How Gender Ideology Escaped the Lab to Become a Treatment Protocol

How did such a flimsy theory become an on-the-ground preferred treatment for so many health care providers? How did it come to be that so many highly trained doctors will surgically remove healthy body tissue of teenagers or inject them with cross-sex hormones, thus making them infertile? Dr. Stephen Levine, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University, explains at Public:

[A] vast chasm that exists between affirmative care doctors who believe that medical interventions should be the first line of treatment for people suffering from gender dysphoria and those like Levine who remain committed to the Hippocratic Oath to first do no harm.

“It’s been for over 2,500 years that we in medicine, we have said we do not remove healthy tissues, and we do not alter the physiology of the body,” he explains, adding that there is no data to suggest that a child who undergoes medical transition can grow up to have a full, happy, accomplished life. “It’s a belief system…and beliefs are not what parents want from doctors. They want to know what the facts are, and part of the facts is the uncertainty of outcome.”

Given that existing long-term data indicate that the “suicide rates of adult transsexuals are much higher than the suicide rate of the general population, not slightly higher, much higher,” Dr. Levine is horrified by doctors who perpetuate the transition-or-suicide narrative as a way to coerce parents into consenting to their child’s transition... A principle of medical ethics is that interventions need to be based on science, and Dr. Levine argues that the evidence for pediatric medical transition is “pretty lousy.”

The entire child sex change experiment is based on a single “innovative experiment” conducted in a Dutch gender clinic. Dr. Levine explains that innovative experiments are how medicine advances. Someone has an idea, tests it out on a tiny patient group, and if the results are promising, that justifies a more controlled study.

“The innovative experiment with patients demands that we repeat and we refine the method to establish the facts,” he said, explaining that this didn’t happen with the puberty blockers experiment.

The original Dutch study began with 197 children, but 86 were ruled out for reasons of mental disturbance. Of the remaining 111, 41 parents refused to allow their children to take part. Of the remaining 70, only 55 were entered into the final reports, and the researchers only had psychological data on 32 of the 55. There was no control group, and no long-term follow-up, as well as other serious methodological flaws. There was one attempt at replication, conducted at the Tavistock gender clinic in London, and it failed to produce the same supposedly positive result.

But Dr. Levine says the Dutch experiment “escaped the lab,” and rapidly spread into general medical practice via a process called “runaway diffusion,” which is when the medical world mistakes a small innovative experiment for proven practice and a potentially harmful treatment becomes widespread medical practice...

When asked what advice he would give to a teenager seeking medical transition, Dr. Levine replied that he says to the young person, “I know that the most important thing about you is that you’re a human being, and you think the most important thing about you is that you’re a trans person.” He seeks to help his young patients understand that anything that is true about human beings is also going to be true about them, including uncertainty, ambivalence, and the influence of the past on their current identity. And above all, he tells them, “Don’t make your parents the enemy.”

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Transgender Medicine, British Approach versus American. Bari Weiss interviews BBC reporter Hannah Barnes. Topic: On what Tavistock’s closure means for youth gender care around the world. Excerpt:

BW: When you look at your reporting from a ten-thousand-foot view, do you think what happened at Tavistock is a unique scandal, or do you think the real scandal is how normalized this kind of medicalized treatment among young people has become?

HB: These are professional people who’ve dedicated their working lives to helping young people, and what they were saying boils down to: this is not good clinical practice. This isn’t how we’ve ever practiced in other places we’ve worked. Somehow, because this is a gender clinic, the same questions that we would ask normally were not welcome...

So, I’m going to start with my understated Britishness by saying that I avoid using the word scandal because we don’t know yet what the scale might be because we just don’t have the data. We know that some people have been harmed and we know that some people have been helped, and we just don’t know the numbers either way. But what I think is really striking is that people who worked in the clinic, who did those assessments, who made those referrals, fear they have played a part in a huge medical scandal. So I’m just going to start with that caveat. What I would say is that, yes, we have a different healthcare system here in the UK than the U.S., but the evidence base is the same wherever young people live in the world, and the evidence base is weak. No one has been able to replicate the findings of the Dutch team that pioneered this approach. Now, those studies have come under much more scrutiny, and those findings themselves are not strong. And yet that is the basis, really, for gender-affirming medical care in young people in its entirety. So, is what happened at the Tavistock clinic happening elsewhere? Absolutely. . . . This area of healthcare has avoided any of the normal scrutiny one would expect, particularly when dealing with children and with a drug that’s being used off-label. The questions and scrutiny that would normally apply from healthcare commissioners, from politicians, from society, and from the media, they just weren’t asked. And I think that’s what’s gone wrong. Collectively, there has been this fear that if you questioned the standard of care here, that you’re somehow questioning the patient population. We wouldn’t have some great cancer hospital applying treatments which haven’t gone through clinical trials and don’t appear to have any evidence of them working. That’s not attacking people with cancer. That’s attacking the system. It’s really strange that any scrutiny is seen as hateful when actually the reverse is true. Because if gender clinics and society and medicine can get this right, then care will be better both for patients who will thrive as trans adults, and for those for whom it won’t be the right pathway. It’s going to be better for everybody.

BW: Here in the U.S., this feels like a very partisan issue. I don’t think it actually is, but I think it feels that way to a lot of people. Hannah, why is this topic and conversation so important?

HB: It’s important because they’re children. It’s the rest of their lives, and adults need to protect children. Absolutely trans people face real transphobia and bigotry. But actually, the current system isn’t serving trans people very well. The adults need to come back into the room. It’s the job of adults to say no, and that’s not saying no to every one of these young people, because it’s more complicated than that. There is a lot of nuance and there’s this real desire for certainty, like “ban puberty blockers or everyone has them.” But the welfare of children is everybody’s responsibility. The judge of a civilized society is how we protect the most vulnerable.

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Following the Science

Was it illegal to say "We don't know" when public health officials didn't know? Instead, they showed hubris when they should have admitted ignorance, hurting millions of people, killing some of them and setting children backwards in their education, by imposing a nationwide lockdown. Here's an example of how they "followed the science."

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Marty Makary Exposes Ten Myths Promulgated by the CDC During COVID

Dr. Marty Makary is a highly accomplished surgeon at John Hopkins. I posted some video of his presentation to Congress here. He has now written "10 myths told by COVID experts — and now debunked" at the New York Post." He writes that throughout COVID the CDC:

weaponized research itself by putting out its own flawed studies in its own non-peer-reviewed medical journal, MMWR. In the final analysis, public health officials actively propagated misinformation that ruined lives and forever damaged public trust in the medical profession.

He then lists 10 ways that the CDC misled Americans. These are the headlines only--visit the NYP for the entire article:

  • Natural immunity offers little protection compared to vaccinated immunity.
  • Masks prevent COVID transmission
  • School closures reduce COVID transmission
  • Myocarditis from the vaccine is less common than from the infection
  • Young people benefit from a vaccine booster
  • Vaccine mandates increased vaccination rates
  • COVID originating from the Wuhan lab is a conspiracy theory
  • It was important to get the second vaccine dose three or four weeks after the first dose
  • Data on the bivalent vaccine is ‘crystal clear’
  • One in five people get long COVID.

The main sin of the public health officials, according to Makary:"Public health officials said “you must” when the correct answer should have been “we’re not sure.” [More . . . ]

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