Originally a comment by As The Smoke Rises Upwards on Permits for brothels.

I claim no expertise on the subject, but my understanding is that legalizing prostitution increases trafficking of women. Once would-be johns no longer fear the legal consequences of paying for sex, demand for prostitutes soars. For some reason, however, not too many women are eager to sign up for a highly stigmatized job that will require them to have sex with an endless line of strange men who may or may not have STDs.¹ And so women are brought in from Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia to fill the gap between supply and demand.

I’ve also read that even legal prostitution—or perhaps especially legal prostitution—generates a sort of social blast zone wherever it is carried out. Women and girls who have the misfortune of living in the area are harassed and solicited for sex. This is why many localities that legalize prostitution at the same time attempt to restrict it to clearly delineated red light districts removed from residential areas and shopping districts. But if the men who are out buying sex behave like feral hogs towards even the “normal” and “good” women who happen to be walking on the street with them, then how exactly are they treating the “bad” and “dirty” women—the acceptable victims—when they’re alone together in a brothel room?

(1) Some brothels take steps to protect their “employees” (read: merchandise) from STDs, but based on what I’ve read, these measures are often very perfunctory—wouldn’t want to drive away customers, after all—and even more rigorous screening practices aren’t going to be failproof.

Amsterdam is trying to “manage” the rental of women.

In their latest effort to rein in carousing visitors, Amsterdam officials announced plans this week to tamp down disruptive behavior in the city’s Red Light District, including barring pot-smoking on the streets, reducing hours for restaurants and brothels, and tightening some alcohol restrictions.

What is a “red light district”? It’s a euphemism for an area where women are rented.

The city issues permits for brothels and sex clubs to operate. Under rules that had already been decided, brothels will only be able to stay open until 3 a.m., not the 6 a.m. closing time in place now.

So get your cash on the counter by 2:59 boys or you’ll have to wait until the next night.

Amsterdam has tried for years to address overtourism concerns, restricting some tours of the historic Red Light District before the pandemic and voting to move sex workers to an erotic center outside of the district in 2021.

An “erotic center” – that’s hilarious in a poisonous kind of way.

The Federalist (sorry) on the different tune that detransitioners hear:

After being swarmed by health providers who enabled her to medically transition as a minor, Prisha Mosley now says she’s been abandoned by the medical community as she attempts to navigate a complicated and painful detransition.

Transition is new, exciting, glam, “woke”; un-transitioning is un-all that.

Prisha has a slew of medical complications dating back to the more than five years she spent on testosterone and a double mastectomy that a plastic surgeon performed shortly after she turned 18. Many of those complications surround her endocrine system, which encompasses the hormones that regulate nearly every process in the body, from metabolism to growth and development, emotions, mood, sexual function, and sleep.

“I was hoping that if I could get my endocrine system working, I could be on less psychiatric medicine because low testosterone and estrogen will cause depression and anxiety, both of which I’m medicated for and don’t really like being medicated for,” she said.

Hmm. Makes you think, doesn’t it. Maybe it’s not such a clever idea to mess around with the endocrine system for something as intangible and mutable and in the head as “gender identity.”

Professional organizations that represent many of these providers claim to offer open, inclusive, supportive care for “transgender” and “gender diverse” individuals. That offering, it appears, doesn’t apply to individuals seeking to detransition.

It wouldn’t, though, would it. Inclusive and supportive are for trans people; those going in the other direction don’t need it and don’t deserve it. Right? They’re, like, traitors to The Cause. Affirmation is all, and what the other-directioners are doing is the opposite of affirmation.

It’s also a matter of medical knowledge.

Cat Cattinson, a woman who medically transitioned to a wrong-sex identity in her 20s before realizing it was a major mistake, said access to medical care from providers who are knowledgeable is one of the major barriers detransitioners face:

Because of the experimental nature of gender medicine, doctors know very little about the long-term effects of medical transition and even less about the health-care needs of those who detransition. Surgeries, obviously, are irreversible, but hormonal interventions can also have lasting effects requiring treatment to mitigate. Testosterone caused irreversible changes to my vocal cords, resulting in daily discomfort and pain, but most ENTs [ear, nose, and throat doctors] and other voice ‘professionals’ are not informed about how testosterone affects a female voice or how to help someone in my situation.

