On "Trans Kids" and related topics..

[Joe Hillshoist]

In Iain Banks' scifi books about The Culture humans can genetically change their biological sex, we develop the technology and it becomes culturally acceptable to live at least some of your life as the opposite sex you were born. Alot of this trans stuff is just the beginning of that.

I feel less certain that Banks would have come to the conclusion you have above. There are no Humans in the culture novels, the word is used interchangeably with sentient consciousness. His view was always evolving and politically he was very realistic. In my view, he used The Culture for allegory, rather than as a discussion of the potential of human technology. I would have thought he made this very clear from early on - his short story State of The Art.

So what?

He specifically describes biological humans (well the descendants of biological humans,) with a much greater control of their own genetic processes than modern biological humans, living as their original biological selves for a while, then changing sex and living that way for a while, and usually having two children, one as a man and one as a woman. Its simply an expression of the ability of humans to use technology to expand or go beyond their our (oops) limitations.

Most of human technological development has simply been an attempt to get beyond our limitations. This isn't really any different.

[Harvey]

In Iain Banks' scifi books about The Culture humans can genetically change their biological sex, we develop the technology and it becomes culturally acceptable to live at least some of your life as the opposite sex you were born. Alot of this trans stuff is just the beginning of that.

I feel less certain that Banks would have come to the conclusion you have above. There are no Humans in the culture novels, the word is used interchangeably with sentient consciousness. His view was always evolving and politically he was very realistic. In my view, he used The Culture for allegory, rather than as a discussion of the potential of human technology. I would have thought he made this very clear from early on - his short story State of The Art.

He specifically describes biological humans (well the descendants of biological humans,)

No, he doesn't. In fact, exactly the opposite.

But as you say, if you want your interpretation of Iain Banks to give some kind of imprimatur to your idea then you're perfectly free to do so. By your idea I mean, of course, that the science we have is completely impartial and operates through pure reason and that anything which can be technically achieved to some degree, will be done and should be done. I don't think it is any of those things though it has the potential to be so at some distant place in the future. The history of technology in particular is littered with ideological battles and the best man hardly ever won. On that note, the history of science owes a lot to more to women than it cares to admit, perhaps why there has been such an effort, historically, to deny them their place within it.

Finally, it's my humble view that The Culture is antithetical to your notion that humans could create such technology, for the very fact that they don't in the novels. The humanoid aliens in The Culture novels are not our ancestors and the technology they wield in the stories was not made by them. I would have thought Banks actually meant something by bothering to make this the background of his Culture stories.

Despite* all evidence to the contrary from the last two years, neither science nor medicine are completely neutral and are demonstrably captive, slaves to the will of the powerful and the ideologies shaped by those powerful people. For that reason alone, I would have thought that it was utterly inadvisable to go about attempting to change fundamental aspects of one's biology in a ham-fisted and irreversible way.

*[Edit: I meant of course because of, not despite.]

[Harvey]

In the interests of practising what I preach, discussion, dialogue and argument, I suppose I'd better give my own sense of what we're discussing, however unscientific, personal and prey to my own bias and prejudice.

I'm a bisexual man, one of my brothers is gay, my daughter is bi-sexual and one of my family is currently in the early stages of transition. Several friends and one or two fairly close friends are gay. I say this not to claim any kind of vicarious authority but simply to point out that I'm no stranger to the issues involved.

One of the insights which has shaped my understanding of the phenomenon we're supposed to be discussing here came to me relatively recently. Throughout my life I've suffered from sometimes bleak and debilitating troughs of depression, alternating with almost euphoric heights of clarity and self awareness and sometimes, more latterly, both in the same moment. It has occurred to me more and more in recent decades that I move quite naturally through periods in which I am definitely more feminine and others in which I am definitely more masculine, almost a steady oscillation between states, which has accompanied the depression and might even be a fundamental cause. I have wondered if this could be one facet of so called bi-polar disorder, the frightening emergence into an alien state of mind within oneself, of unfamiliar longings and foreign emotions, extreme sensitivity to the feelings of others and a heightened empathy for the alien, amidst a confusion of thoughts often accompanied by self loathing for other earlier states of self - without perhaps realising the qualities of each state and of their necessity for my being who I am.

In recent years I have journeyed much further from my self than ever before, putting on other states of being as easily others change clothes, sometimes for extended periods. Being without self almost completely at times and marvelling at the new found ability to appreciate other cultures and ways of being which were once a complete and unfathomable mystery, more likely to elicit fear or loathing than insight or understanding.

