Excellent essay, and I am planning on reading the report. Your discussion on measuring harm is brilliant and I do think it would resonate with a lot of people who have been somewhat accepting of GAC without any direct personal experience and very little questioning.
Of course I worry about anything, anything at all that HHS does in 90-days or by September or whatever. But, I do plan to read the report and hold my judgement until then.
I'm sort of toying with the idea of doing a journal club on this for my graduate students, but I will wait until the year I plan to step down from my current role. Yeah I know that's cowardly. But the approach would be to take a non partisan view and just evaluate the science, based on the same criteria with which we evaluate all other science. What does each study purport to show, is the methodology appropriate, what are the findings, what are the authors' interpretation of the findings, does that stand, what are the underlying assumptions and are the appropriate. I think it would be super interesting, with the right group of students.
This is an excellent idea. And you could actually make it about evidence-based medicine and non-partisan science and pick three topics and treat them all exactly the same way. Make one very low stakes. Make the other something people think is easy but isn't. (Diabetes? I don't know).
I love a low-stakes topic as a starter. Lots of low hanging fruit (pun intended) in the area of nutrition and metabolism. There’s genuine interest in understanding how to decide what/how to eat, general agreement that a lot of dietary guidelines are based on flawed and limited studies, and probably very few “allegiances” among graduate students.
Not cowardly. Just realistic. Some of your students will have meltdowns as they have never encountered good counter arguments for this issue....only the usual, well, propaganda.
Are you familiar with the work of Adam Mastroianni? I first learned of him via EconTalk with Russ Roberts. You may find his observations useful as you "gird your loins" in preparation for this wonderful project with grad students that you're considering.
Any US Cass-Review-style effort is going to face tough odds, if for no reason other than gender ideologues will slander the hell out of it before it even gets started. Unfortunately, in this instance there IS another reason: Donald Trump. Anything he does is guaranteed to arouse opposition, and to some extent that is justified, as Trump is petty, vengeful, corrupt and uninformed. Even his supporters pretty much know this.
That's not to say such a review can't *ever* happen, but it needs to have a lot more credibility than the Trump administration can offer.
They'd overreact no matter who is connected to a normal medical review that all treatments are supposed to be subject to. Gov. Newsom in California had the temerity to say the obvious, that males competing in women's/girls' teams is not fair. He was clobbered. I'm a known gender critical resident in my upstate NY neighborhood. As I was gardening in front recently, the woman who just put up a "we love all trans people" flag in front of her house spat in my direction, very choreographed and obvious. Trans ideologues are the loons.
I share your concerns—and this is of course the constant difficulty. That said, I do think Lisa is right to urge people to look past the who to the what, no matter how long the odds.
And there we have the problem of electing a president who is plainly, eminently unsuited for high office.
Look, I thought George W. Bush was a bad president, but the guy was at least *trying* to do a good job. He viewed himself as a public servant, even though I thought he wasn't a very good one. Donald Trump has no concept of public service; he has zero understanding of those who gave their lives in military service, once asking, "What was in it for them?" To Trump, the presidency is merely a trophy and an ATM, and therefore nobody trusts him any further than they must. So a US Cass Review spawned by his administration will be viewed, rightly or wrongly, as tainted.
(Good grief...if you'd have told me, eighteen years ago, I'd one day be speaking of GWB with tepid favor, I'd probably have fainted on the spot.)
I really appreciate your knowledgeable and thoughtful précis of the review, Lisa, and also your counsel: “The authorship shouldn’t—it must not—matter, because this report is the closest our country has gotten to our version of the Cass Review, the most comprehensive and prismatic look at what should be a scientific controversy and instead flattened into a culture war.” Thank you.
Here is how HRC is covering it on Instagram, first sentence:
"Today, the Department of Health & Human Services released a deliberately "false" report," the outcome of which was predetermined by the Trump Administration."
But what else can they say? Politically they have to reject it. And in medical terms, they absolutely have to reject it since it challenges to the core the tenets that HRC and others have been touting for years with absolute certainty.
