Just a quick public-service announcement: you’re going to have to forgive all the quotation marks (mostly the authors’) and explanatory brackets (mine).
There is an unfortunate saying in medicine: the operation was successful but the patient died. Here it’s, the treatment was successful but the patient got worse.
In this case, they said the treatments are "effective". And there is usually some effect, so they're right. We just forgot to look that up in a dictionary.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I keep thinking of a recent conversation on the topic that my friend shut down yesterday, because my arguments were too "triggering". Those were the usual cisheteronormative transphobic ones, of course, because I just don't accept that the doctors know what they're doing and it's proper medicine and they assess each case and it's got lots of scientific studies, and sex is a spectrum, biologists all agree and gender is different and it's just someone's internal conception of their place on the gender spectrum and I just find it "icky" and...
They are working so hard to deny the reality of what they have done and are continuing to do to gender non conforming confused children and adolescents. Perhaps it’s money, I’m sure that plays a role. But my sense in reading this is that it is fear - fear of being held accountable, fear of being embarrassed in front of people they love and respect, fear of recognizing they deceived themselves and their patients and this led to irreversible harm, and finally fear of looking in the mirror and seeing a monster. I would pity them if they weren’t justifying an unspeakably cruel act, the sterilization of sad, confused, and socially different children.
We're beginning to see the process of institutions and experts gradually changing their positions (without admitting that they are) and constructing elaborate professional justifications for what was essentially an abandonment of scientific principles and a zealous hunting of dissenters.
This article exposes something so evil, it is hard to imagine. Here is the "nuance": so our patients get sicker, die earlier, and don't get the improvement in mental health expected or desired. We did our job - mutilating and drugging healthy bodies and that is a societal good.
Killing people. Making them sicker. Mutilating healthy bodies. That's good? Well, it fits with the ideology we must forward without dissent mein fuhrer....
I am so glad and grateful to Eliza that she has the stomach and the controlled sense of irony, to wade through the gender nutters bullshit theory and their warping of plain English. I notice a new word creeping into their lexicon: ‘affect’. I know what it used to mean, but since it is being reused by the GNs I dread to think what nefarious purpose it will serve when it starts to spread.
‘Affect’ used to refer to how someone appeared to others. A kind of presentation. Perhaps they plan to say that these poor medicalised children only ‘appear’ to be miserable after surgery. Just the appearance.
After a few ‘affects’ I couldn’t carry on reading. I’ve just had 2 coffees in the hope that my agitation might be redirected. The simple thing to say is that I have 2 beloved grandchildren in the US and I hope that by the time they reach puberty, Eliza and others will have exposed this garbage on such a wide scale that their health and development into adulthood will be free of this crap. I also wish, but this maybe a fantasy, that the geniuses who promoted this gender crap will be in jail rather than leaders of think tanks promoting the next pile of delusion.
Yes, the term "affect" is really big in literature and media studies. So of course it's being deployed here too. I think it's also a way to talk about things (feelings, emotions) that are not material, and therefore the discussion can be unfalsifiable?
Holy bucket of mackerel. I listened to your Informed Dissent conversation about this, and reading the text is so much worse. And also exactly what I’m seeing in women I know a few years into their “gender journey”. It’s so much worse from what I can see.
Eliza, would you ever consider investigating a possible legal angle? I wonder if this change in emphasis might be the beginning of efforts to protect doctors from the inevitable tidal wave of detransitioner lawsuits.
I am sure that we will soon be hearing about this "defense" in malpractice suits in the USA. I am also sure that juries will not fall for it after hearing testimony from detransitioners about how much they regret having been talked into "gender affirming" meds and surgeries. It is one thing to fool people into thinking it is simply "polite" to use "preferred pronouns" when speaking about individuals who are supposedly made uncomfortable by English as it has long been spoken, and quite another to hear some doctor insist that what he or she did was somehow good for a patient who is actually sitting there in the courtroom after testifying that they are now suffering from the "good" that was done to them.
I had the same thought. In a sense, though, they’re jumping from the frying pan into the fire. This pivot may protect gender clinicians from detransitioner lawsuits, but at the cost of losing coverage from insurers and state-run medical systems who still use that pesky “normative biomedical framing” when deciding which interventions to cover.
This absurd argument made by the dense will not protect doctors from juries awarding damages to detransitioner plaintiffs. Juries are not stupid. They use common sense and they are also patients! "The operation was a success even if none of the symptoms have been alleviated" is not going to fly.
And it will be the refusal of insurance companies to provide coverage to doctors who practice "gender medicine", which will also result in higher malpractice insurance premiums for all doctors in a state that will get the attention of doctors who right now just shrug off what is happening as "not my problem" because they do not practice "gender affirming medicine".
