All of the words they use are a form of satanic inversion, meaning that what they say is the complete opposite of what is really happening. "Gender affirming" is not gender affirming, it is gender bending. If we want to be real about what is happening to these children, then we need to call it what it really is, mutilation. If someone hears the words "gender mutilation" they won't be so quick to jump on the bandwagon.
Bravo! You wrote: “Gender affirming care” is Frankenstein medicine. I could not agree with you more! What is happening with this T-cult is certainly NOT "care" at all. Granted Dr. Frankenstein was clearly a mad scientist, and he was feared in his community, and he used unethical practices to create a "human" from whatever means he could obtain. He was playing "god". What is happening today seems mad! Removing healthy body parts is unethical. Giving cross-sex hormones, which have lasting and severe side effects, is the opposite of care. You made valid points, and I think your essay is excellent. Our doctors and surgeons are acting like Dr. Frankenstein - making decisions that are harmful not helpful to innocent children without a care in the world. They are playing "god" and tricking our children into thinking that they can become the opposite sex. Even the mad Dr. Frankenstein did not try to do that! Gender Affirming Care is a lie!! It needs to be exposed, and I think we all need to stop calling it that! It is Gender Affirming malpractice!
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Frankenstein only use parts from dead bodies? Gender doctors mutilate otherwise healthy bodies, so they’re more Mengele (or the ghouls in Japan’s Unit 731) than Frankenstein
Good point. Dr. Frankenstein had ethics, apparently, and used dead bodies to experiment on. These doctors use living humans. Plus Dr. Frankenstein was rejected by the medical community. Now the medical community embraces such butchery.
And let's not forget that the monster created by Frankenstein demanded a mate to be made for him. Similarly, trans identified people are always trying to recruit new members, often "transing" their partners. Who else would have them?
I think I had a card game when I was a kid. There were all these crazy animal heads, torsos and leg cards. You could make all these silly combinations. It kind of reminds of this will all the nuttiness of the so called "gender(not)medicine".
This feels like people trying to opt out of being human. Nobody has NO sex organs. We are collectively giving God the finger, which, historically, has proven to be a really bad idea.
Our Pharma-Medical Industrial Complex will do anything for money.
Eisenhower saw this sort of thing coming:
"Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite."
Maybe. I am more confident that it will become part of American sex education along with the Gender Bread person. It will be endorsed by the teachers unions for sure.
I have just started to refer to it as Gender Conforming Care, because that is what it is. And that highlights the disconnect when people say they support gender nonconforming folks by promoting gender conforming care. The illogic is right there. The pointlessness and the inhumanity
This is ONE HUNDRED PERCENT accurate. "You don't fit in to what society says is a 'man' or 'woman'? That's not acceptable. We are going to slice and dice you and pump you full of hormones so you will conform to what you SHOULD look like." HOW is this accepted? Don't people see the hypocrisy? What happened to "Free To Be You and Me?"
I’m going to be a little bit of a dissenting voice here, but I want to make a point about how kids view these things. I have one child who identifies as trans but is currently having doubts. I also work as an aide at a couple local schools.
Kids *love* the sense that they are being edgy, defying adult norms, and nowadays they love to feel like they are an oppressed minority, that has much more cachet than just being a boring white suburban kid. That is absolutely part of the appeal of trans for some kids. I had been wondering how kids would be reacting this fall, how prevalent trans identification would be. Well, school has been in a week now, and I’d say so far it’s regaining popularity compared to last fall, kind of having a resurgeance. Still early, and I’m curious to watch how this develops as the year unrolls. But (without getting into politics, don’t want to debate that, just describing how kids see things), I think the sense that the current administration is mean and cruel to trans people is prevalent, and for certain types of emotionally vulnerable kids that makes the identity much, much more appealing. I’m not sure using names like Frankenstein medicine really helps all this when it comes to teenagers at least. To them it just confirms the idea that opposition to pediatric transition is emotional and hysterical, esp because when they first start hormones the changes are subtle, so terms like Frankenstein seem way overdone to them. And it makes transition seem edgy and likely to upset the adults, which some kids love. And it also kind of identifies trans people with outcasts, which really draws some kids in.