And I see that Jesse Singal has written a review for The Dispatch....has anyone yet read it?
It is, and ever will remain, just fucking bizarre that these "treatments" were rolled out en masse before an "evidence review" of any sort was done. Why did that happen? How did that happen? Why is it still happening? What happened to "first do no harm?" Why should we trust anyone presently in government or "academia" ever again when they fell for this or let it happen?
Those are the important questions, and no one seems to be asking them but me.
How has the federal government found that doctors are mutilating children on no evidence -- and done nothing? Where is the FBI? Why have these sick monsters not been hauled in? Why -- when the administration considers it mutilation -- is this being allowed to continue? Have they been castrated? Is it they who have no balls?
The thing is, the truly shocking reality of what has happened and is happening has not actually reached most of "Trump's America" yet. Neither has it reached most of Catholic America. Neither has it reached most of Muslim America. Most people would never believe that such vile, vicious, barbaric insanity would be tolerated in America. When they find out it is happening, and when they find out the scale it's happening on...
Let me just say that I hope it is stopped before such groups take it in their own hands to stop it. They will, you know -- and it will be, shall we say, "direct action."
I started into the document but it was dismaying. Normally in medical and other science setting it’s critical to have meaningful definitions of terminology, and clear framing.
As you state, gender has a circular non-meaning.
One of the stating sentences joins “gender… with their sexed bodies…”
This means that a non-empirical term with no specific meaning is compared to an empirical observation, and then creates an ever expanding false dichotomy.
The second thing I note in a quick scan that nowhere is there made a differentiation between adolescent anxiety and “dysphoria”.
Adolescent anxiety, which is to say precisely anxiety encountered during puberty, is the single most common psychiatric condition in adolescents, written about extensively.
Without clear definitions - which are frankly not possible - a useful review would proceed down the path of comparing outcomes - physical states, among therapies for identical anxieties and concludes that full or partial sterilization along with irreversible iatrogenic damage of any extent is irresponsible.
But because it retains a “gender” frame it creates the false dichotomy between “affirmation” and “non-affirmation”. The term affirmation is a neologism to mask sterilizing pharmaceuticals and surgery.
Were the simple act taken of refusing to use the word “gender” which has no meaning, biological or medical, the reality of the situation discussed collapses into reality.
This happens fairly often now in biological science, referring to the “gender” of animals, including humans.
As such the report disqualifies itself as science and exists only as rhetorical massage.
Referring to RFK Jr. as a "vaccine denier" is so intellectually lazy I can't believe I just read that sentence at this site. Have you read his book on Fauci? Clearly not or you couldn't peddle such disinformation. Sad is all I can say. Catch up.
Have to agree. RFK Jr. is no “vaccine denier.” I LOVE your journalism but you know too well how MSM cancels and lies. If you really listen to RFK Jr., I predict your opinion will fall into step with the truth.
(Loving correction about Kennedy, he's not a vaccine-denier, he just recognizes that the vaccines we have went through abysmally low-quality testing. The media has distorted everything he says, similar to how they treat anyone bringing uncomfortable evidence that WPATH "informed consent" is not actually informed consent.)
Sadly, liberals are conditioned to distrust him as much as they distrust Trump, and while I no longer hate Trump with the passion of a mind virus, I don't particularly like nor trust him, either. But Kennedy, when it comes to health-related things, has been right about everything. It's awful how the media twists every single thing he says, like saying he insulted the autism community by talking about severe autism. ( https://anntomokorosen.substack.com/p/vaccines-and-autism-the-suppresseddismissed )
Much info here, which is the same place Kennedy gets his vaccine info from - as far down to the roots of the information as is possible to go - clinical trial data, FOIA requests, package inserts.
Just like the cult of trans activists, the pharma controlled "experts", and they've captured Wikipedia, Google, every mainstream and progressive / left media outlet, the reputations of some of the most honest, deeply and accurately informed people are trashed, in a frustrating circle of official disinformation that pretends those who are honest are the ones spreading mis / disinformation.