But she was given testosterone anyway. What the hell, right? Give it a shot and see what happens. Don’t worry about providing a path back.

Prisha doesn’t know why she’s been turned away from so many doctors and medical providers — whether it’s about money, politics, or a lack of knowledge to help. If it’s the latter, one might ask why medical professionals are allowed to put individuals, including minors, on drugs and “treatments” that they’re unable to later undo or address, should that patient change his or her mind.

One might indeed.

But they just might possibly conceivably game the system.

Transgender applicants are being offered “ethically dubious” preferential access to a university, raising fears that fraudsters could game the system to get ahead of straight-A pupils.

Dundee University includes transgender status in its widening access policy, which lowers the admissions criteria for applicants who are deemed to be disadvantaged.

In the US it’s called affirmative action (and it’s highly contested and has been since it came into being decades ago).

Preferential access, widening access, affirmative action, whatever; why would trans people need it? What trans-specific barriers to higher education do they face?

Vikki Boliver, a sociology professor who sits on the Scottish government’s access delivery group, warned that fraudsters could “game the system” by pretending to be transgender.

Her team at Durham University found no link between gender identity and poor educational attainment.

Even if no fraudsters game the system, even if all trans applicants are sincere in their belief that they’re trans, on what basis do they need preferential access?

Male reporter talks to three women about their work, fails to avoid sneering.

Lisa Mackenzie, Kath Murray and Lucy Hunter Blackburn call themselves “a policy analysis collective”. They wince slightly when they hear this description spoken out loud.

“It was the best descriptor of ourselves we could come up with,” Mackenzie says apologetically. Known collectively as Murray Blackburn Mackenzie (MBM), they have consistently provided the most cogent criticism of the Scottish government’s attempts to make it easier to change your legal gender.

In policy papers, blog posts and evidence to parliament over the past five years they have offered clarity where there was muddle. With intellectual ruthlessness they have identified key weaknesses in Sturgeon’s proposal. They have provided a line by line feminist critique of a policy which, despite a healthy majority in parliament, remains deeply unpopular with the public and deeply divisive within the SNP. Gender reform has convulsed Scottish politics and shone a harsh light on how we are governed — and the MBM trio have been operating the searchlight.

So far so good, and it continues to be good for several more paragraphs, but then…

Despite critics pointing out the risks, Scottish government ministers pushed the gender recognition law through Holyrood in December. The UK government blocked it last month, claiming a conflict with UK-wide equality legislation. A showdown at the Supreme Court now looks likely. Meanwhile, the first minister has come under fire over the case of a double rapist known as Isla Bryson who was sent to a women’s jail after claiming to be transitioning to a woman.

Public debate on this subject is shrill and moves quickly to extremes, with little scope for agreement. MBM deny they are participants in a culture war. Murray says their “emphasis on evidence and analysis is the counter to that kind of accusation”.

Sigh. He just had to go for the s-word.

I have warned the trio I will ask them deliberately provocative questions to see how they respond. In the history of equality, I say, progress came when people made room for others who had been excluded. Sometimes they made room voluntarily and sometimes because the law required it. So white people made room on the Alabama bus. Married heterosexuals made room in the register office for married homosexuals. On trans rights, were MBM saying there was no room on the bus?

It should be possible to ask provocative questions without asking stupid questions. We don’t have to “make room” for everybody on every bus. Women don’t have to “make room” for abusive men, or rapists, or murderers of women, or murderers of any kind. We can’t be “inclusive” of everyone and everything in all places and situations, and trying to do so would be “exclusive” of far more people than it would include. It’s not unjust “exclusion” for women not to want men peering at them over the wall of the toilet compartment. Men own most of the buses in the first place, and if women want to say there’s no room on this particular bus because all the seats are taken then we get to say that.

