“Who should we listen to? What should the positive-to-negative outcome ratio be before we have reform instead of the false binary of bans versus a free-for-all?”
I want this question pushed hard and asked by every single journalist and policy maker: HOW MANY KIDS IS IT OK TO GET THIS WRONG FOR AND WHAT IS YOUR PLAN FOR THESE KIDS?
According to Reuters, between 2018 and 2021, there were at least 776 “top surgeries” performed on girls ages 13-17 that were submitted to private insurance for reimbursement. That does not include all the surgeries that were done and paid for out of pocket. For the sake of argument, let’s go with the often cited number of only one percent regret. Also, for the sake of argument, let’s round the number of surgeries on minors in that three-year. period up to 1000 to account for privately funded surgeries. That’s 10 girls who regret having their breasts removed before they even reached legal adulthood. We need to have doctors, pediatricians, psychiatrists, and the therapists writing the approval letters say that getting it wrong for these 10 girls is an acceptable mistake rate and that they are fine with moving forward and continuing to do unnecessary and irreversible major surgery on a certain number of girls each year. And this doesn’t include a 1% regret rate for the even larger number of girls who start testosterone before age 18. What would happen if we forced that into the record of the AMA, the AAP, the New York Times, NPR, NBC, and from the mouth of those in the Biden administration? What if we made Biden, Rachel Levine, AOC, Jack Turban, or the heads of the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics go on TV sitting directly across from some of those kids in that one percent who now regret these treatments and feel devastated, betrayed, and harmed for life, look them in the eye, and say to them, “I’m sorry you’re not happy now, but you were an acceptable number for us, and we are not going to change anything so that this doesn’t happen to other kids because we think the system we have now works just fine and if anything needs fewer restrictions.” What would happen to public opinion and discourse if we forced these people who repeatedly cite the 1% regret rate to say on record what that number actually translates to and that 1) they are not willing to change the system in any way to prevent future cases, 2) that there is no system or treatment protocol in place for supporting the kids they got it wrong for 3) that the 1% number is an old number from a very different cohort of patients, i.e. not teenage girls with no childhood history of dysphoria, and diagnosed and treated under very different protocols, and no one knows what the regret rate is for this new group of teenage girls, and 4) that they are unwilling to make any changes to the system to prevent these mistakes.
Honestly, I think we need to stop focusing on the bans, and thinking there’s a political solution to this. It’s not going to work and it’s a waste of time and resources. We need to go after the doctors, the therapists, and their professional associations, and start forcing them to go on record saying they are willing to get it horribly wrong for at minimum this number of children, and that they don’t even have a medical code to count and document misdiagnoses. And then we need to start pushing for doctors and therapist to take ownership of their diagnoses and treatments, and the outcomes they have. If a doctor or therapist gets it wrong then they are also on the hook for getting treatment for the patient they misdiagnosed. I know so many people want there to be laws and political solutions to this, but if you look at past medical scandals, that’s not how they ended. I think change will only happen when the doctors, therapists, and their professional organizations are pressured and held accountable.
Thank you Puzzle Therapy. I share the anger and frustration that you express so well here. It's infuriating. I'd expand what you are asking clinicians and others to acknowledge to include the lie that we can change sex, as well as the harm done to those children who have tried. I have been writing to and speaking with all the clinicians my family encountered along the way, sending videos (from Trans Train to Affirmation Nation to Genspect), articles, interviews, asking them to commit to slowing down, to reviewing the evidence and to putting in the place the moratorium Lisa talks about elsewhere in this post. I'm also trying to get the wider community to listen - all the organizations who now support "gender affirming care" as part of Pride. Gathering women friends to read Kathleen Stock. Still, everyone around me - at least publicly - stands with the 90 girls (in your calculation - my guess is the regret rate will be much higher in the next 5-10 years) who seem "happy", who look like Elliott Page, who are not ruffling any feathers in college sports. All to say, I think we all have to keep the pressure on - across all fronts. I'm with you.
If the judges, health practitioners, and ideologues would step back and think about the regressive nonsense that's driving this whole craze—the belief that children who don't conform to societal expectations need to be chemically and surgically redesigned—it would all be over in a minute.
