Just to clarify for readers in general: "Democracy Now!" isn't an NPR show. WNYC is an NPR member station and they can interview whomever they like, so they interviewed Amy Goodman. But she doesn't work for NPR (and neither does anyone at WNYC).
NPR is, however, as we've discussed many times, completely irresponsible in its coverage of the "trans" delusion. The network is 100% on board the trans train.
NPR's golden boy, Scott Simon, recently interviewed the author of a new biography on the travel writer James "Jan" Morris. Though I love Morris's writing, he was a supreme narcissist who neglected his family and pretended to be a woman, which, of course, Simon and his guest dutifully respected by continually referring to him as "she" and "her" and lauded because "she" had found "her" supposed "authentic self":
WNYC's "On the Media" is also 100% aboard the trans train. I've known this for a long time, but a recent show pushed me over the edge. I sent host Brooke Gladstone a blistering email, which, of course, she never acknowledged:
I was trying to figure out why you were clarifying this, but I guess it's because of the subtitle, since the piece is about left media generally. DN does air on NPR stations, so I'm going to leave the subtitle.
Yes, the title is fine -- it's a great play on words!
I just wanted to put that out there because I know from a lifetime in public radio that people are constantly confused about what constitutes public radio, public TV, NPR, APM, PRX, individual local stations, etc.
Thank you for doing this. A few months ago I emailed Ms. magazine (for the second time) and the National Women's Law Center. Neither have bothered to reply.
I used to admire Amy and Democracy Now - but that was long ago. I saw a sea change at Democracy Now during the Obama administration when after always being vehemently opposed to America's "regime change wars" - suddenly Democracy Now was shilling the same "official CIA war propaganda" as the rest of MSM. From credulously peddling everything from - "Gaddafi's (non-existent) viagra fueled rape camps," to the baseless "Assad is gassing his own people" propaganda line - Democracy Now dropped the mask of independent journalism and outed itself as another organ of the State. "Regime change" under the banner of the rainbow flag. How incredibly sad and disappointing that this pattern has continued with Democracy Now supporting the ongoing assault on the rights and safety of women & girls and on the adolescent bodies of children of both sexes.
Since when did everyone in the states start calling elections a "regime change"? Another progressive farce- slyly or not so slyly changing descriptive language to raise up Marxist ideas.
"young people committing suicide after transition—including the two in the rare high-quality long-term research we have in this country"
I clicked through on the link embedded in this sentence to see what, according to Lisa, "the rare high-quality long-term research" is. It is the study by Diane Chen et al., published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in January 2023, entitled “Psychosocial Functioning in Transgender Youth after 2 Years of Hormones.”
Lisa, with all due respect (and I'm a fan of your work), Chen et al. is not high-quality research, not even close to it. Yes, the study was published in the prestigious NEJM and was funded by the National Institutes of Health. But the study's (methodological) design is bad most notably because there is no control group which means that we must compare study results with what we assume/imagine (!!!) the result would have been if the study subjects had not received the treatment under study. So if you just assume that gender-dysphoric minors who don't go on cross-sex hormones have significantly worse mental health than those who take such hormones, then the study supports the use of cross-sex hormones as a treatment against gender dysphoria. But the obvious problem is that you just assumed what the study was meant to show! You need a control group, like in the most recent study out of Finland (this month). Have you forgotten that Jesse Singal published two LONG articles on his Substack site on Jan 31 2023 and Feb 7 2023 (both open access) thoroughly taking apart this study by Chen et al.? He also identified a number of other significant problems besides the absence of a control group.
And then there is the issue that Chen et al. threw out their data analysis plan (drawn up before the study was done) AFTER they had seen the data, which did not accord with what the researchers had expected. This is a CARDINAL sin (and if you don't know that then you have too little understanding of what methodologically sound research looks like). Basically, the way this study was published in NEJM, this was research fraud. I know this sounds harsh, but it is the truth - the authors were literally lying to the readers about the research they had done. We only know that they did not follow their pre-specified data analysis plan because of Jesse Singal (he has their original analysis plan). The authors themselves did not disclose this in their NEJM article BECAUSE they would not have been able to justify it. They retrofitted their data analysis (that is, changed it after they had seen the data) in order to avoid disclosing that important hypotheses the study was meant to test were not supported by the data. Like so much else in this area, the fact that NEJM published this article is a scandal. But have you ever seen any articles in NEJM that cast a critical eye on transgender medicine research? There aren't any because NEJM has been an unabashed cheerleader for gender-affirming care.
