The lack of formal protocols
At The Free Press (founded by Bari Weiss) we get a long piece by a gender apostate on why she has transitioned to apostasy.
I am a 42-year-old St. Louis native, a queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders. My worldview has deeply shaped my career. I have spent my professional life providing counseling to vulnerable populations: children in foster care, sexual minorities, the poor.
So, not just your average social media “activist” but someone who does the gritty hard work. For several years she worked with HIV-positive teenagers and young adults.
Many of them were trans or otherwise gender nonconforming, and I could relate: Through childhood and adolescence, I did a lot of gender questioning myself. I’m now married to a trans man, and together we are raising my two biological children from a previous marriage and three foster children we hope to adopt.
So, not a “terf” even if you think that word names something real.
All that led me to a job in 2018 as a case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, which had been established a year earlier.
The center’s working assumption was that the earlier you treat kids with gender dysphoria, the more anguish you can prevent later on. This premise was shared by the center’s doctors and therapists. Given their expertise, I assumed that abundant evidence backed this consensus.
That might make sense if “treat kids” meant something less drastic than what it has come to mean. Tragically for such kids, it doesn’t.
I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there. By the time I departed, I was certain that the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to “do no harm.” Instead, we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care.
So she’s talking about it, despite knowing how radioactive it all is.
Soon after my arrival at the Transgender Center, I was struck by the lack of formal protocols for treatment. The center’s physician co-directors were essentially the sole authority.
Which is odd and disturbing, because being trans isn’t medical.
During Jamie Reed’s time there, the proportion of girls showing up with transness skyrocketed.
The girls who came to us had many comorbidities: depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, obesity. Many were diagnosed with autism, or had autism-like symptoms. A report last year on a British pediatric transgender center found that about one-third of the patients referred there were on the autism spectrum.
Frequently, our patients declared they had disorders that no one believed they had. We had patients who said they had Tourette syndrome (but they didn’t); that they had tic disorders (but they didn’t); that they had multiple personalities (but they didn’t).
The doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion. They even acknowledged that suicide has an element of social contagion. But when I said the clusters of girls streaming into our service looked as if their gender issues might be a manifestation of social contagion, the doctors said gender identity reflected something innate.
How did the doctors know that? How could they know that?
To be continued.
And of course, publishing this on Bari Weiss’ site will generate the usual cries of right-wing this and right-wing that, even though I’m not sure if she is actually right wing, or maybe libertarian? I haven’t followed her much.
That becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The trans activists bully and harass anyone who publishes things that suggest something different than the trans ideology, so the left-wing press won’t take such articles. People are forced to the less mainstream, or to the right-wing press. Then the activists can scream about how they are part of a right-wing conspiracy. (Of course, with Bari Weiss, they shouldn’t be able to lump her with Christian conservatives, but has that ever stopped them before?)
@iknklast,
Indeed. But I hope that the author’s expressed progressive and “pro-trans” cred can help to offset that. As much as it annoys me that the author calls herself “queer,” in this case I do think it might help to disarm the kinds of readers who can only ever see this issue through an us-versus-them lens. In much the same way I think liberal, reform-oriented Muslims can reach more conservative Muslims by remaining Muslim-identified rather than by publicly stating they’ve abandoned the faith altogether, even though in my heart of hearts I do think it’d be best if they’d just put their bloody Quran back on the shelf for good.
Exactly.
Iknklast, that’s the quandary of objecting to trans ideology. Most mainstream media won’t touch the issue except in the most affirming way. I read this article this morning, and even though I don’t subscribe to The Free Press, the preview version is extensive. While Weiss does favor right sided articles, including vaxx scare stories, The Free Press, does also include articles that don’t match her ideological bent.
The doctors in this one clinic in Missouri are doing what Cass has written in the preliminary report on Tavistock. The professionals who are supposed to be the watchdogs, such as professional medical and psychological professional organizations are giving a pass to hold the treatments of meds and surgeries, at least, until rigorous science is done.
Our institutions are deliberately failing in their responsibilities to these kids who don’t know how to discern sex and gender. These kids are at the age where they take the Tide Pod Challenge, or the Cinnamon Spoonful challenge, and pediatricians say they can consent to sterilization and the permanent liss of breast function?
I think there can only be two explanations for it. The first is something that Jennifer Bilek focuses on, and that is the tremendous amount of money and political pressure from billionaire transhumanists to make sex irrelevant in favor of gender identity. I used to think she was a whack conspiracy theorist, but now I’m not so sure.
The other is the subconscious recognition that the radical feminists are right, that the only way for women to achieve equal footing is to destroy the limitations of gender roles. But rather than allow that, patriarchy is in a backlash mode and declaring that if the child favors the gender expression of the other sex, then they really are the other sex. This fixes gendercas natural and dominant over sex.
I may wrong. Further research needed. What I do know is that professional skepticism is needed now more than ever and the ones we need to break their silence, won’t.
I’ve recently started trying to come up with a scenario where Genderism and the belief in medicalizing “trans kids” was originally produced, promoted, and popularized not by the Progressive Left, but by the Conservative Right. Can it be done?
It’s hard because there are so many contributing elements — such as critical theory in academics and unsupervised teenagers on Tumblr — which don’t fit easily into the conservative mindset. But there are I think other elements that either do or could have done.
