Your Receipts #1
Your articles, pitched panels, letters to the editor, etc, that have been canceled or ignored.
#ReceiptsWeek continues!
Please keep sending them. I encourage others to do their own #ReceiptsWeek, too.
To the editors of The New Yorker:
This letter is for the editorial and writing staff with no expectation of publication.
I read Sam Wolson’s piece “A Mother and her Trans Teen Decide to Leave the U.S” in my TNY Daily email yesterday. It is a tragic, heartbreaking story, beautifully rendered by Wolson. It sounds like this teenager does not want to leave home but mom believes it is in the teen’s best interest. She has “done her research,” thought long and hard about this decision. This parent has only ever done what she believes is the right thing to do (as I believe we all do) and has based her decisions on what her cultural and social surround have told her is right and good. I don’t blame this parent. But, like all of us parents, she will someday have to reckon with the decisions she has made.
This story is a compound tragedy. Today I am calling out the journalists and cultural messengers who continue to promulgate the unfalsifiable, unexamined belief that a gender non-conforming child should be medicalized.
According to Wolson’s story, this child “came out” as trans at 11 years old and had a double mastectomy at 13 years old and is taking non-endogenous hormones. Is the only story to be explored here about how the truly horrendous behavior of President Trump and his Project 2025 administration is affecting people?
I am a life-long liberal and duly horrified that our country elected an imbecile who is doing irreparable harm to so many and so much. The 2024 election results are complex to be sure, but I believe the reason Trump was able to garner just enough votes to put him over the edge (and cause enough liberals to abstain from voting) is because of the widespread unexamined belief that medicalizing gender non-conformity in children is a legitimate and appropriate practice. Though the administration’s rhetoric is terrible, on this issue the underlying concern is accurate. Many of us liberals have been trying to get people to look more critically at this issue since long before the 2024 election. Because reporters and cultural voices like The New Yorker would not, we now have a second Trump administration and a subservient, idiotic Republican Party in power.
If journalists and thoughtful writers explore and examine this belief, they will find that it is just that: a belief. There is no evidence anywhere that a human (or any living thing) is “born in the wrong body.”
If an adult, once fully sexually matured, decides that surgically and chemically altering their body helps them live more adaptively, that is for an adult to decide. No adults should be making decisions that lead to young people to permanently chemically and surgically alter their healthy bodies before they are sexually mature and equipped to make decisions for themselves about how to live. Puberty and adolescence is a transformative period in human development. It is awkward and strange and sometimes painful – but it is normal.
“Tina and JJ” are in trouble because Tina currently believes in a false god. Please stop valorizing their situation. Protect them by NOT publishing such stories.
Protect them and our democracy by practicing journalism and actually investigating this belief system. Some on your staff may have medicalized children as well so taking the courageous step to investigate this phenomenon will be painful for all. But real journalism is about exploring and understanding, not reifying or foreclosing the status quo. As a clinical psychologist, it was painful for me to realize I had been believing and spreading ideas that are harmful but I have come through that pain; you can too.
If none of your staff has the courage to do this reporting, ask Lisa Selin Davis or Jesse Singal to write the piece for The New Yorker.
Thank you for reading my letter.
Sincerely,
A letter to the Yale Alum magazine that needless to say did not get printed:
As a clinical psychologist with over 35 years of working with adolescents and young adults, I eagerly yet also skeptically read Dr. Iarovici’s “Stressed: What’s Causing the Mental Health Crisis Among College Students?”
While I value her experience with this age group and embrace many of her ideas, my initial skepticism was validated by two facets of the piece — first, the assertion that “experiences of identity concealment or family rejection, and internalized LGBTQ+-phobia significantly affect psychological health in college,” and second, the mention of The Trevor Project as a beneficial LGBTQ resource.
Over the last decade, increasing numbers of college students have arrived on campus with transgender identities. The narrative is that these identities are inherent and immutable, and that parents who have not “affirmed” their children’s often sudden, post pubertal opposite or neither sex selves have “rejected” them and are bigoted and causing them harm.
The Trevor Project promotes the manipulatively false narrative that youth who are not affirmed in a transgender identity and who are prevented from medicalizing their inner gender identities are at high risk for completed suicide. Even the ACLU lawyer and activist, Chase Strangio, during recent oral arguments heard by the Supreme Court in United States v. Skrmetti, admitted that unaffirmed and unmedicalized trans identified children thankfully do not take their own lives at elevated rates. In fact, it is becoming more apparent that suicidal ideation and completed suicide increase after medical transition. But yet the narrative persists, and questioning, worried parents are vilified, new identities are medicalized, and underlying issues such as actual internalized homophobia (“trans the gay away”), sexual abuse, autism, eating disorders … go unexplored.