I don't know whether you realize that the Chen et al. research team is the same research team that made headlines in the New York Times with this:
Azeen Ghorayshi: U.S. Study on Puberty Blockers Goes Unpublished Because of Politics, Doctor Says. New York Times, Oct 23, 2024
The lead author of this puberty blocker study was Johanna Olson-Kennedy. But it is the same research team as the Chen et al. study that you call high-quality research. Here's what Jesse Singal wrote about them in Sept 2024:
"What have the recipients of this [taxpayer] money [about US $ 15 million] produced so far? The money has gone to a sizable number of studies, for sure, but nine years after the grant was awarded this team has BARELY ADVANCED our knowledge of the psychosocial effects of puberty blockers and hormones at all." (capitalization added)
Jesse Singal: Yale’s “Integrity Project” Is Spreading Misinformation About The Cass Review And Youth Gender Medicine: Part 2 (Corrected). Sept 1, 2024
Benjamin Ryan, in a Substack article from June 6, 2025, entitled "Long-Awaited Puberty Blockers Study Is Out In Pre-Print, Finding No Change In Kids' Mental Health," wrote:
"Dr. Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues therefore took four years to analyze and finally publish their data."
Think about that: it took Olson-Kennedy and her team 4 (!!!) years [counted from the end of data collection] to publish their data in manuscript form (it still has not been published in a scientific journal). Of course, we know that it took so long because they delayed publication because, like with the research that the NEJM published with Diane Chen as lead author, the researchers didn't like their own results because they did not support gender-affirming care. I'm sure that, ideally, they would have preferred to not publish the data at all. We have seen this before: the UK puberty blocker study with lead author Polly Carmichael, which found that the average effect of puberty blockers on mental health was zero (as far as one can tell this from a study without a control group) was published in February 2021 (in PLOS Medicine, I believe), at least 4-5 years after data collection ended – ONLY BECAUSE Oxford University sociologist Michael Biggs was creating a commotion about the data going unpublished. It seems that, metaphorically speaking, he cornered the researchers saying you publish the data or you have to release them and then I will analyze them for publication. The data were collected with taxpayer money (and hence the researchers are accountable to taxpayers and can't just make the data discreetly disappear).
Bottom line: calling Chen et al. high-quality research is 100% false.
This is why I wish I could write more for others. This is just a function of not copy editing. I’ve already written about how bad this paper is. It’s just hard to copy editing yourself.
Is 2 years considered "long-term?" Especially in a drug regimen that's supposed to last a life-time, starting in teenagers - so a good 50+ years.
I would think "long-term" would have to be a minimum of 5 years, and ideally at least 10 years to really show if these medications are helping versus hurting the people using them. (But maybe I am unaware of a scientific standard that deems anything longer than a year "long-term.")
Actually, I believe it is considered long-term by the field. It's pretty rare to have super long follow-up in this country because we don't have a national registry. Is it long-term to us? No, not when you consider that some people believe it takes up to a decade to regret or realize you've been harmed!
2 years is not long term. If I remember this correctly both the puberty blocker and the cross-sex hormone study funded by the National Institutes of Health were supposed to run for 4 years. The NEJM study by Chen et al. from January 2023 reported 2-year interim results. Likewise the still unpublished puberty blocker study with Johanna Olson-Kennedy as the lead author (but available as a manuscript since June 2025). On a normal timeline we should already have or soon have an article from Chen et al. with data for 4 years (on cross-sex hormones). But, frankly, we cannot expect people like Chen, Olson-Kennedy, Diane Ehrensaft, etc., to be straight shooters - they will mess with the data (making unacknowledged and unexplained changes in the data analysis and not reporting certain unfavorable data) and delay publication and then lie about their research findings. They already have done all these things!!! They are true believers who also have invested professionally so much in gender-affirming care. They will try to move heaven and earth before admitting that gender-affirming care does not work for most minors, never mind that these minors really want to have this treatment. (They are kids! If you let them, kids do a lot of stuff that isn't good fo them.)
Data collection for the full 4-year period of the puberty blocker study with lead author Olson-Kennedy should have finished in about June 2023. My recollection from reading Jesse Singal's articles about the Chen et al. study is that once data collection is finished the researchers who collected the data have 4 or 5 years exclusive access/control over the data. After that period data access cannot be denied to researchers not involved in the study because the data were collected with taxpayer money and hence are not private property of Chen, Olson-Kennedy et al. So Olson-Kennedy and collaborators have now had 4 years of data for the puberty blocker study for almost 3 years. Normally, a large research team (consisting of about 9 researchers) should be able to submit a manuscript to a scientific journal within 1 year of the end of data collection. After all, before they started the study they drew up an analysis plan with their hypotheses and a detailed plan for how they will analyze the data. There is no good reason for why it took Olson-Kennedy et al. 4 years to submit a manuscript with the 2-year interim results. Did it really take the authors about as much time to analyze the data and write up the data analysis (4 years) as it took them to collect two years of data for each study subject (study subjects have different enrollment/start dates)? The same applies to the results for the whole 4 year period. They are delaying publication because the results presumably are not favorable to gender-affirming care and because their contract with the study's funding agency (the National Institutes of Health) allows them to do this.