Kennedy's claims about no placebos in the childhood vaccines is true, they just gaslight and consider a poison casserole minus the antigen as a placebo. They also point to a few actual placebo studies for different vaccines (like a much older polio vaccine), or placebo studies of a different population (Hep B shot, now given on the first day of life, originally intended for the obvious population who could benefit from it, adult IV drug users and sex workers, but the Hep B shots for infants were only followed for 4 or 5 days, and an adult study using saline placebo doesn't map to infants.)
Part of an HPV vaccine trial used an actual placebo, after 3 vaccines were already given. (The HPV shot is the most dangerous besides the Covid shot, by far).
Notice the media spin that used to say placebos are used, it's a crazy conspiracy theory that they're not, and now they're also saying that it would be terrible to require placebo testing. But there's no other way to honestly test safety.
Same playbook as gender medicine. Capturing the medical orgs, media, etc. To be fair, some vaccines do prevent / mitigate the diseases they map to, but it's a narrow frame to only look at one disease, when the overall health of unvaccinated kids is far better than vaccinated kids. Some pediatricians give a modified vaccine schedule, careful to wait and space them out. But the current paradigm of dozens of shots, sometimes bunches at the same time to "catch up", is barbaric. And Kennedy is the only prominent person who listened with respect to the vaccine injured families, while everyone else gaslights and shames them.
But, I hear you, it will be hard for the liberal bubble to take seriously anything that comes from a Trump administration, and anything from Kennedy (although a few more are open to him), but the media's lies about him were sadly believed ... I could go on about the insanity of how they distort his comments, like calling him racist for the scientific observation that the MMR vaccine affects African American children differently, and the engineered virus that causes Covid-19 affects different races somewhat differently. And saying he compared the plight of Anne Frank and Holocaust victims to having to mask or not go to restaurants, when his point was that every tyrant has wanted the digital tech abilities that we have now (a point that turned out to be very true).
And this site will have tons of info on May 6th, recordings of calls with the Covid vaccine injured, knowledge of egregious harms, while they were on TV saying they found no signals of harm, and every single person over 6 months should take repeated injections .. https://therealpetermarks.com/
Heartbreaking film about the Covid vaccine injured, Follow The Silenced. Film will be free to watch on / after May 15th, now the trailer is on the site - https://followthesilenced.com/
Thank you so much for the caring, honest, vital information you share.
Love,
Ellen
(they / them) - (No, but that's what I'd be if I were a confused, indoctrinated kid today.)
There are, or were, mechanisms to prevent burying results. Grantees are required to submit progress reports for non-competitive renewal, and to show productivity in the form of peer reviewed publications for renewal. This disincentivizes burying results. Short term burying, maybe. But scientists want to show productivity and want to publish their results. Yes, yes I know about Olsen-Kennedy but a) we ALL know about that so not a good burying job and b) eventually, attempts to bury would have resulted in loss of funding through normal scientific review. As for weaponization-let them weaponize. Good science can withstand weaponization. Controversial science will always be weaponized. Do it anyway.
Excellent essay, and I am planning on reading the report. Your discussion on measuring harm is brilliant and I do think it would resonate with a lot of people who have been somewhat accepting of GAC without any direct personal experience and very little questioning.
Of course I worry about anything, anything at all that HHS does in 90-days or by September or whatever. But, I do plan to read the report and hold my judgement until then.
I'm sort of toying with the idea of doing a journal club on this for my graduate students, but I will wait until the year I plan to step down from my current role. Yeah I know that's cowardly. But the approach would be to take a non partisan view and just evaluate the science, based on the same criteria with which we evaluate all other science. What does each study purport to show, is the methodology appropriate, what are the findings, what are the authors' interpretation of the findings, does that stand, what are the underlying assumptions and are the appropriate. I think it would be super interesting, with the right group of students.
