The Problem with the Transgender Affirmative Care Standard

This is an excerpt from a review  of Abigail Shier's book Irreversible Damage by Dr. Harriet Hall, from a section called, "The customer is always right."

A new “affirmative care” standard of mental health care has been adopted by nearly every medical accrediting organization. The American Psychological Association guidelines go much further than respecting and supporting trans identities; they mandate that therapists adopt gender ideology themselves. Therapists must accept and affirm the patient’s self-diagnosis. Shrier likens this to telling an anorexic teen “If you think you are fat, then you are. Let’s talk about liposuction and weight-loss programs”. She asks whether a standard guided less by biology than by political correctness is in the best interests of the patient.

We don’t provide affirmative care for anorexia. We don’t say “Yes, you are fat” and offer to help them reduce their weight even more. Part of a therapist’s role is to question a patient’s self-assessment.

Dr. Hall emphasizes that she is open to current treatments, but only where the patient needs them:
I support hormones and gender surgeries for adults who will benefit from them. I care about the welfare of these adolescent girls and it bothers me that some of them may be unduly influenced and take irreversible steps they will later regret.

Dr. Hall concludes:

[Abigail Shrier's book] will undoubtedly be criticized just as Lisa Littman’s study was. Yes, it’s full of anecdotes and horror stories, and we know the plural of anecdote is not data, but Shrier looked diligently for good scientific studies and didn’t find much. And that’s the problem. We desperately need good science, and it’s not likely to happen in the current political climate. Anyone who addresses this subject can expect to be attacked by activists. Is ROGD a legitimate category? We don’t know, since the necessary controlled studies have not been done. I fully expect Shrier to be called a transphobe and to be vilified for harming transgender people, and I’m sure I will be labeled a transphobe just for reviewing her book.

She brings up some alarming facts that desperately need to be looked into. The incidence of teen gender dysphoria is rising and appears to be linked to internet influences and social peer groups. The number of people identifying as lesbians is dropping. Therapists are accepting patients’ self-diagnoses unquestioningly, and irreversible treatments are being offered without therapist involvement. We know at least some of these patients will desist and detransition, and we have no way to predict which ones. Children are being instructed in how to lie to parents and doctors to coerce them into providing the treatments they want. Families are being destroyed.

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The Many Types of Gametes

Along with our ramped up search for UFO's, shouldn't we invest $ to document all of the intersex gametes? Gametes that are neither sperm nor egg? It appalls me that colonizing doctors keep pompously "assigning" labels of "egg" and "sperm" to gametes.

I'm reacting tongue-in-cheek to Colin Wright's collection of some of the prominent recent claims that there are allegedly more than two sexes and that "sex is a spectrum." Most surprising is the recent claim in a formerly respectable magazine, Scientific American. Wright's collection is worth a quick tour - click the image below.  Read it and weep.

What are gametes and why are they relevant to this discussion?

Gametes are an organism's reproductive cells, also referred to as sex cells. In species that produce two morphologically distinct types of gametes, and in which each individual produces only one type, a female is any individual that produces the larger type of gamete—called an ovum— and a male produces the smaller tadpole-like type—called a sperm.
It's rather amazing what one can do when one boldly separates the concept of gametes from the concept of sex. These days, it's a way for someone to claim victimization, to gain the warmth of a deluded tribe and to get a lot of attention. Here's why that conceptual move fails. 

In this hard-fought conceptual game, the Woke team prefers to categorize people by their feelings and intuition in terms of numerous "genders," ignoring that the traditional way of categorizing people into male and female, men and women, has deep biological roots related to the propagation of the species.  Using sex organs and games as the basis to categorize individuals as male or female is not an arbitration division. In fact, we divide every other mammalian organism into one of two sexes, male and female, based on the types of the type of gamete that organism produces. That division works virtually every time we encounter a mammal. Dividing humans into male and female is easy and intuitive, based on simple observation of sex organs. There is no need for a doctor to "assign" the sex of a newborn baby. With extremely rare exceptions (2 out of 10,000), that determination is purely scientific.

