219 Comments

At 2 years old, Jazz did not experience gender dysphoria, Jazz’s parents did.

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They're not creating a vagina by inverting a penis, anymore than a surgeon is creating a younger person by performing a facelift. At best it's a facsimile, at worst it's a disaster--the necessity for follow up surgeries is very high, from 40-60%, with as noted, limited function. Of course, a child doesn't understand what is at risk when they are 2, or 4 or 11. As Abigail has written elsewhere, some of these adolescent girls having breast amputated & taking testosterone haven't had a first kiss.

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I've always believed doctors who have the hubris to perform these surgeries are modern-day Frankensteins. Now, offering confused pre-pubescent children life-altering hormone treatments, I feel they are more like Mengele.

As a post-menopausal woman who has been through both puberty and menopause, I know intimately that hormones do not just affect secondary sexual characteristics - they change your personality. These doctors have NO idea what the long-term affects are of these experimental hormonal treatments. This article touches on some possible detrimental outcomes, but it's just the tip of the iceberg. It's horrifying.

Just because you are technically able to produce some result from this or that plastic surgery, this or that experimental hormonal protocol - doesn't mean you should take that unknown path and pat yourself on the back. You are dealing with human beings - not guinea pigs. Mind-numbing hubris.

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I’d like to thank these physicians for speaking out. I have a couple of issues with the current epidemic of non-cis/binary identification.

1-What other psychological conditions are treated surgically?

I can really only think of lobotomies and those have a ‘glorious’ history that may actually look better than our current physicians will in 50 years. Deep brain stimulation is relatively new and not nearly as commonly performed. Also, what is the malpractice risk of the physicians/surgeons when these kids realize they were treated with permanent sterilization for a temporary dysphoria? Even those that are happy with their transition essentially become wards of the medical establishment. No wonder so many doctors see transgender medicine as a growth field. But I can totally see hundreds of juries awarding plaintiffs vast sums for premature medical/surgical interventions before psychological treatment options were adequately attempted.

2-Recent surveys report up to 20-20% of teens are identifying as something other than cis & straight. Can someone explain an evolutionary advantage that would lead to 20% of a population taking itself out of the gene pool?

The 1000x rise in gender dysphoria over the last 20 years suggests to me a social phenomenon. Which takes the medical malpractice beyond surgically treating minors with a temporary psychological dysphoria (in most cases) to treating a social phenomenon with permanently sterilizing major surgery.

Some European health systems have started to realize this and restrain their cavalier physicians. Hopefully, through a combination of legal risk and education we can do the same in the US before more harm is done.

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I am gay and 65. I was an effeminate child, and still have a few mannerisms. I never was dissatisfied being male.

I see what is happening today and it horrifies me. What would have happened to me had I been an effeminate child today? Would I have been told by teachers, psychologists that I was really a girl and should change my body?

I understand that effeminate male children can be targets for suggestions from authority figures about eventual transitioning. And parents can be purposely kept out of what's going on with their children.

Just frightening.

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At some point someone has to point out the emperor's naked arse. I don't know how this "transitioning" nonsense ever got out of the starting gate.

There is no transition, any more than there is a "gender assigned at birth." Nonsense. First, it is sex, not gender. Gender is a language construct; people belong to a sex unless they are among the fortunately-rare individuals who have a chromosomal abnormality such as XXY, XYY, XO, etc. Those patients are called "intersex" and may have ambiguous genitalia and can receive benefit from surgery.

Patients who have the normal XX or XY chromosomal pattern are, respectively, female and male. This pattern is not "assigned at birth;" it is DETERMINED by biology at the moment of conception nine months earlier, and cutting off cranks, making an outie from an innie or vice versa does nothing to change the blueprint that still resides in every nucleated cell in the body. Is that person a "trans?" Trans what, for God's sake? No he/she is most certainly not. If he was a man, now he is a postoperative man and nothing more. If a woman, she is still a woman - a genitally-mutilated woman, but a woman nonetheless.

If we acknowledge the first jot or tittle of this foolishness, then we are just fooling ourselves. Some things are actually known. Sex is one of the ones about which we are pretty sure.

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In the early 80s anorexia nervosa was something that seemed to come out of nowhere and seemed to take the world by surprise. "Why all of a sudden are there lots of young girls starving themselves to death?" many people asked. Years later many experts came to believe this was a social contagion. It seemed to me the "trend" of anorexia nervosa seemed to peter out over time. What concerns me with gender dysphoria is instead of giving young girls the type of support they need there really seems to be full on support of their dysphoria including questionable medical intervention. This would be like supporting a young girls eating disorder instead of getting her the help she needs.