Perhaps these experiences are perfectly natural for certain social roles, which, we are told by technological society, we have little use for today. Even as we need the skills and tools available from them, now more than ever. The shaman for example or the witch. Today such people are more likely to be found at a drawing board in an advertising agency, crushing their soul into the required shape, chipping off all the rough edges until it can do only one thing or another. A perfect cog, perfectly meshed with the rest of the machine. No unsightly views, creating no waves, allowing no deviant or surplus insight, locked up inside, nothing more functional than intellectual property.

I'm suggesting that a necessary part of the journey of some people may be in the process of becoming frozen and dammed like a river, as a brute resource. The understanding available ought not to be politicised, nor rigidly fixed, or allowed to be interfered with by the power relations of the secret societies many of you have been documenting here for a long time. As our bodies are being colonised, it makes perfect sense to codify and regiment gender and put it to use as a workhorse of division, rather than exist as a fluid bridge between different and necessary states of being.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Apart from the confession I didn't know the culture were aliens, just assumed they were humans (I've only read the first book and one or two others)
I scrapped my other post.

That's a good post Harvs.

Sounds like you've followed the path of occult journeying into ... well whatever it is. haha. Good one.

[Harvey]

Apart from the confession I didn't know the culture were aliens, just assumed they were humans (I've only read the first book and one or two others)
I scrapped my other post.

That's a good post Harvs.

Sounds like you've followed the path of occult journeying into ... well whatever it is. haha. Good one.

Thanks for understanding, Joe. Some of what probably seems cold and unsympathetic or unnecessarily confrontational in my conversations with you and others here may in part arise from my frustration at my inability to express what little I know, lacking as I do the academic language/terms and the methodology, to express it in a way which is translatable or useful.

[Joe Hillshoist]

[MacCruiskeen]

Absolutely nothing in this thread justifies the accusation of "bigotry", and the "he-men" jibe is just grotesque.

Here's an interview with Mary Harrington, worth an hour of anyone's time:

https://symbioticculture.co.uk/index.ph ... arrington/

[Grizzly]

^^^
agreed. i don't see any of that, either. But often the "mods" ultimately see something different at every place I go on the interwebs.
Brave and honest Harvey. I respect that.

[Belligerent Savant]

.

Well-written given the target demo and network -

[Belligerent Savant]

@ComradeDoom1
·
Don't look away, this is what the LBGTQ+ agenda has become: a medical experiment being pushed on vulnerable youth.

much thanks to @CutDownTree for having the courage to write this.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/rest ... r-ideology

https://twitter.com/ComradeDoom1/status ... bmGGZ_2M7g

[MacCruiskeen]

Michelle Alise@Michellebudd

According to healthline, men with HPV are men but women with HPV are vulva owners, same source same date.


https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E4g-P3WWUAE ... name=small


https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E4g-P3YWQAE ... name=small

11:00 pm. · 22 June 2021

https://twitter.com/Michellebudd/status ... 3803352064

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb 24, 2020--

Healthline.com, the flagship site of Healthline Media, has passed WebMD.com as the number one ranked health information site in the U.S. with 72.9 million unique monthly visitors as measured by Comscore in January.

https://apnews.com/press-release/busine ... 56e975ba04

[Belligerent Savant]

.

Noteworthy commentary, applicable across topics given the influence of PR, particularly with respect to Pharma Industry objectives.

Placing it here as added consideration.

Disclaimer: The insertion of this here is not a default endorsement of all points/comments raised in the piece.

Trans messaging is too sophisticated to be the work of a small sexual minority dealing with severe health issues

It appears to me that someone else is driving these messaging campaigns and the question is who?

I. Introduction

It brings me no joy to write this article. But I have a unique vantage point on a fiercely contested social issue and feel compelled to share what I know.

Before I go any further let me state unequivocally that I support LGBT equality. Everyone deserves respect, love, and kindness. Any bigotry in the comments will get deleted and possibly banned. In this article and the discussion that follows I aim to model the sort of adult conversation about a difficult topic that is rarely seen anymore. Please join me in elevating the discourse.

