GC Review: Saturday, October 8, 2022
In our weekly GC Review, we return to important articles from the war to date. You might have already seen some of them, but we think they all warrant revisiting.
This day in Herstory: Harriet Taylor Mill (née Hardy), born October 8, 1807 (died November 3, 1858), was a British philosopher and women's rights advocate. Her extant corpus of writing can be found in The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill. Several pieces can also be found in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, especially volume XXI. (more)
US - The Medical Leash of Hormone Replacement Therapy
Gender medicine isn’t ‘experimental,’ because in an experiment someone is collecting data.
From Reality’s Last Stand (USA)
By Corinna Cohn
September 26, 2022
Nearly everyone is born with healthy and functioning endocrine systems. The cells in our bodies depend on both testosterone and estrogen to some degree. Of course, men's bodies depend more on the former and women's on the latter. When a child is put on to puberty blockers, also called gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonist (GnRH), the child’s natural endocrine system is stopped. For a child about to enter puberty, this causes an indefinite delay.
According to WPATH SOC8, gender clinicians may exercise the judgment to start hormone blockers in children at Tanner Stage 2 in their development (i.e. the first signs of puberty). For girls, this may be age 9. For boys, age 11. Most children who start puberty blockers then proceed on to be prescribed cross-sex hormones, also called gender-affirming hormone therapy (GAHT). This whole protocol replaces and works in contradiction to the child’s natural endocrine system. At this point, irreversible changes have occurred. … read full article
US - The Distortions in Jack Turban’s Psychology Today Article on ‘Gender Affirming Care’
Turban's public statements on pediatric gender medicine have been less than honest.
From Reality's Last Stand (USA)
By Leor Sapir
October 7, 2022
For those not following the debate over pediatric gender medicine, Dr. Jack Turban is one of the leading proponents of the controversial protocol known as “gender affirming care” and has been outspoken in the American media promoting puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to manage gender-related distress in youth. He is quoted widely and frequently by mainstream, left-of-center outlets including the Washington Post and the New York Times. This, despite the fact that he is fresh out of his residency and has far less clinical experience than many of the experts with whose more cautious approach to managing gender dysphoria in youth he disagrees.
One of Turban’s most widely cited articles is the one published by Psychology Today back in January of this year. The article, it should be noted, was published after health authorities in Sweden, Finland, and the U.K. had conducted systematic reviews of evidence for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and concluded, unanimously, that the risks and uncertainties outweigh any known benefits. Sweden and Finland have already severely limited the practice, and the U.K. seems to be moving in the same direction following the damning Cass Report. Medical authorities in France and New Zealand have also sounded the alarm, with France’s National Academy of Medicine now urging “the greatest caution” when using hormones to treat gender-related distress in minors. … read full article
Ed. Note: This article is a significant breakthrough in mainstream news coverage of the transgender tsunami. It is far from perfect, but it clearly states “Reuters interviewed parents of 39 minors who had sought gender-affirming care. Parents of 28 of those children said they felt pressured or rushed to proceed with treatment.” The article also honestly describes the concerns that have been raised in Europe and the U.K.: “Dr Annelou de Vries, a specialist in child and adolescent psychiatry, is one of the Dutch researchers whose early work established the importance of rigorous patient assessments before starting medical treatment. She said that while she worries about the growing number of children awaiting treatment, the graver sin is to move too fast when puberty blockers and hormones may not be appropriate.”
A REUTERS SPECIAL REPORT
US - As more transgender children seek medical care, families confront many unknowns
Across the United States, thousands of youths are lining up for gender-affirming care. But when families decide to take the medical route, they must make decisions about life-altering treatments that have little scientific evidence of their long-term safety and efficacy.
From Reuters (USA)
By CHAD TERHUNE, ROBIN RESPAUT, and MICHELLE CONLIN
October 6, 2022
On the two-hour drive back from the hospital, Danielle Boyer kept replaying the doctor’s questions in her mind. Was her then-12-year-old child, Ryace, hearing voices? Was she using illegal drugs? Had she ever been hospitalized for psychiatric treatment? Had she ever harmed herself?
Danielle was still shaken when she and Ryace arrived home in this small town nestled in a bend of the Ohio River. Dinner would have to wait. She had to talk to her husband. “They were asking us these sad, terrible questions,” she told Steve Boyer as the two sat in their garage that August 2020 evening. “Do you know kids have tried to kill themselves?”