This is an excellent idea. And you could actually make it about evidence-based medicine and non-partisan science and pick three topics and treat them all exactly the same way. Make one very low stakes. Make the other something people think is easy but isn't. (Diabetes? I don't know).
I love a low-stakes topic as a starter. Lots of low hanging fruit (pun intended) in the area of nutrition and metabolism. There’s genuine interest in understanding how to decide what/how to eat, general agreement that a lot of dietary guidelines are based on flawed and limited studies, and probably very few “allegiances” among graduate students.
Not cowardly. Just realistic. Some of your students will have meltdowns as they have never encountered good counter arguments for this issue....only the usual, well, propaganda.
Are you familiar with the work of Adam Mastroianni? I first learned of him via EconTalk with Russ Roberts. You may find his observations useful as you "gird your loins" in preparation for this wonderful project with grad students that you're considering.
Adam Mastroianni on the Brain, the Ears, and How We Learn https://www.econtalk.org/adam-mastroianni-on-the-brain-the-ears-and-how-we-learn/
I was not familiar, so thank you! I’ll dig into this!
Your journal club idea sounds terrific. Do keep us posted when/if that comes "live." Would love to hear how it goes.
Any US Cass-Review-style effort is going to face tough odds, if for no reason other than gender ideologues will slander the hell out of it before it even gets started. Unfortunately, in this instance there IS another reason: Donald Trump. Anything he does is guaranteed to arouse opposition, and to some extent that is justified, as Trump is petty, vengeful, corrupt and uninformed. Even his supporters pretty much know this.
That's not to say such a review can't *ever* happen, but it needs to have a lot more credibility than the Trump administration can offer.
They'd overreact no matter who is connected to a normal medical review that all treatments are supposed to be subject to. Gov. Newsom in California had the temerity to say the obvious, that males competing in women's/girls' teams is not fair. He was clobbered. I'm a known gender critical resident in my upstate NY neighborhood. As I was gardening in front recently, the woman who just put up a "we love all trans people" flag in front of her house spat in my direction, very choreographed and obvious. Trans ideologues are the loons.
I share your concerns—and this is of course the constant difficulty. That said, I do think Lisa is right to urge people to look past the who to the what, no matter how long the odds.
And there we have the problem of electing a president who is plainly, eminently unsuited for high office.
Look, I thought George W. Bush was a bad president, but the guy was at least *trying* to do a good job. He viewed himself as a public servant, even though I thought he wasn't a very good one. Donald Trump has no concept of public service; he has zero understanding of those who gave their lives in military service, once asking, "What was in it for them?" To Trump, the presidency is merely a trophy and an ATM, and therefore nobody trusts him any further than they must. So a US Cass Review spawned by his administration will be viewed, rightly or wrongly, as tainted.
(Good grief...if you'd have told me, eighteen years ago, I'd one day be speaking of GWB with tepid favor, I'd probably have fainted on the spot.)
I really appreciate your knowledgeable and thoughtful précis of the review, Lisa, and also your counsel: “The authorship shouldn’t—it must not—matter, because this report is the closest our country has gotten to our version of the Cass Review, the most comprehensive and prismatic look at what should be a scientific controversy and instead flattened into a culture war.” Thank you.
Here is how HRC is covering it on Instagram, first sentence:
"Today, the Department of Health & Human Services released a deliberately "false" report," the outcome of which was predetermined by the Trump Administration."
But what else can they say? Politically they have to reject it. And in medical terms, they absolutely have to reject it since it challenges to the core the tenets that HRC and others have been touting for years with absolute certainty.
And I see that Jesse Singal has written a review for The Dispatch....has anyone yet read it?
I suspect ChatGPT was asked for a comment in the style of HRC.
Singal article was pay walled when i checked. Disappointed to hear HRC comments.
It is, and ever will remain, just fucking bizarre that these "treatments" were rolled out en masse before an "evidence review" of any sort was done. Why did that happen? How did that happen? Why is it still happening? What happened to "first do no harm?" Why should we trust anyone presently in government or "academia" ever again when they fell for this or let it happen?