Blackburn bristles. “The privilege argument is very difficult to hear when you’re a woman,” she says before adding, “particularly from a man. I never feel privileged in contexts where I feel vulnerable to men. It’s offensive. It’s offensively wrong.”

Oh no no, it’s merely “provocative.”

Breathtaking.

Uterus transplants for transgender women will soon be possible, doctors say.

So what? It’s possible to cut people’s heads off, but it’s not desirable. Sticking a uterus in a man is not desirable. Human beings have more urgent things to do at this time.

Several teams are “actively working” to make uterus transplants for transgender women a reality, according to an article published in the medical journal Fertility and Sterility, with the first such procedure likely to happen “within the next few years, if not sooner.”

Why stop there? Why not transplant zebra legs onto humans? Why not transplant dog tails onto sharks? Why not remake The Fly?

If the anatomical challenges in transgender women can be overcome — and surgeons have said none seem insurmountable — uterus transplants would make it possible for trans women to gestate and give birth to a child.

Never mind global warming, never mind pandemics, never mind droughts and famines and wildfires, never mind poverty and exploitation and rape and genocide, let’s use our intelligence and resources making it possible for men to gestate frankenbabies.

Makes no sense.

Literally zero sense.

His new blue tick is simply a thing you buy. You pay $8 a month, it’s yours. It means nothing.

The old blue tick was a verification of identity and (at least sometimes) “notability.” It was free, and it required documentation.

How is the second “truly corrupt” and the first not corrupt?

Maybe I’m overthinking this. Maybe to him “corrupt” just means “not giving Elon Musk money.”

Here’s a thing that makes me angry.

In this video for example. You can hear people bellowing “Allahu akbar” as the boy is pulled out – that’s all you can hear them bellowing.

Allah is great because he (definitely he) allowed them to rescue one child? Why not just not do the earthquake???

It’s so Stockholm syndrome. This guy who has killed my whole family and most of the people in my city and 20 thousand and counting total – he’s great because he cut me a tiny break.

It’s not just Allah, either. I notice myself blurting “thankgod” in moments of intense relief. I’ve never been able to think of any good substitute, either – “thank fuck” is all very well but it’s kind of imprecise.

Anyway, I wish humans could get out of the habit. Gods aren’t our friends. If they were they would have clued us in about global warming at least 150 years ago.

Speaking of Trump and criminality and how he totally had no idea it’s not legal to steal an election, Mark Pomerantz was on Fresh Air a couple of days ago.

Our guest today, Mark Pomerantz, has written an insider’s account of the year he and others at the Manhattan district attorney’s office spent on a criminal investigation of Donald Trump’s finances and business practices. Pomerantz was a retired prosecutor and lawyer in December 2020 when he was invited to join then DA Cyrus Vance’s team looking into Trump. In his book, Pomerantz calls the investigation the legal equivalent of a plane crash where the principal cause was pilot error.

At the end of 2021, as District Attorney Vance approached retirement, Pomerantz felt the team had sufficient evidence to file felony charges against Trump. But the newly elected district attorney, Alvin Bragg, wasn’t ready to proceed with charges. So Pomerantz and another senior attorney resigned. Their departures made news. And Pomerantz wrote in his resignation letter that not bringing a case against Trump was a grave failure of justice.

To put it mildly.

The thing about Pomerantz is that he spent a lot of time – many many hours – looking at the [deeply boring] details of the financial fiddling, work that normally an underling would do.

DAVIES: You know, you would say at the end of the book that when others were reluctant to proceed with charges against Trump, they hadn’t gone through this process. They didn’t see, you know, what was really at work here. It took time to get into it and grasp the import of it. Let’s take an example or two of these statements and what they told us about Trump’s practices. Do you want to pick one?

