I’m in Lisbon at the Genspect conference (and tuning in to World Professional Association for Transgender Health conference when I can…), so I’m recirculating this piece I wrote about the last three -PATH conferences I attended and what I’ve learned…
I’m assuming you’re aware that earlier this year the Daily Wire obtained and released several hours of video from the 2022 Montreal conference you attended (the conference immediately after the release of SOC8, yes?). These are available on YouTube now for anyone who wants to watch them, which I did. Apparently not very many other people have because as I write this each video has at most a few dozen views. Not sure what that says about me…
The Daily Wire’s goal seemed to be to mine for inflammatory nuggets to release on social media, which, fair enough. They were certainly there to be had. My interest in watching was much closer to yours in attending: How do the people in WPATH think and talk about these things when they assume no one outside the movement is watching?
My takeaway was much the same as yours. They seem to be sincerely living in an alternative reality where the following things are so axiomatic they’re almost never said directly, and will not be surprising to anyone who’s followed this topic for a while. They are 1) everyone has an innate but potentially flexible gender identity, 2) for people whose bodies don’t align with their gender identity, the greatest and highest good is to alter their body with hormones and surgeries to bring the two into alignment, 3) these are safe, effective, and ALWAYS medically necessary, 4) anything interfering with easy access to these is “gatekeeping” and is bad, 5) anything that normalizes them and makes them easier to get is “gender affirming” and is good, 6) the gender affirming community is a small, brave, beleaguered community defending access to these treatments against dark forces who are conspiring to take them away.
So what I saw in the videos is what you would expect a “normal” conference looks like when everyone is in unspoken agreement about those things. Which, of course, is not at all like a normal conference at all.
Gender is the great, sticky tar baby of our age. I've recently been taken to task quite rudely in another Substack discussion page for saying that gender in the queer theory sense of the term exists only in the imagination of genderists. My adversary then gave me a lecture about sexual dimorphism.
In a perfect world there would be an online sex realist's dictionary or encyclopedia where the best current thinking about contentious topics such as gender would be compiled for easy reference.
I saw the back and forth about sexual dimorphism. I was so tempted to jump in, but that person who goes by the name Steersman is a one-track record playing the same troll bully song over and over. There’s no useful debate with him. Just ignore that type.
I’m not surprised, but horrified, that I am newly horrified and not surprised by rereading this because it is all still happening in spite of so many of us seeing it for the horror that it really is.
The people pushing GI are feeling desperate at this point. That's what I gather from the article. It's good they feel that way because it means sanity is on the upgrade
It appears that its up to patients, families and ex-wives to point out the foibles of WPATH theology; the 1 appt diagnoses, the 2 months later mastectomies, the malpractice giving wrong sex hormones with nary a thought to the future of the patient's liver, kidneys, uterus, heart and breasts.
Good for you, Eliza, for putting yourself through these miasmic lectures in order to report on their machinations. I'm curious as to what percentage at WPATH convos are actually AGP or married to one. Dr. Marci/Mark Bowers, long a leader there, performed the cuts in the famous Jazz Jennings surgeries. Is it at all possible that this man who hasn't even had the good graces to give his wife, the mother of their 3 children a divorce, has possible conflicts of interest? Conflicts of interest such as his investments in the town of Trinidad, Colorado, where an outsized percent of the "sex change surgeries" performed at his clinics. It's obvious that WPATH has no standards, no requirements regarding conflicts of interest for those installed as top leaders. Each of them should have to declare how much profit they're making off of these vulnerable children and psychiatrically ill adults. Now that Dr. Elliot Kaminetsky, child psychologist, has named this malady Identity-Based Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, what is Dr. Bowers' reaction? Bowers is neither a psychologist nor psychiatrist and based on his very public surgeries on the poor boy in reality television, he has no deep or even surface, understanding of the standards of Piaget's stages of child development. A child in the concrete operational stage (3-6 years) cannot possibly know he's "in the wrong body." This idea is the ret-con of childhood by exactly Dr. Bowers types.
Your point about the framework of “good gender clinician” versus “bad gender clinician” demonstrates that these captured experts aren’t just unscientific, they are anti-scientific. Skepticism about one’s assumptions and conclusions is the foundation of science.
Just like some people find comfort in the idea of an afterlife when this life becomes difficult to bear, I sometimes find relief from the nightmarish world of gender identity ideology and everything it has unleashed by thinking about how posterity will judge the present.
