When I first noticed the shift from gender dysphoria to gender incongruence seemed to me to be primarily about normalizing an ever-widening range of body modifications. (And don’t get me wrong: that’s still a big part of it!) But watching the discouraging data about patient mental health outcomes—data that researchers and clinicians refuse to translate into evidence that transition works or doesn't work—roll in, it occurs to me that incongruence triumphed over dysphoria for other reasons.*
This is a relief to read. If the outcomes were more positive, I would be concerned. It's not that I don't want transgender people to have good outcomes. But if they did, it would go against the grain of everything I know about humanity.
Years ago there was a show which gave free cosmetic surgery to people with what you might call mild deformities. For example, one woman had a hook nose and buck teeth. When those things were repaired, she felt dramatically better about herself. Now, THAT'S what you could call "affirming" surgery, because it made her more attractive as what she already was, a woman. But when a person is imagining that they were born the wrong sex, and they get surgery to change the appearance of their bodies, that's not anything that could be called an improvement.
So what about people who have true gender dysphoria? Are they made happier by their surgeries? If they are, that could only happen if (1) the surgery was successful, without serious complications, and (2) the person getting the surgeries is convinced that his or her body has actually been changed to the opposite sex. What I think happens in most cases is that they eventually realize that the surgeries are fake. Sooner or later they face the fact that they have fake breasts and fake vaginas and fake penises, not to mention that many of them are sterile. When they start to face those realities, their satisfaction evaporates and the dysphoria returns.
I've mentioned this before in my comments, but it deserves saying again. I once saw an interview with an extraordinarily handsome man who wanted to become a woman. But he was so extremely handsome as a man, I found myself thinking, "Why sacrifice your perfection as a male to become a strange-looking and imperfect female?" On an emotional level, I guess I still don't get it.
I looked up the definition of incongruence on APA website. Each of the three definitions fits trans crap delightfully https://dictionary.apa.org/incongruence. From "one’s subjective evaluation of a situation is at odds with reality" to "lack of alignment between the real self and the ideal self" to "a lack of genuineness, honesty, or open expression on the part of the therapist in his or her interactions with a client"... Boy, this is it for real. So, basically they admit that the logic goes something like : "Hey, this person doesn't see the reality so let's move reality closer to what this person sees."
Patients, parents, and activists need to start hearing the message that EPATH and WPATH are making more and more clear: WPATH and EPATH are not patient advocacy groups. Their mission is protecting the professionals, the providers. SOC 8 removed all age minimums and the ethics chapter for the benefit and legal protection of the providers. The eunuch chapter seems to be more of a vanity project of a castration obsessed university academic than a serious attempt at creating anything that resembles good psychiatric or medical care. And now the slippery, constantly changing language - gender incongruence, gender journeys - is all about protecting the providers, not the patients.
Extrapolating a bit further, "gender incongruence" becomes "body incongruence", so even more cosmetic procedures (including elective amputation of limbs etc) become acceptable to healthcare funders, to the advantage of the suppliers' share prices.
Waiting for these lunatics to start "treating" those with dissociative identity disorder (DID) by surgically trying to make the body match one of the "identities" of the person with DID. Perhaps if there's more than one "identity," the butchers can do one side of the body as one identity and then the other side of the body to match a different identity.
So given these findings are they going to be treating a non-existent 'illness?' How do insurance companies justify paying for what have always been plastic/cosmetic interventions when there is no longer a classified illness? Am I missing something?
Thanks for sitting through all of that! I think there should be in person interviews at length with men like my ex-husband, who had the surgeries and turned our lives upside down 25-30 years ago. I bet if you caught them in an honest, candid moment (hard to do, don't I know) they'd actually express regret and talk about the fact that heterosexual men are just not interested in this kind of "woman." I just posted a parallel bit about these practitioners' conflicts of interest. This piece shows the conflict and the first phase of their "detransition," in my opinion. They can't face the enormity of their medical malpractice. The question that hangs in the air over their heads is this. Will they tell the patient that "treatment" with hormones and surgeries will not alleviate their co-existing issues, perhaps work on those first would make more sense.
Thank you for sharing your information. It just seems that the lunatics are running the asylum. Hadley Freeman article at link re doctors' concern about 'gender' treatments. https://t.co/tuk2IKoeKv
Any attempt to improve on God’s image of ourselves as humans is fraught with evil outcomes. Governments incapable of governing have found a convenient way to rebrand eugenics toward population control, give based people something to expend energy against, and expedite the destruction of the economy simultaneously. Just my 5 cents.
Let’s see if the Weffers come out of this Big Crazy and enjoy the Big Ugly as they’ve pissed off billions of jab victims too.