Here in Oregon, where I live, the legislature passed a law forbidding insurance companies from raising premiums on doctors who are sued for malpractice relating to "gender affirmation". Well, the law can do that, but it cannot force any medical malpractice insurer from simply refusing to offer malpractice insurance in this state.
More and more malpractice insurers will simply stop offering coverage in states like Oregon, Washington, California and other blue states, raising premiums for all doctors. That will get doctors who did not think they had a dog in this fight against the ravages of gender medicine to finally realize they do, and to oppose the many ways in which blue state governments support the harming of minors and other vulnerable citizens.
I suspect gender clinics will operate without malpractice insurance, and will require patients to enter into legal agreements not to sue as a condition of treatment. It's elective treatment, after all, and no-one is being forced to accept the terms and conditions offered.
This phrase caught my eye: "toward a stable endpoint, solidifying into a static identity in young adulthood." The authors are critiquing the notion that anyone's identity is ever "static" or "stable." It will keep evolving, they seem to be saying.
Well, which is it? Is trans identity an inherent immutable identity? Or is it simply one of many possible identities that can then change in the future? They can't have it both ways!
They want to ensure that they can be paid when they transition someone back to their original self-identification. A two-way trip into trans joy and back is much more profitable than this unidirectional unqueer heteronormative performative final destination of magically changing your sex. Also, you can't change your sex. Maybe they've finally figured that out.
The doctors who think like this are beyond "help". Many like De Vries and Bowers are "trans women" who actually believe that what they are doing to young people and other vulnerable people is good. Either that or they are sadists and/or sociopaths, which is entirely possible. We know that many are pedophiles.
De Vries is not transgender. She's a very gender-nonconforming lesbian who has her own children. Why she can't see that she's been transing girls like her, I don't know.
I don’t know why, but reading this reminded me of Hitler and Nazi Germany. There’s a level of callousness, underneath which is black-and-white thinking and social conformity that is maybe the root of true evil? Like we’re just going to charge full steam ahead at destroying others and ourselves? There’s a sort of depressive inevitability underpinning her stance that is genuinely frightening- almost psychopathic.
You're correct to think of the Nazi doctors. Robert Jay Lifton in his book on Nazi Doctors theorizes that the doctors engaged in a mental "splitting" when they violated the Hippocratic Oath. Seems applicable here, too.
De Vries is a man. A male. Like many of the doctors who are practicing "gender affirming medicine", he "identifies as" a woman. A "transwoman". Not only is his professional life now at stake, but his whole concept of himself is at stake in his absurd defense of the mutilation of young people. Some of these doctors who are not themselves "trans" have spouses who are.
De Vries is not transgender. She's a very gender-nonconforming lesbian who has her own children. Why she can't see that she's been transing girls like her, I don't know.
I remember when "normative" became a bad word rather than a descriptive one. When I was in grad school in the early 1990s and queer theory hit the humanities, it replaced the predominance of marxism and freudianism.
The idea was to critique everything normal. Normal was simply an ideological construct; anyone who approved of normalcy was simply a victim of mystification. Only the brilliant academics could "see" through it.
"Normativity" forces conformity instead of diversity and so by definition is oppressive.
Just as "diversity" has become "good" and "binary" has become "bad," "normative" is now something that "good" people like these doctors try to avoid at all costs.
Because we’ve been telling people, young people especially for the last 30 odd years…that they can have anything they want, and if any of that goes poorly…there certainly will be no consequences for them. That bad feelings are reserved only for “trauma” and as an affliction on one by another, never a normal healthy human experience. This whole article used to be the kind of psychotic reasoning you’d only hear coming out of the mouths of Ted Bundy or Dahmer. We used to be able to identify this insane discourse for what it was, purely pathological. We used to have morals and values…..now we just have participation trophy syndrome.
Transprovement - A trans improvement. This type of outcome is on the opposite side of the normative goal of improvement which is still sadly pervasive in medicine.
Yes. I tell people all the time now that “trans” just means “NOT.” As in, “trans” health care is NOT health care. “Trans” women are NOT women. “Trans” joy is NOT joy. Just see “Trans” as the absolute negation of whatever follows. It’s so simple once you crack the code.
What a bunch of charlatans! Positively evil, and peddling desperately to convince themselves and anyone else stupid enough to go along with this that they aren't.
There is an unfortunate saying in medicine: the operation was successful but the patient died. Here it’s, the treatment was successful but the patient got worse.
In this case, they said the treatments are "effective". And there is usually some effect, so they're right. We just forgot to look that up in a dictionary.
It's exactly like that.
I'm so sorry, I just couldn't read past the first paragraph.
I need to go and breathe into a paper bag and come back to reading your article once I can reframe my outrage
Yeah, I know what you mean. I keep thinking of a recent conversation on the topic that my friend shut down yesterday, because my arguments were too "triggering". Those were the usual cisheteronormative transphobic ones, of course, because I just don't accept that the doctors know what they're doing and it's proper medicine and they assess each case and it's got lots of scientific studies, and sex is a spectrum, biologists all agree and gender is different and it's just someone's internal conception of their place on the gender spectrum and I just find it "icky" and...