I completely sympathize with all the concerns here. There are long term harms to medical transition, and a lot is unknown about it so we are experimenting on kids. But I think our most effective approach by far is just to emphasize over and over the basic facts and keep pointing to the much more cautious approach Europe takes, and emphasize that the US is now largely an outlier. Again, I’m making this point thinking mostly about how kids react and how I see it working out in schools. I deeply understand why parents see things this way. But I don’t think this kind of messaging helps either persuade more liberal adults or helps with kids at all - for kids, mostly the opposite.
I don't think we as adults should alter our language to try to appease kids. We were kids once too. The adults around me certainly did not alter their language and beliefs so as to not upset me or other kids. That's just life. If they want to be "edgy" fine. But they don't get to be edgy in a way that is harmful to themselves or others without adult intervention to stop that. That is the responsibility of adults, most importantly their parents. And in no way do they get to police adults' language. They need to learn their place. And its not in charge. That's for adults.
I hear you about the desire of kids to be edgy, but the AAP and the rogue plastic surgeons need to be stopped. And, young people get the signal that the adult professional world thinks medical "transition" is fine and almost normal now. Parents are just dinosaurs. Heck, the adult professional world needs to get the message that this is not OK and they can get in professional trouble for it. If Frankenstein medicine were not available the kids would just mess around with hair and clothing like they always have. Maybe there would be some sort of new Goth that they could move on from one day.
My daughter probably did want to be more edgy in high school but she would never have "done drugs". She's begun "T" as an "adult". She took up with the ideology in high school and I also thought she might be moving away from it at times. I have seen many girls around her sort of "slow walk" things - don't make waves and worry mom & dad too much, then Whammo a few years later. I hope that is not your case.
I didn't think it was helpful that when my daughter was in high school & the people there went along with names and pronouns and acted like it was no big deal to take direction from her and not parents. In the past we understood that adults/parents understood the world a little better than kids who have no life experience. Do we really think we should cater to their whims?
Also, sudden personality changes in your child could mean there is something going on. Is the child being messed with sexually, for instance? When "gender identity" is mentioned no one looks further.
So, sure, when you want to persuade liberal co-workers then talking about "cautious approaches" in another place is fine. But, the language proposed in the article would work better in the adult medical and legal world that "Gender Affirming Care" which is very gaslighting and makes it all sound like a picnic to those not involved personally. We need all language to be reality based, IMO. The reality is not pretty.
I knew this comment wd get pushback, and that’s fine. People can choose how they want to frame this. But I stand my ground on this point. It’s not a matter of adults choosing their language to appease kids. It’s a question of whether our aim is to effect change or to vent our emotions. Those two goals are not the same, and not always compatible. Heaven knows, we do need to vent emotions and PITT is the forum for it. But if the recommendation is to use a certain type of language out in the larger world, this is going to backfire. It’s self-defeating.
Every successful social movement for change has exercised a certain self-discipline, realism, and smarts about how to put out their message. People in these movements didn’t always say what they felt like saying; they said things that would work. If we’re going to succeed, ours is no exception. There are many, many straightforward, factual ways to point out the abuses of the gender industry. To take just one example, Dr. Johanna Olsen-Kennedy saying if a girl wants breasts again after they’re cut off, she can just get them. That is obviously a false thing no doctor should say - you can get two bags of silicon, but you cannot get back the complex systems of glands, ducts, and nerves that is the human breast, not to mention you’ll never have the same appearance. This is not something that should need to be explained to a doctor, but apparently it is. We can make those specific points in a very factual way, and it is more effective and more clear than name calling like “Frankenstein.” The problem with Frankenstein type language is that, without detailing the specifics of why gender medicine is abusive, it acts purely to amp up emotion. This absolutely makes transition more appealing to the kinds of emotionally vulnerable kids who might be drawn to transition. It’s an own-goal.