POMERANTZ: Yeah. One pretty straightforward example has to do with the triplex penthouse apartment that Trump had on the top of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. In the years 2015 and 2016, the value he assigned to that apartment for financial statement purposes was $327 million. And he reached that, among other things, by saying, well, this apartment contains 30,000 square feet. And let’s put aside for the moment the price per square foot that was used, although that was inflated as well. But the notion that the apartment should be valued on the basis that it contains 30,000 square feet fell apart when it became clear the apartment doesn’t have 30,000 square feet, it has 11,000 square feet.

That’s smaller. 11 is smaller than 30.

So for financial statement purposes, the value of the apartment was tripled by simply saying it had 30,000 square feet when it didn’t. The value of the apartment was vastly overstated. Now, did Trump know that the apartment had only 11,000 square feet and not 30,000 square feet? Was he responsible for telling people that the apartment had 30,000 square feet? Well, we spoke to witnesses who heard him say, in fact, right at this time, that the apartment has 33,000 square feet, even more than the square footage that was used in the financial statements. And if the question is, does Donald Trump know the difference between a 30,000 square foot apartment and an 11,000 square foot apartment, consider the facts that it was his business to buy and sell apartments. He built the building that contained this apartment. He looked after the renovation of this apartment. He has proclaimed himself a real estate guru, and he lived in the apartment. So the notion that it was an innocent mistaken overstatement is just not one that I think people should accept.

It’s ludicrous. Real estate hustlers live and breathe square footage. Of course they don’t make “mistakes” of that kind.

And $327 million is a lotttttttttttttttttttt of money.

POMERANTZ: Well, $327 million is not only a value that exceeds the price that has been ever paid for any apartment in New York City to this date, it’s a number that is larger than the price that has ever been paid for a private residence in the history of the United States, ever. In fact, $327 million for a single residence would put it on the list of the highest prices ever paid or ever valued for a private residence, including such properties as the Taj Mahal and Buckingham Palace. So, you know, it’s a nice apartment, but $327 million? I don’t think so. Our experts looked at the apartment and valued it in the neighborhood of $55- to $60 million, being charitable with respect to its possible value.

I just looked up Balmoral for further comparison. The estimate is $140 million – and it’s enormous, probably genuinely 300 30,000 square feet or something, plus all that land, plus the cachet of royal royality. Trump’s vulgar gilt apartment with the nice view of the park not quite the same.

Any more inflated stats of that kind?

POMERANTZ: Well, another easy example is his golf course in Jupiter, which he bought at the end of 2013, I believe, for $5 million. It was valued as of June 30, 2014 – so that’s about seven months later – it was valued in connection with his financial statements at over $60 million. He had bought the golf course only a few months earlier and had paid $5 million in cash. So how do you get from $5 million to $62 million when no substantial changes or building or redesign or anything much had happened to the golf course in the several months between when he bought it and when it was valued on his financial statements? When we looked at the accounting backup in detail, we saw that Trump had – when he bought the property, he had also inherited some liabilities to members. There were circumstances in which he would potentially have to pay back their membership deposits, and there was about $41 million worth of potential refund obligations. And so he added that to the $5 million.

But the problem was, he had also said in the financial statements that for liability purposes, those liabilities were unlikely to be repaid. There’d always be new members, so they would be valued at zero. Well, he valued them at zero on the liability side, but he valued them at $41 million on the asset side. You can’t do that. And on top of that, he added another 30% for the so-called brand value of the fact that his name was now on the golf course. Again, whether or not that’s appropriate in some circumstances is beside the point because the financial statement said we’re not including brand value in the values that are reflected on this statement. So again, that value was misleading.

Zero on the liability side, $41 million on the asset side. It’s so Trump.

Why did he do all this wild inflation of his monetary worth? To get banks to lend him vast sums of money. That’s a crime.