The puberty blocker trial that was planned in the UK also has a terrible trial design (and is now embroiled in controversy and is being challenged in court). It plans to compare two groups of gender dysphoric minors both getting puberty blockers, but one group at time X and the control group at time X + 1 year. Such a design can tell us nothing about the long-term effects of puberty blockers because it would compare minors who are in the first year of having their puberty blocked with minors who want to go on blockers but have to wait for 1 year. This is a truly ridiculous trial design. You sterilize minors and severely degrade their future sexual functioning while learning nothing about the long-term effects of puberty blockers. (From past research we know that puberty blockers have permanent effects because almost everyone who goes on blockers later goes on cross-sex hormones. So blockers are not a neutral temporary pause button, giving minors time to think about their true gender identity.) Opponents of this trial say that what needs to be done first is a study that follows up on the minors who had their puberty blocked at the GIDS clinic in London 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 years ago. I agree.
Exactly right. This "experiment" is like an experiment of cutting off people's healthy body parts to see if that's "good" for them. We already know it's not "good," and are just pretending this could possibly be good somehow!! Then the results are manipulated to make it look like these people are happy by asking questions they are likely to answer in the affirmative - especially if they subscribe to the "sunk costs" fallacy (and this usually a subconsciously held belief). It's "Tooth Fairy" science, but so much worse because at least belief in a Tooth Fairy doesn't cause any harm!
We can and should follow up on all of the victims of this experiment who are already out there, but should not be continuing the harms.
Is 2 years considered "long-term?" Especially in a drug regimen that's supposed to last a life-time, starting in teenagers - so a good 50+ years.
I would think "long-term" would have to be a minimum of 5 years, and ideally at least 10 years to really show if these medications are helping versus hurting the people using them. (But maybe I am unaware of a scientific standard that deems anything longer than a year "long-term.")
Yves, WHY do you still use the phrase, "gender affirming"? Isn't that an oxymoron? Isn't "gender denying", or "gender negating", or "gender reversing", or "gender undoing", or "gender divisive", or "gender profiting", or "gender exploiting", or "gender confusion" EVEN MORE accurate? WHAT "gender" is being "affirmed", in so-called "gender affirming" "care"? I bet you can't even get the numbers correct in "Covid1984", can you?.... RSVP?....
BTW, except for that, your comment was EXCELLENT, and much appreciated!
Great title. As soon as I read it, I heard the theme music to Democracy Now! blaring in my head. Ugh. Almost all the people on the far left who are over 60 embraced trans like it was the second coming of Karl Marx. Do they just love having a cause to get righteous and all "dissenting" about? What is wrong with these people? How can they forget about women's rights? I really cannot understand it.
The left has a mixed record on women's rights. Shirley Chisholm said she found it harder to advance in left politics as a woman than a Black person. Stokey Charmichael said, "A woman's position in the moment is prone." And Joe Biden threw Anita Hill under the bus.
Too bad, Amy Goodman has always been a supporter of transgender propaganda. She tends to support what's trendy on the left and is part of a little click including her brother David and people like Marc Stern and Noam Chomsky. I agree with most of their politics concerning economics and imperialism....but. I met her once while she interacted with a crowd and she revealed herself to be elitist and opportunistic more concerned with popularity than integrity. Ditto for Brooke Gladstone.. Marc Stern once had Gail Dines on his radio show to discuss pornography and he was so defensive, protective of pornography. Grrrr
I stopped watching Democracy Now over this. I’d been a fan for 15 years and then….i realized oh no, they’re retarded. How does everyone not see this for what it is?
Thank you Lisa. I appreciate it, and I’d be grateful if you read this overly long comment. That’s a good idea about writing DN. I was disillusioned.
I’m tired of explaining that I love all three of my “trans” nieces, all Irish teenage girls and what I’m objecting to is the Orwellian propaganda that implies people have always changed their gender or had no gender at all and are finally coming out of the closet after….centuries? Millennia? It’s bananas.
Same on Substack. I’ll be reading Freddie deBoer or Cartoons hate her or many other big accounts and they’ll randomly reference “throwing trans people under the bus” or something and it’s like 😩 oh lord.
It’s incredible the number of 100k + accounts that just credulously infer that “trans” people are being oppressed and it’s gone on too long and they shall overcome and….like I k ow Amy Goodman and Kamala Harris must know there were no trans kids in their high schools…but no. They think they were closeted due to transphobia.
La leche league endorsing men injecting serum into their chests and suckling infants at their nipples is….to me, obvious proof of mass psychosis.
I firmly believe that this mass phenomenon is a direct result of the cognitive dissonance experienced by liberal, progressive and feminist people who for years, described efforts to curtail the mass trauma and psychological sexual abuse of western civilizations kids by internet pornographers as a moral panic.