I understand the impulse to use terms like “Frankstein medicine.” And if parents want to use it among ourselves, fine. But my concern about language used in the larger public is that we’re thinking more about what feels good to us in the moment, and less about what’s tactically smart. The tactically smart way is to get out the facts, over and over, and avoid ratcheting up the kind of culture war language that makes people pull more and more into their tribes.
I do see what you are saying, but language is important here. Tactically, I think using any of the gender ideology lingo guarantees that you lose the debate, or are just ignored. How can you be against "....care"? "Frankenstein Medicine" does capture the reality that these treatments are unethical, unnatural, experimental, and don't work, causing all sorts of harm. I also like Frankenstein Medicine because it's an accusation against the doctors prescribing these treatments that they are like Dr. Frankenstein, doing things they shouldn't be doing. But just about all of the suggestions listed by other commenters would be better than "gender affirming care".
I couldn’t agree more that language is important, and that’s why I think we should avoid things like “Frankenstein medicine”. It’s very worth looking at social change movements that have been successful in the past, from the civil rights movement to Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The language these orgs used in their public-facing comments is strikingly restrained by social media standards today. And it’s not that they didn’t call out wrongs! They made the brutalities of racism and the numbers of people killed by drunk drivers very, very clear. But what they did was stick to facts rather than name calling. They explained or showed why people should agree with them. I think we should be very explicit about what people like JOK are doing, tell the stories in precise, graphic detail. Also keep talking about European studies showing how weak the evidence base is that transition helps most people long term, talk about the long term harms of hormones and how much we don’t know, and be very graphic about how there is no real assessment in the US, how orgs like Planned Parenthood are just selling hormones like chewing gum.
The problem with relying on terms like Frankenstein medicine is it does none of those things. It’s name-calling which immediately lets TRAs and others depict us as emotional not rational, it has the suggestion of cruelty (that kids who have transitioned are some kind of monster) which our opponents will gleefully jump on and use, it will make hormones if anything more appealing to edgy kids, it raises the temperature and amps up the culture wars, and it fails completely to give specifics or facts abt why people might come around to our pov.
I think one of the worst things about social media is that it encourages this kind of culture war name-calling which gets likes online in the moment but does nothing to persuade. We need to use social media of course, but I think should take lessons from older activist movements that succeeded in actually changing things, often against powerful opposition. Less of the kind of name-calling that amps culture wars online, more disciplined, fact-based messaging that gets people to see why they should rethink things.
You're right in that drawing from the success of past activist movements with rational arguments that stick to the facts seems like the logical approach to make people reconsider their support of GAC. It just seems like in today's environment, that isn't working, or at least it's going really, really slowly. Maybe 30 years ago the Cass Review would have stopped medicalization everywhere, or at least paused it, but as we all know, that didn't happen, at least not in the US. Would a more neutral term for GAC like "sex-trait modification" (mentioned by another commenter) be better? Probably anything other than GAC would be attacked by the TRA crowd, since they attack anything, factual or not, that doesn't align with their ideology. "Recovered Memory Syndrome" was renamed to "False Memory Syndrome" when Recovered Memory Syndrome was discredited. Someday Gender Affirming Care will have a new name..
Yep, I take yr point. I do think that a big effort to get out basic facts wd still pay off, though I get how hard that is in this era. But living as I do in a blue area, it’s amazing how many people don’t even know for example that most European countries, including very liberal countries like Finland, have looked at solid systematic reviews and found that the evidence transition helps is weak and often not worth the harms, so they generally have much more conservative regulation of this than we do. The diff is their medical systems are better regulated and less for profit than ours, and so they end up with better safeguarding of their children than we have in the U.S.. These are big, public facts that should be part of the conversation, and yet I talk to people all the time who have no clue about this at all. They assume the only people opposed to “trans medicine” are hyper conservative politicians in the US. To so many of these folks, you use a term like “Frankenstein medicine” and you just sound like Donald Trump; trust me, they’re not gonna listen. It just sounds like name-calling to them. You talk abt the much more conservative regulation in Europe and you can see people taken aback, beginning to rethink.