But we now have increasing numbers of people and organizations declaring that there are more than two sexes. It's a classic case of making shit up.

I'll close with this quote by a being that happened to look like an egg:

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."

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West Coast State Laws Re Transgender Issues Surprise Parents of Troubled Teens Who Enter Youth Shelters

At City Journal, Abigail Shrier has written an article titled: "When the State Comes for Your Kids: Social workers, youth shelters, and the threat to parents’ rights." . She describes the journeys of several families, which are harrowing, given the state laws. What are those state laws? Shrier describes the laws of the state of Washington:

Here, for instance, are the powers granted to a 13-year-old child by the state of Washington. Minors age 13 and up are entitled to admit themselves for inpatientand outpatient mental health treatment without parental consent. Health insurers are forbidden from disclosing to the insured parents’ sensitive medical information of minor children—such as that regarding “gender dysphoria [and] gender affirming care.” Minors aged 13 to 18 can withhold mental health records from parents for “sensitive” conditions, which include both “gender dysphoria” and “gender-affirming care.” Insurers in Washington must cover a wide array of “gender-affirming treatments” from tracheal shaves to double mastectomies.

Put these together, and a seventh grader could be entitled to embark on “gender affirming care”—which may include anything from a provider using the child’s name and pronouns to the kid preparing to receive a course of hormones—without her parents’ permission, against her parents’ wishes, covered by her parents’ insurance, and with the parents kept in the dark by insurance companies and medical providers.

This is a detailed, well-researched article that will surprise and shock many families who thought that youth shelters only had relevant for children from broken homes.

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USA Today Unilaterally Removes “Hurtful Language” from a Female College Athlete’s Op-Ed

Chelsea Mitchell runs track at the college level. On May 22, USA Today published her Op-Ed in which she complained that runners who had "male bodies" are repeatedly and unfairly winning championships in women's college track meets. Three days after the publication of the Op-Ed, USA Today retroactively edited Chelsea Mitchell's Op-Ed, offering the following reasons as an editor's note:

Editor's note: This column has been updated to reflect USA TODAY’s standards and style guidelines. We regret that hurtful language was used.

I took the liberty of running a "compare" of the edited part of the original article (published in its original form by Alliance Defending Freedom) to the new version of the USA Today article, the one from which the "hurtful language" has been removed. The red corrections were the changes made by USA Today.

I don't understand what is factually inappropriate about saying that the MTF (male to female) transgender runners to some degree, retained "male bodies" if that is what Chelsea Mitchell (an accomplished athlete) observed. These are facts that are also strongly borne out by the stunning success of these runners when they are competing against the runners who are biologically female.  That is, in fact, the entire point of Chelsea Mitchell's Op-Ed. Apparently, she will not be allowed to make her argument in her own words.

Mitchell's article did not even once mention the vague-to-the-point-of-meaningless word, "gender." Her article was about the two sexes, male and female. Perhaps USA Today also finds basic biology principles hurtful, including this finding, which goes back for thousands of years: Mammals, including human animals, come in two and only two sexes, male (small gametes) and female (larger gametes) (and see this peer reviewed article.  There is not a third type of gamete.  Mitchell should be allowed to freely discuss and compare the competitive advantages of those with biologically male bodies versus those with biologically female bodies.  That said, this is 2021, and we are in the deep throes of Wokeness. 

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Duke Neuroscientist Punished for Arguing that There are Only Two Sexes.

From a May 14, 2021 article in The College Fix:

John Staddon, an emeritus professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, was taken off the Society for Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psychology Division 6 listserv overseen by the APA.

. . .

The topic that appears to have gotten him removed was the suggestion that there are only two sexes. According to Staddon, what likely got him taken off was this post: “Hmm… Binary view of sex false? What is the evidence? Is there a Z chromosome?”

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