My child was castrated at 23 (I had no idea), but when I met his gender affirming counselor when he was 21, and I was trashed to no end, I felt sick. After one or 2 appts, she had sent him to an endocrinologist. I had no idea. The article is spot on.
Hell YES. Why are people like us able to state the obvious, yet no one pays attention and the bullies who smear and smother our voices are believed to be they have magic power to put people is a foggy trance. Greta piece. PROVE IT.
This! So tired of therapy “professionals” using the fear tactic of if you don’t go along with the lie, they will kill themselves. If they transition, they are physically killing their bodies. That’s the deception.
Yes, indeed, "Prove it!" What is the test for "trans" and prove that the "treatments" help people. Instead it is willy nilly experimentation on humans.
WaPo: "I co-wrote the anonymous HHS report on pediatric gender medicine
The hostile reaction to our work shows why we needed to do it in the first place."
By Alex Byrne - professor of philosophy at MIT.
"The review describes how the medicalized “gender affirming care” approach to treating pediatric gender distress, endorsed by the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, rests on very weak evidence. Puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones compromise fertility and may cause lifelong sexual dysfunction (among other adverse effects); surgeries such as mastectomies remove healthy tissue and carry known risks of complications. Medical procedures always have downsides, but in this case no reliable research indicates that these treatments are beneficial to minors’ mental health.
One of the most important chapters provides an ethical analysis, arguing that pediatric medical transition is ethically inappropriate because of its unfavorable risk/benefit profile. We agree with the health authorities in Sweden, who reached the same conclusion in 2022. The argument is quite simple — “medical ethics 101,” as one of my colleagues put it — and does not rely on contested claims about consent or regret, which is how the ethical debate is often framed.
After surveying all the evidence, and applying widely accepted principles of medical ethics, we found that medical transition for minors is not empirically or ethically justified."
...
"Why is the United States, as Cass has observed, “out of date” on treatment for gender distress in young people? One reason is our fragmented health care system: more centralized systems in Europe and Britain prioritize cost-effectiveness, which requires careful evaluation of the evidence of medical benefit. Centralization also makes it easier to establish national treatment guidelines. Another reason is the stark division in the U.S. along political party lines. Adding to the mix is a problem not confined to this country: many adults in the room were driven to prudent silence by aggressive activists. “There are few other areas of healthcare,” Cass wrote in her foreword, “where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media, and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behaviour.”
The price of speaking out no doubt contributed to the collapse of medical safeguarding in the United States. A more subtle influence is the language used by proponents of pediatric medical transition, which is euphemistic and often misleading. “Gender-affirming top surgery” sounds entirely positive, and papers over the salient fact that the breasts of physically healthy teenagers are removed. Patients who undergo irreversible surgery and later regret it are said to have “dynamic desires for gender-affirming medical interventions.” The usual words to indicate a young patient’s sex are disallowed: female children are “individuals assigned female at birth” or “trans boys,” and are never simply “girls.” This has the Orwellian effect of making plain truths impossible to state."
...
"The review is a sober examination of what by any standards are drastic medical interventions for physically healthy minors. It deserves to be read by people of all political leanings. Whether its early critics bothered to do so is unclear.
Mere hours after publication, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Susan Kressly, claimed that the review was undermined by reliance on “a narrow set of data.” A glance at the evidence synthesis (or even just the separate appendix) by anyone familiar with evidence-based medicine would show that this complaint is preposterous. The hypocrisy is blatant: the AAP’s policy statement for the treatment of gender-dysphoric youth is unsupported by its own citations.
Equally baseless was the statement issued by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health the day after the review’s publication, saying it “misrepresents existing research.” If it does, why not clinch the case with some examples? Yet none were provided."
...
"There is much to admire about modern health care, but it has taken some gravely wrong turns, from lobotomies to the pathologization of homosexuality and the opioid epidemic. More wrong turns are inevitable. What we should do is promote a culture which makes it easier to turn back.
Such a culture is animated by the scientific spirit — a willingness to question assumptions, to seek new evidence, and to resist pressure to conform from our in-group. That is exactly what has been missing from the debate over youth gender medicine, and we liberals must take some blame. The more liberals who can rise above tribal loyalties and publicly dissent, the better."
Great bravado, but today if you’re in a blue state, before you could finish your challenge to them they would be cutting you off and then reporting you to social services for abuse. And you would be in real danger of losing custody of your kid.
Therapists are mandated reporters, and are accorded a tremendous amount of power in that process, without any training on how to use that power responsibly.
And they’ve been trained, explicitly, to be woke activists in their work.
They will not hesitate to use it to punish you.
I know that from personal experience unfortunately.
Really, what you need to be doing instead of challenging your therapist, is getting a new one. There are resources listing therapists who know that the gender stuff is nonsense. Seek those out.