POMERANTZ: What we learned – and when I say we, I should include the staff of the New York attorney general, which had been conducting a parallel civil investigation and which discovered many of the same facts and indeed discovered many of these facts before the DA’s office learned them. And they were extremely helpful in allowing our criminal investigation to go forward. But what emerged from the investigation was that the financial statements were used in a variety of contexts. But the one context in which they were used that most directly led to criminal liability was the fact that the statements were given to banks in connection with applications for loans, in connection with a loan that The Trump Organization got to purchase the Doral Golf Resort near Miami, in connection with the creation of a luxury hotel at the old post office property in Washington, D.C., and a refinancing of Trump’s property in Chicago.

In each case, The Trump Organization asked for financing in the amount of millions – hundreds of millions of dollars. And in each case, the bank required that Donald Trump personally guarantee the loans. And Trump was willing to guarantee the loans, but the bank insisted in connection with those guarantees. And this is standard practice in the industry and certainly for this portion of the bank’s operations. The bank insisted on not only a guarantee but the submission of a personal financial statement. The bank required as a condition of making the loan and accepting the guarantee that Donald Trump verify that the financial statements he supplied to the bank were true and accurate in all material respects and that they accurately reflected his financial condition. And they didn’t. They overstated his net worth. They overstated the value of his assets by literally billions of dollars. For each year that he submitted personal financial statements to the bank – and the bank required them to be updated annually – the financial statements were massively inflated. And that’s a crime.

He would have just blamed it on his accountants, right? The prosecutors knew that, right?

POMERANTZ: We did. And if a charge had been brought or if a charge should be brought, and certainly in the context of the pending civil case, Donald Trump will certainly say, I relied on accountants; I relied on the people around me. And to be sure, we looked for and got evidence reflecting his personal involvement and responsibility for the financial statements. We developed evidence that he had been involved in providing the values for particular assets to the people in the Trump Organization whose job it was to compile these numbers.

They were, of course, assets that he spent his lifetime building and acquiring. He cared deeply about his net worth. And we had evidence that he had a history of exaggerating and indeed lying and misleading people about his net worth and the value of his assets. And bear in mind, each financial statement indicated that he, Donald Trump, was responsible for the preparation of the financial statements, responsible for the numbers that they contained. They’re his assets. The financial statements were used for his benefit. They were prepared by people who worked for him and who followed his directions. And so we thought the circumstances made out a pretty compelling case that he was indeed personally responsible for the misstatements.

One would hope that’s the way it works – that the big bosses don’t get to say “Oh it was all the underlings’ fault” and walk away humming a cheerful tune.

And on top of all the paper and the circumstances and the facts surrounding the valuation of particular properties, Michael Cohen also told us, as he had told Congress some years earlier, that he had been in the room with Donald Trump and with the CFO, Allen Weisselberg, when the financial statements were prepared. And he knew that the process included Trump saying, in effect, this is what I need to be worth. Now go out, and come back with values of the properties that add up to what I need to be worth. And so the valuations that were put on individual properties were, in effect, reverse engineered to meet the target that Trump had set forth for his net worth. And so that had all the trappings of criminal conduct.

Yet Trump remains at liberty.

Pence has had the heavy arm of the law descend on his shoulder.

Former Vice President Mike Pence received a subpoena from the special counsel investigating key aspects of the sprawling probe into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and former president Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, according to a person familiar with the matter.

It’s about January 6th, the Post tells us.

It is unclear whether Pence will comply with the subpoena. His advisers had previously said he was not interested in appearing before the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Yyyyyeeeeeah it’s not really about whether he’s “interested” or not.

Pence has publicly suggested Trump got bad legal advice and downplayed the idea that he saw criminal conduct.

“Well, I don’t know if it is criminal to listen to bad advice from lawyers,” Pence told NBC last year.

Oh come on. We’re not talking about some naïve random citizen here, we’re talking about a “president,” the chief law officer blah blah blah. Trump didn’t just bumble into trying to cancel an election because he didn’t know any better, Trump capped a long long career of criminality with an attempted coup. He didn’t just listen to bad advice!

“Presidents, just like all of us that have served in public life, you have to rely on your team, you have to rely on the credibility of the people around you. So, as time goes on, I hope we can move beyond this, beyond that prospect. And this is really a time when our country ought to be healing.”

