UnHerd column I meant to share here a week ago… The American Academy of Pediatrics has since announced the guidance won’t be coming out in the New Year (always curious about the behind-the-scenes workings over there).
The new guidance is a rare bright spot for co-author Jason Rafferty, a paediatrician and child psychiatrist who has weathered a stormy autumn that saw him sued by two former patients. Rafferty was also featured in an unflattering piece in the Boston Globe, in which he described his approach to gender-affirming care as “affirming and validating the child’s sense of identity from day one through to the end”. Reporter Jennifer Block spells out what that means in practice:
Rafferty told me patients who live with harms or regrets do not signal a failure of the affirmative care model. If a child or patient doesn’t like the effects of an intervention, or begins to feel different in their identity, then the provider continues to affirm by discontinuing treatment. ‘They’re not treatment failures if that’s what’s affirming,’ he said.
- Jennifer Block
In other words, the solution to gender-affirming care gone wrong is more affirmation, more hormones, more surgeries.
Critics and young people who’ve come to see being affirmed in their transgender identity as a form of medical harm beg to differ. Just last month, FAIR in Medicine smuggled dissent into the heart of the Academy’s annual conference, renting a booth in the exhibition hall to bring paediatricians face-to-face with detransitioners. While some paediatricians were eager to learn more, others were furious to be confronted with the underside of gender-affirming care, “refus[ing] to look at any materials, responding with ‘I already know all that, I already know.’ They were sure they knew what we had to say, sure they’d been fully informed, sure that anyone who wanted to talk was a bigot and a transphobe and nothing more.”
Rafferty and the American Academy of Pediatrics have fallen into what Megan McCardle termed “the Oedipus trap”. This holds that “there are some mistakes no one can live with, no matter how innocently they were made […] If you have made such a mistake, it is obviously better not to know you have done so.”
Far too many pediatricians have not only fallen into the Oedipus trap they also have developed a different form of identity disorder that so many of their patients contend with, namely their MD stands for medical doctor and not “My Deity”. Their oath of, “Do no harm” at times seems to be in question.
And what will the good pediatrician doctors say about the very strong tangent of the AGP men/"transwomen" who regularly use prostitutes ("escorts" if you like euphemisms) to service their "schoolgirl" sexual fetish addictions? Only trans widows can reveal these truths. We have nothing else to lose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfb7bbz4YeM