So many egregious abuses are taking place under the umbrella of gender identity that it is difficult to name the worst. In my view, the first prize for breaching ethical norms goes to medical professionals and their enablers who believe minors and young adults have given informed consent to so-called gender affirming medical interventions. It is such an open and notorious scandal that future scholars will be dumbfounded that we sat by and let it happen.
It isn't even nuanced, though goodness knows philosophers have a knack for complexifying even the simplest ideas. If we can keep the ethicists at bay, it should be self-evident that young people lack the capacity, knowledge and experience to consent to therapies that could render them sterile and make them incapable of experiencing sexual pleasure. Likewise, given that so much remains unknown about the effect of gender medicine on the human brain and body, how can any physician ever claim to have given his client enough facts about the substance or procedure to form the basis for their informed consent?
This type abuse is occurring regularly across the nation without any apparent resistance from the medical profession's regulatory organizations or law enforcement. Where are the litigators when we need them?
I see present-day US culture as a continuation of the wild west in many areas, not just with gender ideology as it affects medical professionals, but almost everywhere. $$$ as a necessity for "survival" no doubt has a lot to do with it. Wish I had faith in future scholars, but the future is here now IMO, i.e. more people should have been wary of this from the outset and are caught up and accepting of it instead and that's allowed it to take such a hold on society. The future may look back on this time with dismay but by then there will probably be a new horror to be faced down. Hopefully I'm wrong, I'd love to be wrong. But even as cynical as I am, like many others who are much braver and outspoken than I am, I won't stop taking a stand against transgenderism in my own way. There's at least some hope in that.
Children can no more "consent" to have their healthy breasts and genitalia removed or take puberty blockers than they can
"consent" to have sex with an adult.
Similarly, parents and doctors can no more approve such permanent mutilation simply because a minor child desires it than they can approve pedophilia.
Ultimately society will see the truth and ban the practice as we have banned female genital mutilation. Do people support that practice if the parents consent? I truly hope not
It is monstrous to believe otherwise and those who do will ultimately be held to account for their actions.
I’m assuming you’re aware that earlier this year the Daily Wire obtained and released several hours of video from the 2022 Montreal conference you attended (the conference immediately after the release of SOC8, yes?). These are available on YouTube now for anyone who wants to watch them, which I did. Apparently not very many other people have because as I write this each video has at most a few dozen views. Not sure what that says about me…
The Daily Wire’s goal seemed to be to mine for inflammatory nuggets to release on social media, which, fair enough. They were certainly there to be had. My interest in watching was much closer to yours in attending: How do the people in WPATH think and talk about these things when they assume no one outside the movement is watching?
My takeaway was much the same as yours. They seem to be sincerely living in an alternative reality where the following things are so axiomatic they’re almost never said directly, and will not be surprising to anyone who’s followed this topic for a while. They are 1) everyone has an innate but potentially flexible gender identity, 2) for people whose bodies don’t align with their gender identity, the greatest and highest good is to alter their body with hormones and surgeries to bring the two into alignment, 3) these are safe, effective, and ALWAYS medically necessary, 4) anything interfering with easy access to these is “gatekeeping” and is bad, 5) anything that normalizes them and makes them easier to get is “gender affirming” and is good, 6) the gender affirming community is a small, brave, beleaguered community defending access to these treatments against dark forces who are conspiring to take them away.
So what I saw in the videos is what you would expect a “normal” conference looks like when everyone is in unspoken agreement about those things. Which, of course, is not at all like a normal conference at all.
Gender is the great, sticky tar baby of our age. I've recently been taken to task quite rudely in another Substack discussion page for saying that gender in the queer theory sense of the term exists only in the imagination of genderists. My adversary then gave me a lecture about sexual dimorphism.
In a perfect world there would be an online sex realist's dictionary or encyclopedia where the best current thinking about contentious topics such as gender would be compiled for easy reference.
I saw the back and forth about sexual dimorphism. I was so tempted to jump in, but that person who goes by the name Steersman is a one-track record playing the same troll bully song over and over. There’s no useful debate with him. Just ignore that type.
I’m not surprised, but horrified, that I am newly horrified and not surprised by rereading this because it is all still happening in spite of so many of us seeing it for the horror that it really is.
The people pushing GI are feeling desperate at this point. That's what I gather from the article. It's good they feel that way because it means sanity is on the upgrade
Your work has been so incredibly powerful. Thank you for reporting from behind the scenes all these years.