I think that is fine if people pursue different strategies that work for them personally. I don't myself view naming a thing for what it is as being emotional at all. I think that sanitized language has carried the bad actors a very long way. I think most people not personally involved don't get it.
Sure, I take your point that some of the emotionally vulnerable young will like the Frankenstein aspect. In fact, years ago now I read about being a Frankenstein as a positive/authentic/almost ethereal thing on a pro-transing site.
But, I am for peeling back the mask that there is anything good about "medical transition". Dr. Johanna Olsen-Kennedy made that comment at a conference somewhere around 2017 and 4thwavenow.com exposed it. Yet, she continued to practice.
Maybe you could show some of your colleagues stuff like this:
yes, this is part of the problem: how things are defined. Gender USED to be used in place of SEX. Then GENDER came to be used as a social construct. Gender was the thing that meant stereotypes, often with negative consequences (e.g., men aren't nurturing; women don't drive trucks, etc.) Then GENDER came to be used as what you feel like.
When there is so much ambiguity and disagreement about the meaning of words, ideologies can thrive. IF you define a woman as anyone who feels like one, then yes, anyone can be a woman.
I call it “loss-of-function elective cosmetic chemical and surgical sex trait modification.” It’s the loss of function that makes this ghastly cosmetic sexual mutilation so egregiously unethical. No other elective cosmetic surgical procedure endorses loss of function as an acceptable outcome. And the chemical side effects of blocking the function of the pituitary gland is messing with the brain, akin to lobotomy. Cross-sex hormone administration is purely cosmetic, and the negative, health-diminishing aesthetic side effects are the point of the prescription, which is like prescribing cadmium tablets to make someone’s skin more rosy.
I knew a father of a young adult daughter who was characterizing the girl’s elective double mastectomy as akin to a “nose job.” I said, “Only if the surgeon removed the entire nose, leaving a hole in the middle of the face, and eradicated all sense of taste and smell.”
As soon as we allowed the murder of babies to be known as “reproductive health,” or any other euphemism, we opened Pandora’s box. They can and will call mutilation of children “care.”
Delusional mutilation... this is so evil and when they are adults parents have no voice... When you know your child is suffering with an acute mental disorder and is also suffering at the hands of evil so called medicine. We have no voice or rights...
I don’t understand why I keep getting appalled, confused, and surprised. Even though so many years have passed and so much information has been revealed, I can’t wrap my head around the fact that there are still doctors who continue participating in this madness, continuing to mutilate kids and young adults. Why the fuck is this still happening?!
https://eppc.org/publication/terminology-and-definition-replacing-gender-affirming-carewith-sex-rejecting-procedures/
“Gender affirming care” is Frankenstein medicine...absolutely true.
Also we should start calling it Gender Conversion Therapy! Bunch of demons!! The anger I have to all of this is great!
I love this idea! Maybe "gender conversion care." They hate the word "conversion" so they'd be forced to grapple with what this actually is.
Exactly
Excellent piece and totally agree.
Have cross posted.
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/do-not-forsake-me-oh-my-darling-part
Dusty
All of the words they use are a form of satanic inversion, meaning that what they say is the complete opposite of what is really happening. "Gender affirming" is not gender affirming, it is gender bending. If we want to be real about what is happening to these children, then we need to call it what it really is, mutilation. If someone hears the words "gender mutilation" they won't be so quick to jump on the bandwagon.