Here are my bona fides in connection with this issue:

I spent 10 years fighting for LGBT equality as the communications director for the moderator of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). I edited hundreds of speeches, sermons, and articles as well as the book Jesus, the Bible, and Homosexuality that became a Christian bestseller. When we began in 2000, marriage equality was polling below 20%. Over the course of a decade we changed so many hearts and minds that the denomination revised its Constitution to allow LGBT ordination and marriage. Thanks to our work, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) approved LGBT equality before the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed marriage equality and thus created political cover for the Supreme Court to do the right thing.

After the campaign was over I got a master of public policy degree (2010-2012) at UC Berkeley and went to Cambodia in 2012 where I taught Gender Studies in a private university in Phnom Penh. I taught the Genderbread Person v1 and I even taught sections of Judith Butler’s classic work, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, to Cambodian teens and young adults in my classes. It was fascinating and wonderful.



Suffice it to say, I have read, written, and thought a LOT about gender. I think gender studies is a helpful tool for understanding power and relationships and examining how societies are organized.

By 2012-2013 we had won across the board. Equal rights to marriage, employment, housing, and hospital visitation rights were becoming the law of the land in the U.S. and throughout the world. We had achieved bipartisan consensus even on the fiercely divided U.S. Supreme Court. We had science, logic, and reason on our side. It was settled law and settled science.

And then, somewhere around 2015, the movement went completely off the rails.

II. The very strange switch in messaging

For a century, progressives had fought to show that biological sex and gender were two different things. The argument was that sex is biological, given (and yes there was acknowledgement of the 0.02% to 1.7% of people who are intersex). Gender was/is seen as a social construct, theater, performative. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique; Susan Faludi, Backlash; Anne Fausto Sterling, Sexing the Body; and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble all made the same point, sex is biological, gender is socially constructed. We won that argument in a rout.

But in the last few years, the argument shifted. Socially constructed gender now superseded biology. Everything was gender now. Biological sex itself was labelled a social construct.

This contradicted a century of progressive scholarship on the topic and threatened to erase extraordinary gains for women (Title IX being one of the clearest examples). This was a 180 degree turn and yet the field of gender studies proceeded as if nothing had changed at all. All of this was very strange to anyone who had studied this topic at length and fought in the trenches in the gender wars.

Prior to 2015, two of the worst sins that one could make in the gender wars were gender essentialism and biological determinism.

“Gender essentialism” is the notion that, “all men are like this (whatever predefined masculine traits the speaker chose)” or “all women are like this (whatever predefined feminine traits one might select).”

“Biological determinism” is the notion that biology is destiny, that sex characteristics define personal expression (they don’t).

What’s striking to me then about the current version of the trans movement is its rigid gender essentialism and biological determinism. A woman is defined, by the trans movement, as lipstick, long hair, boobs, and skirts. Caitlyn Jenner, Rachel Levin, or Laverne Cox don the costume of stereotypical womanhood and boom they are a woman. But that goes against a century of scholarship in the feminist movement that fought to say that these are NOT the traits that define a woman.

Furthermore, if everything is socially determined, why is there an emphasis on hormone injections and radical surgery to force one’s body conform to one’s thoughts? If gender is just performative theater (it is) then there is no need for surgery, just be whoever you want to be and love the body that God gave you. The LGBT movement went from “God does not make mistakes” (acceptance) to God as a drunken factory worker who often mixes up parts (get thee to a surgeon for repair!) in the space of just a few years.

The modern trans movement does not appear to be a natural outgrowth of the feminist or even gay, lesbian, and bisexual acceptance movement. It is my strong belief that something else altogether is going on here.

III. Stabbed in the back by former allies

Now my work focuses on corruption in the pharmaceutical industry. Starting in 1986 and accelerating in 2015, the pharmaceutical industry launched an all out war against humanity. Pharma has spent billions of dollars to pass totalitarian vaccine laws in every state and at the federal level in the United States. Pharma’s dual goal is to wipe out any unvaccinated pockets in the population in order to hide evidence of their crimes and normalize chronic illness which makes them rich. All of the world’s wealth will thus be drained out of individuals and families and directed into the Swiss bank accounts of pharmaceutical industry executives. Through control of the World Health Organization and other international bodies, Pharma (and their enablers) have sought to expand this totalitarian model throughout the developed world.