How could it be ubiquitously dismissed as no big deal until the dam broke in 2020 and against their will were forced to admit all was not well at Pornhub and other such entities.
Even Kristoffs NYT “expose” was shot through with his attitude of “ I found it hard to believe that good ol Pornhub had videos of non-consensual abuse, but after much investigation it turns out they weren’t the movie enterprise we all thought they were”.
I paraphrase but like- say it ain’t so Pornhub. 🙄
A decade of profound cognitive dissonance on this issue literally made everyone insane. Allowing this madness to sweep through the adult population via media, including medicine, schools, academia and social services- all the same institutions that had nothing to say at all about the harrowing sudden mass exposure to modern internet pornography that we all just went through.
This is in reponse the guy Mark who was suspended and claimed you are not a journalist, Lisa.
Lisa. I'm not sure if there was more to the story of this guy getting suspended. I am sure it's tricky and you have a desire not to allow haters to invade this space. But if it's dissension you are trying to make space for, perhaps it is better to allow him to stay. Let your readers come to your defense.
I can understand why someone would claim that what Lisa does is not "journalism." Though unbiased, objective journalism is really impossible. At a minimum, journalism is biased by what is omitted, what story is not told. Lisa is countering the bias by omission (and worse- reporting false information and conclusions) but sharing the story that is not told in mainstream media. She digs deeper, investigating and searching for the closest thing to truth that we can find. And Lisa is pretty open - many of her readers feel that she is to a fault. Journalism has morphed over time and it is rare to find "the straight factual news." Lisa has provided journalism and so much more to her readers. Lisa provides editorial writing on Substack (a form of journalism) that has given her readers a much-needed haven from the disorienting, cult (with regards to pushing gender ideology as the normal we must accept) of mainstream media and (left) culture. In addition to providing legislative updates, summaries of current events, she voices, not just her own opinion, but the collective feelings of most of her readers who have been exiled from political and social circles because they are not acceptable.
There is a time and place for everything. There are different types of journalism, Lisa is capable of and produces different types, depending on what the occasion calls for. And then she also shares her personal experience, bares her soul, allows us to be seen in doing so and for that, so many of us are so grateful.
If a journalist also has a blog where they write poetry or fiction, nobody is going to say "Aha! You are not a journalist!" You can do more than one thing.
Lisa. I'm not sure if there was more to the story of this guy getting suspended. I am sure it's tricky and you have a desire not to allow haters to invade this space. But if it's dissension you are trying to make space for, perhaps it is better to allow him to stay. Let your readers come to your defense.
I can understand why someone would claim that what Lisa does is not "journalism." Though unbiased, objective journalism is really impossible. At a minimum, journalism is biased by what is omitted, what story is not told. Lisa is countering the bias by omission (and worse- reporting false information and conclusions) but sharing the story that is not told in mainstream media. She digs deeper, investigating and searching for the closest thing to truth that we can find. And Lisa is pretty open - many of her readers feel that she is to a fault. Journalism has morphed over time and it is rare to find "the straight factual news." Lisa has provided journalism and so much more to her readers. Lisa provides editorial writing on Substack (a form of journalism) that has given her readers a much-needed haven from the disorienting, cult (with regards to pushing gender ideology as the normal we must accept) of mainstream media and (left) culture. In addition to providing legislative updates, summaries of current events, she voices, not just her own opinion, but the collective feelings of most of her readers who have been exiled from political and social circles because they are not acceptable.
There is a time and place for everything. There are different types of journalism, Lisa is capable of and produces different types, depending on what the occasion calls for. And then she also shares her personal experience, bares her soul, allows us to be seen in doing so and for that, so many of us are so grateful.
Wow, I wanna see the comment that was deleted! And that "Mark M Breza" just sounds like an annoying jerk, not really "delete-worthy". But as Author, I will of course defer to your judgement here, Lisa! I really liked your response to the long comment from Yves, above! KEEP UP the GOOD WORK!....
Just to clarify for readers in general: "Democracy Now!" isn't an NPR show. WNYC is an NPR member station and they can interview whomever they like, so they interviewed Amy Goodman. But she doesn't work for NPR (and neither does anyone at WNYC).
NPR is, however, as we've discussed many times, completely irresponsible in its coverage of the "trans" delusion. The network is 100% on board the trans train.
