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If you are violating one of the principles of human medicine – first do no harm – it may be wise to reconsider your position on ‘gender-affirming treatment’ regardless of how lucrative it is.
“Children are being harmed. Young people are being harmed.
In many ways, this story is not new. From snake oil to thalidomide, from lobotomies to opioids, medicine has a long history of fake cures and terrible practices. In his 2022 book The Skeptical Professional’s Guide to Rational Prescribing: The Impact of Scientific Fraud and Misconduct, Dr. Charles Dean writes that in modern times the challenges facing medicine include “untoward ties with drug companies, the power of the pharmaceutical industry to co-opt physicians and institutions, the failure of peer review, the use of fraudulent data, and the failure of institutions to monitor their investigators…other topics are also in need of review, including publication bias, spinning poor or questionable results into positive outcomes, omitting or changing the primary outcomes of studies after the data fail to deliver the expected results…” Certainly, many parents see all this in play in the unfolding gender medical scandal.
However, what is new is the Gordian knot of confused cultural ideas about gender and sex, along with a tangle of transgender activism, tribal politics, and medical lobbying that have ultimately allowed malpractice to continue. Those who can see some of the problems with the current protocol–otherwise ethical professionals–make calls for randomized trials, better research, and the restriction of these drugs and surgeries to “some” children. But they forget the most basic principle of medicine: primum non nocere: first do no harm. Decades of research have made clear that there is no good evidence that any of these medications or surgeries help anyone; there is good evidence that they harm. So what type of medical ethics is a clinician practicing when she begins the first stage of sterilizing a trans-identifying child, even a highly distressed one?
For those doctors, therapists, politicians, journalists, and educators who have grasped what’s going on, there is a tremendous urgency to raise awareness in order to change the current medical guidelines and stop the horrendous mistreatment of gender-diverse kids.”
Transactivism and transgender ideology in general have little respect for truth, morality, and established scientific/medical procedures and processes. It is imperative to realize that this ideology at its very core is activist inspired and activist driven. Their goal is to violently change how society works and there is never a bridge too far. There is no institution or individual that is not worth the sacrifice if the overarching goal (destabilizing society enough for social revolution, so the margins can be moved to the centre) can be met.
So, yes its okay to push the demonstrably false narrative of affirm-or-suicide on parents. If the familial bond can be severed, any damage inflicted is worth it because creating another destabilized transgender activist helps the cause along. The gender-mill always requires more useful idiots to do its bidding.
“Sapir believes that the fear-mongering with inflated statistics about trans suicide rates has been essential to activists in achieving their goals in the political arena. “The affirm-or-suicide mantra has become the central strategy of contemporary transgender activism, and at times it would seem that activists have little else in their rhetorical arsenal,” said Sapir.
Sapir cites recent examples of the hyperbolic language used by purveyors of the affirm-or-suicide myth. Khiara Bridges told Senator Josh Hawley during a recent senate hearing that his “transphobic” line of questioning is why “one in five” transgender people attempt suicide.
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg agreed with his husband Chasten, who said that the Florida Parental Rights in Education Act would “kill kids.” Maia Kobabe, author of the pornographic children’s book Gender Queer, said her book’s presence in libraries was “life-saving.” The term “life-saving” was also used by Assistant Secretary for Health and Human Services Rachel Levine regarding “gender affirming” interventions (i.e. sex changes) for kids. Levine is a trans-identified biological male.
“Despite the unwaveringly confident manner in which these claims are often asserted, there is no good evidence that failing to ‘affirm’ minors in their ‘gender identity’ will increase the likelihood of them committing suicide,” said Sapir. “Gender activists commonly argue that roughly four in ten transgender-identified youth (TIY) attempt suicide when not socially and medically ‘affirmed.’ Does the research bear this out? The simple answer is: no,” he adds.
Sapir found that surveys of suicidality in “trans” youth rely on self-report and do little to vet whether suicide was actually attempted. Studies that claim “trans” youth are at elevated risk of suicide are commonly compared with average mentally healthy teenagers, which is deeply misleading. When researchers compared “trans” youth with teens suffering from similar mental health problems, there was virtually no difference in suicide rates between the groups. “Trans” youth are not any more suicidal than teens with garden variety mental illness, which means that failing to “affirm” a child’s transgender identity does not drive suicidal behavior.
Teens with rapid onset gender dysphoria are “known to have very high rates of anxiety, depression, history of sexual trauma, anorexia, and eating disorders, all of which typically precede their gender-related distress,” said Sapir, who believes that gender distress may be a symptom of a troubled teenage girl, but it is incorrectly being treated as an underlying cause.
Sapir dives into the studies purporting to find that puberty blockers given to minors lead to reduced suicidality. The author of the studies, Jack Turban, a trans activist and psychiatry fellow at UCSF, has a long history of designing poor experiments and using bad methodology and biased samples to draw erroneous conclusions from data. “Turban sold his work to an eager media environment as having found strong evidence that puberty blockers are life-saving and medically necessary. And they gobbled it up uncritically,” said Sapir.
A Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) is the gold standard for finding a causal relationship in science. No RCT has ever studied the effects of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria, which is why the FDA has never approved the use of Lupron and other puberty blockers for that purpose.
The claims activists make about puberty blockers being completely safe, effective, and a “pause button on puberty” rely entirely on referencing their approved on-label use which is to treat precocious puberty, not how they are increasingly being used off-label to treat gender dysphoria.
Sapir breaks down a thoroughly debunked 2018 article by Jason Rafferty published in Pediatrics that claimed to find conclusive evidence that alternatives to gender-affirming care are “futile and harmful.”