The proof is right in front of us and we do NOT accept that our daughter is a boy. I don’t believe so and neither does her dad. We don’t have to talk to the therapists or to the doctor and tell us that we ‘lost’ a daughter just like what that her former counselor told me. That counselor is delusional and out-of-line. I could’ve told her that but I was shocked and dumbfounded when she said that and my daughter was in the room so I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t want to get her more depressed and anxious.
Spot on Cookie. Although my daughter is transitioning as a 30 year old adult it will never be accepted by her dad & I. I was at my wonderful doctor's office the other day having a meltdown when she suggested a way I might be able to cope with the situation. It was basically that after therapy & over time I would come to accept my daughter as a boy. Suffice to say that she was put in her place & I walked out with strong meds for depression!
I've not spoken to my daughter for over 18 months & I don't expect I will ever because I refuse to go along with the demands of the death cult!
I am also the parent of a trans identified kid, and I do not support the gender affirming model. But, I would like to play devils advocate.
How can a mental health professional “prove” that someone has major depressive disorder? Or “prove” someone has schizophrenia? There are no laboratory studies to “prove” any of these diagnoses. But most of us would accept treatment for these disorders.
The difference is that they don't think trans ID is a disorder, they think it's real and valid.
They play the diagnosis code game, because that is how they get paid by the insurance provider. But that's a separate thing, in their minds.
So specifically what the challenge to them would be, is
1) Prove that it's valid, that it's not a delusion;
2) Prove that affirmation and medicalization objectively improves mental health outcomes.
They can do neither, but they won't admit that, rather they'll tell you you have a problem and if you defy them on that they'll report you to social services.
Brilliantly written! This needs to be the mantra of all parents moving forward. This needs to be the war cry for the parents who are facing this, have faced this and will face this. We analyze every single other disorder until we are blue in the face but we are supposed to take this just because they say so? No more - scream it from the mountaintops so parents, enablers, and the medical community can hear it loud and clear - PROVE IT!!
Yes, Prove It! Great essay and very powerful. This trans-cult blindsided most of us and I wish we had had the courage to say those words: "PROVE IT" and then stand our ground. Too many of us were terrified and shocked when our child said those devastating words "I am trans" so we relied on doctors for help and guidance. We have all been duped, tricked, and conned by people in authority that we once trusted. Looking back, I wish I had done more, said more, fought harder. I tried to talk to my nephew and asked him to tell me what "trans" meant and how he knew he was "trans" but he hung up on me. Why didn't I write to him, send him a letter, a card, emails or even call him back? I was too afraid of pushing him down the rabbit hole further, so I did nothing. Once my sister told me that the doctor they went to for help and guidance told them in front of their son something along the lines of "would you rather have a live daughter or a dead son?" I knew that nothing good was going to come from this trans gender nightmare, and I was right. Your essay is spot on, and we all should have pushed back harder in the very beginning of this nonsense to all the authorities who suddenly knew what was better for our child than we did. Perhaps we could have made a difference by fighting together in masses. I was so caught off guard that "transgender" could even exist in the 21st century, that anyone would even buy into its ideology, especially doctors, therapists, counselors, teachers, coaches, surgeons, and nurses were supporting the MTF and FTM options as if it were possible! What? How? I am still so angry. PROVE IT!
My question has always been why aren’t we doing blood tests to measure hormone levels in these individuals or chromosomal testing to establish a baseline? I also find it curious that many FTM especially those on the autism spectrum seem also to have symptoms of PCOS.
Scream in their face “Prove it Now” but first of all avoid any psychologist or Psychiatrist who specializes in gender nonsense … I am so sick of these frauds! These people go to college and then make their own interrogations about your loved one! NO. Don’t go to them unless they are a Catholic or Christian based and not gender affirming in any way! This is a spiritual battle! This is the demon roving around the internet seeking souls to ruin! Take cell phones away from kids- go on a long vacation - do anything but let them think they were born in the wrong body by some “doctor”! People put way too much trust in doctors of all kinds. Heal this yourselves thru God and his teachings. Read Theology of the Body. Do anything but trust these doctors!
I'd like to add some wisdom gained by Cori/Corinna Cohn
June 2020:
“For 30 Years, I've Tried to Become a Woman. Here’s What I Learned Along the Way
The mirror doesn’t lie.”
https://quillette.com/2020/06/22/for-30-years-ive-tried-to-become-a-woman-heres-what-i-learned-along-the-way/
September 2022:
"The medical leash of hormone replacement therapy
Children who are medically transitioned become permanent medical patients."
https://corinnacohn.substack.com/p/the-medical-leash-of-hormone-replacement
Currently:
(“based TERF and Tranny,” Nina Paley and Corinna Cohn)
https://heterodorx.substack.com/
My child was castrated at 23 (I had no idea), but when I met his gender affirming counselor when he was 21, and I was trashed to no end, I felt sick. After one or 2 appts, she had sent him to an endocrinologist. I had no idea. The article is spot on.