NPR's golden boy, Scott Simon, recently interviewed the author of a new biography on the travel writer James "Jan" Morris. Though I love Morris's writing, he was a supreme narcissist who neglected his family and pretended to be a woman, which, of course, Simon and his guest dutifully respected by continually referring to him as "she" and "her" and lauded because "she" had found "her" supposed "authentic self":
https://www.npr.org/2026/04/18/nx-s1-5647654/sara-wheeler-discusses-her-new-biography-of-the-late-welsh-travel-writer-jan-morris
WNYC's "On the Media" is also 100% aboard the trans train. I've known this for a long time, but a recent show pushed me over the edge. I sent host Brooke Gladstone a blistering email, which, of course, she never acknowledged:
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/trans-people-are-facing-a-dual-state-in-trumps-america
I was trying to figure out why you were clarifying this, but I guess it's because of the subtitle, since the piece is about left media generally. DN does air on NPR stations, so I'm going to leave the subtitle.
Yes, the title is fine -- it's a great play on words!
I just wanted to put that out there because I know from a lifetime in public radio that people are constantly confused about what constitutes public radio, public TV, NPR, APM, PRX, individual local stations, etc.
Yep, and I'm glad you did—I just clarified a little in the piece. Thank you!
Thank you for doing this. A few months ago I emailed Ms. magazine (for the second time) and the National Women's Law Center. Neither have bothered to reply.
I used to admire Amy and Democracy Now - but that was long ago. I saw a sea change at Democracy Now during the Obama administration when after always being vehemently opposed to America's "regime change wars" - suddenly Democracy Now was shilling the same "official CIA war propaganda" as the rest of MSM. From credulously peddling everything from - "Gaddafi's (non-existent) viagra fueled rape camps," to the baseless "Assad is gassing his own people" propaganda line - Democracy Now dropped the mask of independent journalism and outed itself as another organ of the State. "Regime change" under the banner of the rainbow flag. How incredibly sad and disappointing that this pattern has continued with Democracy Now supporting the ongoing assault on the rights and safety of women & girls and on the adolescent bodies of children of both sexes.
I've observed the same selective, opportunistic politics.
Aaron Maté couldn’t have said it better — and he worked there.
Yep.
Since when did everyone in the states start calling elections a "regime change"? Another progressive farce- slyly or not so slyly changing descriptive language to raise up Marxist ideas.
Regarding Lisa writing:
"young people committing suicide after transition—including the two in the rare high-quality long-term research we have in this country"
I clicked through on the link embedded in this sentence to see what, according to Lisa, "the rare high-quality long-term research" is. It is the study by Diane Chen et al., published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in January 2023, entitled “Psychosocial Functioning in Transgender Youth after 2 Years of Hormones.”
Lisa, with all due respect (and I'm a fan of your work), Chen et al. is not high-quality research, not even close to it. Yes, the study was published in the prestigious NEJM and was funded by the National Institutes of Health. But the study's (methodological) design is bad most notably because there is no control group which means that we must compare study results with what we assume/imagine (!!!) the result would have been if the study subjects had not received the treatment under study. So if you just assume that gender-dysphoric minors who don't go on cross-sex hormones have significantly worse mental health than those who take such hormones, then the study supports the use of cross-sex hormones as a treatment against gender dysphoria. But the obvious problem is that you just assumed what the study was meant to show! You need a control group, like in the most recent study out of Finland (this month). Have you forgotten that Jesse Singal published two LONG articles on his Substack site on Jan 31 2023 and Feb 7 2023 (both open access) thoroughly taking apart this study by Chen et al.? He also identified a number of other significant problems besides the absence of a control group.
And then there is the issue that Chen et al. threw out their data analysis plan (drawn up before the study was done) AFTER they had seen the data, which did not accord with what the researchers had expected. This is a CARDINAL sin (and if you don't know that then you have too little understanding of what methodologically sound research looks like). Basically, the way this study was published in NEJM, this was research fraud. I know this sounds harsh, but it is the truth - the authors were literally lying to the readers about the research they had done. We only know that they did not follow their pre-specified data analysis plan because of Jesse Singal (he has their original analysis plan). The authors themselves did not disclose this in their NEJM article BECAUSE they would not have been able to justify it. They retrofitted their data analysis (that is, changed it after they had seen the data) in order to avoid disclosing that important hypotheses the study was meant to test were not supported by the data. Like so much else in this area, the fact that NEJM published this article is a scandal. But have you ever seen any articles in NEJM that cast a critical eye on transgender medicine research? There aren't any because NEJM has been an unabashed cheerleader for gender-affirming care.
