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A refresher in how we create mechanical advantages, and more importantly, why it works the way it does.
It is going to be very disheartening for people who bought into the puberty blockers as a solution to their ‘gender dysphoria’ realize that they were the first test subjects in a long term trial. What they were told, and what will happen are likely to be two very different occurrences.
“When ECRI was contacted by this author and asked why WPATH guidelines were not included, and why the Endocrine Society guidelines did not have a scorecard rating, they responded in an email, saying that the reason the Endocrine Society guidelines did not meet inclusion criteria to be rated was because “Only a few of their recommendations were supported by the systematic review; the majority were not.” The reason WPATH was not included, ECRI stated, was because the guidelines were over five years old, and “did not use a systematic review to process”.
They did not use a systematic review to process.
ECRI
A search of the Canadian database yielded no results for transgender treatment. When contacted, Joule’s response was “In order to be included in our database, all guidelines have to be either developed or endorsed by an authoritative medical/healthcare organization. Neither the WPATH nor the Endocrine Society guidelines on transgender care have been endorsed by any Canadian organization(s) and therefore are not included in our database”. A search of the GIN library also yielded no results for transgender care.
Neither the WPATH nor the Endocrine Society guidelines on transgender care have been endorsed by any Canadian organization(s) and therefore are not included in our database.
Joule
Guidelines over five years old are at high risk of becoming clinically irrelevant due to new research findings, or changes in patient populations. Given the rapidly changing epidemiology and treatments in transgender care, seven-year-old guidelines are severely outdated in this field. One case in point is that when the WPATH guidelines were published in 2011, natal males were the primary group presenting to gender clinics in adolescence, but now males have been eclipsed by natal females 3 to 1.
Research on male adolescent clients cannot be generalized to females, an age-old fallacy in medicine. This makes the entire recommendation section for adolescent transgender care in the WPATH SOC dubious at best, irrelevant at worst. Investigation must be undertaken to determine why a new cohort has developed, and whether this group can be included in guidelines that were developed for a group with different histories and possibly different etiologies.”
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To their credit, WPATH does not say anywhere in the SOC that treatment is proven safe and effective. Instead, the overall message in the guidelines is to urge physicians to follow the patient’s wishes only, putting aside scientific evidence and ethical delivery of care.
The concept of an innate gender identity is unproven, unverifiable, and does not even have a clear definition. In the same spirit of historical psychiatric misadventures, somatic treatments are being prescribed for a psychologically based identity disorder. How many vulnerable children, adolescents and young adults will be harmed before we realize that history is repeating itself.
The Dangerous Denial of Sex
Transgender ideology harms women, gays—and especially feminine boys and masculine girls.
By Colin M. Wright and
Emma N. Hilton
Feb. 13, 2020 6:54 pm ET
“Transgender ideology can take on a comical character, as in a recent American Civil Liberties Union commentary objecting to sales tax on tampons and similar products while pondering: “How can we recognize that barriers to menstrual access are a form of sex discrimination without erasing the lived experiences of trans men and non-binary people who menstruate, as well as women who don’t?”
Yet it’s one thing to claim that a man can “identify” as a woman or vice versa. Increasingly we see a dangerous and antiscientific trend toward the outright denial of biological sex.
“The idea of two sexes is simplistic,” an article in the scientific journal Nature declared in 2015. “Biologists now think there is a wider spectrum than that.” A 2018 Scientific American piece asserted that “biologists now think there is a larger spectrum than just binary female and male.” And an October 2018 New York Times headline promised to explain “Why Sex Is Not Binary.”
The argument is that because some people are intersex—they have developmental conditions resulting in ambiguous sex characteristics—the categories male and female exist on a “spectrum,” and are therefore no more than “social constructs.” If male and female are merely arbitrary groupings, it follows that everyone, regardless of genetics or anatomy should be free to choose to identify as male or female, or to reject sex entirely in favor of a new bespoke “gender identity.”
To characterize this line of reasoning as having no basis in reality would be an egregious understatement. It is false at every conceivable scale of resolution.
In humans, as in most animals or plants, an organism’s biological sex corresponds to one of two distinct types of reproductive anatomy that develop for the production of small or large sex cells—sperm and eggs, respectively—and associated biological functions in sexual reproduction. In humans, reproductive anatomy is unambiguously male or female at birth more than 99.98% of the time. The evolutionary function of these two anatomies is to aid in reproduction via the fusion of sperm and ova. No third type of sex cell exists in humans, and therefore there is no sex “spectrum” or additional sexes beyond male and female. Sex is binary.