It has been incredibly painful to see many people in the LGBT community go all in to support Pharma and gaslight mothers of vaccine injured children. Gay elected officials including Brad Hoylman in NY and Scott Weiner in CA have gone full fascist as they require 54+ shots for all children regardless of their religion or medical history. The result is a health catastrophe as chronic illness rates, including neurodevelopmental disabilities, skyrocket across the country. These policies appear to make no discernible difference on the infectious diseases that they purportedly target as many of these shots are not very effective. So the harms always outweigh the imagined benefits.

We are in the midst of a Pharma genocide of children and many people in the LGBT community who should know better are the point of the spear leading the charge. There is no intersectional solidarity nor any hint of self-awareness that they have become the bullies that they used to fight against. I fought for the LGBT community and alongside the LGBT community and now many former allies are stabbing me and the parents of vaccine injured children in the back every single day. This is not okay.

IV. The trans wars

The trans wars are everywhere right now.

Dave Chappelle is arguably the most successful comedian in a generation. In October of last year (2021) Netflix released his third comedy special for the streaming service titled, “The Closer.” The hour-long monolog is centered around Dave’s friendship with a trans comedian who killed herself after being bullied for defending Dave’s work. The special is many things — funny, edgy, offensive at times, an insightful commentary on the intersection of race and gender, vulnerable, raw, personal — but above all it is a heartfelt plea to end trans-on-trans violence.

The release of the comedy special was met by an incredibly sophisticated campaign to “cancel” Dave Chappelle for being “transphobic”. Most people who spoke out against Chappelle either had not seen “The Closer” or did not understand it. It is extremely difficult to get a story on the front page of a mainstream newspaper (it usually requires the help of an expensive PR firm) and yet this story was on the front page of every major newspaper for weeks. The NY Times hit Chappelle multiple times a week — to the point where the story about the supposed backlash was on the front page, business section, and arts section all in one day. A few days after the special first aired, a small protest of about 45 people with handmade signs in front of Netflix headquarters led the evening news across all of the major TV networks. The medical freedom movement can now turn out 20,000 to 50,000 people for a protest and we get zero mainstream news coverage. How do 45 people holding signs at lunchtime in front of the offices of Netflix make the front page and the evening news?

J.K. Rowling is one of the most beloved authors in a generation. Her Harry Potter novels and movies have smashed sales records and led to an entire subculture built around love for these stories. She is a fierce defender of women and the entire LGBT community.

Then things got weird.

As Glamour magazine reports,

On June 6, 2020, Rowling retweeted an op-ed piece that discussed “people who menstruate,” apparently taking issue with the fact that the story did not use the word women. “‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?” she wrote.

A strange kind of fury followed. Rowling was called transphobic, a TERF (“trans-exclusionary radical feminist”), and she started getting very detailed death threats from a handful of people in the trans community. Every time Rowling explained her thoughts and her lifelong commitment to LGBT equality, the attacks on her intensified. Emma Watson who stars in the Harry Potter movies spoke out against J.K. Rowling from the stage at an awards ceremony. J.K. Rowling was not included in an HBO Max documentary about the reunion of the actors from the Harry Potter movies because of her supposed (but not actual) “transphobic” views.

V. What on earth is going on here?

Being trans is difficult. People who are trans are often dealing with a wide range of comorbid mental and physical health issues. Being trans is often experienced as distressing, foreign, more akin to OCD than identity. Depression and suicidality are common. Family and friends often do not understand. Discrimination makes finding and keeping employment more difficult. Many trans people, particularly teens, end up homeless. Most trans people are just trying to make it through the day.

In any movement, messaging is incredibly difficult. It’s difficult to distill the ideas of a large group of people into single words or soundbites that are sticky and easy to share. As I said above, making the front page of the newspaper is incredibly difficult and these days even the most successful movements require very expensive PR firms to help “place” the story. Making the TV news is even more difficult and more expensive.

Yet somehow, the trans movement, right out of the gate, was firing on all cylinders. The weaponized terms “cisgender” and “TERF”; the vast campaign to get people to put pronouns in their bios; the phrase “trans women are women”; the aggressive push into women’s sports; the repeated promotions of the completely incompetent Rachel Levine to ever-higher government posts; the ability to place stories at will in all mainstream media outlets; and the elaborate campaigns to “cancel” any critical discussion of these matters… that’s all extremely labor-intensive and expensive to pull off.

Trans messaging (in the mainstream press and on social media) is far too sophisticated to be the work of a marginalized sexual minority that is dealing with a wide range of health issues (and other challenges) every day.