I don't know whether you realize that the Chen et al. research team is the same research team that made headlines in the New York Times with this:
Azeen Ghorayshi: U.S. Study on Puberty Blockers Goes Unpublished Because of Politics, Doctor Says. New York Times, Oct 23, 2024
The lead author of this puberty blocker study was Johanna Olson-Kennedy. But it is the same research team as the Chen et al. study that you call high-quality research. Here's what Jesse Singal wrote about them in Sept 2024:
"What have the recipients of this [taxpayer] money [about US $ 15 million] produced so far? The money has gone to a sizable number of studies, for sure, but nine years after the grant was awarded this team has BARELY ADVANCED our knowledge of the psychosocial effects of puberty blockers and hormones at all." (capitalization added)
Jesse Singal: Yale’s “Integrity Project” Is Spreading Misinformation About The Cass Review And Youth Gender Medicine: Part 2 (Corrected). Sept 1, 2024
Benjamin Ryan, in a Substack article from June 6, 2025, entitled "Long-Awaited Puberty Blockers Study Is Out In Pre-Print, Finding No Change In Kids' Mental Health," wrote:
"Dr. Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues therefore took four years to analyze and finally publish their data."
Think about that: it took Olson-Kennedy and her team 4 (!!!) years [counted from the end of data collection] to publish their data in manuscript form (it still has not been published in a scientific journal). Of course, we know that it took so long because they delayed publication because, like with the research that the NEJM published with Diane Chen as lead author, the researchers didn't like their own results because they did not support gender-affirming care. I'm sure that, ideally, they would have preferred to not publish the data at all. We have seen this before: the UK puberty blocker study with lead author Polly Carmichael, which found that the average effect of puberty blockers on mental health was zero (as far as one can tell this from a study without a control group) was published in February 2021 (in PLOS Medicine, I believe), at least 4-5 years after data collection ended – ONLY BECAUSE Oxford University sociologist Michael Biggs was creating a commotion about the data going unpublished. It seems that, metaphorically speaking, he cornered the researchers saying you publish the data or you have to release them and then I will analyze them for publication. The data were collected with taxpayer money (and hence the researchers are accountable to taxpayers and can't just make the data discreetly disappear).
Bottom line: calling Chen et al. high-quality research is 100% false.
100% true: Lisa, I like you, a lot.
This is why I wish I could write more for others. This is just a function of not copy editing. I’ve already written about how bad this paper is. It’s just hard to copy editing yourself.
Fixed!
It’s true, I should have said long-term, not high. Only because it’s prospective. I’ll have to change later because substack hard to change on phone!
Is 2 years considered "long-term?" Especially in a drug regimen that's supposed to last a life-time, starting in teenagers - so a good 50+ years.
I would think "long-term" would have to be a minimum of 5 years, and ideally at least 10 years to really show if these medications are helping versus hurting the people using them. (But maybe I am unaware of a scientific standard that deems anything longer than a year "long-term.")
Actually, I believe it is considered long-term by the field. It's pretty rare to have super long follow-up in this country because we don't have a national registry. Is it long-term to us? No, not when you consider that some people believe it takes up to a decade to regret or realize you've been harmed!
2 years is not long term. If I remember this correctly both the puberty blocker and the cross-sex hormone study funded by the National Institutes of Health were supposed to run for 4 years. The NEJM study by Chen et al. from January 2023 reported 2-year interim results. Likewise the still unpublished puberty blocker study with Johanna Olson-Kennedy as the lead author (but available as a manuscript since June 2025). On a normal timeline we should already have or soon have an article from Chen et al. with data for 4 years (on cross-sex hormones). But, frankly, we cannot expect people like Chen, Olson-Kennedy, Diane Ehrensaft, etc., to be straight shooters - they will mess with the data (making unacknowledged and unexplained changes in the data analysis and not reporting certain unfavorable data) and delay publication and then lie about their research findings. They already have done all these things!!! They are true believers who also have invested professionally so much in gender-affirming care. They will try to move heaven and earth before admitting that gender-affirming care does not work for most minors, never mind that these minors really want to have this treatment. (They are kids! If you let them, kids do a lot of stuff that isn't good fo them.)
Data collection for the full 4-year period of the puberty blocker study with lead author Olson-Kennedy should have finished in about June 2023. My recollection from reading Jesse Singal's articles about the Chen et al. study is that once data collection is finished the researchers who collected the data have 4 or 5 years exclusive access/control over the data. After that period data access cannot be denied to researchers not involved in the study because the data were collected with taxpayer money and hence are not private property of Chen, Olson-Kennedy et al. So Olson-Kennedy and collaborators have now had 4 years of data for the puberty blocker study for almost 3 years. Normally, a large research team (consisting of about 9 researchers) should be able to submit a manuscript to a scientific journal within 1 year of the end of data collection. After all, before they started the study they drew up an analysis plan with their hypotheses and a detailed plan for how they will analyze the data. There is no good reason for why it took Olson-Kennedy et al. 4 years to submit a manuscript with the 2-year interim results. Did it really take the authors about as much time to analyze the data and write up the data analysis (4 years) as it took them to collect two years of data for each study subject (study subjects have different enrollment/start dates)? The same applies to the results for the whole 4 year period. They are delaying publication because the results presumably are not favorable to gender-affirming care and because their contract with the study's funding agency (the National Institutes of Health) allows them to do this.