Not on the basics you don’t. The fine points of national security, sure, but whether or not it’s ok to steal an election, no. Trump is a lifelong criminal, and Pence knows it.

This is why we can’t do anything about global warming.

China seeks ‘bold’ steps to lift birth rate

So that more people will have to deal with the horrors in the future. Never mind what’s good for people already born, and the climate they depend on, and the resources they need – just keep doing more and more until everyone is gone.

News outta Scotland:

The Scottish Green Party has suspended Beth Douglas from the role of Rainbow Greens co-convener, after a series of “violent” tweets.

Douglas has been accused of using derogatory language on social media, supporting controversial protests against women, inflaming debate by calling feminists ‘fascists’ and posing with weapons for Twitter pictures that threaten “cis” people.

Oh is that all.

Douglas, who still has the job title in her Twitter bio, has been in the “public facing” representative role for LGBT+ members of the Scottish Greens and attended Holyrood equality committee evidence sessions.

The use of the offensive word Terf -Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist- used to describe women who criticise gender ideology, features heavily on Douglas’s social media, along with unfounded allegations that they are “fascists”.

There are also images of Douglas holding an axe and a knife circulating social media. Holding up a knife in a threatening way, one of the captions for the images says “I heard yall hate trans women, knives and axes”.

Oh you mean this one?

The date on it is October 22, 2020. It’s more than two years old. Wouldn’t you think the Scottish Green Party could have acted a little more quickly? Wouldn’t you think they would ask themselves why they wanted that guy in that kind of job?

I hopped on a bus to Carkeek Park this afternoon. It’s basically a chunk of forest with streams, and it ends up at the beach, which is accessible only via a pedestrian overpass. I stood on the overpass to take in the scene for ten minutes or so. There was a great blue heron standing in the water, and a bald eagle flew up to perch in a tall cedar. Then, the cherry on the cake, I heard a train approaching from the south, so I got to watch it chug around the curve at the far end of Golden Gardens and then come thundering along and under the overpass. It gave a little blast on the horn as it approached, either for safety reasons or to say hello.

The heron left the scene though.

This one is traveling north to south; the one I saw was going south to north. A two-engine freight train though, not the commuter train.

Dale He/Him has spoken.

Stupid liars. Maya didn’t break any of those rules. They’re such liars.

The Independent tells us:

Vulnerable female patients have been sexually “exposed” on a mixed gender ward deemed not “fit for purpose”, the NHS watchdog has warned.

The Care Quality Commission found that sexual incidents had occured at Hill Crest, a 25-bed mixed gender mental health unit in Redditch, as male and female were being put at risk.

It found male patients are able to walk into female bathrooms and bedrooms, leading to risks of sexual assault and relationships. It found that sexual incidents had taken on the unit because of the risks.

Duh. Are people really having to re-learn what they’ve known since puberty? Or are they just pretending?

The rate of assaults on mixed sex wards is significantly higher than on single-sex wards, data has shown.

You don’t say! What a surprise.

Vicki Nash, head of Policy, Campaigns and Public Affairs for charity Mind said: “The fact that sexual incidents occurred on a mental health ward is abhorrent. Mental health hospitals are a place where people have the right to feel safe, and should never be put at risk of any harm, including traumatising sexual assault. We expect Worcestershire Health and Care Foundation Trust to take immediate action to address these risks and ensure people are kept safe.

“Mixed-sex NHS accommodation has been expected to be eliminated, except where it is in the best interests of the patient, for over a decade.”

Which patient? Some male patients might consider it in their best interests, but it’s hard to see how women would.

Originally a comment by Sastra on The lack of formal protocols.

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.