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Rats running from a sinking ship

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This is a deeply tragic situation for the people described. I have seen as a physician, colleagues who have drunk the cool-aid. The contention and division around this reminds me of the recovered memory debacle of the 80's, which likewise destroyed or damaged many lives and families. First do no harm should guide us. That there can't be reasoned evidence-based discussion without efforts to cancel people out is an indictment on our society and aspects of my profession.

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Someday this procedure will be illegal, and discredited as inhumane. It'll go the way of lobotomies. This is not medicine; this is satanism.

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The saddest (and truly most frightening) aspect of all of this is that parents are held hostage by medical professionals to the threat of suicide.

I can’t even imagine…..

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Every doctor who did this type of stuff to a minor, especially without parental permission (which happens), should be locked up for the rest of their lives. And throw away the fucking key. Just another example of the devastation wrought by progressivism.

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We're in the middle of the largest medical experiment on CHILDREN because we have a society bent on this extremism and it's scary! When the rate of teenage girl's saying they're boy's increases a 1000% come on people something is going on....when a political party is encouraging and threatening doctors to prescribe hormones to 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 year old children something is clearly wrong. If we're not listening to doctors who are questioning this then we're NOT FOLLOWING THE SCIENCE! ....

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In 2009, in the 12-18 age group, there were 24 natal boys and 15 natal girls presenting at GIDS Tavistock.

In 2016 there were 426 natal boys and 1071 natal girls in the same age group. )de Graaf et al 2018.) That is, the number of boys went up by a factor of 17 and the number of girls by a factor of 71.

The article notes that the boy/girl ratio has changed, but it is also true that the numbers have gone up by an insane amount. Again, 17x as many boys and 71x as many girls in the uk, just between 2009 and 2016. There is a crazy rise in both boys and girls. Both boys and girls are showing up in huge numbers compared to earlier, and getting drugs quickly, even those who try to get psychological evaluations can end up with an evaluator who is a "yes-man" who doesn't evaluate at all.

Lonely, traumatized, etc., kids can lock on this, that is what some report later when they detransition. They see all these happy videos and get all this encouragement online. Examples are in Littman's great exploratory paper trying to say what she found (and for those who criticize ROGD, check out Cantor's great response about it at sexology today, earlier this year, "CAAPS, ROGD, and the science neglected" ).

Back to boys and girls: it isn't clear whether boys or girls are more likely to detransition, no one knows how many have detransitioned, no one is keeping track of outcomes. Regret after starting hormones or getting surgery seems on average to be anywhere between 4 and 9 years, depending on the protocol for transitioning (affirm or not) and how regret is measured.

I'm glad these doctors are speaking up, but they need to start collecting the data on outcomes. If someone has done 2000 of these surgeries on MTF, where are they now? 5 years later? 10 years later? 15 years later?

Do either of these doctors have follow up on their patients from 10 years ago, to find out how they are doing? All of them? (Sometimes studies quote low regret rates, but it's because they didn't include everyone when they surveyed to check regret, see D'Angelo et al, 2018.) Many people have euphoria a few years later (the only time the Dutch in their study which everyone quotes, from 2014, evaluated), so the study really has to be long enough.

Also, as far as benefit, it seems that long term there isn't on average a benefit to surgery or hormones in general, according to a Yale/Karolinska study (which first tried to say there was benefit, but then was corrected). No one knows who might actually get over gender dysphoria without medical intervention, and who will have intervention and still have gender dysphoria. They don't know. And these children and young people are having their sex organs cut up, off, taken out, based on this "evidence".

The way to be careful isn't only to do evaluations, it is to do follow up. Maybe, like Sweden's Karolinska, restrict these interventions unless they are part of studies, or be super super careful like Finland which is restricting under 26 I think. Check out segm.org/news to find out more.

I'm so glad they spoke up but there is so much more that needs to be known.

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Thank you, Abigail (and Bari) for publishing these prominent doctors' comments on the sloppiness and rushed nature of the current standard medical approach to teenagers with gender dysphoria. I would love to have every doctor treating such teens read this article! If anyone has any ideas about how laypeople can help get the word out (besides sharing on social media), please share them.

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At the top of the Wikipedia page for the Hippocratic Oath, it says, "Not to be confused with Hypocrisy." Hmmm.

Speaking of hypocrisy, thanks NYT for rejecting that op-ed. It's disgusting how much the Paper of Record caters to the Religion of Elite Opinion.

Also, although I'm sure I would disagree with these doctors on some issues, and even though they seem like part of the problem in some respects, I still have to commend them for going on the record against the Trans Orthodoxy in the current climate. Takes some courage.

Abigail, keep crushing it. Carefully reported truth is a beautiful thing.

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