Middle Ground on Trans Rights?

Andrew Sullivan is begging the Democrats to take a middle ground on transgender issues. The first problem with that is that the Democrats in charge are in denial about that some of the criticisms are legit.  The second problem is that Dems see trans rights as sacred and thus non-negotiable:

In this air-tight ideological bubble, where Bostock is unknown, the Dems flounder. “This isn’t happening” was the first gambit. Good try. Then: “this has all been ginned up by the far right, and Dems did nothing.” Did they miss the Obama and Biden Title IX diktats, Admiral Levine’s removal of lower age limits for transing kids, Biden’s “nonbinary” official Sam Brinton stealing dresses, or other embarrassments like the White House invite to Dylan Mulvaney? Then they say it’s a tiny issue. But it helped Trump massively in 2024. And if it’s tiny, why not compromise? After that, it’s just MLK-envy all the way down, the desire to be the next Rosa Parks. But it’s odd to campaign for “civil rights” when you already have them.

After trying to debate, you come to realize it’s pointless. The woke mind is not really a mind; it’s more like a bunch of synapses. Presented with an actual argument, they snap shut. This is part of what Eric Kaufmann calls the “sacralization” of minorities. For the woke, the “oppressed” are sacred. And in the social justice hierarchy, no minority is as oppressed and thereby as sacred as trans.

And so what sacred trans people say they want — or rather, what a tiny group of trans activists say they want — is all that matters. Anything else is illegitimate or “hate”. And any opponent is a bigot. Try arguing your way out of that dogmatic thicket. It’s like trying to disprove the Holy Trinity. I’ve given up.

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New Position on Transgender Surgeries by the AMA and ASPS

It has long been my position that adults can and should be able to do anything they want with their own bodies. With exceptions that would need to be extraordinary, rare and carefully considered in light of a detailed psychological analysis, I have simultaneously opposed irreversible transgender medical surgeries and injections done to minors that will make them sterile, prevent them from ever achieving orgasm and a host of other harmful physical outcomes. This is my position even if these procedures are supposedly done with the "consent" of minors (who are prohibited by age from getting a tattoo or voting).

In light of new evidence of the dangers of these surgeries, two major medical organizations have now voiced their concerns.

Nicolas Hauser's article is titled "Major Medical Organizations Retreat on Irreversible Gender Surgeries for Minors: The American Medical Association and the American Society of Plastic Surgeons move to defer irreversible gender surgeries in minors days after $2 million malpractice verdict for teen detransitioner." Excerpt:

This week, the American Medical Association (AMA) endorsed delaying gender-affirming surgeries until adulthood, just one day after the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) recommended postponing breast/chest, genital, and facial surgeries until at least age 19. While framed as recommendations rather than binding clinical guidelines, the signal is unmistakable: irreversible surgical alteration of minors is facing growing resistance.

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The Inner Workings of Transgender Medical Centers

rom 2018 to November 2022, Reed worked as a case manager at the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital in Missouri, where she handled patient intake for transgender youth. In this role, she observed the clinic's operations, which involved prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to adolescents. In 2023, she blew the whistle on her employer.

In 2023, she authored a 23-page affidavit and an essay published by The Free Press, accusing the clinic of rushing minors onto irreversible medical interventions without adequate mental health screenings. Key allegations included:Doctors downplaying co-occurring conditions like depression, anxiety, autism, or peer pressure/social media influences in favor of gender dysphoria diagnoses.

  • Prescribing hormones (e.g., testosterone) after minimal consultations, sometimes on the first visit, with only one parent's consent required.

  • Patients experiencing severe side effects, such as deformed genitalia, rectal bleeding, bone density loss, and infertility, with little follow-up care.

  • A high rate of "detransitioners" who later regretted treatments, including one patient who attempted suicide after realizing the changes were not reversible.

What follows is a transcription of her recent video statement:

My name is Jamie Reed, and I hold a Master's of Science in Clinical Research Management from Washington University in St Louis. I am also a lifelong Democrat, a mom of five boys, three of whom were adopted out of the foster care system. And I'm a lesbian. I am also the public whistleblower from inside a pediatric Gender Center.

I participated in transitioning nearly 1500 unique patients who ranged in age from three to 26 now I understand I participated in an industry that was based on fraud, deception, and in layman's terms, we were running a racket. Patients were treated using unethical and deceptive informed consent practices. They were minor patients. They had significantly presenting comorbidities, some even meeting the criteria for a legal medical disability, the entire diagnosis is based on regressive stereotypes and self described feelings. For an assessment to be diagnostic, there must be a statistically significant number of patients who will not meet the diagnostic criteria, parents and the public have been deceived into believing that these assessments are diagnostic, that they're consistent, that they're comprehensive, and that no child is ever receiving treatment without one.

But even if this field was completing a true biopsychosocial assessment and saying no to a significant percentage of the patient population, those who would be told yes would be homosexuals, and especially the gender non-conforming homosexuals. We would still be okay to be rendered sterile, without sexual function, with destroyed endocrine systems, and be allowed to die early simply because we are gender non conforming homosexuals.

One of my patients, after her radical bilateral mastectomy at 19 called begging for her breath to be put back on. Another patient's intellectual function was so impaired that they could not identify to me where they lived or explain what type of identification they possessed. This patient even stated that they desired to have biological children, yet they were prescribed a treatment that would ultimately render them sterile for life.

We as clinicians in the gender industry openly stated it does not matter if patients even had gender dysphoria. If a patient said they were trans, then they were trans. Parents were unaware that patients were self diagnosing, that clinicians had completely abandoned the diagnostic process entirely.

Parents who didn't agree with our lives were isolated, abandoned by our centers. And we tore children apart from caring parents who told us no.

Imagine if children went in self-declaring that they had a malignant cancer, if that child demanded to go through chemotherapy and surgery, that the clinicians would comply. This is precisely what we were doing in the Gender Center. What finally led me to speak up is that we significantly harmed our patients. We didn't just deceive them or their parents. I hurt the very children I was employed to protect.

Reed now serves as executive director of the LGBT Courage Coalition, a nonprofit advocating for improved standards in youth gender medicine, emphasizing mental health support and caution with interventions.

In this next video, Erin Friday lays out the economics of gender medicine, including the fact that puberty blockers, which cause irreversible damage to the reproductive system, are "handed out like candy."

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Peak Non-Binary

is back with another episode of TGIF at The Free Press. I look forward to her column every Friday. She recaps the news quite well, along with plenty of links and humor. This week she mentioned the decline of non-binary designations:

Nonbinary identification is collapsing: The number of young people identifying as neither male nor female has fallen through the floor, which is crazy because I thought they were all born that way. An analysis of data from surveys by Brown University, Andover, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) shows a massive drop-off among nonbinary students from the 2022–2023 peak. Maybe nonbinary was just another boarding school fad that has started to fade—pronouns are out, trust funds are back in (good thing polo shirts work for both vibes).

[Emphasis not in the original]

To me and most other people who don't cling to the corporate media, it was always clear that declaring oneself "non-binary" was a cheap-signalling fad fueled by social contagion and that it would eventually fade because it was not anchored to any reality in the physical or biological world. It will continue to fall the same way as bell-bottoms, pet rocks, disco music and the ice bucket challenge. I predict that "queerness" will soon follow suit.

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