“I had no idea,” he said. …
But the initial consultation brought troubling new questions. The doctor at the Akron clinic told Danielle and Ryace that puberty blockers could weaken Ryace’s bones. The effects on her brain development and fertility weren’t well-understood. …
But families that go the medical route venture onto uncertain ground, where science has yet to catch up with practice. While the number of gender clinics treating children in the United States has grown from zero to more than 100 in the past 15 years – and waiting lists are long – strong evidence of the efficacy and possible long-term consequences of that treatment remains scant. … read full article
US - What Do Girls Do?
Girls Become Women
From Natural Selections (USA)
By Heather Heying
October 4, 2022
There is an eight-year-old girl who likes to play in streams and look under rocks for squirmy critters. She not only knows how to throw a ball but enjoys doing it. She loves math and logic, and has no interest in dolls or dresses. She will grow up to be a woman. Because that’s what girls do.
There is another eight-year-old girl who likes to give tea parties for her stuffed animals. She likes to dance all the dances, often with other girls who like to do the same thing. She loves to read, and has no interest in trucks or trails. She will also grow up to be a woman. Because, again, that’s what girls do.
One of these girls may want to be an astronaut. The other, a chef. Or a mother. Or a lawyer. An actress. A racecar driver. Are all of these desires equally likely among girls? They are not. Girls are likely to want some things more than others. But guess what: the girls who aren’t girly are still girls. You can tell, in part, by the fact that they grow up to be women. Because that’s what girls do. … read full article
Trans Is Something We Made Up
On Separating Human Universals from Cultural Creations
From The 21st Century Salon (USA)
By The 21st Century Salonnière
November 22, 2021
Whether from a college class or clickbait, many of us have heard of unusual psychiatric ailments that people in other cultures experience: Some people in Malaysia “run amok”; some people in Africa experience “koro”—the fear or belief that their penis will shrink into their body.
Even when accompanied by calls for greater cultural sensitivity, the unfortunate takeaway is still usually that our superior Western understanding of anxiety or trauma or anger management is the scientific and true understanding, and those other cultures with their funny beliefs are backward compared to us. …
But how does that happen? How do cultures hit upon the specific stories they tell about the nature of a universal human experience? It’s not clear. But Ronald Simons, a psychiatrist who’s studied culture-bound syndromes, has described it this way:
“Unlike objects, people are conscious of the way they are classified, and they alter their behavior and self-conceptions in response to their classification.” … read full article
UK - Researchers are wounded in academia’s gender wars
The toxic dispute over the rights of transgender people and how freely these matters should be discussed remains academia’s most divisive issue. Laura Favaro explains what she learned from speaking to both sides
From Times Higher Education
By Laura Favaro
September 15, 2022
“Are you not terrified? Everybody is going to hate you.” This response was not unusual as I interviewed those caught up in the so-called gender wars that have divided Western academia so deeply in recent years.
Warnings that the field was risky for an early career researcher to investigate came from scholars on all sides – from “gender-critical” feminists, who described being vilified and ostracised for stating that sex is binary and immutable, to those who saw that position as callous bigotry, or, moreover, “a genocidal project” (including journal editors thus endorsing censorship). Certain doors in academia may quietly close if I went further; invitations to speak would disappear and online abuse would follow, they warned. … read full article
Why I stopped being a good girl
Women can no longer afford to sit out the gender wars
From UnHerd (UK)
By Hadley Freeman
Feb 20, 2022
I was always a good girl, by which I mean a people pleaser, because that is what being a good girl is. I enjoyed the benefits that such a personality brings (straight As at school, a close relationship with my parents, a decent job) and endured the usual downsides (teenage anorexia, frequent bouts of insomnia, lifelong anxiety). I had what a therapist later described as “total conflict avoidance”, which is a therapy way of saying I would rather eat my hair than argue with someone.
For example, when I was 10, I wore a Santa jumper to school. “You can’t wear Santa, you’re Jewish! Do you believe Jesus was born on Christmas?” a girl in my class said to me. I didn’t really know what she was talking about, but I knew what she wanted me to say, so I said it: “Yes, Jesus was born on Christmas.” She walked away, satisfied, and I felt a little like I’d given something away, but I was mainly relieved I’d avoided an argument.
And that’s how things continued for me, until 2014, when everything changed.
I was reading the New Yorker one evening and came across an article with the headline “What is a Woman?”. It was, according to the standfirst, about “the dispute between radical feminism and transgenderism”, a subject about which I knew nothing. I read it, vaguely interested in the social shift that meant being “transgender” no longer refers to someone who has undergone a sex change operation, but is now “how someone sees themselves”, as the writer Michelle Goldberg put it. This meant, Goldberg continued, that women-only spaces were increasingly changing to women-and-transwomen spaces, even if those transwomen still had male bodies — and to query this risked accusations of bigotry.
