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.
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.
"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 discretly 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.
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.
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.
Aaron Maté couldn’t have said it better — and he worked there.
Yep.
“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.
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 discretly 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!
Ughhhhh sorry