Time Magazine: Response from a parent of a trans identified youth

Time Magazine—you had me at the headline: Pediatricians Who Serve Trans Youth Face Increasing Harassment. Lifesaving Care Could Be on the Line

It was quite dramatic.  Pediatricians working with “trans” youth face harassment. The horror. Lifesaving care for “trans youth” could be on the line?  Oh my.  What is this horrific disease called “trans”?  What lifesaving care is at risk, and why would pediatricians face harassment for helping?

Upon opening the article, I see an extremely somber looking woman sitting in a dimly lit room. This concerned pediatrician looks like quite the victim here.  I wonder, what is her dilemma?  I must know, so I read on.

Oh, the issue is protestors! Those multitudes of ignorant people gathering to inform others of the “dangers” of Dr. Sequeira’s gender-affirming care. How misguided must they be to protest something so pure and good, so morally righteous!

Now I am starting to see where this hit piece is going. This article is going to elevate a Machiavellian doctor, who is causing medical harm to vulnerable children/adolescents/young adults, while vilifying these alternatively informed “protestors.”  

Time, you have not done your homework. If you take even a cursory but objective look at what is happening in so called “transgender medicine,” you will see that our country is advocating the narcissistic abuse of young people by telling them they can change their sex (oh but they call it gender identity, which is an undefinable, esoteric feeling). The medical community is concretizing a feeling and robbing a large cohort of young people of their fertility and sexual function.  

What these individuals really need is mental health services. Most kids struggling with identity issues have a variety of issues and experiences including sexual abuse, trauma, autism, OCD, ADHD.  This is widely documented through studies, and through the reports of parents, like me, who have experienced it firsthand with our trans identified children, by therapists and other non-captured medical practitioners, and by desisters and detransitioners who were once enamored by the trans ideology, but have since left the fold of believers.

The real reason that several clinics had protestors is because of the medical scandal that is unfolding right under your nose.  These protestors are the whistle blowers trying to call out the medical and psychiatric communities for doing more harm than good.  They are pointing out that the only people benefitting from this movement are Big Pharma and the Medical Industrial Complex who, through this fad of medicalizing identity, are creating lifelong medical patients reliant on their products and services.

Shame on you, Time, for not paying attention to the latest research.  It’s universally known, for those willing to research, that Finland is no longer doing medical interventions for trans identified youth.  They are offering mental health services instead, having learned of the damage caused by so-called gender affirmation treatments. The affirmative approach is ineffective in helping confused children and young people who actually need mental health support and time, undisturbed to go through their natural puberty and mind/body maturation process. They certainly don’t need activists clinicians gaslighting their reality. This is not developmentally appropriate care.

The “research” link you cite is an article by the notorious Jack Turban, who references an irrelevant and out-of-date study from the Netherlands.  This study is well known for being based on an entirely different cohort of kids than today’s teens who are suddenly adopting “trans” identities.  It also had a small sample size, a high drop out rate, and even a death resulting from necrosis after “gender affirming” surgery. Finland and Sweden have increased restrictions on medical interventions for young people. There are newer studies coming out all the time, and other countries have already adapted to promote better care, which means adequate mental health. The US is behind the times, and so is Time.

The reporter goes on to breathlessly inform us that “conservative” lawmakers have over 130 “anti-trans” bills out there.  Well that right there is misleading and disingenuous.  I have read several of those bills.  Some are actually trying to protect the integrity of girls/women’s sports in the name of equity—sex-based equity, not some intangible “trans” equity.  

This article reads more like a press release— only a small group of pediatricians provide this care? This is at best a half truth. There are hundreds of doctors, clinicians, clinics, surgeons providing transgender care throughout our country and it is a growing business, over 700 clinics in the US alone.  Let’s face it, they have the perfect business model.  Unlike Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family, the pharmaceutical companies and medical communities have devised a way to market this idea directly to impressionable children through social media and gender identity propaganda in schools.

The hyperbole in this article is amazing. For example, “threatening” mail—aka letters of concern from parents trying to protect their children/adolescents/young adults from medical harm. Dr. Sequeira perhaps has a conscience.  Seems that she has been thinking someone might actually send her anthrax so, when an odd envelope came, even though she was afraid, she bravely opened the envelope.  Time, it is outrageous that you would print this kind of rhetoric, and unfounded scare mongering about unsubstantiated threats. Sequeira is one of those clinicians profiting off of vulnerable people all in the name of “affirmation”—she’s not afraid of anthrax, she’s afraid of the truth, and the end of her gravy train and moral authority claiming when the trans house of cards comes down. A real investigative journalist wouldn’t fall for this smoke and mirrors.

Continuing with the moral panic, Time next, of course, equates gender doctors to abortion doctors.  Let’s see one is preventing an unwanted pregnancy (hopefully at a very early gestational age), and the other encourages wrong-sex hormones and genital surgeries for those who have a quasi-religious and utterly un-evidenced based feeling that their gendered soul is in the wrong human body.  

Another implication of your article, is that these gender doctors can fix this mythical problem permanently and effectively. That a penile inversion will create an actual vagina. That male can be made female, literally, and vice versa. It will be quite a surprise to the patients that this is not true. The younger people in this affirmation model may never experience an orgasm.  They will not have functioning opposite sex bodies. Any rational person with one ounce of brain power can understand this. You, Time, are spreading misinformation here and that makes you complicit. Your “reporter” is just regurgitating the same old talking points to emotionally manipulate the reader into believing these doctors are doing good work, and all these protestors and bill writers have it out for them.  No harm being committed here, folks.  Or should that be folxs?

Time, you are perpetuating the regressive idea that kids that don’t want to dress in stereotypical clothes should believe they were “assigned” the wrong “gender” at birth.  So if a kid doesn’t fit the “mold” for male or female, as defined by our society today, give them some new pronouns, cut their hair, throw them some drugs, cut off some parts and presto chango—opposite sex!  Easy peasy. Is this really what kids need from the grownups as they try to navigate the trials and tribulations of the adolescent world?  

The truth is, Time, that you are promoting and perpetuating disinformation and fear mongering.  There is no “rise in harassment”.  These are protests and a calling out on this medical scandal.  It’s called whistle blowing.  It is not anti-anything.  It is pro-health, pro-reality. And to paint this as a movement of the “right” or “conservatives” is also a lie.  I know because I am one of many liberal parents trying to push back on this toxic ideology that is confusing young people.  We are parents, both gay and straight, who are trying to get the word out, so that more people can join in the whistle blowing.

Doctors practicing this kind of medicine should lose their licenses.  They have been marketed to and sold an idea, and they’re too invested to change course now that their reputations and careers are on the line.  It’s a scheme, just like the opioid crisis.  I will not cry a river for Dr. Sequeira.  She is not the victim here, and you, Time, are not in the right for perpetuating these lies.