Watershed Declaration From WPATH Therapists On Trans Healthcare - Washington Post Nov 24, 2021
An Important Step In Confronting A Health Crises And Its Causes
This is a guest post by Shannon B. Douglas.
On November 25th the Washington Post published a watershed article about the widespread failures of medical practitioners to provide competent care to trans-identified children in the US and Canada. The article by Dr Laura Edwards-Leeper and Dr. Erica Anderson entitled, “The Mental Health Establishment is Failing Trans Kids” addresses the exploding numbers of Trans-Identified children and teens in recent years, and voiced concern for the “flood of referrals to mental health providers and gender medical clinics, (which when) combined with a political climate that sees the treatment of each individual patient as a litmus test of social tolerance, is spurring many providers into sloppy, dangerous care.”
The authors of the article both worked with the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH), a thinly disguised group of activists and sad toadies, which provides standards of care to doctors and therapists working with transgender people around the world. We may see these authors some day as conscientious whistleblowers, bravely speaking or as something else.
In a narrative reversal that walks a careful line to avoid admitting WPATH complicity with widespread medical abuse of children, the authors at long last point to alarming problems in healthcare practices that are harming children on a wide scale. I believe that this is partly to maintain some degree of credibility and influence in the face of mounting credible evidence and research being gathered by organizations critical of WPATH and their practices. It comes suspiciously on the heels of the first Global Conference on Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) hosted by Genspect, an organization formed largely to shed light on the toxicities of gender ideology and provide a healthier framework.
One set of problems the authors show us arises from the exploding numbers of children seeking care and the disturbing lack of competence in practitioners providing it. Other practitioners simply dismiss the (paltry) guidance provided by WPATH and act on their own beliefs.
Alarm bells have been ringing for years around issues related to the skyrocketing numbers of children presenting with Gender Dysphoria. The authors specifically acknowledge that a significant barrier to open discussion is the justifiable fear that professionals have of being labeled as transphobes, or bigots, or anti-trans by activists. Dr. Kenneth Zucker, one of the leading researchers and clinical experts in the world, who was head of Gender Identity Services at the Toronto Center for Addictions and Mental Health was bullied out of his role in 2015 by activists who claimed he was practicing conversion therapy. Zucker was unceremoniously fired but was later awarded more than $500,000 following an investigation. This is far from isolated and it’s clear that widespread abuse and bullying chills open discourse. It replaces scientific competence and the free exchange of ideas with ideological assertions, fabricated medical realities and illegitimate power-claims.
Gender Dysphoria is a mental condition where one suffers debilitating anxiety and psychological distress related to the feeling that one is the wrong gender. Authors of the WaPo article point to a doubling of trans-identified children over five years. Well-documented increases range from a 2,000% increase in a Canadian study, to 4,400% increase over ten years in the UK, and a 100x increase in young women since 2007 in a 2021 college survey. The scope and scale of this phenomenon has never been seen in any culture, nor in any era. We have never in human history had medical technology to allow us to attempt to medically transition boys to become girls and girls to become boys. It cannot possibly be claimed that questioning this is transphobic, or that medical transition is somehow a human right – but trans activists vehemently deny the reality of biological sex, so we’re not operating in any rational sphere when we engage with them.
Medical interventions for trans-identified children can begin with puberty-blockers which are being used off-label, repurposed from toxic cancer-treatments and drugs used to chemically castrate sex offenders. Activist doctors falsely claim these blockers are a fully reversible pause button, but recently released studies tell us that more than 98% of kids who are prescribed them go on to take cross-sex hormones. The negative developmental outcomes are barely understood but are known already to negatively impact brain and cognitive development.
Testosterone or “T” in its application to treat gender dysphoria is also used off-label. There are no peer-reviewed studies or clinical trials, nor follow-up studies on any of these drugs in their use to change children’s sex characteristics. Neither are there any long-term studies as to the effectiveness of these treatments for gender dysphoria. By definition: in the absence of scientific validation, medical interventions for children with gender dysphoria are experimental.
What is laid bare in the Washington Post article is a disturbing set of incoherent practices leading to negative outcomes: Across the developed world doctors are performing medical experiments on children and this warrants a serious open discussion. Abusive activists and bullies must be put in their place while sober, thoughtful, and qualified medical experts ground their analysis in science and the standards of proven medical practice.
We also need to examine the larger educational, cultural and political frameworks contributing to the skyrocketing numbers of trans-identified kids. Ontario teachers using approved curriculum materials created by trans activists are teaching that gender identity is a social or cultural construction. Grade one students are being taught that there is no such thing as boys and girls in biology-denying lessons. Gender pronouns are a standard conversation in schools at all levels, where children are asked by their teachers to state their names and preferred pronouns, and this presupposes and reinforces the gender-constructionist world-view further confusing children.
Kids are then seeking answers online. Unsupervised by parents they’re being drawn into online groups where the most common answer to the question, “How do I know if I’m Trans?” is, “If you’re asking the question, it probably means you are.”
Compounding this in Ontario, thanks to the 2015 “Anti-Conversion Therapy Bill” co opted by Trans Activists and enacted without qualified medical or scientific evidence, we have a widely held belief in practice that anything other than affirming a child who is questioning their gender identity is illegal. It is now institutionally entrenched that no-one is allowed to question cross-gender identification in a child. Teachers, school counsellors, doctors, and psychologists all feel bound, or feel empowered by moral righteousness to affirm gender identity.
This would largely be fine if the outcomes were that girls felt more free to be tomboys if that was their nature, and if it meant that boys felt more free to be emotive and feminine if they felt so inclined, but children are being funneled to irreversible medical interventions.
Growing numbers of reports from all over Canada tell us that teachers are supporting students who are changing names, clothing and preferred pronouns without the knowledge of parents. Teachers often assess whether a child’s home is “Safe” for them as a trans person and where they determine that a child’s home might be “Unsafe” they are keeping secrets from parents.
Today our governments, our schools and our medical system has largely decided that they have moral authority to educate, indoctrinate and perform medical experiments on children and no-one is allowed to question it. The last time that happened we had a residential school system.
Parents of residential school kids cried out for generations that the state, in it’s claims to be doing what it believed was best for kids, was in fact committing crimes and atrocities. We are seeing eerily similar parallels today and up until these therapists from WPATH pointed to the horrors happening to our children, and to the bullying and intimidation that meets all questioning, the only people asking questions about this have faced brutal attacks that destroy careers and livelihoods – but the tide is turning and with these voices finally speaking up from WPATH it is time to speak up.
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