I replied to one of your previous Substacks, supplying links about the rise of childhood bipolar diagnoses, etc. as previous examples of medical fads/scandals.
I don't know if this is of use to you, but if you ever need another example of a medical scandal with many similarities to gender medicine please look into the rise and fall of high-dose chemotherapy with bone-marrow transplant (HDC/BMT) for breast cancer in the 1980's -1990's.
Wikipedia's description of this episode sounds eerily prescient;
""From its birth in the 1980s to its denouncement in the late 1990s, HDC/BMT transformed clinical practice, activist-driven legislation on healthcare insurance coverage, public health policy and drove a two-decade long period of entrepreneurial oncology. It also gave rise to one of the most serious cases of research misconduct of the 20th century..."
The procedure ended when the original data were proved to have been faked - which explained why subsequent studies were unable to replicate the astounding results.
Prior to that there had been tremendous pressure by activists on both state governments and the courts to legislate that insurance companies had to pay for the treatment.
In the United States insurance companies denied payment on the basis that they considered the treatment to still be experimental. A fight ensued over what constituted experimental treatment. Many people - myself included at the time - were suspicious of any position embraced by the insurance industry.
This became a very public, very emotional fight over what was perceived as a life-or-death medical decision. My memory of that time is that there were frequent news stories and talk shows that focused on the heart-rending plight of young women - especially young mothers - facing imminent death from aggressively metastasizing cancers if they were denied BMT.
In reality, it turned out that the treatment itself actually killed 10-20% of the patients, and the promised cure rates didn't exist.
But, before that was proven, an unprecedented jury award led to insurance companies agreeing to pay for what they still considered an experimental treatment.
"The award, $89.1m, was the largest “ever levied against an insurance company for refusing to provide health coverage benefits.”
New York Times 1999: Hope For Sale - A Special Report. Business Thrives on Unproven Care, Leaving Science Behind
"In fact, small earlier studies had reported a high mortality rate from the therapy itself, and European and American oncologists hadn’t been seeing close to that [claimed] 50% cure rate [from the fraudulent study]. But there it was, published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, and Bezwoda’s study became very influential. Women worldwide were offered this new therapy, and life or death decisions were made based on this study."
Scared of dying and encouraged by misleading claims of effectiveness by prominent doctors, patients chose this unproven treatment so overwhelmingly that it became difficult for American researchers to find women willing to enroll in clinical trials that could be used to evaluate the effectiveness of BMT versus traditional chemotherapy.
........
New York Times 1996 - Women Resist Trials to Test Marrow Transplants
Reprint of 1995 NYT article: Breast Cancer Researchers Frustrated on Marrow Therapy
"Her concern is that transplants are rapidly becoming the treatment of choice without the scientific proof that they are the best therapy. Under pressure from lawsuits, many insurance companies have agreed to pay for the treatment."
"With insurance companies paying often more than $100,000 for the treatment, women who fervently wanted a bone marrow transplant went to doctors and hospitals that provided them outside of the studies. Many women were reluctant to enroll in studies in which they might be assigned to a group that received conventional chemotherapy for comparison."
"As a result, as many as 30,000 women had bone marrow transplants in the 1990s, while only 1,000 participated in the scientific studies."
BMJ 2002: Presumed benefit: lessons from the American experience with marrow transplantation for breast cancer
"Comments made to the press, however, were less cautious. In the news section of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, one author said: “I think this shows that ABMT can be a very effective form of treatment.” A similar sentiment appeared in the Los Angeles Times: “A combination of bone marrow transplants and very high doses of anti-cancer drugs may be able to double the survival rate of patients with advanced breast cancer, a Boston researcher reported last week.”
In the U.S. "The Science" seemed to be overwhelmingly on the side of this new treatment - at least in the press.
-Dr. Bezwoda, who headed the study that proved to be fraudulent appeared to have an impressive track record. He was the co-author of 188 previous studies and his BMT study was published in a prestigious medical journal. [See below for how shockingly bad this study turned out to be.]
Politicians took a side - also note the support from major academic medical centers here;
"There was also political pressure. In October 1993 54 members of congress wrote to demand that the Office of Personnel Management cover the procedure.23 They cited statistics from a report at Duke University claiming transplantation and high dose chemotherapy were “eight times more effective than conventional dose therapy.” (The statement was loosely based on an article on bone marrow transplantation in high risk primary breast cancer reporting a 72% 5-year survival rate compared to 35% in historical controls.24) In June 1994 the directors of five major academic cancer treatment programmes wrote to the office, presenting even more favourable data. Finally, Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton led a hearing in August 1994, with testimonies from federal employees who had been denied coverage. Despite hearing the National Cancer Institute position that “formal scientific evaluation (ought) to proceed the routine use of such a toxic and expensive therapy”25 she called for the Office of Personnel Management to re-evaluate its policy."