It appears to me that someone else is driving these messaging campaigns. The question is who? Only a few industries have the resources to pull this off and even fewer have the motive. Cui bono?

To me, the incredible sophistication of the trans movement feels like the work of elite Pharma PR firms. Trans messaging, vaccine messaging, and Democratic Party messaging all have the same look these days — lean, fast, hard-hitting, planned out months or years in advance, focus-group tested, and perfectly executed. The similarities between these campaigns would make sense if they are all using the same PR firms.

But why would Pharma be so intent on promoting trans acceptance?

Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson are financial supporters of the Human Rights Campaign. But beyond that, it does not appear that Pharma coordinates with trans groups at all. The “biggest” trans advocacy groups in the country are all tiny (less than $100k in annual revenue) — there is no way that they have the wherewithal to land a story on the front page of the NY Times, even though that happens on a regular basis. It appears that Pharma is doing this on their own to serve their own interests. Why?

VI. Sexual dysphoria appears to be vaccine injury

The answer, unfortunately, is here:


There are now at least 23 empirical studies that show that people with sexual dysphoria are significantly more likely to be autistic (and vice versa). See literature review here — footnotes 12 through 34.

If autism is the result of injury from toxicants including vaccines (it is), and autistic people are more likely to be trans (they are), then it is also likely that sexual dysphoria is vaccine injury.

If trans is vaccine injury that would explain why the trans population is growing so rapidly. Like autism, there are few trans people in the oldest age groups but in the younger populations, 3% to 5% identify as trans or nonbinary. If trans is vaccine injury, the upper bound of the future size of the trans population is a limit approaching 100%.

(As a side note, one of the common characteristics of autism is mixing up pronouns — and alternative pronouns have become one of the hallmarks of the trans movement.)

If trans is vaccine injury that would explain Pharma’s interest in normalizing all things trans and why Pharma would be willing to spend billions of dollars on it (independent of the trans community itself).

Look, I wish it wasn’t true. The vaccine debate is already complicated enough without bringing in the gender wars too.

Increasing trans prevalence could also be the result of the pesticide atrazine (that turns male tadpoles into females). Or it could be that vaccines are contaminated with pesticide residues (including atrazine). Theresa Deisher argues that using cells lines from aborted male and female fetuses to grow the antigens used in some vaccines could be wrecking havoc on sexual expression as well. The mechanism of action will be sorted out over time (or not, if Pharma blocks any research into the matter).

But for now we have a strong association between trans and autism, that raises the question about the role of vaccines, and we are also witnessing the curious fact that trans messaging has all of the hallmarks of a multibillion dollar Pharma PR campaign.

VII. The left and the right are now completely useless for thinking about gender and biological sex

The left thinks that children, many of whom are autistic and/or have multiple mental health issues, should be able to surgically mutilate their bodies permanently without telling their parents, and that this should be covered by both government and private health insurance. This view stretches from the Biden administration all the way down to local Democratic Party elected officials. Democrats believe that they are the only people who care about these children and that this position is supported by science (it’s not). This view is clearly insane and should be called out as such. This is Orwellian Gender Tyranny brought to you by Pfizer (Merck, GSK, and Sanofi).

Meanwhile the political right makes a mess of this debate too. Matt Walsh’s documentary, What is a Woman (on Dailywire) is brilliant. He exposes the fact that the left is so addled by ideology that they are completely unable to define the word “woman”. But in the end he mucks things up by announcing his strong support for biological determinism. For Walsh, biology is destiny and having a vagina means that women want to have babies, wear dresses, and make sandwiches for men (for real). He thinks this declaration is clever whereas it’s actually just the same tired, self-serving, knuckle-dragging neanderthal nonsense that lost badly in the 100-year gender wars of the last century. In his rush to reaffirm the patriarchy, Walsh completely missed the real story here — the role of one industry, Pharma, in erasing women altogether.

I am proposing a third position, that is neither left nor right but sane and offers us a way forward as a society. To reiterate, gender and sex are two different things. Gender is socially constructed, performative, theater. Sex is biological, given, and refers to chromosomes, hormones, and anatomical features (and yes, somewhere between 0.02% to 1.7% of people are intersex). This is what we spent the last century figuring out and it is backed by mountains of evidence from the social sciences and physical sciences (before they went bonkers at the behest of Pharma).

