, it is astonishing that it is allowed to exist. It's a horror show for profit.
I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there. By the time I departed, I was certain that the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to “do no harm.” Instead, we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care.
The Left solves every problem by making it worse.
Levine's personal affirmation and dreams of Mengele with shades of Sanger.
I read the entire article linked to here and the letter the author sent to the Missouri AG. It is horrifying and sadly it confirms what I have suspected ever since the transgender movement sprang up. One parent is quoted as saying "that we were lucky her family was not the type to sue." Too bad, a few medical malpractice losses might bring this whole evil experiment to a halt. I hope the Missouri AG comes down hard on the clinic as well. And AGs across the country for that matter. As more and more information like this comes out it will be interesting to see how the rabid supporters of so-called 'gender-affirming' care for adolescents react. Will they double down or claim ignorance?
How stupid do you have to be to be a Democrat.
Bennies for babies, for one.
Thanks for this Ann. I wish I'd seen this before my Nebraska committee testimony yesterday.
The Nebraska Let Them Grow Act might not pass. Hard to believe the Left won't protect kids from medical experiments.
In what sane world is this stuff ok?
In the Antisci world. 30 or 40 years since Johns Hopkins determined that transgender conversion therapy through medical, surgical, and/or psychiatric corruption neither mitigated nor aborted progress of the mental disorder or self-abortive intent. It was probably around this time that they decided it was plausible to distinguish between homosexuals and others in the transgender spectrum based on stability, and before that, perhaps ironically, viability.
the Left won't protect kids from medical experiments
DIEversity, and ethical prescription, sometimes a wicked solution. Social progress, equity, and inclusion under the color of law, science, and humane treatment.
Hawkeyejb and others: re the "support system".
"The doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion. They even acknowledged that suicide has an element of social contagion. But when I said the clusters of girls streaming into our service looked as if their gender issues might be a manifestation of social contagion, the doctors said gender identity reflected something innate." (from the article)
All the cool girls are doing it. It's just not hip to be "normal". It doesn't have to be gender disphoria, it can be eating disorder, depression, "on the spectrum", cutting, LGBTQ+. Just anything so that I don't have to admit I am "cis" "correctly gendered at birth" mentally healthy, and (gasp) White.
Hawkeyejb and others: re the "support system".
"The doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion. They even acknowledged that suicide has an element of social contagion. But when I said the clusters of girls streaming into our service looked as if their gender issues might be a manifestation of social contagion, the doctors said gender identity reflected something innate." (from the article)
All the cool girls are doing it. It's just not hip to be "normal". It doesn't have to be gender disphoria, it can be eating disorder, depression, "on the spectrum", cutting, LGBTQ+. Just anything so that I don't have to admit I am "cis" "correctly gendered at birth" mentally healthy, and (gasp) White.
I thought I was saving trans kids …
Savior syndrome.
I am glad this individual is speaking out against the mutilation of children. In a sane world this type of barbarism never would have occurred.
Maybe I’ve posted this before, but I can’t get this testimony out of my mind. At age 16, Nebraska Medicine removed healthy breasts on a 16 year old girl. Months later, she was given hormones. They told her parents they could either have a dead daughter (suicide) or a live son.
She changed her mind.
I’m still upset over this.
I recommend reading the whole article before commenting. Some of you clearly did not and are hitting a straw man.
I'm glad Althouse put this article in her blog. One thing I realized recently while visiting different relatives over Christmas is the extreme difference in when information becomes available to different groups. For example, Republicans knew that masks, lockdowns and the vaccine were not working by late 2020 when Trump began supporting the work of Scott Atlas and when the great Barrington Declaration came out whereas Democrats only recently discovered these facts.*
Similarly, the right is now aware of the dangers of the trans craze among teen-agers due to articles like this while the left is simply unaware because these articles don't appear in left-accepted publication venues. One hopes that the leftists who come here will read, think and pass on the information. You have a responsibility when you know and when you know you might be listened to.
* Incredibly, Fauci published an article January 11, 2023 saying that he knew all along that an vaccine injected via muscles had never worked on a respiratory virus and that it was doubtful that the Covid vaccine would be effective. And so they increased the amount of spike proteins in the doses and made it mandatory. "Rethinking next-generation vaccines for coronaviruses, influenzaviruses, and other respiratory viruses." David M. Morens Jeffery K. Taubenberger, Anthony S. Fauci, https://www.cell.com/cell-host-microbe/fulltext/S1931-3128(22)00572-8, This article is being passed around on the right. How long will it be before the NYT allows its captives to hear about it?)