Absolutely. And remember that "transexual" was rebranded to "transgender" to make it appear acceptable to foist onto children.
Yes, completely diabolical.
Bravo! You wrote: “Gender affirming care” is Frankenstein medicine. I could not agree with you more! What is happening with this T-cult is certainly NOT "care" at all. Granted Dr. Frankenstein was clearly a mad scientist, and he was feared in his community, and he used unethical practices to create a "human" from whatever means he could obtain. He was playing "god". What is happening today seems mad! Removing healthy body parts is unethical. Giving cross-sex hormones, which have lasting and severe side effects, is the opposite of care. You made valid points, and I think your essay is excellent. Our doctors and surgeons are acting like Dr. Frankenstein - making decisions that are harmful not helpful to innocent children without a care in the world. They are playing "god" and tricking our children into thinking that they can become the opposite sex. Even the mad Dr. Frankenstein did not try to do that! Gender Affirming Care is a lie!! It needs to be exposed, and I think we all need to stop calling it that! It is Gender Affirming malpractice!
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Frankenstein only use parts from dead bodies? Gender doctors mutilate otherwise healthy bodies, so they’re more Mengele (or the ghouls in Japan’s Unit 731) than Frankenstein
Good point. Dr. Frankenstein had ethics, apparently, and used dead bodies to experiment on. These doctors use living humans. Plus Dr. Frankenstein was rejected by the medical community. Now the medical community embraces such butchery.
Very good point.
And let's not forget that the monster created by Frankenstein demanded a mate to be made for him. Similarly, trans identified people are always trying to recruit new members, often "transing" their partners. Who else would have them?
I think I had a card game when I was a kid. There were all these crazy animal heads, torsos and leg cards. You could make all these silly combinations. It kind of reminds of this will all the nuttiness of the so called "gender(not)medicine".
Yes. You made me think of nullo/smoothie:
https://queerdoc.com/nullectomy-nullification/
How is this allowed?
This feels like people trying to opt out of being human. Nobody has NO sex organs. We are collectively giving God the finger, which, historically, has proven to be a really bad idea.
Our Pharma-Medical Industrial Complex will do anything for money.
Eisenhower saw this sort of thing coming:
"Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite."
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwight-d-eisenhowers-farewell-address
It also didn't work out here:
https://www.pittparents.com/p/echoes-of-eugenics-what-the-doctors?utm_source=publication-search
Ok, I will make my own crazy, mix and match game and include nullification and as many other categories as I can think of. Now, will it sell on Etsy?
Maybe. I am more confident that it will become part of American sex education along with the Gender Bread person. It will be endorsed by the teachers unions for sure.
Bookstores will feature it.
Maybe better as a satirical cartoon then.
Yes. You could submit it as an article here. Maybe it will get shared around a little?
Ooh, I like. Thank you!
I have just started to refer to it as Gender Conforming Care, because that is what it is. And that highlights the disconnect when people say they support gender nonconforming folks by promoting gender conforming care. The illogic is right there. The pointlessness and the inhumanity
This is ONE HUNDRED PERCENT accurate. "You don't fit in to what society says is a 'man' or 'woman'? That's not acceptable. We are going to slice and dice you and pump you full of hormones so you will conform to what you SHOULD look like." HOW is this accepted? Don't people see the hypocrisy? What happened to "Free To Be You and Me?"
I’m going to be a little bit of a dissenting voice here, but I want to make a point about how kids view these things. I have one child who identifies as trans but is currently having doubts. I also work as an aide at a couple local schools.