The puberty blocker trial that was planned in the UK also has a terrible trial design (and is now embroiled in controversy and is being challenged in court). It plans to compare two groups of gender dysphoric minors both getting puberty blockers, but one group at time X and the control group at time X + 1 year. Such a design can tell us nothing about the long-term effects of puberty blockers because it would compare minors who are in the first year of having their puberty blocked with minors who want to go on blockers but have to wait for 1 year. This is a truly ridiculous trial design. You sterilize minors and severely degrade their future sexual functioning while learning nothing about the long-term effects of puberty blockers. (From past research we know that puberty blockers have permanent effects because almost everyone who goes on blockers later goes on cross-sex hormones. So blockers are not a neutral temporary pause button, giving minors time to think about their true gender identity.) Opponents of this trial say that what needs to be done first is a study that follows up on the minors who had their puberty blocked at the GIDS clinic in London 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 years ago. I agree.
Exactly right. This "experiment" is like an experiment of cutting off people's healthy body parts to see if that's "good" for them. We already know it's not "good," and are just pretending this could possibly be good somehow!! Then the results are manipulated to make it look like these people are happy by asking questions they are likely to answer in the affirmative - especially if they subscribe to the "sunk costs" fallacy (and this usually a subconsciously held belief). It's "Tooth Fairy" science, but so much worse because at least belief in a Tooth Fairy doesn't cause any harm!
We can and should follow up on all of the victims of this experiment who are already out there, but should not be continuing the harms.
"Trans" is as "real" as Santa Claus, but not more real....
Is 2 years considered "long-term?" Especially in a drug regimen that's supposed to last a life-time, starting in teenagers - so a good 50+ years.
I would think "long-term" would have to be a minimum of 5 years, and ideally at least 10 years to really show if these medications are helping versus hurting the people using them. (But maybe I am unaware of a scientific standard that deems anything longer than a year "long-term.")
I answered above, too. The short is: kind of, in the field. Not really, to us.
Well that's a good point, too. But compared to the others, yes. Now I feel I should modify again!
Yves, WHY do you still use the phrase, "gender affirming"? Isn't that an oxymoron? Isn't "gender denying", or "gender negating", or "gender reversing", or "gender undoing", or "gender divisive", or "gender profiting", or "gender exploiting", or "gender confusion" EVEN MORE accurate? WHAT "gender" is being "affirmed", in so-called "gender affirming" "care"? I bet you can't even get the numbers correct in "Covid1984", can you?.... RSVP?....
BTW, except for that, your comment was EXCELLENT, and much appreciated!
Great title. As soon as I read it, I heard the theme music to Democracy Now! blaring in my head. Ugh. Almost all the people on the far left who are over 60 embraced trans like it was the second coming of Karl Marx. Do they just love having a cause to get righteous and all "dissenting" about? What is wrong with these people? How can they forget about women's rights? I really cannot understand it.
The left has a mixed record on women's rights. Shirley Chisholm said she found it harder to advance in left politics as a woman than a Black person. Stokey Charmichael said, "A woman's position in the moment is prone." And Joe Biden threw Anita Hill under the bus.
Too bad, Amy Goodman has always been a supporter of transgender propaganda. She tends to support what's trendy on the left and is part of a little click including her brother David and people like Marc Stern and Noam Chomsky. I agree with most of their politics concerning economics and imperialism....but. I met her once while she interacted with a crowd and she revealed herself to be elitist and opportunistic more concerned with popularity than integrity. Ditto for Brooke Gladstone.. Marc Stern once had Gail Dines on his radio show to discuss pornography and he was so defensive, protective of pornography. Grrrr
“Not NO Debate Policy:
Dissenters are encouraged for the specific list of topics* that follows; all other dissension remains taboo.
*List subject to change without prior public consultation or notice. Dissension is not allowed around this process or its outputs.”
Turban? Well, wow. That's incompetent and irresponsible.
I stopped watching Democracy Now over this. I’d been a fan for 15 years and then….i realized oh no, they’re retarded. How does everyone not see this for what it is?
Let them know that!
Thank you Lisa. I appreciate it, and I’d be grateful if you read this overly long comment. That’s a good idea about writing DN. I was disillusioned.
I’m tired of explaining that I love all three of my “trans” nieces, all Irish teenage girls and what I’m objecting to is the Orwellian propaganda that implies people have always changed their gender or had no gender at all and are finally coming out of the closet after….centuries? Millennia? It’s bananas.
Same on Substack. I’ll be reading Freddie deBoer or Cartoons hate her or many other big accounts and they’ll randomly reference “throwing trans people under the bus” or something and it’s like 😩 oh lord.
It’s incredible the number of 100k + accounts that just credulously infer that “trans” people are being oppressed and it’s gone on too long and they shall overcome and….like I k ow Amy Goodman and Kamala Harris must know there were no trans kids in their high schools…but no. They think they were closeted due to transphobia.
