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.
The feminist and anthropologist in me still doesn’t get it. So your cultural stereotype of your gender doesn’t suit you? What ever happened to the idea of challenging stereotypes? And I’m sorry, but if you didn’t grow up being told not to be bossy or bitchy or brag about yourself, you’re not a woman of our culture in my view. And if there is a definition of woman and I’m not the one to decide, I don’t think young males should be given that authority either. Several of the ones I’ve heard interviewed seem obsessed with their looks and impractical, often sex object clothing. Privileged groups everywhere and throughout history have done a terrible job of charactarizing the oppressed.
Speaking of anthropology, don’t Native American tribes recognize “Two Spirit” people who express male and female traits in some combination?
https://www.ihs.gov/lgbt/health/twospirit/
I would suspect Native Americans are not the only people with this belief system.
Someone feels “female trapped in a male body”, or vice versa, the Natives just let the individual act in whatever way made that person feel comfortable, and the tribe was OK with it.
They didn’t feel a need to resort to surgery, not that they even had that option in years past.
Reminds me of the Twilight Sleep craze of the early 20th century. Morphine and scopolamine. Everyone demanded it, there was a National Twilight Sleep Association pressuring doctors to use it. It died in 1915 when one of the leading proponents of Twilight Sleep died under the influence of Twilight Sleep. Not even clear if the Twilight sleep had anything to do with her death,but that was hardly good publicity.
Worked in a hospital that was a medical museum I swear.They still had full leather restraints in obstetrics, left over from the days of Twilight sleep. Scopolamine and pain is not a good combination. Patients can go wild. They no longer used Twilight sleep, but they still had the leather restraints. The hospital still used rotating torniquets for heart failure. I’d only heard of rotating torniquets, never actually saw it until I went there.
I found a Schimmelbusch mask in a desk drawer, used to deliver ether You put gauze over a wire screen and drip ether on it.
It’s beautiful German stainless steel from before the war.
I use it to strain lemons.
People will look back on this phase many years from now and say “ what the hell were they thinking?”
I always say you can change your shirt but you can’t change your ‘genes’! During my career I knew three male physicians who had gender-reassignment surgery (from male to female) later in life…one after retirement. Life is hard enough, IMHO. Maybe there’s something I’m missing in not understanding these supposedly tortured souls. Maybe it’s the difficulty in finding a size-14 high heel! But to subject children to hormone therapy or surgery is another realm altogether.
Excellent! Read every word and totally agree with you.
I used to work in a pediatrics office until the physicians decided to retire early – close their practice. I seriously believe this rush to mutilate children’s bodies was one of the reasons for their withdrawal from medicine. They didn’t want to be called ‘transphobe’ if they didn’t submit.
In a liberal-to-the-point-of-self-destruction place like Austin, TX, you submit or have your reputation destroyed by the mob.