I read the whole thing. The author, Jamie Reed, is a very brave person.
Yesterday at the Nebraska hearing, a liberal atheist testified in favor of the Let Them Grow Act.
All reasonable, moral and civilized people should be against this sex change stuff for children.
who-knew
I asked the Nebraska AG (who I actually know) to investigate Nebraska Medicine. People need to be fired over this.
I too hope we have hit peak crazy but I also think it is inherently hard to know —one cannot easily graph the progress of this evil— and it will get increasingly hard to know enough about the crimes committed in the course of “helping young people become who they really are.” People who can commit such crimes, can and will lie and rewrite the script, manufacturing false evidence and destroying real evidence. So-and-so’s medical chart? Lost when the server crashed. Dr. X or Nurse Y who performed those procedures? Left the country, no forwarding address.
And we will be urged to “move on.” “Mistakes were made,” but with the very best of intentions.
A harrowing read. The predictable effects and side effects of these hormone treatments make you wonder whether any 11 to 17 year old is able to knowingly consent. Couple that with occasionally going forward without parental knowledge, and you have the making of massive damages in tort actions. Sadly, though the lawsuits may finally put an end to this evil, the damage done to the individual girls and boys is permanent.
From lobotomies to recovered memories to oxycodone to the 7 year explosion of trans surgeries and hormone treatments, fads in modern medicine are capable of doing phenomenal harm. Keep this in mind every time you pass a yard with the smug "In this house we believe in science."
The story of the girl who wanted her breasts back is worthy of the finest Greek tragedies. I don't see a low of straw men being whacked at in these comments. I do see a lot of people expressing their horror at monstrous behavior by the type of establishment the author of the article described. It is an exceedingly perverse moral calculus needed to render such action acceptable.
Blogger Ann Althouse said...
I recommend reading the whole article before commenting. Some of you clearly did not and are hitting a straw man.
After your comment I went back and read most of the article. I don't think anyone was "hitting a straw man." What we all understand is that this is a fad pretending to be a moral panic about gender dysphoria. The reason the founder of Johns Hopkins' center shut it down 40 years ago was because 25% of the patients came back wanting to be returned to their birth gender. There is also no difference in the suicide rates of gender dysphoria patients untreated and those who have gone through the "transitioning." Treating the kids at very young ages ignores the large percentage who get over it.
I recommend reading the whole article before commenting.
@Althouse, I am a Free Press subscriber, however I couldn’t read much past these paragraphs below.
To begin transitioning, the girls needed a letter of support from a therapist—usually one we recommended—who they had to see only once or twice for the green light. To make it more efficient for the therapists, we offered them a template for how to write a letter in support of transition. The next stop was a single visit to the endocrinologist for a testosterone prescription.
That’s all it took.. [Emphasis mine]
I could barely keep it together when the author quoted a teenaged girl who was detransitioning saying “I want my breasts back.” Sorry, Althouse, but I happen to care about other people. So it was kind of tough to take.
Oh, and I stand by my comment at 12:09.
Whoa, this person is going to get some serious, serious democrat hate. Check your car before you start it and k is where your children are.
Vale, Primum non nocere.
Clearly the intention was never to assuage the usual conflicted feelings of pubescent teens faced with adulthood. It was ALWAYS to render them sterile. And using a medical profit motive and cover of respected MDs that is helping them with a perfect cover story for pouring in billions of our governmental dollars to stop Americans from having babies.
In other words it is the old Nazi Level Science of Eugenics. It has gone from the popular 1930s sterilizing of African American men in the name of a new Evolutionary Science to mass sterilizing all Americas on an Auschwitz level of industrial efficient depopulating by rendering the youth sterile in the name of a new Gender Science making children into Eunuchs a trend.
A very important trajectory: this stuff started in gender studies, teacher education, and psychology departments, then contaminated law schools, them took the medical schools.
As all revolutions do.
I think we've reached peak trans.
The only problem is the number of well meaning goodthinkers who tend to think T is really just another flavor of LGB.
Not many gay men or lesbians mutilating themselves like this.
Oh, and an entrenched group of surgeons making all the $$$.
This was very hard to read. I hope the dam is breaking on the groupthink surrounding trans teenagers.
Salem witch trials?
"I am a 42-year-old St. Louis native, a queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders."
I'm sorry for your mental issues. But I do want you to know that I will pray for you that you will find your your way to the Lord Jesus.
In the meantime I also want to let you know that you are otherwise a flaming asshole.