Kids *love* the sense that they are being edgy, defying adult norms, and nowadays they love to feel like they are an oppressed minority, that has much more cachet than just being a boring white suburban kid. That is absolutely part of the appeal of trans for some kids. I had been wondering how kids would be reacting this fall, how prevalent trans identification would be. Well, school has been in a week now, and I’d say so far it’s regaining popularity compared to last fall, kind of having a resurgeance. Still early, and I’m curious to watch how this develops as the year unrolls. But (without getting into politics, don’t want to debate that, just describing how kids see things), I think the sense that the current administration is mean and cruel to trans people is prevalent, and for certain types of emotionally vulnerable kids that makes the identity much, much more appealing. I’m not sure using names like Frankenstein medicine really helps all this when it comes to teenagers at least. To them it just confirms the idea that opposition to pediatric transition is emotional and hysterical, esp because when they first start hormones the changes are subtle, so terms like Frankenstein seem way overdone to them. And it makes transition seem edgy and likely to upset the adults, which some kids love. And it also kind of identifies trans people with outcasts, which really draws some kids in.
I completely sympathize with all the concerns here. There are long term harms to medical transition, and a lot is unknown about it so we are experimenting on kids. But I think our most effective approach by far is just to emphasize over and over the basic facts and keep pointing to the much more cautious approach Europe takes, and emphasize that the US is now largely an outlier. Again, I’m making this point thinking mostly about how kids react and how I see it working out in schools. I deeply understand why parents see things this way. But I don’t think this kind of messaging helps either persuade more liberal adults or helps with kids at all - for kids, mostly the opposite.
I don't think we as adults should alter our language to try to appease kids. We were kids once too. The adults around me certainly did not alter their language and beliefs so as to not upset me or other kids. That's just life. If they want to be "edgy" fine. But they don't get to be edgy in a way that is harmful to themselves or others without adult intervention to stop that. That is the responsibility of adults, most importantly their parents. And in no way do they get to police adults' language. They need to learn their place. And its not in charge. That's for adults.
Well said, Susan Z.
I hear you about the desire of kids to be edgy, but the AAP and the rogue plastic surgeons need to be stopped. And, young people get the signal that the adult professional world thinks medical "transition" is fine and almost normal now. Parents are just dinosaurs. Heck, the adult professional world needs to get the message that this is not OK and they can get in professional trouble for it. If Frankenstein medicine were not available the kids would just mess around with hair and clothing like they always have. Maybe there would be some sort of new Goth that they could move on from one day.
My daughter probably did want to be more edgy in high school but she would never have "done drugs". She's begun "T" as an "adult". She took up with the ideology in high school and I also thought she might be moving away from it at times. I have seen many girls around her sort of "slow walk" things - don't make waves and worry mom & dad too much, then Whammo a few years later. I hope that is not your case.
I didn't think it was helpful that when my daughter was in high school & the people there went along with names and pronouns and acted like it was no big deal to take direction from her and not parents. In the past we understood that adults/parents understood the world a little better than kids who have no life experience. Do we really think we should cater to their whims?
Also, sudden personality changes in your child could mean there is something going on. Is the child being messed with sexually, for instance? When "gender identity" is mentioned no one looks further.
So, sure, when you want to persuade liberal co-workers then talking about "cautious approaches" in another place is fine. But, the language proposed in the article would work better in the adult medical and legal world that "Gender Affirming Care" which is very gaslighting and makes it all sound like a picnic to those not involved personally. We need all language to be reality based, IMO. The reality is not pretty.
I knew this comment wd get pushback, and that’s fine. People can choose how they want to frame this. But I stand my ground on this point. It’s not a matter of adults choosing their language to appease kids. It’s a question of whether our aim is to effect change or to vent our emotions. Those two goals are not the same, and not always compatible. Heaven knows, we do need to vent emotions and PITT is the forum for it. But if the recommendation is to use a certain type of language out in the larger world, this is going to backfire. It’s self-defeating.