There is a difference, however, between the statements that there are only two sexes (true) and that everyone can be neatly categorized as either male or female (false). The existence of only two sexes does not mean sex is never ambiguous. But intersex individuals are extremely rare, and they are neither a third sex nor proof that sex is a “spectrum” or a “social construct.” Not everyone needs to be discretely assignable to one or the other sex in order for biological sex to be functionally binary. To assume otherwise—to confuse secondary sexual traits with biological sex itself—is a category error.
Denying the reality of biological sex and supplanting it with subjective “gender identity” is not merely an eccentric academic theory. It raises serious human-rights concerns for vulnerable groups including women, homosexuals and children.
Women have fought hard for sex-based legal protections. Female-only spaces are necessary due to the pervasive threat of male violence and sexual assault. Separate sporting categories are also necessary to ensure that women and girls don’t have to face competitors who have acquired the irreversible performance-enhancing effects conferred by male puberty. The different reproductive roles of males and females require laws to safeguard women from discrimination in the workplace and elsewhere. The falsehood that sex is rooted in subjective identity instead of objective biology renders all these sex-based rights impossible to enforce.
The denial of biological sex also erases homosexuality, as same-sex attraction is meaningless without the distinction between the sexes. Many activists now define homosexuality as attraction to the “same gender identity” rather than the same sex. This view is at odds with the scientific understanding of human sexuality. Lesbians have been denounced as “bigots” for expressing a reluctance to date men who identify as women. The successful normalization of homosexuality could be undermined by miring it in an untenable ideology.
Those most vulnerable to sex denialism are children. When they’re taught that sex is grounded in identity instead of biology, sex categories can easily become conflated with regressive stereotypes of masculinity and femininity. Masculine girls and feminine boys may become confused about their own sex. The dramatic rise of “gender dysphoric” adolescents—especially young girls—in clinics likely reflects this new cultural confusion.
The large majority of gender-dysphoric youths eventually outgrow their feelings of dysphoria during puberty, and many end up identifying as homosexual adults. “Affirmation” therapies, which insist a child’s cross-sex identity should never be questioned, and puberty-blocking drugs, advertised as a way for children to “buy time” to sort out their identities, may only solidify feelings of dysphoria, setting them on a pathway to more invasive medical interventions and permanent infertility. This pathologizing of sex-atypical behavior is extremely worrying and regressive. It is similar to gay “conversion” therapy, except that it’s now bodies instead of minds that are being converted to bring children into “proper” alignment with themselves.
The time for politeness on this issue has passed. Biologists and medical professionals need to stand up for the empirical reality of biological sex. When authoritative scientific institutions ignore or deny empirical fact in the name of social accommodation, it is an egregious betrayal to the scientific community they represent. It undermines public trust in science, and it is dangerously harmful to those most vulnerable.
Mr. Wright is an evolutionary biologist at Penn State. Ms. Hilton is a developmental biologist at the University of Manchester.”
I like a nice glass of milk once and awhile. The real love comes when we get down to business with cheese and sour cream though, both go so well with perogies. :)
It would be strangely terrible if the beginning of humanities decline was prefaced with something known as the “Big Burp”. The methane in the arctic is a super green house gas, and if the facts are correct, it is going to over salt our soup sooner than later.
“Wadhams puts to rest the common criticism by many in the scientific community that say not to worry about ESAS starting a bout of dangerous runaway global warming (RGW) because subsea methane deposits oxidize and dissolve in the seawater as released and never make it into the upper atmosphere, to wit: “The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is exceptionally shallow — more than 75 per cent of its entire area of 2.1 million square kilometres is shallower than 40 metres — so most of the methane gas avoids oxidation in the water column and is released into the atmosphere.” (Wadhams, pg. 123)
With ESAS getting more and more active as of recent, it is important to evaluate the risks of further breakout. For example, Wadhams says that Natalia Shakova, the leading expert on ESAS, believes it contains up to 700 GT of CH4. The risk is rapid release, a big burp of 8% of the deposit or 50GT, which, in turn, would crank up worldwide temperatures by 0.6°C over two years. This would have an extremely negative impact on the overall global climate system with unknown but likely horrific results as temps crank up to, or beyond, the IPCC danger zone of 2°C much sooner than anybody expects. Wadhams believes this is society’s biggest climate threat because at 2°C above pre-industrial crop yields start going down, very rapidly. An ESAS big burp would do the job.
The risk of an ESAS methane big burp alone should be enough of a threat to motivate global governments to call an emergency meeting at the UN to do whatever it takes to halt excessive greenhouse gas emissions on a worldwide basis as soon as possible.”
What a time to be alive!
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
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