BROADview in Brief

What's been going on?

The other day, at my kid’s baseball game, I spoke to some of the parents who are interested in and willing to listen to multiple viewpoints on pediatric and adolescent “sex” changes. I told them I’d watched a short video that concisely, accurately and empathetically explained why so many of the things we think are “kind” can cause real harm—not the harm where someone feels uncomfortable, but the kind where families can be torn apart, bodies can be hurt, mental health can sink. The person in the video? Megyn Kelly. I doubt they watched it because, well, that’s a name associated with the right and we live in liberal-land. But I really think this is a great encapsulation and that she (and her writers) deserve credit for such a thoughtful piece.

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The American Medical Association, which apparently doesn’t keep track of international news on the gender-care front, strengthened its policy in support of gender-affirming care. “More than 2,000 scientific studies have examined aspects of gender-affirming care since 1975, including more than 260 studies cited in the Endocrine Society’s Clinical Practice Guideline,” they wrote in a press release.

They continued: “Gender-affirming care can be life saving for a population with high suicide rates.” They go on to detail a 2020 study comparing 89 adults who said they’d gotten blockers to 3,400 who said they didn’t. “The study found that those who received puberty-delaying hormone treatment had lower likelihood of lifetime suicidal ideation than those who wanted puberty-delaying treatment but did not receive it, even after adjusting for demographic variables and level of family support. Approximately nine in ten transgender adults who wanted puberty-delaying treatment, but did not receive it, reported lifetime suicidal ideation.”

Many of the adults in that study tried to access care when the guidelines were much stricter. Thus, they were denied interventions because of poor mental health, rather than having poor mental health because they were denied interventions. There is no good evidence that transition prevents suicide; in a recent study, two of 315 committed suicide after transition. Tragic, yes, but it’s possible that they weren’t receiving the right care.

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Speaking of the wrong care, hyper-lefty site Vice released a short video about a detransitioner who received a double mastectomy, then realized she was actually autistic, not trans, and regretted the medical interventions. The bulk of the video, though, is dedicated to assuring viewers that just because it didn’t work out for her, the care can be necessary for some, and thus bans are bad.

Meanwhile, another young detransitioner has filed a lawsuit, as Christina Buttons reports in Reality’s Last Stand. Kayla Lovdahl received puberty blockers at 12 and a double mastectomy at 13. Yes, 13. She detransitioned at 17. “Layla Jane exhibited various mental health symptoms during her childhood, which went largely unaddressed despite her parents’ concerns and a family history of mental health problems,” Buttons wrote.

After years of essentially denying their existence, three journals have recently published papers on detransition. One, by J. Cohn, makes a very key point about them: we haven’t any idea how many there are, or what the rate of regret is. Another, by Sarah C. J. Jorgensen, is a great overview of the various difficulties and controversies, and concludes around detransition, and concludes that “minimizing harm will require conducting robust research, challenging fundamental assumptions, scrutinizing of practice patterns, and embracing debate.”

A third, by a trans man and researcher Kinnon MacKinnon, asserts that, “Understanding the full range of experiences and perspectives of people who detransition—who may be referred to as detransitioners or detrans people—is crucial to advancing the field of gender care.” Some regretful detransitioners accuse MacKinnon of trying to muddy up the word by insisting it should be applied to people who stop medical interventions for reasons of access, money or stigma. But, writes MacKinnon, “Although there are detransitioned people who feel appreciative of their gender transition process in that it was an opportunity for self-discovery, care services must be able to recognise and hold therapeutic space for complex feelings such as regret and grief.”

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Lawmakers in the state of Nevada, purple in hue, apparently haven’t read these papers. They passed a bill requiring health insurers to cover gender-affirming procedures for kids and adults. Per a local news site, “SB163, mandates health insurers including Medicaid cover all medically necessary gender-affirming treatments and eliminate exclusions that have historically been used to avoid paying for treatments classified as ‘cosmetic.’” The rest of the article repeats the normal misinformation about suicide. There are in fact three bills that went up. The Republican Gov signed two and vetoed the third. If there are any Nevadans here, please tell us more about the legal landscape there. So far, as far as I know, no state has been able to pass an amendment forcing insurance companies to cover detransition care. Dems oppose it likely on the grounds that, if passed, insurance companies will really stop wanting to provide any transition procedures at all.

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A paper co-authored by psychologist and sexologist Michael Bailey was retracted for really dumb reasons. It’s full of valuable information about ROGD, including that the greatest predictor of whether a young person medicalizes is whether or not they’ve gone to a gender clinic. Politicizing research prevents knowledge-gathering, prevents good care, prevents people from living in reality. Listen to Bailey talk about what happened on Gender: A Wider Lens.

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Last, but definitely not least, Genspect, an international nonprofit dedicated to better approaches to gender dysphoria, announced the formation of a new think tank, “charged with developing a healthy alternative to the deeply flawed Standards of Care 8 promoted by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). Genspect believes there is an urgent need for an international, structured, comprehensive and well-informed alternative to SOC8, and we are uniquely positioned to sponsor the development of such a document. Rather than offering our own Standards of Care for medicalised transgender healthcare, however, we will instead lay out a non-medicalised pathway toward resolving gender distress and toward understanding it within the larger sociocultural context.

“In short, Genspect will create a non-medical guide (the Gender Care Framework) torival WPATH’s Standards of Care 8, relying upon contributions from experts and leading thinkers in various fields impacted by gender ideology. We intend to publish this guide in November 2023, coinciding with our next conference in Denver, Colorado.”

Kind of sounds like filling the huge gaps left by the American medical associations, our crummy healthcare system and the blind-eyed Democrats.

What else did you read or see this week that we should take note of? Please leave in comments!