Every successful social movement for change has exercised a certain self-discipline, realism, and smarts about how to put out their message. People in these movements didn’t always say what they felt like saying; they said things that would work. If we’re going to succeed, ours is no exception. There are many, many straightforward, factual ways to point out the abuses of the gender industry. To take just one example, Dr. Johanna Olsen-Kennedy saying if a girl wants breasts again after they’re cut off, she can just get them. That is obviously a false thing no doctor should say - you can get two bags of silicon, but you cannot get back the complex systems of glands, ducts, and nerves that is the human breast, not to mention you’ll never have the same appearance. This is not something that should need to be explained to a doctor, but apparently it is. We can make those specific points in a very factual way, and it is more effective and more clear than name calling like “Frankenstein.” The problem with Frankenstein type language is that, without detailing the specifics of why gender medicine is abusive, it acts purely to amp up emotion. This absolutely makes transition more appealing to the kinds of emotionally vulnerable kids who might be drawn to transition. It’s an own-goal.
I understand the impulse to use terms like “Frankstein medicine.” And if parents want to use it among ourselves, fine. But my concern about language used in the larger public is that we’re thinking more about what feels good to us in the moment, and less about what’s tactically smart. The tactically smart way is to get out the facts, over and over, and avoid ratcheting up the kind of culture war language that makes people pull more and more into their tribes.
I do see what you are saying, but language is important here. Tactically, I think using any of the gender ideology lingo guarantees that you lose the debate, or are just ignored. How can you be against "....care"? "Frankenstein Medicine" does capture the reality that these treatments are unethical, unnatural, experimental, and don't work, causing all sorts of harm. I also like Frankenstein Medicine because it's an accusation against the doctors prescribing these treatments that they are like Dr. Frankenstein, doing things they shouldn't be doing. But just about all of the suggestions listed by other commenters would be better than "gender affirming care".
I couldn’t agree more that language is important, and that’s why I think we should avoid things like “Frankenstein medicine”. It’s very worth looking at social change movements that have been successful in the past, from the civil rights movement to Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The language these orgs used in their public-facing comments is strikingly restrained by social media standards today. And it’s not that they didn’t call out wrongs! They made the brutalities of racism and the numbers of people killed by drunk drivers very, very clear. But what they did was stick to facts rather than name calling. They explained or showed why people should agree with them. I think we should be very explicit about what people like JOK are doing, tell the stories in precise, graphic detail. Also keep talking about European studies showing how weak the evidence base is that transition helps most people long term, talk about the long term harms of hormones and how much we don’t know, and be very graphic about how there is no real assessment in the US, how orgs like Planned Parenthood are just selling hormones like chewing gum.
The problem with relying on terms like Frankenstein medicine is it does none of those things. It’s name-calling which immediately lets TRAs and others depict us as emotional not rational, it has the suggestion of cruelty (that kids who have transitioned are some kind of monster) which our opponents will gleefully jump on and use, it will make hormones if anything more appealing to edgy kids, it raises the temperature and amps up the culture wars, and it fails completely to give specifics or facts abt why people might come around to our pov.
I think one of the worst things about social media is that it encourages this kind of culture war name-calling which gets likes online in the moment but does nothing to persuade. We need to use social media of course, but I think should take lessons from older activist movements that succeeded in actually changing things, often against powerful opposition. Less of the kind of name-calling that amps culture wars online, more disciplined, fact-based messaging that gets people to see why they should rethink things.
You're right in that drawing from the success of past activist movements with rational arguments that stick to the facts seems like the logical approach to make people reconsider their support of GAC. It just seems like in today's environment, that isn't working, or at least it's going really, really slowly. Maybe 30 years ago the Cass Review would have stopped medicalization everywhere, or at least paused it, but as we all know, that didn't happen, at least not in the US. Would a more neutral term for GAC like "sex-trait modification" (mentioned by another commenter) be better? Probably anything other than GAC would be attacked by the TRA crowd, since they attack anything, factual or not, that doesn't align with their ideology. "Recovered Memory Syndrome" was renamed to "False Memory Syndrome" when Recovered Memory Syndrome was discredited. Someday Gender Affirming Care will have a new name..
