Censorship and Transgender Identification

Recently a large store chain banned a book by author/journalist Abigail Shrier dealing with the sudden spike in anorexia, particularly among teenage girls.  This sad diagnosis, wherein the sufferer often genuinely perceives themselves to be grossly overweight, leads to all sorts of harmful self-diagnosis and self-treatment with often severe long-term consequences.  For raising questions about a psychiatric condition defining an objectively defined mind-body disconnect, the author has been scourged on social media, given the dreaded label of “controversial,” and had her book yanked from shelves. Why?

Because of course Shrier wasn’t writing about THAT mind-body disconnect, but about the protected, celebrated one insidiously referred to as “transgenderism.”  Every few months I get suspended from Twitter for stating that “all transgenderism is mental illness,” which it clearly is.  That sort of intolerance based on honesty and objective observation cannot be tolerated.

The author of Irreversible Damage:  The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters took pains to answer a query, “Except that I didn’t write about ‘the trans thing.’ I wrote specifically about the sudden, severe spike in transgender identification among adolescent girls. I fully support medical transition for mature adults.”  So, the author is clearly not off on some ideological or prudish tear.  She actually accepts the lunacy of chemical and surgical mutilation in order to overcome a psychiatric condition.  And yet still they came for her.

Read this paragraph: “Between 2016 and 2017, the number of females seeking gender surgery quadrupled in the United States. Thousands of teen girls across the Western world are not only self-diagnosing with a real dysphoric condition they likely do not have; in many cases, they are obtaining hormones and surgeries following the most cursory diagnostic processes. Schoolteachers, therapists, doctors, surgeons, and medical-accreditation organizations are all rubber-stamping these transitions, often out of fear that doing otherwise will be reported as a sign of “transphobia”—despite growing evidence that most young people who present as trans will eventually desist, and so these interventions will do more harm than good.”

So why are “doctors, surgeons, and medical-accreditation organizations” going along with this?  Where went our purported love of evidence and the scientific method?  Medical schools and idiot-fests like the AAFP are starting to seriously indoctrinate the cause of transgenderism, and like this author, anyone skeptical of this “science” will be at increasing risk for punishment.  A profession once proud to examine different hypotheses has now become a herd creature, banning medications, behaviors, and actual independent thoughts, while promoting faux “diagnoses,” and anyone coloring outside the lines will be called something-or-other-phobic, be publicly attacked, or even have their livelihood threatened.  Yes, this has happened throughout history, and both Galileo and Dr. Lister might have something to say about 2020. 

While I obviously disagree with the author on the larger question, she is to be admired for an honest inquiry into an unsettling development.  Along the way she has been temporarily banned both by Amazon and Target, even as both of those organizations have actively promoted the celebration of teen transgenderism as some sort of circular logic good that need only express its unidirectional compassion to be validated.  Spotify has attempted to block very popular podcasts that have hosted her. 

Shrier points out the problem is not necessarily a growing recognition of actual genes on X chromosomes going askew, but that of social contagion.  “Unless you want trouble, do not challenge the narrative of unquestioning ‘affirmation’ for every child who claims to be trans—no matter the age, context, or lack of responsible medical oversight provided to the family.”  And what of that “responsible” medical oversight?  How many FP’s or pediatricians who assist in the permanent alteration of a child’s self-image, and later their body, do so with any specialized training or experience?  A weekend course or a couple of articles from the AAFP makes the practitioner no more capable of dealing with this core-shattering conflict than does a weekend-long CME boondoggle in Tahoe prepare them to perform stat c-sections.  Where are the skeptics in medicine, not just in the trenches, but in positions of leadership and media credibility?  I know, stop laughing, it was a rhetorical question. 

And Voila’! the author brings me full circle with “a 2018 paper by Brown University public health researcher Lisa Littman, which hypothesized that the sudden uptick in transgender identification among teen girls might be a maladaptive coping mechanism similar to an eating disorder.”  Didn’t I always know it?

But enough self-congratulation, back to Shrier: “I want to be clear about something. I don’t believe that I’ve been harmed by these suppression efforts….

But there is a victim here—the public. A network of activists and their journalistic enablers have largely succeeded in suppressing a real discussion of the over-diagnosis of gender dysphoria among vulnerable girls…

This is what censorship looks like in 21st-century America. It isn’t the government sending police to your home. It’s Silicon Valley oligopolists implementing blackouts and appeasing social-justice mobs, while sending disfavored ideas down memory holes. And the forces of censorship are winning.”  If you think that she isn’t describing the AMA and its lackeys, to be used as cover by state medical boards to sanction the non-compliant, then you are a fool.

Physicians are increasingly abdicating their responsibility to stand against this censorship on behalf of their patients, and of their own self-respect.  I think – to not put too fine a point on it – that all efforts to promote, normalize, and celebrate “transgenderism” are destructive, lazy, narcissistic bullshit that are the absolute opposite of compassion toward those who need it more than most.    

And maybe you think I’m wrong.  Fine.  The larger point here is that the medical community should not be afraid to argue it out, and should not promote unproven ideas based on the fashionable winds.  When I think of our profession’s embrace not of knowledge, but of our own professional social contagion, it gives me the urge to make myself vomit. 

Get our awesome newsletter by signing up here. It’s FREE!!! And we don’t share your email with anyone.