Consider a hypothetical revisionist history where, back in the early 2000s or so:
1.) A few respected and prominent conservative pundits start floating the idea that homosexuality is not so much a sin as a sign that the essential natures of women and men were born into the wrong bodies. A gay man is really a straight woman; a lesbian is really a straight man. A simple explanation, with a simple solution.
2.) Transexuals and people with gender dysphoria are used as examples supporting this — and the conservative community begins to support them . They argue for more and better health care that helps align the true inner soul to the body. They invite them to speak, join, their communities, and love bomb some of them into doing so, seeing the trans-identified as proof that “our souls are real, men and women have different natures, and it matters.”
3.) The heartfelt emphasis on “believe the children” popular during the Satanic Panic is continued, with the pure and honest declarations of childhood you can depend on now having to do with an inner gender needing acknowledgment instead of nursery school teachers sacrificing goats.
4.) The vulnerable, marginalized status of trans people is emphasized by people intent on showing God’s infinite love towards them, and the stories of Born Again as the Correct Gender join and sometimes turn into the stories of Born Again in Christ.
5.) Pushback from the scientific, skeptical, rational community involves ridiculing the homophobia, gendered souls, and Save the Children “roots” of the belief in transgenderism.
7.) The religious demonize those secular liberalswho scoff at the existence of Gender Identity and/or try to prevent trans kids from expressing their God-Given nature. Eventually, they also “demonize” them metaphorically.
6.) The media begins to frame the issue as Conservative vs Liberal, and then starts to report it as Republican vs Democrat.
7.) Both sides get caught up in rationalizing why the Other Side is wrong.
Might it have gone that way? I don’t know. I don’t think it would have achieved anywhere near the popularity it has. But I can conceive of this scenario. Conservatives who insist the excesses of trans doctrine are the natural consequence of uniquely Progressive thinking are mistaken. It could have been them.
From what little I know, this sounds like what has happened in Iran, hardly a bastion of progressive thought. Given the choice of “affirming” surgery or death, the appeal of the former will tend to increase.
[…] a comment by Sastra on The lack of formal […]
I’m almost surprised that gender identity ideology didn’t take root here on the right instead of the left. After all, that’s how it happened in Iran, when in 1987 the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a Fatwa condoning transsexualism and paving the way for state-sponsored genital reconstruction surgeries and hormone treatments, presumably because he saw it as a convenient solution to the problem of homosexuality.
The early North American and European crossdressing groups were deeply conservative and explicitly homophobic, and went to great lengths to distance themselves from the gay rights movement.
Many prominent feminist writers in the 1970s and ’80s, clearly progressive women, were appalled at the shallow, sexist, objectifying behaviour that transsexuals put on. For example, Nora Ephron’s 1974 Esquire review of Jan Morris’s transition memoir, Conundrum:
Even now, the ultra-conservative Christian American right are starting to embrace trans ideology. (e.g., Pat Robertson, who famously declared that Covid was God’s punishment for gay marriage, saying that a transgender child is perfectly acceptable and part of God’s plan; child actor Kai Shappley’s Southern Baptist mother telling any outlet that’ll listen that a trans identity is God’s approved program to get out of having a gay son.)
Surprisingly, it’s the fact that so many conservatives have actually softened and come around to support homosexual rights that lately they’re the ones bringing up all the problems with the extreme gender ideology agenda being pushed in schools and state legislatures across the US. But from as early as the 1970s up until about 10 years ago, it was progressive outlets like the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the Guardian that were publishing pieces that were sympathetic to transsexuals’ distress but which openly questioned and challenged the underlying beliefs that transsexuals held:
https://artymorty.substack.com/p/before-the-media-went-mad
I think the only reason this ideology ended up hitching its ride with the left is because it became enmeshed in identity politics. It’s not a medical condition anymore, it’s a sacred identity. And for some reason progressive politics sees everything in terms of self-declared identities now. And my guess is that it’s done so because identity politics is the easiest way for middle-class people to reconcile their relative comfort and privilege with their supposed championship of the causes of marginalized people: they simply identify into such groups.
Way back in my school days, a friend and I began to develop a stammer. Whenever we spent time together, our speech got worse; when we spent time elsewhere, it improved. Our stammers were reinforcing each other, a learned speech pattern where both of us were teacher and student.
We got over it.
Yes, but those were the ones who grew into OLD feminists! They were second wave! They thought feminism was only for women! Exclusive!
Yeah. There was a time when nearly everyone understood that women’s rights were for women. That accounts for a lot of the backlash.
iknklast,
For what it’s worth, Weiss describes herself as “liberal” and a “left-leaning centrist”.
In other words, according to gender identity enthusiasts, a literal nazi.
In college I had a class where the person who taught it had a minor issue where his voice would get hoarse and crack when he used certain inflections. I found it to be a bit annoying and so was horrified when my voice started doing the exact same thing. Crazy how the brain works, “helpfully” giving me a speaking style that I didn’t care for. Luckily it didn’t last.
I have a friend who has been dealing with almost constant tinnitus for several years. It came on suddenly, with no apparent cause, and has caused him a lot of grief as he’s tried many different ways of treating it, all unsuccessful. Then recently he causally said he sometimes wonders if he gave himself tinnitus by enrolling in a tinnitus study. I asked for details, and it turned out he saw a solicitation for the study, and it wanted people with and without tinnitus, so, to try to be helpful, he enrolled and did surveys and tests for a few months. Shortly after the study ended, he developed tinnitus himself. He’s pretty sure it’s just a coincidence, but I wonder.