Yep, I take yr point. I do think that a big effort to get out basic facts wd still pay off, though I get how hard that is in this era. But living as I do in a blue area, it’s amazing how many people don’t even know for example that most European countries, including very liberal countries like Finland, have looked at solid systematic reviews and found that the evidence transition helps is weak and often not worth the harms, so they generally have much more conservative regulation of this than we do. The diff is their medical systems are better regulated and less for profit than ours, and so they end up with better safeguarding of their children than we have in the U.S.. These are big, public facts that should be part of the conversation, and yet I talk to people all the time who have no clue about this at all. They assume the only people opposed to “trans medicine” are hyper conservative politicians in the US. To so many of these folks, you use a term like “Frankenstein medicine” and you just sound like Donald Trump; trust me, they’re not gonna listen. It just sounds like name-calling to them. You talk abt the much more conservative regulation in Europe and you can see people taken aback, beginning to rethink.
I think that is fine if people pursue different strategies that work for them personally. I don't myself view naming a thing for what it is as being emotional at all. I think that sanitized language has carried the bad actors a very long way. I think most people not personally involved don't get it.
Sure, I take your point that some of the emotionally vulnerable young will like the Frankenstein aspect. In fact, years ago now I read about being a Frankenstein as a positive/authentic/almost ethereal thing on a pro-transing site.
But, I am for peeling back the mask that there is anything good about "medical transition". Dr. Johanna Olsen-Kennedy made that comment at a conference somewhere around 2017 and 4thwavenow.com exposed it. Yet, she continued to practice.
Maybe you could show some of your colleagues stuff like this:
https://queerdoc.com/nullectomy-nullification/ or share about Dr. Gallagher
https://lilymaynard.com/wielding-the-sidhbh-gallagher/
If they are English teachers you could ask them if they've read Mary Shelley and what do they think?
Anyway, it is Frankenstein Medicine.
Some people will not be convinced and we have to stop this stuff despite them.
yes, this is part of the problem: how things are defined. Gender USED to be used in place of SEX. Then GENDER came to be used as a social construct. Gender was the thing that meant stereotypes, often with negative consequences (e.g., men aren't nurturing; women don't drive trucks, etc.) Then GENDER came to be used as what you feel like.
When there is so much ambiguity and disagreement about the meaning of words, ideologies can thrive. IF you define a woman as anyone who feels like one, then yes, anyone can be a woman.
I call it “loss-of-function elective cosmetic chemical and surgical sex trait modification.” It’s the loss of function that makes this ghastly cosmetic sexual mutilation so egregiously unethical. No other elective cosmetic surgical procedure endorses loss of function as an acceptable outcome. And the chemical side effects of blocking the function of the pituitary gland is messing with the brain, akin to lobotomy. Cross-sex hormone administration is purely cosmetic, and the negative, health-diminishing aesthetic side effects are the point of the prescription, which is like prescribing cadmium tablets to make someone’s skin more rosy.
I knew a father of a young adult daughter who was characterizing the girl’s elective double mastectomy as akin to a “nose job.” I said, “Only if the surgeon removed the entire nose, leaving a hole in the middle of the face, and eradicated all sense of taste and smell.”
I don't think you are harsh enough. It should be referred to as "genital mutilation surgery". You know, what it is.
As soon as we allowed the murder of babies to be known as “reproductive health,” or any other euphemism, we opened Pandora’s box. They can and will call mutilation of children “care.”
That’s the bigger picture.
This article describes merely a symptom.
Delusional mutilation... this is so evil and when they are adults parents have no voice... When you know your child is suffering with an acute mental disorder and is also suffering at the hands of evil so called medicine. We have no voice or rights...
I don’t understand why I keep getting appalled, confused, and surprised. Even though so many years have passed and so much information has been revealed, I can’t wrap my head around the fact that there are still doctors who continue participating in this madness, continuing to mutilate kids and young adults. Why the fuck is this still happening?!
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