Continuing the Gender Apostate’s Tale:

Many encounters with patients emphasized to me how little these young people understood the profound impacts changing gender would have on their bodies and minds. But the center downplayed the negative consequences, and emphasized the need for transition. As the center’s website said, “Left untreated, gender dysphoria has any number of consequences, from self-harm to suicide. But when you take away the gender dysphoria by allowing a child to be who he or she is, we’re noticing that goes away. The studies we have show these kids often wind up functioning psychosocially as well as or better than their peers.” 

Note the “allowing a child to be who he or she is” part – which is hardly a medical description. It’s more a bit of religious terminology from the Temple of Gender Idenniny.

There are no reliable studies showing this. Indeed, the experiences of many of the center’s patients prove how false these assertions are. 

She provides the example of a patient who was put on Bicalutamide and developed liver toxicity.

He was sent to another unit of the hospital for evaluation and immediately taken off the drug. Afterward, his mother sent an electronic message to the Transgender Center saying that we were lucky her family was not the type to sue.

Maybe the family should have sued though.

How little patients understood what they were getting into was illustrated by a call we received at the center in 2020 from a 17-year-old biological female patient who was on testosterone. She said she was bleeding from the vagina. In less than an hour she had soaked through an extra heavy pad, her jeans, and a towel she had wrapped around her waist. The nurse at the center told her to go to the emergency room right away.

We found out later this girl had had intercourse, and because testosterone thins the vaginal tissues, her vaginal canal had ripped open. She had to be sedated and given surgery to repair the damage. She wasn’t the only vaginal laceration case we heard about.

Worth it to “be who he or she is”?

Reed got out of that job and tried to put it all behind her, but then…

Then I came across comments from Dr. Rachel Levine, a transgender woman who is a high official at the federal Department of Health and Human Services. The article read: “Levine, the U.S. assistant secretary for health, said that clinics are proceeding carefully and that no American children are receiving drugs or hormones for gender dysphoria who shouldn’t.”

I felt stunned and sickened. It wasn’t true. And I know that from deep first-hand experience. 

I wonder if Levine knew it was a lie. The nature of Gender Theology can mess with people’s critical thinking skills to the point where they believe absurd reckless claims like that.

There is a clear path for us to follow. Just last year England shut down the Tavistock Centre, the only youth gender clinic in the country, after an investigation revealed shoddy practices and poor patient treatment. Sweden and Finland, too, have investigated pediatric transition and greatly curbed the practice, finding there is insufficient evidence of help, and danger of great harm. 

Some critics describe the kind of treatment offered at places like the Transgender Center where I worked as a kind of national experiment. But that’s wrong. 

Experiments are supposed to be carefully designed. Hypotheses are supposed to be tested ethically. The doctors I worked alongside at the Transgender Center said frequently about the treatment of our patients: “We are building the plane while we are flying it.” No one should be a passenger on that kind of aircraft.

No one should be a pilot or flight attendant on it either.

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.

Last week I shared a Slate piece that involved a reckless gun enthusiast who liked to use his gun as well as carry it, and a court ruling that said it is his RIGHT.

To refresh our memories:

The Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to possess a gun while under a restraining order for domestic violence, the 5^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Thursday in a decision with alarming implications for gun violence in America.

Although mass shootings and intimate partner murders are heavily linked to domestic violence, the 5^th Circuit held that the government cannot disarm alleged abusers solely because they are subject to a civil protective order. The court vacated the conviction of a man, Zackey Rahimi, who possessed a gun after allegedly assaulting his girlfriend, and invalidated the federal law that prevents alleged abusers from bearing arms.

Today What a Maroon alerted us to Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post with further details on Zackey Rahimi:

Over a six-week stretch from December 2020 to January 2021, Rahimi took part in five shootings around Arlington, Texas. He fired an AR-15 into the home of a man to whom he had sold Percocet. The next day, after a car accident, he pulled out a handgun, shot at the other driver and sped off — only to return, fire a different gun and flee again. Rahimi shot at a police car. When a friend’s credit card was declined at a fast-food restaurant, he fired several rounds into the air.

But the 5th Circuit smiles approvingly on his possession of these guns that he fires so casually and recklessly.