What really interested me was how quickly institutions were falling into line with this new ideology: venues cancelled talks if a radical feminist was on the bill; all-female bands pulled out of women-only festivals for fear of looking transphobic. How strange, I thought, that those with authority capitulate to the obviously misogynistic demands of a few extreme voices. Oh well, that’s just America — obviously it will never happen in the UK. … read full article
All Roads Lead to WPATH
The global trans health lobby group WPATH lies at the centre of a vast scientific fraud. Last week it revealed its true colours.
From Malcolm’s Newsletter (UK)
By Malcolm Richard Clark
September 25, 2022
How did a bizarre theory on the fringes of 1950s sexology become the most cherished conviction of contemporary “progressive” politics? How did it become respectable to suggest two year olds can be transgender, 12 year olds need their puberty blocked and tomboy girls might just want to bind their breasts?
In the giant gender identity swindle no organisation has played a more important role than the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. It sounds so respectable doesn’t it? In truth, WPATH is a mafia finishing school for bad science. Its members include charlatans, hucksters and the odd bare-faced liar. And those are the nice guys. WPATH is the medieval papacy for pronoun people.
The unstated role of WPATH is to take in the sort of shoddy papers that gave us the Dutch Protocol, full of unsupportable logic, dodgy data, bad statistical practice and unrepeatable experiments, and then cite them as evidence in its regularly updated Standards of Care (or SOC) which have gained an almost unimpeachable status, being constantly referenced for instance by the NHS. … read full article
By Any Other Name
The story of my transition and detransition.
From prude posting (USA)
By Helena
Feb 19, 2022
My name is Helena, and as of this writing I’m a 23-year-old woman who, as a teenager, believed I was transgender. In the years since detransitioning (stopping testosterone treatment and no longer seeing myself as transgender), I’ve become interested in exploring why, in the last decade, nearly every English-speaking country has seen a meteoric rise in adolescents believing they are transgender and pursuing cosmetic medical and surgical interventions. Here, I’d like to go over how and why I came to see myself as transgender, the process of transitioning, and the events leading up to and following my detransition.
The short version of my detransition story for those who want the bare details is that when I was fifteen, I was introduced to gender ideology on Tumblr and began to call myself nonbinary. Over the next few years, I would continue to go deeper and deeper down the trans identity rabbit hole, and by the time I was eighteen, I saw myself as a “trans man”, otherwise known as “FtM”. Shortly after my eighteenth birthday, I made an appointment at a Planned Parenthood to begin a testosterone regimen. At my first appointment, I was prescribed testosterone, and I would remain on this regimen for a year and a half. It had an extremely negative effect on my mental health, and I finally admitted what a disaster it had been when I was 19, sometime around February or March 2018. When the disillusionment fully set in, I stopped the testosterone treatment and began the process of getting my life back on track. It has not been easy, and the whole experience seriously derailed my life in ways I could never have foreseen when I was that fifteen-year-old kid playing with pronouns on Tumblr.
But what leads a girl with no history of discomfort with stereotypical “girl” toys and clothes, or even the slightest desire to be a boy in childhood, to want to be a “man” through hormonal injections as she approached adulthood? In a vacuum, such a profound confusion leading to such drastic measures sounds like it should be rare and a sign of some sort of severe mental disturbance. Was I a fluke? Was I some kind of idiot who mistakenly believed I was trans because I’m crazy or just downright irresponsible? … read full article (and SUBSCRIBE to prude posting)
US - Big Pharma, Big Tech, and Synthetic Sex Identities
(Speech given at Hillsdale College July 2022)
From Jennifer’s Newsletter
By Jennifer Bilek
September 18, 2022
Hi everyone, thank you for being here, and special thanks to Douglas Jeffrey and Matt Bell for inviting me to Hillsdale College to speak.
I hope to clarify what’s happening in the name of transgenderism — why it’s happening and who’s profiting from it.
I began researching this issue because of my alarm at the censorship experienced by those trying to critique it. That was nearly a decade ago. What has emerged for me is a clear indication that we’re being manipulated and groomed to accept radical changes to human evolution engineered by those at the highest echelons of society invested in the biotech, pharmaceutical, technological, and financial industries. … read full article
Helena’s essay was my entry into all things gender critical when my daughter first revealed her transmasc identity and mused upon one day taking “just hormones and stuff.” The essay continues to be the top piece of writing that describes my daughter and one that I hope to share with her when the time it right. ❤️
A great compilation. Thank you.