The real issue here is that the pharmaceutical industry is trying to take over the world. They seek to destroy any independent source of power including families, religion, personal sovereignty, women, men, children, democracy, independent media, science, critical thinking, logic, reason, and love itself. Pharma loves everything about the trans movement that they appear to have created and run. It enables them to cover up vaccine (or other toxic) injury, transition surgery is a big money maker for doctors, and trans people are dependent on Pharma for life for hormone and other treatments. Pharma uses the trans community to make money and normalizes sexual dysphoria to cover up the evidence of Pharma’s crimes.

Pharma’s astroturf support for all things trans also supports the wider goals of the globalists at the WEF. Klaus Schwab said the quiet part out loud at a recent conference when he said that power in the future will come from the combination of the material, biological, physical, and digital worlds.

@liz_churchill_

“At the end…it’s a fusion of Material, Biological, Physical and Digital Worlds…what we see now is a break-through…I think in the end…we will see…a combination of Physical, Biological and Digital…” -Klaus Schwab
#KlausSchwab

The future that Gates, Schwab, Bourla and the predatory globalists want is The Matrix where everyone is chronically ill, plugged into the system, and enslaved by the Pharma billionaires. The Pharma totalitarian worldview is mechanistic and deterministic and so human bodies, organs, and cells are just seen as gears to be arranged in the global machine that they designed to serve them. Through a combination of toxic injections, political capture, and the most sophisticated messaging operation in the history of the world, they are well on their way to accomplishing their goals.

Updates July 19, 2022

For those who object to the statement that “gender is theater” let me offer a more nuanced view. Anne Fausto Sterling’s Sexing the Body is an absolutely brilliant exploration of the roots of desire. And toward the end of the book, after working through mountains of scientific data on the question, she comes up with the Russian nesting dolls metaphor. She argues that desire is the result of the interaction between these six layers of existence — the cell, organism, psyche, person to person relationships, culture, and history. So, biology plays a role, but there are lots of factors (biological, psychological, and social) that interact to shape our desires. I find the Russian nesting dolls metaphor helpful for explaining all sorts of different human tendencies.



Also, in the comments, several people pointed out that Jennifer Bilek has already done extraordinary work on following the money behind the big trans push. She recently posted a Twitter thread that links to several articles that provide receipts on who is funding what:

[links at source]

The Billionaire Family Pushing Synthetic Sex Identities (SSI)

Who Are the Rich, White Men Institutionalizing Transgender Ideology?

The Stryker Corporation and the Arcus Foundation: Billionaires Behind The New ‘LGBT’ Movement

Capturing the American Psychological Association: The Engineering of Human Sexual Evolution

It’s interesting to me that it always comes back to the billionaires. A billion dollars is so much money I think it’s hard for any of us to wrap our heads around how much influence a billion dollars can buy. We live in the age of billionaires and this is really a new phenomenon — lots of people with more concentrated wealth than at any point in history who decide to spend it on remaking the world to fit their ideas of how things should be. And billionaires are crazy so their ideas of utopia always turn into dystopias for everyone else.

https://tobyrogers.substack.com/p/trans ... histicated

[Grizzly]

https://twitter.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1553689999618371584

Puberty-blocking procedures promoted by the Biden/Harris Admin are child abuse. The FDA has just confirmed these hormones/drugs have extremely dangerous side effects, like brain swelling and vision loss.

[Belligerent Savant]

Rachael Wong
CEO of Women's Forum Australia

2d • 2 days ago

This is HUGE.

The US has its first major - incredibly brave - whistleblower from inside a children's gender clinic and the abuses she has seen are horrifying.

"Almost everyone in my life advised me to keep my head down. But I cannot in good conscience do so. Because what is happening to scores of children is far more important than my comfort. And what is happening to them is morally and medically appalling."

EVERYONE should read and share this piece.

These are KIDS.

Please don't look the other way.

https://www.thefp.com/p/i-thought-i-was ... trans-kids

I Thought I Was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle.

There are more than 100 pediatric gender clinics across the U.S. I worked at one. What’s happening to children is morally and medically appalling.

By Jamie Reed

February 9, 2023

I am a 42-year-old St. Louis native, a queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders. My worldview has deeply shaped my career. I have spent my professional life providing counseling to vulnerable populations: children in foster care, sexual minorities, the poor.

For almost four years, I worked at The Washington University School of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases with teens and young adults who were HIV positive. Many of them were trans or otherwise gender nonconforming, and I could relate: Through childhood and adolescence, I did a lot of gender questioning myself. I’m now married to a transman, and together we are raising my two biological children from a previous marriage and three foster children we hope to adopt.