He has no idea what triggered feels like.
A 'friend' of 30 years cut off all contact from me for stating factual information. It is a cult, and therapists, doctors and surgeons are in on it.
These people should be in jail.
Solution is just to skip past the amazing bafflegab and just read our host’s scathing summary and rebuttal. 😝
Thanks for the tip 👍 😀
They are working so hard to deny the reality of what they have done and are continuing to do to gender non conforming confused children and adolescents. Perhaps it’s money, I’m sure that plays a role. But my sense in reading this is that it is fear - fear of being held accountable, fear of being embarrassed in front of people they love and respect, fear of recognizing they deceived themselves and their patients and this led to irreversible harm, and finally fear of looking in the mirror and seeing a monster. I would pity them if they weren’t justifying an unspeakably cruel act, the sterilization of sad, confused, and socially different children.
Give them a well-deserved death penalty and they won't have to worry about any of those fears anymore.
We're beginning to see the process of institutions and experts gradually changing their positions (without admitting that they are) and constructing elaborate professional justifications for what was essentially an abandonment of scientific principles and a zealous hunting of dissenters.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/quietly-correcting
Great article, thank you for sharing.
This article exposes something so evil, it is hard to imagine. Here is the "nuance": so our patients get sicker, die earlier, and don't get the improvement in mental health expected or desired. We did our job - mutilating and drugging healthy bodies and that is a societal good.
Killing people. Making them sicker. Mutilating healthy bodies. That's good? Well, it fits with the ideology we must forward without dissent mein fuhrer....
The real question remaining is how many readers of the British Medical Journal are going to swallow this BS and fall for it.
I am so glad and grateful to Eliza that she has the stomach and the controlled sense of irony, to wade through the gender nutters bullshit theory and their warping of plain English. I notice a new word creeping into their lexicon: ‘affect’. I know what it used to mean, but since it is being reused by the GNs I dread to think what nefarious purpose it will serve when it starts to spread.
‘Affect’ used to refer to how someone appeared to others. A kind of presentation. Perhaps they plan to say that these poor medicalised children only ‘appear’ to be miserable after surgery. Just the appearance.
After a few ‘affects’ I couldn’t carry on reading. I’ve just had 2 coffees in the hope that my agitation might be redirected. The simple thing to say is that I have 2 beloved grandchildren in the US and I hope that by the time they reach puberty, Eliza and others will have exposed this garbage on such a wide scale that their health and development into adulthood will be free of this crap. I also wish, but this maybe a fantasy, that the geniuses who promoted this gender crap will be in jail rather than leaders of think tanks promoting the next pile of delusion.
Yes, the term "affect" is really big in literature and media studies. So of course it's being deployed here too. I think it's also a way to talk about things (feelings, emotions) that are not material, and therefore the discussion can be unfalsifiable?
It's actually a common word in psychology - it just means feeling or mood. It usually has the stress on the first syllable, unlike the verb.
Holy bucket of mackerel. I listened to your Informed Dissent conversation about this, and reading the text is so much worse. And also exactly what I’m seeing in women I know a few years into their “gender journey”. It’s so much worse from what I can see.
Eliza, would you ever consider investigating a possible legal angle? I wonder if this change in emphasis might be the beginning of efforts to protect doctors from the inevitable tidal wave of detransitioner lawsuits.
See Glenna Goldis (The Unyielding Bicyclist) for the new angle on lawsuits, which is consumer fraud. She’s on this already.
I am sure that we will soon be hearing about this "defense" in malpractice suits in the USA. I am also sure that juries will not fall for it after hearing testimony from detransitioners about how much they regret having been talked into "gender affirming" meds and surgeries. It is one thing to fool people into thinking it is simply "polite" to use "preferred pronouns" when speaking about individuals who are supposedly made uncomfortable by English as it has long been spoken, and quite another to hear some doctor insist that what he or she did was somehow good for a patient who is actually sitting there in the courtroom after testifying that they are now suffering from the "good" that was done to them.
I had the same thought. In a sense, though, they’re jumping from the frying pan into the fire. This pivot may protect gender clinicians from detransitioner lawsuits, but at the cost of losing coverage from insurers and state-run medical systems who still use that pesky “normative biomedical framing” when deciding which interventions to cover.
This absurd argument made by the dense will not protect doctors from juries awarding damages to detransitioner plaintiffs. Juries are not stupid. They use common sense and they are also patients! "The operation was a success even if none of the symptoms have been alleviated" is not going to fly.