So this judge says there is clear evidence of how beneficial these treatments are. Another judge in FL said that "gender identity is real." What if a judge said "Adam and Eve were the first people on Earth and we all stem from them" or "the Earth is flat." When our judges are referring to unsupported opinions and theories and calling them facts, we have a dangerous situation. We can't even get a documentary on the subject in theatres for one day, so it's obviously going to be difficult and slow going educating and changing hearts and minds of the public without legislation. I don't know what it will take to get people to see the truth - but we have to keep trying.
“The evidence showed”--was it Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland who insisted that words meant whatever he said they meant? We are in Humpty Dumpty’s world.
Why are these interventions being offered outside of studies?
How about if all those people who want the interventions offered produce some outcomes? These drugs etc have been offered to minors and young people since 2007.
Where are they now?
Whoever wants to feed more kids to these drugs....what happened to all the ones who got them earlier, once they hit 5 years in, 10 years in, age 25?
All of them?
And....can these people who claim they can determine who will remain gender dysphoric, how about if they do a study showing their approach works? Predict and then wait?
They haven't even tried.
This "you can't show me it is harmful enough" argument for sterilizing children and disrupting their endocrine systems with powerful drugs, when study after study fails to show benefit...why is anyone falling for it?
These are all the right questions, you are exactly right. It is remarkable how thoroughly blindness to reality has taken hold, on so many levels. I do think we know the basics of why: lots of money to be made and powerful, well funded lobbying groups pushing public officials to keep that spigot open.
It is amazing how so many judges feel empowered to make judgments on controversial medical matters. Their "education" seems to be decidedly one-sided. The medical principle of "do no harm" has really been thrown in the wastebasket by the establishment. I wish we had an example of a children's hospital which has embraced what has become the European norm and fashioned a fair and balanced program to care for the gender confused young people that avoids hiring totally committed "coaches" who now fill the rosters of so many transgender clinics. That would be like hiring Planned Parenthood types to populate the OB-GYN clinics of newly pregnant women. American medicine has abandoned informed consent.
I agree 💯 with all here that we have to keep pushing on all fronts, using every opportunity we have to get this issue in front of people we know or to whom we have access. No matter how small our individual megaphones are, together it all adds up. I also agree that it is absolutely infuriating that, each day that passes, more children are being harmed.
Gerald Posner, BTW, who has a big, big platform from which to speak, shot out a note on this decision almost immediately once it came out. Here’s what he had to say:
“Leaving science to politicians and judges is never a good idea. How about conducting legitimate clinical trials before we overdiagnose tens of thousands of children and adolescents w/ gender dysphoria and start many on a medicalization assembly line with lifelong consequences?”
As Helen Joyce has counseled (this is a rough paraphrase) you have to keep pushing and pushing. It will seem as if you’re making no headway until, one day, the Zeitgeist shifts, and everyone is paying attention. I believe we are seeing this happen in the UK. We have to hope it can happen here too, and soon.
A moratorium with careful provisions for people already on the medical path, coupled with a bipartisan committee to collect evidence from gender clinics and an immediate long-term followup plan.
Related to this, Lisa, you note, “We don’t have nonpartisan government groups to conduct systematic evidence reviews.” Is this not something that a government agency could undertake? I think of the many studies the CDC does as one example. The key is, of course, that the agency would have to conduct the review free of any taint of advocacy organization lobbying. If we had a President who had any idea what he is dealing with, could he not, by Executive Order, order such a review, setting forth specific guidance on what the review must cover and the timeline by which it must report?
You might have missed this milestone--The Daily Mail published a lengthy profile of a trans widow and the trials she went through after the father of their 3 children spiraled out of control, spending the family's savings, conducting extramarital affairs and shocking the children with email notification of his "new pronouns." Talk about letting Mom handle the fallout. A reading of the article, with my comments on the similarities (child with suicidal ideation, working 3 jobs, crying somewhere alone to protect the children) in our experiences. I'm hoping The Telegraph and The Spectator will follow suit with more profiles. Our stories reveal the medical malpractice, the abdication of responsibility and the narcissistic abuse of therapists' validation of narcissistic abuse.
i think we've seen this movie before. The gender biz floods policy makers, judges, schools etc with completely false information regarding gender "care". initially institutions embrace it and memorialize gender biz policies in law and medical practice. then after a couple years people realise it was all a fraud.
“Who should we listen to? What should the positive-to-negative outcome ratio be before we have reform instead of the false binary of bans versus a free-for-all?”
I want this question pushed hard and asked by every single journalist and policy maker: HOW MANY KIDS IS IT OK TO GET THIS WRONG FOR AND WHAT IS YOUR PLAN FOR THESE KIDS?
