WP Finally Allows Transgender Experts to Raise Concerns about Shoddy Transgender Diagnoses and Treatments

It looks like it is now safe to publicly say these critically important things at the WP, 18 months after Abigail Shrier sounded the alarm but was completely and intentionally ignored by WP/NYT/NPR. Here is an excerpt from a brand new article by Laura Edwards-Leeper and Erica Anderson: "The mental health establishment is failing trans kids Gender-exploratory therapy is a key step. Why aren’t therapists providing it?":

"The number of adolescents requesting medical care is skyrocketing: Now 1.8 percent of people under 18 identify as transgender, double the figure from five years earlier, according to the Trevor Project. A flood of referrals to mental health providers and gender medical clinics, combined with a political climate that sees the treatment of each individual patient as a litmus test of social tolerance, is spurring many providers into sloppy, dangerous care. Often from a place of genuine concern, they are hastily dispensing medicine or recommending medical doctors prescribe it — without following the strict guidelines that govern this treatment. . . .

When working in gender clinics, we’ve also both received letters from therapists who had “assessed” patients they were referring to us. An astonishing number of these were nothing but a paragraph that stated the youth identified as trans, had dysphoria and wanted hormones, so that course was recommended. There are nearly 200,000 members of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association. Add to that the clinical social workers, marriage counselors and family therapists. The overwhelming majority of those well-intentioned professionals receive limited or no training in the assessment of gender-diverse youth. (We receive requests frequently from people eager for more comprehensive, nuanced trainings, which we both deliver.) In simple terms, the demand for competent care has outstripped the supply of competent providers."

How many teenagers have been permanently damaged as a result of getting ideology instead of meaningful counseling? How many have been permanently disfigured or made sterile as a result of surgery and hormone treatment in those 18 months since Abigail Shrier tried to warn us but was shut down in a concerted effort by left-leaning media, social media platforms and even a prominent attorney for the ACLU?

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Why and How to have Conversations With the People Who Disagree with Us

Here, Scott Barry Kaufman tells us why we need to have conversations with people who think differently than us:

Here is a long list of many of the things we have in common, a list compiled by Donald Brown in a book called Human Universals. I commented on this long list in a previous post.

And here is a good recipe for having those conversations, the HxA Way of Heterodox Academy.

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One of my Favorite Jazz Solos

This is one of my favorite jazz solos of all time: Oscar Peterson, playing "Where do we go from here" on an album titled "Great Connection." I've listened to Oscar's solo dozens of time and always revel in its beauty and complexity. Nils Osted-Pedersen's exquisite bass lines are entirely worth a second listen immediately after the first.

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