Those are the important questions, and no one seems to be asking them but me.
How has the federal government found that doctors are mutilating children on no evidence -- and done nothing? Where is the FBI? Why have these sick monsters not been hauled in? Why -- when the administration considers it mutilation -- is this being allowed to continue? Have they been castrated? Is it they who have no balls?
The thing is, the truly shocking reality of what has happened and is happening has not actually reached most of "Trump's America" yet. Neither has it reached most of Catholic America. Neither has it reached most of Muslim America. Most people would never believe that such vile, vicious, barbaric insanity would be tolerated in America. When they find out it is happening, and when they find out the scale it's happening on...
Let me just say that I hope it is stopped before such groups take it in their own hands to stop it. They will, you know -- and it will be, shall we say, "direct action."
As always crisp, pleasurable writing.
I started into the document but it was dismaying. Normally in medical and other science setting it’s critical to have meaningful definitions of terminology, and clear framing.
As you state, gender has a circular non-meaning.
One of the stating sentences joins “gender… with their sexed bodies…”
This means that a non-empirical term with no specific meaning is compared to an empirical observation, and then creates an ever expanding false dichotomy.
The second thing I note in a quick scan that nowhere is there made a differentiation between adolescent anxiety and “dysphoria”.
Adolescent anxiety, which is to say precisely anxiety encountered during puberty, is the single most common psychiatric condition in adolescents, written about extensively.
Without clear definitions - which are frankly not possible - a useful review would proceed down the path of comparing outcomes - physical states, among therapies for identical anxieties and concludes that full or partial sterilization along with irreversible iatrogenic damage of any extent is irresponsible.
But because it retains a “gender” frame it creates the false dichotomy between “affirmation” and “non-affirmation”. The term affirmation is a neologism to mask sterilizing pharmaceuticals and surgery.
Were the simple act taken of refusing to use the word “gender” which has no meaning, biological or medical, the reality of the situation discussed collapses into reality.
This happens fairly often now in biological science, referring to the “gender” of animals, including humans.
As such the report disqualifies itself as science and exists only as rhetorical massage.
Referring to RFK Jr. as a "vaccine denier" is so intellectually lazy I can't believe I just read that sentence at this site. Have you read his book on Fauci? Clearly not or you couldn't peddle such disinformation. Sad is all I can say. Catch up.
Have to agree. RFK Jr. is no “vaccine denier.” I LOVE your journalism but you know too well how MSM cancels and lies. If you really listen to RFK Jr., I predict your opinion will fall into step with the truth.
(Loving correction about Kennedy, he's not a vaccine-denier, he just recognizes that the vaccines we have went through abysmally low-quality testing. The media has distorted everything he says, similar to how they treat anyone bringing uncomfortable evidence that WPATH "informed consent" is not actually informed consent.)
Sadly, liberals are conditioned to distrust him as much as they distrust Trump, and while I no longer hate Trump with the passion of a mind virus, I don't particularly like nor trust him, either. But Kennedy, when it comes to health-related things, has been right about everything. It's awful how the media twists every single thing he says, like saying he insulted the autism community by talking about severe autism. ( https://anntomokorosen.substack.com/p/vaccines-and-autism-the-suppresseddismissed )
Much info here, which is the same place Kennedy gets his vaccine info from - as far down to the roots of the information as is possible to go - clinical trial data, FOIA requests, package inserts.
The attorneys at the Informed Consent Action Network ( https://aaronsiri.substack.com/ ) win court cases all the time, using gov't and pharma info, not exaggerations or inaccurate claims. https://www.icandecide.org
Just like the cult of trans activists, the pharma controlled "experts", and they've captured Wikipedia, Google, every mainstream and progressive / left media outlet, the reputations of some of the most honest, deeply and accurately informed people are trashed, in a frustrating circle of official disinformation that pretends those who are honest are the ones spreading mis / disinformation.