All that led me to a job in 2018 as a case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital, which had been established a year earlier.

The center’s working assumption was that the earlier you treat kids with gender dysphoria, the more anguish you can prevent later on. This premise was shared by the center’s doctors and therapists. Given their expertise, I assumed that abundant evidence backed this consensus.

During the four years I worked at the clinic as a case manager—I was responsible for patient intake and oversight—around a thousand distressed young people came through our doors. The majority of them received hormone prescriptions that can have life-altering consequences—including sterility.

I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there. By the time I departed, I was certain that the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to “do no harm.” Instead, we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care.

Today I am speaking out. I am doing so knowing how toxic the public conversation is around this highly contentious issue—and the ways that my testimony might be misused. I am doing so knowing that I am putting myself at serious personal and professional risk.

Almost everyone in my life advised me to keep my head down. But I cannot in good conscience do so. Because what is happening to scores of children is far more important than my comfort. And what is happening to them is morally and medically appalling.



Reed in her office. (Theo R. Welling).

The Floodgates Open

Soon after my arrival at the Transgender Center, I was struck by the lack of formal protocols for treatment. The center’s physician co-directors were essentially the sole authority.

At first, the patient population was tipped toward what used to be the “traditional” instance of a child with gender dysphoria: a boy, often quite young, who wanted to present as—who wanted to be—a girl.

Until 2015 or so, a very small number of these boys comprised the population of pediatric gender dysphoria cases. Then, across the Western world, there began to be a dramatic increase in a new population: Teenage girls, many with no previous history of gender distress, suddenly declared they were transgender and demanded immediate treatment with testosterone.

I certainly saw this at the center. One of my jobs was to do intake for new patients and their families. When I started there were probably 10 such calls a month. When I left there were 50, and about 70 percent of the new patients were girls. Sometimes clusters of girls arrived from the same high school.

This concerned me, but didn’t feel I was in the position to sound some kind of alarm back then. There was a team of about eight of us, and only one other person brought up the kinds of questions I had. Anyone who raised doubts ran the risk of being called a transphobe.

The girls who came to us had many comorbidities: depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, obesity. Many were diagnosed with autism, or had autism-like symptoms. A report last year on a British pediatric transgender center found that about one-third of the patients referred there were on the autism spectrum.

Frequently, our patients declared they had disorders that no one believed they had. We had patients who said they had Tourette syndrome (but they didn’t); that they had tic disorders (but they didn’t); that they had multiple personalities (but they didn’t).

The doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion. They even acknowledged that suicide has an element of social contagion. But when I said the clusters of girls streaming into our service looked as if their gender issues might be a manifestation of social contagion, the doctors said gender identity reflected something innate.

To begin transitioning, the girls needed a letter of support from a therapist—usually one we recommended—who they had to see only once or twice for the green light. To make it more efficient for the therapists, we offered them a template for how to write a letter in support of transition. The next stop was a single visit to the endocrinologist for a testosterone prescription.

That’s all it took.

When a female takes testosterone, the profound and permanent effects of the hormone can be seen in a matter of months. Voices drop, beards sprout, body fat is redistributed. Sexual interest explodes, aggression increases, and mood can be unpredictable. Our patients were told about some side effects, including sterility. But after working at the center, I came to believe that teenagers are simply not capable of fully grasping what it means to make the decision to become infertile while still a minor.

Side Effects

...

Continued at link.
https://www.thefp.com/p/i-thought-i-was ... trans-kids

[Belligerent Savant]

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For anyone that remains delusional enough to suggest, even now, that scrutiny of hormone treatments/bodily alteration surgery on TEENS is a form of "bigotry": what of Jamie Reed, then? Is she a bigot?

It's remains perplexing to me, the extent some seem to take pains to remain blind. Unfortunately, we are in a period of time when the willfully blind greatly assist in perpetuating egregious affronts to basic human rights. And that's a big problem, because current agendas are far from passive; they are OVERT -- and they have largely succeeded in turning us against each other. Worse: they've convinced a significant percentage to clamor for policies/concepts that are clearly counter to both individual AND collective interests.

With each passing month I am less sympathetic to those that refuse to reconsider their positions and/or reorient (especially as the ground beneath their feet shift ever more aggressively, to the point that what was previously East is now West).