According to Reuters, between 2018 and 2021, there were at least 776 “top surgeries” performed on girls ages 13-17 that were submitted to private insurance for reimbursement. That does not include all the surgeries that were done and paid for out of pocket. For the sake of argument, let’s go with the often cited number of only one percent regret. Also, for the sake of argument, let’s round the number of surgeries on minors in that three-year. period up to 1000 to account for privately funded surgeries. That’s 10 girls who regret having their breasts removed before they even reached legal adulthood. We need to have doctors, pediatricians, psychiatrists, and the therapists writing the approval letters say that getting it wrong for these 10 girls is an acceptable mistake rate and that they are fine with moving forward and continuing to do unnecessary and irreversible major surgery on a certain number of girls each year. And this doesn’t include a 1% regret rate for the even larger number of girls who start testosterone before age 18. What would happen if we forced that into the record of the AMA, the AAP, the New York Times, NPR, NBC, and from the mouth of those in the Biden administration? What if we made Biden, Rachel Levine, AOC, Jack Turban, or the heads of the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics go on TV sitting directly across from some of those kids in that one percent who now regret these treatments and feel devastated, betrayed, and harmed for life, look them in the eye, and say to them, “I’m sorry you’re not happy now, but you were an acceptable number for us, and we are not going to change anything so that this doesn’t happen to other kids because we think the system we have now works just fine and if anything needs fewer restrictions.” What would happen to public opinion and discourse if we forced these people who repeatedly cite the 1% regret rate to say on record what that number actually translates to and that 1) they are not willing to change the system in any way to prevent future cases, 2) that there is no system or treatment protocol in place for supporting the kids they got it wrong for 3) that the 1% number is an old number from a very different cohort of patients, i.e. not teenage girls with no childhood history of dysphoria, and diagnosed and treated under very different protocols, and no one knows what the regret rate is for this new group of teenage girls, and 4) that they are unwilling to make any changes to the system to prevent these mistakes.
Honestly, I think we need to stop focusing on the bans, and thinking there’s a political solution to this. It’s not going to work and it’s a waste of time and resources. We need to go after the doctors, the therapists, and their professional associations, and start forcing them to go on record saying they are willing to get it horribly wrong for at minimum this number of children, and that they don’t even have a medical code to count and document misdiagnoses. And then we need to start pushing for doctors and therapist to take ownership of their diagnoses and treatments, and the outcomes they have. If a doctor or therapist gets it wrong then they are also on the hook for getting treatment for the patient they misdiagnosed. I know so many people want there to be laws and political solutions to this, but if you look at past medical scandals, that’s not how they ended. I think change will only happen when the doctors, therapists, and their professional organizations are pressured and held accountable.
Thank you Puzzle Therapy. I share the anger and frustration that you express so well here. It's infuriating. I'd expand what you are asking clinicians and others to acknowledge to include the lie that we can change sex, as well as the harm done to those children who have tried. I have been writing to and speaking with all the clinicians my family encountered along the way, sending videos (from Trans Train to Affirmation Nation to Genspect), articles, interviews, asking them to commit to slowing down, to reviewing the evidence and to putting in the place the moratorium Lisa talks about elsewhere in this post. I'm also trying to get the wider community to listen - all the organizations who now support "gender affirming care" as part of Pride. Gathering women friends to read Kathleen Stock. Still, everyone around me - at least publicly - stands with the 90 girls (in your calculation - my guess is the regret rate will be much higher in the next 5-10 years) who seem "happy", who look like Elliott Page, who are not ruffling any feathers in college sports. All to say, I think we all have to keep the pressure on - across all fronts. I'm with you.
From Reuters, hormones in minors, again based only on insurance claims. One percent is getting to be a bigger number to have to justify
At least 14,726 minors started hormone treatment with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis from 2017 through 2021,
If the judges, health practitioners, and ideologues would step back and think about the regressive nonsense that's driving this whole craze—the belief that children who don't conform to societal expectations need to be chemically and surgically redesigned—it would all be over in a minute.
Yes! This idea has an alarming hold - in my opinion, on our wider society.
So this judge says there is clear evidence of how beneficial these treatments are. Another judge in FL said that "gender identity is real." What if a judge said "Adam and Eve were the first people on Earth and we all stem from them" or "the Earth is flat." When our judges are referring to unsupported opinions and theories and calling them facts, we have a dangerous situation. We can't even get a documentary on the subject in theatres for one day, so it's obviously going to be difficult and slow going educating and changing hearts and minds of the public without legislation. I don't know what it will take to get people to see the truth - but we have to keep trying.