Put that on a bumpersticker:
PROVE IT
Hell YES. Why are people like us able to state the obvious, yet no one pays attention and the bullies who smear and smother our voices are believed to be they have magic power to put people is a foggy trance. Greta piece. PROVE IT.
This! So tired of therapy “professionals” using the fear tactic of if you don’t go along with the lie, they will kill themselves. If they transition, they are physically killing their bodies. That’s the deception.
Exactly, people need to try offense instead of defense for a change. Make them prove what they are trying to manipulate, they cannot.
Yes, indeed, "Prove it!" What is the test for "trans" and prove that the "treatments" help people. Instead it is willy nilly experimentation on humans.
WaPo: "I co-wrote the anonymous HHS report on pediatric gender medicine
The hostile reaction to our work shows why we needed to do it in the first place."
By Alex Byrne - professor of philosophy at MIT.
"The review describes how the medicalized “gender affirming care” approach to treating pediatric gender distress, endorsed by the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, rests on very weak evidence. Puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones compromise fertility and may cause lifelong sexual dysfunction (among other adverse effects); surgeries such as mastectomies remove healthy tissue and carry known risks of complications. Medical procedures always have downsides, but in this case no reliable research indicates that these treatments are beneficial to minors’ mental health.
One of the most important chapters provides an ethical analysis, arguing that pediatric medical transition is ethically inappropriate because of its unfavorable risk/benefit profile. We agree with the health authorities in Sweden, who reached the same conclusion in 2022. The argument is quite simple — “medical ethics 101,” as one of my colleagues put it — and does not rely on contested claims about consent or regret, which is how the ethical debate is often framed.
After surveying all the evidence, and applying widely accepted principles of medical ethics, we found that medical transition for minors is not empirically or ethically justified."
...
"Why is the United States, as Cass has observed, “out of date” on treatment for gender distress in young people? One reason is our fragmented health care system: more centralized systems in Europe and Britain prioritize cost-effectiveness, which requires careful evaluation of the evidence of medical benefit. Centralization also makes it easier to establish national treatment guidelines. Another reason is the stark division in the U.S. along political party lines. Adding to the mix is a problem not confined to this country: many adults in the room were driven to prudent silence by aggressive activists. “There are few other areas of healthcare,” Cass wrote in her foreword, “where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media, and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behaviour.”
The price of speaking out no doubt contributed to the collapse of medical safeguarding in the United States. A more subtle influence is the language used by proponents of pediatric medical transition, which is euphemistic and often misleading. “Gender-affirming top surgery” sounds entirely positive, and papers over the salient fact that the breasts of physically healthy teenagers are removed. Patients who undergo irreversible surgery and later regret it are said to have “dynamic desires for gender-affirming medical interventions.” The usual words to indicate a young patient’s sex are disallowed: female children are “individuals assigned female at birth” or “trans boys,” and are never simply “girls.” This has the Orwellian effect of making plain truths impossible to state."
...
"The review is a sober examination of what by any standards are drastic medical interventions for physically healthy minors. It deserves to be read by people of all political leanings. Whether its early critics bothered to do so is unclear.
Mere hours after publication, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Susan Kressly, claimed that the review was undermined by reliance on “a narrow set of data.” A glance at the evidence synthesis (or even just the separate appendix) by anyone familiar with evidence-based medicine would show that this complaint is preposterous. The hypocrisy is blatant: the AAP’s policy statement for the treatment of gender-dysphoric youth is unsupported by its own citations.
Equally baseless was the statement issued by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health the day after the review’s publication, saying it “misrepresents existing research.” If it does, why not clinch the case with some examples? Yet none were provided."
...
"There is much to admire about modern health care, but it has taken some gravely wrong turns, from lobotomies to the pathologization of homosexuality and the opioid epidemic. More wrong turns are inevitable. What we should do is promote a culture which makes it easier to turn back.
Such a culture is animated by the scientific spirit — a willingness to question assumptions, to seek new evidence, and to resist pressure to conform from our in-group. That is exactly what has been missing from the debate over youth gender medicine, and we liberals must take some blame. The more liberals who can rise above tribal loyalties and publicly dissent, the better."
https://archive.ph/2O6oo#selection-1769.0-1787.375
Great bravado, but today if you’re in a blue state, before you could finish your challenge to them they would be cutting you off and then reporting you to social services for abuse. And you would be in real danger of losing custody of your kid.
Therapists are mandated reporters, and are accorded a tremendous amount of power in that process, without any training on how to use that power responsibly.