With the acceptance of gender ideology that permeates the article, seen in the mentions of “gender-fluidity” and college-aged people “of all genders,” the author misses an important source of some of their mental anguish— the “mass sociogenic illness” of trans identity (just like the infinitely more benign contagion of tic “disorders” the author cites). Vulnerable, identity-seeking youth, and also well-meaning “allies” determined not to repeat the horrors of homophobia, are not aware of the harmful repercussions of gender ideology, family estrangement, and hormonal and surgical interventions.
Lisa (Melnick) Duval ‘88
Charlottesville, VA
In 2022, I co-submitted a proposal for the Toronto conference: one with Lisa Littman and Riittakerttu Kaltiala. I wasn’t involved, but another proposal featured Ken Zucker, Lisa Littman, Riittakerttu Kaltiala, and Patrick Hunter, which included perspectives from detransitioners. These panels would have been an invaluable resource for the AACAP membership, offering a critical look at international developments and the profound ethical issues surrounding care. Despite the caliber of the experts involved, both submissions were rejected.
The following year, I was determined to present a panel that was undeniable in its merit and could only be rejected out of ideological intolerance. I reached out early in the process to Aron Janssen, co-chair of the AACAP Gender Committee, to join me on an international panel. He declined and declined to offer suggestions for other committee members or any form of assistance. This lack of collaboration was uniquely unprofessional and continues at AACAP.
I submitted a proposal featuring a world-class panel, including Riittakerttu Kaltiala (Finland), Michael Biggs (UK), and Mikael Landén (Sweden). Dr. Landén intended to share data from Sweden’s then-unpublished systematic review of the evidence, while Dr. Kaltiala would have presented her research from Finland, and Michael Biggs would have presented his suicide research in the UK. We even secured the past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics as our discussant. Simultaneously, we submitted a second, clinically focused panel featuring Dr. Landén, Dr. Kaltiala, and an affirmative clinician from the UK to discuss ongoing case reviews. Incredibly, both of these high-level panels were rejected. These stories are important for understanding the current landscape of professional discourse within medicine on these issues.
Aron Jansson, AACAP’s “lead on transgender issues” on the conference program committee, testified under oath to the Florida medical board that he “can’t speak on” European developments in youth gender medicine. Jansen’s claim of “not being able to speak on international developments” is after AACAP’s rejection of the conference submission with Kaltiala, the head of Finland’s gender service. Also note that the AACAP bestowed its “highest honor” on Gavin Newsom in October 2023. Yeah, that’s what it is like within that bubble at AACAP, but that’s not to say the membership is all on board. When allowed to speak freely, there is plenty of opposition to the madness; it is just that the gatekeepers and leadership control the organization.
Kristopher Kaliebe
My letter to the ideologically captured Chicago Tribune, in the captured state of Illinois, unpublished:
“The Tribune has failed to report on two major stories concerning “gender-affirming care” for minors. In late January, a NY jury awarded $2 million to Fox Varian in the first major gender medicine malpractice decision, finding her psychologist and surgeon negligent in approving a double mastectomy when she was 16. On Feb 3, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons issued a position paper citing the poor evidence of benefit and emerging risk of harm involved not only in mastectomies and genital surgeries, but also in puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and recommending delaying surgery before age 19.
The largest newspaper in Illinois owes it to its readership to report on these stories. Under the claim of “consensus” sits activism rather than science. Poorly-designed and conducted studies are misleading. We lack quality long-term studies on “gender-affirming” treatments because this large cohort of “transitioners” is so recent. Lawsuits by detransitioners provide a peek at this affected population, and people need to see it, recognizing that the vast majority of patients suffering similarly will never get their day in court. The fact that a professional medical organization is now basing its recommendations on the lack of evidence of benefit and actual evidence of harm is an important story, as is the fact that the American Medical Association is also now advising caution relative to gender medicine for minors.
Anyone who has gone through puberty themselves or is watching adolescents pass through this phase of life knows that it is painful, confusing, often lonely and distressing - having your body change awkwardly while trying to figure out your identity distinct from your parents. Most of these gender distressed teens have confounding issues: autism, internalized homophobia, trauma from sexual abuse or porn exposure, anxiety and depression. They are told their REAL problem is being “born in the wrong body.” These kids are legitimately distressed, and adults want to help them. Adults know that their children’s futures are at stake, but that it is not possible to change sex, however strong the desire to do so.
The Tribune owes it to its readership to validate through honest reporting, not deny, what most adults instinctively know: adolescents are living through a turbulent time of their lives in a turbulent society, and whatever teens vehemently believe today should not lock them into a lifetime of sterility, medical dependency and compromised physical health.”
Send more, or leave your receipts in the comments. Another post coming tomorrow.
Wow, what a compendium!
Thanks for linking to my receipts, Lisa. I forgot to do it at Cogitemus. Will do today and link to yours.