Yes, we have to.
More evidence that we don’t and can’t know who to trust.
“The evidence showed”--was it Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland who insisted that words meant whatever he said they meant? We are in Humpty Dumpty’s world.
Why are these interventions being offered outside of studies?
How about if all those people who want the interventions offered produce some outcomes? These drugs etc have been offered to minors and young people since 2007.
Where are they now?
Whoever wants to feed more kids to these drugs....what happened to all the ones who got them earlier, once they hit 5 years in, 10 years in, age 25?
All of them?
And....can these people who claim they can determine who will remain gender dysphoric, how about if they do a study showing their approach works? Predict and then wait?
They haven't even tried.
This "you can't show me it is harmful enough" argument for sterilizing children and disrupting their endocrine systems with powerful drugs, when study after study fails to show benefit...why is anyone falling for it?
These are all the right questions, you are exactly right. It is remarkable how thoroughly blindness to reality has taken hold, on so many levels. I do think we know the basics of why: lots of money to be made and powerful, well funded lobbying groups pushing public officials to keep that spigot open.
It is amazing how so many judges feel empowered to make judgments on controversial medical matters. Their "education" seems to be decidedly one-sided. The medical principle of "do no harm" has really been thrown in the wastebasket by the establishment. I wish we had an example of a children's hospital which has embraced what has become the European norm and fashioned a fair and balanced program to care for the gender confused young people that avoids hiring totally committed "coaches" who now fill the rosters of so many transgender clinics. That would be like hiring Planned Parenthood types to populate the OB-GYN clinics of newly pregnant women. American medicine has abandoned informed consent.
I agree 💯 with all here that we have to keep pushing on all fronts, using every opportunity we have to get this issue in front of people we know or to whom we have access. No matter how small our individual megaphones are, together it all adds up. I also agree that it is absolutely infuriating that, each day that passes, more children are being harmed.
Gerald Posner, BTW, who has a big, big platform from which to speak, shot out a note on this decision almost immediately once it came out. Here’s what he had to say:
“Leaving science to politicians and judges is never a good idea. How about conducting legitimate clinical trials before we overdiagnose tens of thousands of children and adolescents w/ gender dysphoria and start many on a medicalization assembly line with lifelong consequences?”
As Helen Joyce has counseled (this is a rough paraphrase) you have to keep pushing and pushing. It will seem as if you’re making no headway until, one day, the Zeitgeist shifts, and everyone is paying attention. I believe we are seeing this happen in the UK. We have to hope it can happen here too, and soon.
"...the false binary of bans versus a free-for-all."
What is the middle ground when it comes to physical interventions for mental health and spirituality? Especially for children?
A moratorium with careful provisions for people already on the medical path, coupled with a bipartisan committee to collect evidence from gender clinics and an immediate long-term followup plan.
Related to this, Lisa, you note, “We don’t have nonpartisan government groups to conduct systematic evidence reviews.” Is this not something that a government agency could undertake? I think of the many studies the CDC does as one example. The key is, of course, that the agency would have to conduct the review free of any taint of advocacy organization lobbying. If we had a President who had any idea what he is dealing with, could he not, by Executive Order, order such a review, setting forth specific guidance on what the review must cover and the timeline by which it must report?
Ok, that sounds reasonable. Thank you.
You might have missed this milestone--The Daily Mail published a lengthy profile of a trans widow and the trials she went through after the father of their 3 children spiraled out of control, spending the family's savings, conducting extramarital affairs and shocking the children with email notification of his "new pronouns." Talk about letting Mom handle the fallout. A reading of the article, with my comments on the similarities (child with suicidal ideation, working 3 jobs, crying somewhere alone to protect the children) in our experiences. I'm hoping The Telegraph and The Spectator will follow suit with more profiles. Our stories reveal the medical malpractice, the abdication of responsibility and the narcissistic abuse of therapists' validation of narcissistic abuse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ywza61YruI&t=11s
i think we've seen this movie before. The gender biz floods policy makers, judges, schools etc with completely false information regarding gender "care". initially institutions embrace it and memorialize gender biz policies in law and medical practice. then after a couple years people realise it was all a fraud.
https://genderclinicnews.substack.com/p/court-out