And they’ve been trained, explicitly, to be woke activists in their work.
They will not hesitate to use it to punish you.
I know that from personal experience unfortunately.
Really, what you need to be doing instead of challenging your therapist, is getting a new one. There are resources listing therapists who know that the gender stuff is nonsense. Seek those out.
The proof is right in front of us and we do NOT accept that our daughter is a boy. I don’t believe so and neither does her dad. We don’t have to talk to the therapists or to the doctor and tell us that we ‘lost’ a daughter just like what that her former counselor told me. That counselor is delusional and out-of-line. I could’ve told her that but I was shocked and dumbfounded when she said that and my daughter was in the room so I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t want to get her more depressed and anxious.
Spot on Cookie. Although my daughter is transitioning as a 30 year old adult it will never be accepted by her dad & I. I was at my wonderful doctor's office the other day having a meltdown when she suggested a way I might be able to cope with the situation. It was basically that after therapy & over time I would come to accept my daughter as a boy. Suffice to say that she was put in her place & I walked out with strong meds for depression!
I've not spoken to my daughter for over 18 months & I don't expect I will ever because I refuse to go along with the demands of the death cult!
I am also the parent of a trans identified kid, and I do not support the gender affirming model. But, I would like to play devils advocate.
How can a mental health professional “prove” that someone has major depressive disorder? Or “prove” someone has schizophrenia? There are no laboratory studies to “prove” any of these diagnoses. But most of us would accept treatment for these disorders.
CA mom.
The things that can be proven is the irreversible damage that is done if the trans person decides to take medication and/or have surgeries.
That is proof that is not provided to the parent and/or child or adult when they choose this path.
The difference is that they don't think trans ID is a disorder, they think it's real and valid.
They play the diagnosis code game, because that is how they get paid by the insurance provider. But that's a separate thing, in their minds.
So specifically what the challenge to them would be, is
1) Prove that it's valid, that it's not a delusion;
2) Prove that affirmation and medicalization objectively improves mental health outcomes.
They can do neither, but they won't admit that, rather they'll tell you you have a problem and if you defy them on that they'll report you to social services.
Brilliantly written! This needs to be the mantra of all parents moving forward. This needs to be the war cry for the parents who are facing this, have faced this and will face this. We analyze every single other disorder until we are blue in the face but we are supposed to take this just because they say so? No more - scream it from the mountaintops so parents, enablers, and the medical community can hear it loud and clear - PROVE IT!!
Excellent points!
Welcome to medicine of the absurd for the 21st Century!
Yes, Prove It! Great essay and very powerful. This trans-cult blindsided most of us and I wish we had had the courage to say those words: "PROVE IT" and then stand our ground. Too many of us were terrified and shocked when our child said those devastating words "I am trans" so we relied on doctors for help and guidance. We have all been duped, tricked, and conned by people in authority that we once trusted. Looking back, I wish I had done more, said more, fought harder. I tried to talk to my nephew and asked him to tell me what "trans" meant and how he knew he was "trans" but he hung up on me. Why didn't I write to him, send him a letter, a card, emails or even call him back? I was too afraid of pushing him down the rabbit hole further, so I did nothing. Once my sister told me that the doctor they went to for help and guidance told them in front of their son something along the lines of "would you rather have a live daughter or a dead son?" I knew that nothing good was going to come from this trans gender nightmare, and I was right. Your essay is spot on, and we all should have pushed back harder in the very beginning of this nonsense to all the authorities who suddenly knew what was better for our child than we did. Perhaps we could have made a difference by fighting together in masses. I was so caught off guard that "transgender" could even exist in the 21st century, that anyone would even buy into its ideology, especially doctors, therapists, counselors, teachers, coaches, surgeons, and nurses were supporting the MTF and FTM options as if it were possible! What? How? I am still so angry. PROVE IT!
My question has always been why aren’t we doing blood tests to measure hormone levels in these individuals or chromosomal testing to establish a baseline? I also find it curious that many FTM especially those on the autism spectrum seem also to have symptoms of PCOS.
Because the cult will not be questioned & the harms it does are permanent & required to reach it's aims!
Scream in their face “Prove it Now” but first of all avoid any psychologist or Psychiatrist who specializes in gender nonsense … I am so sick of these frauds! These people go to college and then make their own interrogations about your loved one! NO. Don’t go to them unless they are a Catholic or Christian based and not gender affirming in any way! This is a spiritual battle! This is the demon roving around the internet seeking souls to ruin! Take cell phones away from kids- go on a long vacation - do anything but let them think they were born in the wrong body by some “doctor”! People put way too much trust in doctors of all kinds. Heal this yourselves thru God and his teachings. Read Theology of the Body. Do anything but trust these doctors!
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. YES.