And it will be the refusal of insurance companies to provide coverage to doctors who practice "gender medicine", which will also result in higher malpractice insurance premiums for all doctors in a state that will get the attention of doctors who right now just shrug off what is happening as "not my problem" because they do not practice "gender affirming medicine".
Here in Oregon, where I live, the legislature passed a law forbidding insurance companies from raising premiums on doctors who are sued for malpractice relating to "gender affirmation". Well, the law can do that, but it cannot force any medical malpractice insurer from simply refusing to offer malpractice insurance in this state.
More and more malpractice insurers will simply stop offering coverage in states like Oregon, Washington, California and other blue states, raising premiums for all doctors. That will get doctors who did not think they had a dog in this fight against the ravages of gender medicine to finally realize they do, and to oppose the many ways in which blue state governments support the harming of minors and other vulnerable citizens.
I suspect gender clinics will operate without malpractice insurance, and will require patients to enter into legal agreements not to sue as a condition of treatment. It's elective treatment, after all, and no-one is being forced to accept the terms and conditions offered.
This phrase caught my eye: "toward a stable endpoint, solidifying into a static identity in young adulthood." The authors are critiquing the notion that anyone's identity is ever "static" or "stable." It will keep evolving, they seem to be saying.
Well, which is it? Is trans identity an inherent immutable identity? Or is it simply one of many possible identities that can then change in the future? They can't have it both ways!
They want to ensure that they can be paid when they transition someone back to their original self-identification. A two-way trip into trans joy and back is much more profitable than this unidirectional unqueer heteronormative performative final destination of magically changing your sex. Also, you can't change your sex. Maybe they've finally figured that out.
Textbook cognitive dissonance. These people need help.
The doctors who think like this are beyond "help". Many like De Vries and Bowers are "trans women" who actually believe that what they are doing to young people and other vulnerable people is good. Either that or they are sadists and/or sociopaths, which is entirely possible. We know that many are pedophiles.
De Vries is not transgender. She's a very gender-nonconforming lesbian who has her own children. Why she can't see that she's been transing girls like her, I don't know.
Well this is revolting. How can these people live with themselves?!
They sincerely believe they are fighting the good fight....
I don’t know why, but reading this reminded me of Hitler and Nazi Germany. There’s a level of callousness, underneath which is black-and-white thinking and social conformity that is maybe the root of true evil? Like we’re just going to charge full steam ahead at destroying others and ourselves? There’s a sort of depressive inevitability underpinning her stance that is genuinely frightening- almost psychopathic.
You're correct to think of the Nazi doctors. Robert Jay Lifton in his book on Nazi Doctors theorizes that the doctors engaged in a mental "splitting" when they violated the Hippocratic Oath. Seems applicable here, too.
De Vries is a man. A male. Like many of the doctors who are practicing "gender affirming medicine", he "identifies as" a woman. A "transwoman". Not only is his professional life now at stake, but his whole concept of himself is at stake in his absurd defense of the mutilation of young people. Some of these doctors who are not themselves "trans" have spouses who are.
From Eliza, above
De Vries is not transgender. She's a very gender-nonconforming lesbian who has her own children. Why she can't see that she's been transing girls like her, I don't know.
Hmm I don’t think so. She looks and sounds just like a woman to me
I remember when "normative" became a bad word rather than a descriptive one. When I was in grad school in the early 1990s and queer theory hit the humanities, it replaced the predominance of marxism and freudianism.
The idea was to critique everything normal. Normal was simply an ideological construct; anyone who approved of normalcy was simply a victim of mystification. Only the brilliant academics could "see" through it.
"Normativity" forces conformity instead of diversity and so by definition is oppressive.
Just as "diversity" has become "good" and "binary" has become "bad," "normative" is now something that "good" people like these doctors try to avoid at all costs.
Because we’ve been telling people, young people especially for the last 30 odd years…that they can have anything they want, and if any of that goes poorly…there certainly will be no consequences for them. That bad feelings are reserved only for “trauma” and as an affliction on one by another, never a normal healthy human experience. This whole article used to be the kind of psychotic reasoning you’d only hear coming out of the mouths of Ted Bundy or Dahmer. We used to be able to identify this insane discourse for what it was, purely pathological. We used to have morals and values…..now we just have participation trophy syndrome.
Transprovement - A trans improvement. This type of outcome is on the opposite side of the normative goal of improvement which is still sadly pervasive in medicine.
Yes. I tell people all the time now that “trans” just means “NOT.” As in, “trans” health care is NOT health care. “Trans” women are NOT women. “Trans” joy is NOT joy. Just see “Trans” as the absolute negation of whatever follows. It’s so simple once you crack the code.
I love your use of "not"! I hope it catches on. I am going to use it.
What a bunch of charlatans! Positively evil, and peddling desperately to convince themselves and anyone else stupid enough to go along with this that they aren't.
Thanks for the exposé Eliza.