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So here is thought, let’s not do medical practices that are unreliable and unable to justify the risks and uncertainties experienced by the patients (children).
“Systematic reviews represent the highest level of evidence analysis in evidence based medicine. The three European countries that did these reviews independently came to the same conclusion: Due to their severe methodological limitations, studies cited in support of hormonal interventions for adolescents are of “very low” certainty.
For health authorities in these countries, this meant that the studies were too unreliable to justify the risks and uncertainties of “gender affirming care.” Sweden, Finland, and England have since placed severe restrictions on access to hormones. Although these countries now allow hormones in a very carefully selected cohort of patients who fulfill the criteria of the Dutch protocol, they do so against the findings of their own systematic reviews.
That is because the systematic reviews found the Dutch study, on which the Dutch protocol is based, also provides “very low” certainty evidence. Finland’s Council for Choices in Healthcare recognizes medical transition for minors as “an experimental practice.”
The medical establishment in Ireland is being led away from evidence based medicine by the gender ideologues. Nothing good can come of it.
“This week another expert in his field offered a considered opinion and he has been studiously ignored. At various times in recent years, his expertise has attracted personal abuse. His credentials are unimpeachable but the problem is he is bearing inconvenient truths at a time when such truths are considered to be more trouble than they’re worth.
Professor Donal O’Shea is well known for his media contributions on obesity. He is the HSE’s national clinical lead on obesity but he also works as an endocrinologist in the National Gender Service within the executive. He has worked for over twenty-five years within the area of gender dysphoria. Last weekend he told the that he and his colleague, psychiatrist Paul Moran, are alarmed that the HSE is trying to set up an “activist led” gender service which will be “dangerous for patients”. The HSE is currently advertising for a clinical lead in the National Gender Service but bizarrely prior experience is not a prerequisite.”
Better to stop it before it takes root my Irish friends. The damage it has done to children here in Canada is an ongoing tragedy.
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This is an entirely unremarkable state of affairs, considering how strong male sex-bias is in society, and that medicine has rather happily gone along with that. For more info on this much broader topic, I can recommend my book Born in the Right Body and Caroline Criado Perez’ Invisible Women, among a large body of work that addresses this issue.
In this overall sexist environment, we now have an ideology that essentially denies sex. Or rather, we have a proliferation of activists who claim that humans can change sex by changing their physical appearance. When these activists are confronted with reality – that sex is determined at fertilisation by the presence or absence of the Y chromosome (because both human males and females have an X but only males have a Y) and this cannot be changed using any known medical intervention – they declare genetic sex and sex chromosomes “irrelevant”.
I have seen my medical colleagues laugh this off for years. “Surely these people are just ignorant, they are talking nonsense (not exactly rare on the internet when medical issues are concerned!) and besides – who cares?”
While accurate, such laissez-faire attitude has gotten us to a point where activists who are denying basic human biology have now captured not just laws and policies but medical establishment itself, and any doctor who tries to debunk pseudoscientific “sex denialist” ideology will very quickly experience disproportionate interpersonal and institutional discrimination and violence.
I have seen doctors wade into these discussions in good faith, only to have activists report them to their governing bodies, which now have policies that conflate sex – being man, woman, boy, girl – with gender – emulating masculine or feminine stereotypes of appearance and behaviour. And god help anyone who doesn’t cower and apologise immediately.
The general public has observed this loss of sense and integrity within the medical profession for years now, which has been accompanied by the removal of the word “woman” from healthcare, loss of single-sex spaces (which are particularly important to women and girls due to the male violence I briefly discussed above) and deepening of the sex disparity in research which has plagued medicine since its inception.
We need to support our medical professionals when they speak up against the anti-reality/anti-science activists. Calling bullshit on their antics still carries far too high a price, that must change if we want to reestablish trust in our institutions and professional classes.
AAP announces they’ll do an evidence review
“The American Academy of Pediatricians (which also covers Canadian pediatricians) is starting to cave to pressure to evaluate their recommendations for gender-affirmation care. They announced this week that they would undertake a systematic review of evidence and update their guidance.
We see this as a ploy to buy some time as the AAP (hopefully) works out how they’re going to backpedal from the current policy they continue to promote. Three systematic evidence reviews have already been done in Europe and the Florida Medical Board has done a “review of reviews”. The findings from the AAP will not change.
Canadian research expert, Dr Gordon Guyatt of McMaster University was quoted in the New York Times yesterday saying the A.A.P.’s report will most likely find low-quality evidence for pediatric gender care. “The policies of the Europeans are much more aligned with the evidence than are the Americans’,” he said.”
All I can say is : ‘About Damn Time!’. Who would of thought that evidence based medicine should be based on evidence and proof of efficacy?
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.
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