Through childhood and adolescence, I did a lot of gender questioning myself.
Now, why in the hell was she doing this?
Answer: Feminist indoctrination the schools and media.
Another, insidious form of social contagion.
"I am a 42-year-old St. Louis native, a queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders."
I'm sorry for your mental issues. But I do want you to know that I will pray for you that you will find your your way to the Lord Jesus.
In the meantime I also want to let you know that you are otherwise a flaming asshole.
Cue Chuck, Inga, and the rest to laugh and say "how dare you oppose Science! Science meaning what we say it means, which is that mutilating children is the most moral thing possible!"
As an endocrinologist I get some referals for treating "gender dysphoria". Almost all of the adults I have seen have major psychological problems. Few of them can produce a note from a therapist that this is in the patient's best interest so they are turned away.
As for children, 20 and under, nope. No treatment.
In these culture battles it's always as well to look at the cultural underpinnings as well as at immediate political solution. If we changed the old definition, "man is a rational animal", to "a human being is a rational mammal" we would be better able to make natural law arguments in these gender cases under the secular human rights aegis. For then it would be plain that the human body plan implies two sexes with radically different architecture. It would be clear that superficial alterations or mutilations don't change a human being's essential bodily plan. Each human being formed their own body as an unborn child and continues to try to maintain that body through its life. That is why "changing gender" with hormones requires hormones for the rest of that body's life - that body has not changed its gender and it continues to attempt to conform the original body plan. That isn't socity's doing, that the doing of the individual's own body, the only one that individual has or will ever have.
But, at the same time, saying that the body plan is "mammal" instead of "animal" highlights the fact that those born with the body of a female mammal are designed to give up two years of their life to the child their body encloses and then nourishes. There's nine months while the child builds its own body and then at least a year while breast feeding. (Those belonging to the mammal species feed their babies on breast milk.) Our society claims that there are no differences between men and women but our bodies beg to differ. Every woman alive today has to contend with the problems this denied difference brings with it. Is it really surprising that some try to solve the problem by saying there is no difference and chopping their bodies about to carve them into an easier shape? And when you've lived long enough it isn't really surprising that some men and women are making money and a career off these bewildered kids. For it's quite true that as soulless predators there are no differences between men and women
Wait until you see what is coming down the road. The social contagion is much worse in grades 5-8, where in some of the more affluent towns more than 70% of the girls now claim not to be non- "cis" or "binary." I know families caught up in this. The driving forces are TikTok and teachers, but the "ideology" (it doesn't deserve that dignity) they push at this age is just ridiculous. What we used to call "personality" is now, ridiculously, "gender." An 8th-grade I have known since she was born told me "I don't want to live in a house with a white picket fence and cook and clean all day for a husband who works at a bank, so I am non-binary." It is like a caricature of the most vulgar and inane forms of 90's 'gender theory' filtered through the dumbest students at the worst colleges and then misunderstood by poorly educated teachers who then explained it (poorly) to 14-year-olds, who then taught it to other 14-year-olds.
But then they get into high school and encounter all the misery that goes with that transition, and some fraction of them will get sucked into the crazy and the hormones and surgery and doom themselves to a lifetime of physical and mental misery. And why? Creepy, middle-aged, wealthy, exploitive predators realized that they could create and farm a large and vulnerable prey population for their fetish appetites. Immoral and greedy clinics and doctors found a way to suck huge quantities of money out of the evil insurance companies, who are afraid to say no to even the most expensive, long-term, unjustified treatments. Ideological extremists saw a way to split off vulnerable children from their parents, allowing them to be exploited, groomed, recruited, etc. And the dimwitted wine-moms of American found a way to signal how special they are by exploiting their own children. What the current over-culture has done and is doing to children is an abomination, and the blood and tears we are seeing now is just the beginning.
It's distressing to observe, but like all insanity, there's really not a lot you can do besides let it run its course and get it out of the gene pool. By preventing these people from removing themselves from the population, all you're really doing is prolonging the agony.
I've yet to see anyone really "recover" from this sort of mental health issue. They just keep doubling-down on the crazy until they eventually just snap or exhaust themselves with it all. In no case have I ever observed a remotely stable and/or sane person come out the other end, and the only thing you really do by encouraging these types is to cause them to focus more and more intently on the "issues" they perceive. Encouragement can take multiple forms, including being confrontational and denying their issues; that's like throwing gas on the fire. Likewise, you get all supportive and enthused about their insanities, then they get invested in them, and that's just as bad. Probably the best course of action is to simply say something like "That's nice, dear... But, you're still a boy/girl at the end of the day, and I still love you unconditionally."