( https://anotherbetrayedliberal.substack.com/p/information-permaculture-and-cooties - "Beware the Wikipedia, etc Trap" )
Kennedy's claims about no placebos in the childhood vaccines is true, they just gaslight and consider a poison casserole minus the antigen as a placebo. They also point to a few actual placebo studies for different vaccines (like a much older polio vaccine), or placebo studies of a different population (Hep B shot, now given on the first day of life, originally intended for the obvious population who could benefit from it, adult IV drug users and sex workers, but the Hep B shots for infants were only followed for 4 or 5 days, and an adult study using saline placebo doesn't map to infants.)
Part of an HPV vaccine trial used an actual placebo, after 3 vaccines were already given. (The HPV shot is the most dangerous besides the Covid shot, by far).
Placebo info here, with links to package inserts. https://aaronsiri.substack.com/p/clinical-trials-of-childhood-vaccines?utm_source=publication-search
https://icandecide.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/no-placebo-101823.pdf
Notice the media spin that used to say placebos are used, it's a crazy conspiracy theory that they're not, and now they're also saying that it would be terrible to require placebo testing. But there's no other way to honestly test safety.
Same playbook as gender medicine. Capturing the medical orgs, media, etc. To be fair, some vaccines do prevent / mitigate the diseases they map to, but it's a narrow frame to only look at one disease, when the overall health of unvaccinated kids is far better than vaccinated kids. Some pediatricians give a modified vaccine schedule, careful to wait and space them out. But the current paradigm of dozens of shots, sometimes bunches at the same time to "catch up", is barbaric. And Kennedy is the only prominent person who listened with respect to the vaccine injured families, while everyone else gaslights and shames them.
But, I hear you, it will be hard for the liberal bubble to take seriously anything that comes from a Trump administration, and anything from Kennedy (although a few more are open to him), but the media's lies about him were sadly believed ... I could go on about the insanity of how they distort his comments, like calling him racist for the scientific observation that the MMR vaccine affects African American children differently, and the engineered virus that causes Covid-19 affects different races somewhat differently. And saying he compared the plight of Anne Frank and Holocaust victims to having to mask or not go to restaurants, when his point was that every tyrant has wanted the digital tech abilities that we have now (a point that turned out to be very true).
I'm working on an article about Kennedy vs the narrative ... https://anotherbetrayedliberal.substack.com/
And this site will have tons of info on May 6th, recordings of calls with the Covid vaccine injured, knowledge of egregious harms, while they were on TV saying they found no signals of harm, and every single person over 6 months should take repeated injections .. https://therealpetermarks.com/
Heartbreaking film about the Covid vaccine injured, Follow The Silenced. Film will be free to watch on / after May 15th, now the trailer is on the site - https://followthesilenced.com/
Thank you so much for the caring, honest, vital information you share.
Love,
Ellen
(they / them) - (No, but that's what I'd be if I were a confused, indoctrinated kid today.)
Thx 4 CliffsNotes
The PBS coverage sounds pretty neutral judging by the headline. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/trumps-hhs-urges-therapy-for-transgender-youth-departing-from-broader-gender-affirming-health-care
We’d know more about potential long term impacts of treatments if those “transgender mice” studies weren’t terminated.
Assuming that the results would not be weaponized by the TRAs. Or buried.
There are, or were, mechanisms to prevent burying results. Grantees are required to submit progress reports for non-competitive renewal, and to show productivity in the form of peer reviewed publications for renewal. This disincentivizes burying results. Short term burying, maybe. But scientists want to show productivity and want to publish their results. Yes, yes I know about Olsen-Kennedy but a) we ALL know about that so not a good burying job and b) eventually, attempts to bury would have resulted in loss of funding through normal scientific review. As for weaponization-let them weaponize. Good science can withstand weaponization. Controversial science will always be weaponized. Do it anyway.
Love this: "Good science can withstand weaponization. Controversial science will always be weaponized. Do it anyway." I'm saving this quote!