La leche league endorsing men injecting serum into their chests and suckling infants at their nipples is….to me, obvious proof of mass psychosis.
I firmly believe that this mass phenomenon is a direct result of the cognitive dissonance experienced by liberal, progressive and feminist people who for years, described efforts to curtail the mass trauma and psychological sexual abuse of western civilizations kids by internet pornographers as a moral panic.
How could it be ubiquitously dismissed as no big deal until the dam broke in 2020 and against their will were forced to admit all was not well at Pornhub and other such entities.
Even Kristoffs NYT “expose” was shot through with his attitude of “ I found it hard to believe that good ol Pornhub had videos of non-consensual abuse, but after much investigation it turns out they weren’t the movie enterprise we all thought they were”.
I paraphrase but like- say it ain’t so Pornhub. 🙄
A decade of profound cognitive dissonance on this issue literally made everyone insane. Allowing this madness to sweep through the adult population via media, including medicine, schools, academia and social services- all the same institutions that had nothing to say at all about the harrowing sudden mass exposure to modern internet pornography that we all just went through.
I’m 100% sure of this in my heart.
This is in reponse the guy Mark who was suspended and claimed you are not a journalist, Lisa.
Lisa. I'm not sure if there was more to the story of this guy getting suspended. I am sure it's tricky and you have a desire not to allow haters to invade this space. But if it's dissension you are trying to make space for, perhaps it is better to allow him to stay. Let your readers come to your defense.
I can understand why someone would claim that what Lisa does is not "journalism." Though unbiased, objective journalism is really impossible. At a minimum, journalism is biased by what is omitted, what story is not told. Lisa is countering the bias by omission (and worse- reporting false information and conclusions) but sharing the story that is not told in mainstream media. She digs deeper, investigating and searching for the closest thing to truth that we can find. And Lisa is pretty open - many of her readers feel that she is to a fault. Journalism has morphed over time and it is rare to find "the straight factual news." Lisa has provided journalism and so much more to her readers. Lisa provides editorial writing on Substack (a form of journalism) that has given her readers a much-needed haven from the disorienting, cult (with regards to pushing gender ideology as the normal we must accept) of mainstream media and (left) culture. In addition to providing legislative updates, summaries of current events, she voices, not just her own opinion, but the collective feelings of most of her readers who have been exiled from political and social circles because they are not acceptable.
There is a time and place for everything. There are different types of journalism, Lisa is capable of and produces different types, depending on what the occasion calls for. And then she also shares her personal experience, bares her soul, allows us to be seen in doing so and for that, so many of us are so grateful.
If a journalist also has a blog where they write poetry or fiction, nobody is going to say "Aha! You are not a journalist!" You can do more than one thing.
Lisa, have you thought of inviting Goodman to a discussion? It might be productive.
I’ve spent so much time reaching out to the people who consider themselves non-radicals, like Brian Lehrer. I don’t think she’s worth the effort.
Could this information from Yves combined with Lisa's be sent to Nih, Oz, Bhattacharya and Kennedy?
Lisa. I'm not sure if there was more to the story of this guy getting suspended. I am sure it's tricky and you have a desire not to allow haters to invade this space. But if it's dissension you are trying to make space for, perhaps it is better to allow him to stay. Let your readers come to your defense.
I can understand why someone would claim that what Lisa does is not "journalism." Though unbiased, objective journalism is really impossible. At a minimum, journalism is biased by what is omitted, what story is not told. Lisa is countering the bias by omission (and worse- reporting false information and conclusions) but sharing the story that is not told in mainstream media. She digs deeper, investigating and searching for the closest thing to truth that we can find. And Lisa is pretty open - many of her readers feel that she is to a fault. Journalism has morphed over time and it is rare to find "the straight factual news." Lisa has provided journalism and so much more to her readers. Lisa provides editorial writing on Substack (a form of journalism) that has given her readers a much-needed haven from the disorienting, cult (with regards to pushing gender ideology as the normal we must accept) of mainstream media and (left) culture. In addition to providing legislative updates, summaries of current events, she voices, not just her own opinion, but the collective feelings of most of her readers who have been exiled from political and social circles because they are not acceptable.
There is a time and place for everything. There are different types of journalism, Lisa is capable of and produces different types, depending on what the occasion calls for. And then she also shares her personal experience, bares her soul, allows us to be seen in doing so and for that, so many of us are so grateful.
Ughhhhh sorry
Wow, I wanna see the comment that was deleted! And that "Mark M Breza" just sounds like an annoying jerk, not really "delete-worthy". But as Author, I will of course defer to your judgement here, Lisa! I really liked your response to the long comment from Yves, above! KEEP UP the GOOD WORK!....