It appears that its up to patients, families and ex-wives to point out the foibles of WPATH theology; the 1 appt diagnoses, the 2 months later mastectomies, the malpractice giving wrong sex hormones with nary a thought to the future of the patient's liver, kidneys, uterus, heart and breasts.
Good for you, Eliza, for putting yourself through these miasmic lectures in order to report on their machinations. I'm curious as to what percentage at WPATH convos are actually AGP or married to one. Dr. Marci/Mark Bowers, long a leader there, performed the cuts in the famous Jazz Jennings surgeries. Is it at all possible that this man who hasn't even had the good graces to give his wife, the mother of their 3 children a divorce, has possible conflicts of interest? Conflicts of interest such as his investments in the town of Trinidad, Colorado, where an outsized percent of the "sex change surgeries" performed at his clinics. It's obvious that WPATH has no standards, no requirements regarding conflicts of interest for those installed as top leaders. Each of them should have to declare how much profit they're making off of these vulnerable children and psychiatrically ill adults. Now that Dr. Elliot Kaminetsky, child psychologist, has named this malady Identity-Based Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, what is Dr. Bowers' reaction? Bowers is neither a psychologist nor psychiatrist and based on his very public surgeries on the poor boy in reality television, he has no deep or even surface, understanding of the standards of Piaget's stages of child development. A child in the concrete operational stage (3-6 years) cannot possibly know he's "in the wrong body." This idea is the ret-con of childhood by exactly Dr. Bowers types.
Your point about the framework of “good gender clinician” versus “bad gender clinician” demonstrates that these captured experts aren’t just unscientific, they are anti-scientific. Skepticism about one’s assumptions and conclusions is the foundation of science.
Absolutely hideous. Oh to have a hidden camera.
I doubt the camera was hidden, but will this do? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlMXp0ngpYM&list=PL_tICBU6BcUZtCkczkcQP8uA51jZAwxYY
Just like some people find comfort in the idea of an afterlife when this life becomes difficult to bear, I sometimes find relief from the nightmarish world of gender identity ideology and everything it has unleashed by thinking about how posterity will judge the present.
So many egregious abuses are taking place under the umbrella of gender identity that it is difficult to name the worst. In my view, the first prize for breaching ethical norms goes to medical professionals and their enablers who believe minors and young adults have given informed consent to so-called gender affirming medical interventions. It is such an open and notorious scandal that future scholars will be dumbfounded that we sat by and let it happen.
It isn't even nuanced, though goodness knows philosophers have a knack for complexifying even the simplest ideas. If we can keep the ethicists at bay, it should be self-evident that young people lack the capacity, knowledge and experience to consent to therapies that could render them sterile and make them incapable of experiencing sexual pleasure. Likewise, given that so much remains unknown about the effect of gender medicine on the human brain and body, how can any physician ever claim to have given his client enough facts about the substance or procedure to form the basis for their informed consent?
This type abuse is occurring regularly across the nation without any apparent resistance from the medical profession's regulatory organizations or law enforcement. Where are the litigators when we need them?
I see present-day US culture as a continuation of the wild west in many areas, not just with gender ideology as it affects medical professionals, but almost everywhere. $$$ as a necessity for "survival" no doubt has a lot to do with it. Wish I had faith in future scholars, but the future is here now IMO, i.e. more people should have been wary of this from the outset and are caught up and accepting of it instead and that's allowed it to take such a hold on society. The future may look back on this time with dismay but by then there will probably be a new horror to be faced down. Hopefully I'm wrong, I'd love to be wrong. But even as cynical as I am, like many others who are much braver and outspoken than I am, I won't stop taking a stand against transgenderism in my own way. There's at least some hope in that.
The lawsuits have begun! Search Themis Resource Fund.
I hope you get some time to look at this year’s WPATH conference Eliza. I have really learned from what you told us about previous conferences.
Lots of people are at sensible rational Genspect. Only you were at WPATH!
Children can no more "consent" to have their healthy breasts and genitalia removed or take puberty blockers than they can
"consent" to have sex with an adult.
Similarly, parents and doctors can no more approve such permanent mutilation simply because a minor child desires it than they can approve pedophilia.
Ultimately society will see the truth and ban the practice as we have banned female genital mutilation. Do people support that practice if the parents consent? I truly hope not
It is monstrous to believe otherwise and those who do will ultimately be held to account for their actions.
What are the clinicians telling their patients about cutting off their natural parents?