This is a relief to read. If the outcomes were more positive, I would be concerned. It's not that I don't want transgender people to have good outcomes. But if they did, it would go against the grain of everything I know about humanity.
Years ago there was a show which gave free cosmetic surgery to people with what you might call mild deformities. For example, one woman had a hook nose and buck teeth. When those things were repaired, she felt dramatically better about herself. Now, THAT'S what you could call "affirming" surgery, because it made her more attractive as what she already was, a woman. But when a person is imagining that they were born the wrong sex, and they get surgery to change the appearance of their bodies, that's not anything that could be called an improvement.
So what about people who have true gender dysphoria? Are they made happier by their surgeries? If they are, that could only happen if (1) the surgery was successful, without serious complications, and (2) the person getting the surgeries is convinced that his or her body has actually been changed to the opposite sex. What I think happens in most cases is that they eventually realize that the surgeries are fake. Sooner or later they face the fact that they have fake breasts and fake vaginas and fake penises, not to mention that many of them are sterile. When they start to face those realities, their satisfaction evaporates and the dysphoria returns.
I've mentioned this before in my comments, but it deserves saying again. I once saw an interview with an extraordinarily handsome man who wanted to become a woman. But he was so extremely handsome as a man, I found myself thinking, "Why sacrifice your perfection as a male to become a strange-looking and imperfect female?" On an emotional level, I guess I still don't get it.
I looked up the definition of incongruence on APA website. Each of the three definitions fits trans crap delightfully https://dictionary.apa.org/incongruence. From "one’s subjective evaluation of a situation is at odds with reality" to "lack of alignment between the real self and the ideal self" to "a lack of genuineness, honesty, or open expression on the part of the therapist in his or her interactions with a client"... Boy, this is it for real. So, basically they admit that the logic goes something like : "Hey, this person doesn't see the reality so let's move reality closer to what this person sees."
Patients, parents, and activists need to start hearing the message that EPATH and WPATH are making more and more clear: WPATH and EPATH are not patient advocacy groups. Their mission is protecting the professionals, the providers. SOC 8 removed all age minimums and the ethics chapter for the benefit and legal protection of the providers. The eunuch chapter seems to be more of a vanity project of a castration obsessed university academic than a serious attempt at creating anything that resembles good psychiatric or medical care. And now the slippery, constantly changing language - gender incongruence, gender journeys - is all about protecting the providers, not the patients.
Extrapolating a bit further, "gender incongruence" becomes "body incongruence", so even more cosmetic procedures (including elective amputation of limbs etc) become acceptable to healthcare funders, to the advantage of the suppliers' share prices.
Waiting for these lunatics to start "treating" those with dissociative identity disorder (DID) by surgically trying to make the body match one of the "identities" of the person with DID. Perhaps if there's more than one "identity," the butchers can do one side of the body as one identity and then the other side of the body to match a different identity.
If transition is the cure for dysphoria, then why do the rest of us have to keep playing along afterwards?
So given these findings are they going to be treating a non-existent 'illness?' How do insurance companies justify paying for what have always been plastic/cosmetic interventions when there is no longer a classified illness? Am I missing something?
Once again the voice of clarity and reason. Thank you Eliza.
Thanks for sitting through all of that! I think there should be in person interviews at length with men like my ex-husband, who had the surgeries and turned our lives upside down 25-30 years ago. I bet if you caught them in an honest, candid moment (hard to do, don't I know) they'd actually express regret and talk about the fact that heterosexual men are just not interested in this kind of "woman." I just posted a parallel bit about these practitioners' conflicts of interest. This piece shows the conflict and the first phase of their "detransition," in my opinion. They can't face the enormity of their medical malpractice. The question that hangs in the air over their heads is this. Will they tell the patient that "treatment" with hormones and surgeries will not alleviate their co-existing issues, perhaps work on those first would make more sense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwmfOFsMKBs&t=1s
Thank you for sharing your information. It just seems that the lunatics are running the asylum. Hadley Freeman article at link re doctors' concern about 'gender' treatments. https://t.co/tuk2IKoeKv
Any attempt to improve on God’s image of ourselves as humans is fraught with evil outcomes. Governments incapable of governing have found a convenient way to rebrand eugenics toward population control, give based people something to expend energy against, and expedite the destruction of the economy simultaneously. Just my 5 cents.
Let’s see if the Weffers come out of this Big Crazy and enjoy the Big Ugly as they’ve pissed off billions of jab victims too.
