Little more than a pressure group
While the mainstream meeja carefully ignore the WPATH files, Malcolm Clark at The Critic underlines some items.
No organisation has played a greater role in the adoption of the pseudo-science of so-called “gender affirming healthcare” globally than the World Professional Association of Transgender Health. That’s why this week’s release of leaked discussions between some of its leading figures suggesting possible medical malpractice could prove a pivotal moment in the Gender Wars. It’s been a long time coming.
The truth is WPATH is little more than a pressure group made up of a mixture of saucer-eyed trans activists and self-professed experts in disciplines like endocrinology, psychiatry and surgery. “Experts” who just happen to pocket huge profits from the mutilation and sterilisation of deluded people who are convinced they were born in the wrong body.
Speaking of deluded people who are convinced they were born in the wrong body, I have to wonder how many of those people now become thus convinced precisely because there is such a fad for talking about and flattering and promoting deluded people who are convinced they were born in the wrong body. “Listen up kids, you too could be an influencer like Dylan Mulvaney, step right up and become a girlier girl than any of the girls you know!”
Yet by a combination of external bullying and internal feeble-mindedness, some of the world’s top medical authorities from the BMA to the American American Academy of Pediatrics have given WPATH the stamp of approval, citing its regularly updated Ethical Guidelines and Standards of Care as clinical best practice.
Once even the NHS was happy to genuflect to the organisation. No longer. The revelation that the latest version of the Standards of Care (SOC8) included a new chapter asserting that being a eunuch is a gender identity has led the NHS to distance itself from WPATH.
Ok NHS so now go the rest of the way: grasp the fact that a “gender identity” is a silly concept and not something to aspire to.
The leaked documents from WPATH’s own private message forum and a video recording of an internal panel discussion were released by the noted journalist and whistle blower Michael Shellenberger and his team at the campaign group Environmental Progress. The WPATH Files, as they’ve been dubbed, were refreshingly light on castration porn but when it came to medical ethics were almost as jaw-dropping.
Clinicians were revealed to be allowing adolescents to dictate their own treatment plans such as hormone dosage despite the fact they knew these kids had no clear goals and often changed their minds. Girls were effectively being encouraged to masculinise their bodies and boys feminise them in real-time experiments, even though cross-sex hormones have powerful effects on emotions and states of mind meaning these patients risked being trapped in a pharmaceutical maelstrom.
You have to wonder how much of this was genuine trying to help the adolescents and how much was a sly unacknowledged research program. Try it and see what happens, eh what?
That was nothing compared to the fact that some young people were diagnosed as psychotic. In one discussion clinicians considered how to gain consent for life-changing surgery from a teenager with multiple personalities. The multiple personalities could not agree. Nor could the clinicians who weighed in with suggestions. With this level of unethical behaviour perhaps it’s unsurprising WPATH doctors dismissed concerns about regret for genital surgery as “part of the journey” and promoted treatments to parents as a way to lessen the risk of their youngster’s suicide despite two recent studies in Denmark and Sweden suggesting suicide can be up to 7 times higher among those who undergo “gender affirmation surgery” than the general population.
Um. Let’s avoid the risk of suicide by doing something that makes suicide much more likely.
Yo, BBC, NY Times, New Yorker – any interest? Hello?
…Holy shit. I am definitely going to dig into those after work today.
Holms — that grabbed my attention also. Please share what you find, maybe over at the Miscellany Room.
But we’re told this “treatment” is supposed to prevent suicide. Of course this will be blamed on societal “transphobia” (and TERFs specifically) rather than the failure of “gender affirming care” to live up to its own hype, and its complete inability to change anyone’s sex.
I’ve always assumed those “transitioning” for non-erotic reasons were more suicidal anyways; wonder if that’ll be the end conclusion or if it’s more interestingly complicated.
“ You have to wonder how much of this was genuine trying to help the adolescents and how much was a sly unacknowledged research program. Try it and see what happens, eh what?”
Hmm. Now, I am not a scientist, so I might be way off here, but I thought that a research program would have an aim, hypothesis, concept of how treatments would assist and by what mechanisms, ethical approval, oversight, record keeping, analysis of results, follow up, criteria for participants, a framework for measuring successes and failures.
I’ve probably missed a lot. I feel like this is worse than a bad research program – a bad research program would have analysed the results and been shut down by now as a total failure. On the other hand, if you do this, you can go on forever, doing harm without ever acknowledging the damage you’re doing.
I found two studies which might be the ones referenced.
The Danish study:
Suicide attempts are 7.7 times and suicide mortality 3.5 times the population base rate. No doubt TRAs will spin this – my prediction being that this merely proves how pressing it is to grant full self-ID in all things and look how hostile the world is to the poor dears.
The Swedish study:
However, the significance of this finding seems to have been challenged by a later literature review, but I am too tired to really dig in at the moment.
It is also possible the Clark article referenced two entirely different papers; I wish he had given his references.