The key thing is to do your best to prevent the obsessive spiral you get with these folks, most of whom are somewhere along the spectrum for autism. More I think about it, the more I come to believe that my friend who "turned gay" was in one of these spirals, and that he really wasn't "gay", he just talked himself into it over the course of months. Started out with the two of us observing a pretty set of legs, a really nice ass, and some long, blond hair... Which turned out to be the back side of a really hirsute guy with beard. Me? I simply went "Damn... Dude looks like a hot chick from the other side...", while my friend went into this whole "OMG... I liked a guy's ass!! Am I gay? I must be gay... I'm gay..." spiral. He was a fairly obsessive/compulsive type, and looking back on it, I think he might have been, at worst, ambivalent about his sexuality. He got push-back from his family, and that, I suspect is what set the spiral into concrete.
There's a lot of human behavior that's influenced by some very odd things, things that nobody really considers when trying to explain the odd behavior of others. I'd love to know what the actual ratio of "I've always known I was gay/lesbian" sorts there is to those that sort of talk themselves into it or fall into it through the influence of others. My friend, I suspect, would have gone other directions absent the triggering events he experienced.
There are those kids that everyone around them just knows are not hetero, from early age. Then, there are those who seemingly turn a switch in later life, for unknown reasons, and there you are. I think the switch-turners, to coin a phrase, are somewhat ambivalently sexed until something turns a corner in their lives, and there's no telling what a lot of those corners might be. The reaction of the other people in their lives to their "change" might well explain a lot of what happens; oppositional defiance disorder can have some really odd forms, when you start looking for it. "Oh? Mom says I'm not gay/transgender? Fine; that just proves it!!!", and Mom is actually triggering the whole thing. Likewise, if a kid is just "trying something out", and Mom comes in with enthusiasm and investment? Then, they're like "OMG... I'm getting attention! This is great!! I must be gay/transgender..." or it's "OMG, now I gotta be gay/transgender because it'd be too embarrassing to go back on all this drama..."
Best option for parents is probably to just be very low-key supportive, and factual about the whole thing; if they're going to get over it, then the best thing is not to trigger an obsessive/compulsive spiral and lock it all in.
Serious Question,
If (for the sake of this argument,) insurance companies (were forced to) quit paying for this..
How much would there be?
HOW MANY families would spend THEIR money on chemical castration, hormones, top and bottom surgeries?
As much as I admire Bari Weiss and the Free Press, I wish this had appeared in a mainstream publication. Alas, we're still some distance from that happening, although I think in time we will see many stories holding people like the doctors and therapists described in this article accountable. I firmly believe we'll treat them the same way we do doctors who performed lobotomies. It can't happen soon enough.
As I've posted here before, after the TV movie Sybil was broadcast in 1976, reported cases of Multiple Personality Disorder skyrocketed. It was a rarely treated or reported phenomenon before that, and later investigations suggested the psychiatrist treating the patient suggested the illness during hypnosis. People are easily led, especially if they're fighting some other mental illness. Therapists and physicians have an incentive when a trend like this presents itself to take advantage of it. Lots of money to be made.
I would take tobacco companies as an example for what me may see in ten or so years. I knew every cigarette I lit was harmful. That fact was on every pack I bought. It was in public service ads on TV. I quit after 18 years because I couldn't walk up two flights of stairs without nearly passing out. I was 34 and otherwise in good shape. When I saw coverage of lawsuits against tobacco companies where smokers claimed somehow it was manipulation, chemical or otherwise, by these companies that led to their habit, I just scoffed. Still do. Tobacco companies took an enormous financial hit. It's coming to these folks.
The stories in this article are heartbreaking, and they're from someone who started out with an open mind. I think we'll hear more like this as time goes on. Again, please make it soon.
It was brave of her to run against the current of her friends and others in her field. I must say, therefore, that gspencer's post is puzzling, as is his need to repost it.
Gordon Pasha said...
As an endocrinologist I get some referals for treating "gender dysphoria". Almost all of the adults I have seen have major psychological problems. Few of them can produce a note from a therapist that this is in the patient's best interest so they are turned away.
============
@Pasha == are these 'adults' cognizant that their personal /psych-issues/ are actually major psychological problems? are you allowed to point it out and suggest referral for care? or will you be disciplined if you do?
in other words --- are you free in USA to practice medicine with a moral conscience?
We had patients who said (...) they had tic disorders (but they didn’t)
More like Tik-Tok disorders, amirite...?!
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