“The article contains a shocking number of errors, omissions, and blatant mischaracterizations of the available research on pediatric gender transition, some of them so fundamental and egregious as to suggest bad faith in the authors,” said Sapir. He added that the article’s central conclusion is negated by its citations and flawed logic.
“The hyperbole surrounding the suicide threat is designed to get us to overlook the fundamentally experimental nature of pediatric gender medicine,” said Sapir. The point of suicide alarmism, he adds, is to get us to not weigh the pros and cons, benefits and risks.”
Clearly, transgender ideology has always been on the wrong side of science. Hopefully soon it will be on the wrong side of history.
I post this letter written to Alberta Health Services regarding the experience one Albertan woman had in the context of the language being used in a letter to her regarding pap testing. She has given me permission to reprint her letter in hopes that more Albertan women will also write to Alberta Health Services or the Alberta Public Ombudsmen to tell them in no uncertain terms that erasing females from our healthcare system is an unacceptable practice.
“To Whom It May Concern,
I hope this finds you well. I am lodging a formal complaint re: the language used in a recent letter from the AHS in regards to pap testing.
The letter asks, “Who should have a pap test?” and the answer is “women and people with a cervix”. All “people with cervixes” are women so this sub setting of women informs me that AHS is now practicing Gender Ideology as opposed to neutral, clear and scientific language one expects from an institution dealing with medicine. As the AHS now defines women as an identity what the author should have written was “cis women and people with cervixes”. That would clarify for all readers that the AHS has joined the zeitgeist which allows men to identify as women, teaches children they have a “gender identity”, and dehumanizes women by “queering” our language from mothers to “birthing parents”.
I AM a woman.
I do not identify as a woman. I do not like the word “woman” being disappeared in order to be more “inclusive”. Inclusive to who? Not to me. Not to women from religions who do not believe in “gender” and/or whose beliefs dictate a separation of men from women in public spaces. Not to women with mental health issues like Dementia or Alzheimer’s. Not to women who have depression and anxiety as girls and women are called dehumanizing/disassociative terms like “bleeders”, “menstruators”, “birthing bodies”, “pregnant people”, “bodies with a vagina”, “cervix owners”, “chest feeders”, “womb carriers” etc. by institutions supposedly serving our health & the health of our children.
And this adaptation does not serve women and girls for whom English is a second language and who already have far more challenges navigating a medical lingo which is now also “queering language” in the name of equity. I assume that this wording was brought in as a part of a formal Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policy. Yet the vast majority of indigenous women generally do not like being called “native womb carriers” and many black women are not overly fond of being called “black birthing bodies”, both terms I have recently seen used by institutions in the medicine and publishing fields.
Ostensibly this linguistic split is to support the women and girls identifying out of their sex class and into Identitarianism, a belief system which all of society, no matter what reasons they have to resist, are being made to affirm. While this is being framed as a help to women/girls who it really helps is men who now can identify into every sphere of the hard-won sex-based rights of girls and women with no more than a magical declaration: “I am a woman.” It is via this linguistic practice that a woman who was raped in BC was compelled by the court to call the man who raped her by “she” and “her” pronouns while giving her testimony.
In the same vein, convicted rapists and violent men are now living in women’s prisons throughout Canada where, if we’re interested in Equity, indigenous women are very over represented. So, were putting rapists and violent men into prisons to bunk down with the indigenous women we’re supposed to be practicing reconciliation with? That seems counter intuitive!
This process of identifying also allows men/boys access to any women/girl’s sex-based space or sport. For example, in the US this weekend a 29-year-old man (ranked 838th in the men’s division) stole a woman’s skateboarding title & prize money from a 13-year-old girl because he identifies as a woman. That couldn’t happen without Gender Ideology, an ideology which the AHS is now promoting in it’s communications. As the AHS serves all women and girls, it would also do well to remember the lesbian population. When the AHS practices Gender Ideology by reframing women as an identity you cement a belief system where men are women on demand.
So heterosexual men who identify as women now demand sexual relations from lesbians under the auspices of “breaking the cotton ceiling”. When those women have to courage to refuse, they are called bigots and transphobes. Sometimes they lose their jobs and are cancelled. Sometimes, as in the case of Allison Bailey, a black lesbian barrister in the UK, you have to go to court for stating the truth. Finally, did it occur to anyone at the AHS that women with cervix cancer themselves might be upset at the term “people with a cervix”.
Every girl and women on this planet understands the immense challenges of our sex but to be dehumanized from the material reality of being a woman when fighting for your life because you are a woman is a grotesque charade. Shame on the AHS for adopting and enforcing this de-facto religion which is both misogynistic and anti reality. This belief system is decoupling our youth and mentally ill from reality and turning them into life long medical patients because of a supposed “identity” and forcing all of us, even women fighting cervical cancer, to go along with it.”
We have to act now folks. This toxic gender ideology will not go away on its on.
It certainly seems like the religious, libertarian hard right fringe has made its way from the US to Canada. The illegal occupation of Ottawa and border crossings are prime examples of the profoundly undemocratic/reactionary roots of this ‘movement’.
The police are reacting with a glacial slowness that is exacerbating the situation. Much more needs to be done to protect our civil society, public health, and democratic institutions.
There you have it folks. What has changed from a medical standpoint with regards to masking efficacy from the beginning of the school term until now? Absolutely fucking nothing from an epidemiological standpoint.
What has changed is that we have anti-vax lunatics closing border crossings and disrupting traffic in Alberta cities. These foolish ignorant people make up a significant part of the UCP’s ‘base’. And thus, despite what the science indicates or even what the precautionary principle suggests we’re just gonna do the opposite because it is politically expedient.
Gonna take this week off of teaching and let the COVID party take place in the schools without me.
This is what happens when you let the dipshits dictate public health policy.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
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