Hey Eliza,
I replied to one of your previous Substacks, supplying links about the rise of childhood bipolar diagnoses, etc. as previous examples of medical fads/scandals.
I don't know if this is of use to you, but if you ever need another example of a medical scandal with many similarities to gender medicine please look into the rise and fall of high-dose chemotherapy with bone-marrow transplant (HDC/BMT) for breast cancer in the 1980's -1990's.
Wikipedia's description of this episode sounds eerily prescient;
""From its birth in the 1980s to its denouncement in the late 1990s, HDC/BMT transformed clinical practice, activist-driven legislation on healthcare insurance coverage, public health policy and drove a two-decade long period of entrepreneurial oncology. It also gave rise to one of the most serious cases of research misconduct of the 20th century..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-dose_chemotherapy_and_bone_marrow_transplant
.................................................................................
The procedure ended when the original data were proved to have been faked - which explained why subsequent studies were unable to replicate the astounding results.
Prior to that there had been tremendous pressure by activists on both state governments and the courts to legislate that insurance companies had to pay for the treatment.
In the United States insurance companies denied payment on the basis that they considered the treatment to still be experimental. A fight ensued over what constituted experimental treatment. Many people - myself included at the time - were suspicious of any position embraced by the insurance industry.
This became a very public, very emotional fight over what was perceived as a life-or-death medical decision. My memory of that time is that there were frequent news stories and talk shows that focused on the heart-rending plight of young women - especially young mothers - facing imminent death from aggressively metastasizing cancers if they were denied BMT.
In reality, it turned out that the treatment itself actually killed 10-20% of the patients, and the promised cure rates didn't exist.
But, before that was proven, an unprecedented jury award led to insurance companies agreeing to pay for what they still considered an experimental treatment.
"The award, $89.1m, was the largest “ever levied against an insurance company for refusing to provide health coverage benefits.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1123033/
........
New York Times 1994 - Patients' Lawyers Lead Insurers To Pay for Unproven Treatments
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/03/28/us/patients-lawyers-lead-insurers-to-pay-for-unproven-treatments.html
........
New York Times 1999: Hope For Sale - A Special Report. Business Thrives on Unproven Care, Leaving Science Behind
"In fact, small earlier studies had reported a high mortality rate from the therapy itself, and European and American oncologists hadn’t been seeing close to that [claimed] 50% cure rate [from the fraudulent study]. But there it was, published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, and Bezwoda’s study became very influential. Women worldwide were offered this new therapy, and life or death decisions were made based on this study."
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/03/us/hope-for-sale-special-report-business-thrives-unproven-care-leaving-science.html
........
Scared of dying and encouraged by misleading claims of effectiveness by prominent doctors, patients chose this unproven treatment so overwhelmingly that it became difficult for American researchers to find women willing to enroll in clinical trials that could be used to evaluate the effectiveness of BMT versus traditional chemotherapy.
........
New York Times 1996 - Women Resist Trials to Test Marrow Transplants
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/15/us/women-resist-trials-to-test-marrow-transplants.html
........
Reprint of 1995 NYT article: Breast Cancer Researchers Frustrated on Marrow Therapy
"Her concern is that transplants are rapidly becoming the treatment of choice without the scientific proof that they are the best therapy. Under pressure from lawsuits, many insurance companies have agreed to pay for the treatment."
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Breast-Cancer-Researchers-Frustrated-on-Marrow-3044922.php
.........
"With insurance companies paying often more than $100,000 for the treatment, women who fervently wanted a bone marrow transplant went to doctors and hospitals that provided them outside of the studies. Many women were reluctant to enroll in studies in which they might be assigned to a group that received conventional chemotherapy for comparison."
"As a result, as many as 30,000 women had bone marrow transplants in the 1990s, while only 1,000 participated in the scientific studies."
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/2000/02/16/insurer-halts-pay-for-cancer-therapy/
...........
BMJ 2002: Presumed benefit: lessons from the American experience with marrow transplantation for breast cancer
"Comments made to the press, however, were less cautious. In the news section of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, one author said: “I think this shows that ABMT can be a very effective form of treatment.” A similar sentiment appeared in the Los Angeles Times: “A combination of bone marrow transplants and very high doses of anti-cancer drugs may be able to double the survival rate of patients with advanced breast cancer, a Boston researcher reported last week.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1123033/
.........
In the U.S. "The Science" seemed to be overwhelmingly on the side of this new treatment - at least in the press.
-Dr. Bezwoda, who headed the study that proved to be fraudulent appeared to have an impressive track record. He was the co-author of 188 previous studies and his BMT study was published in a prestigious medical journal. [See below for how shockingly bad this study turned out to be.]
https://www.cancernetwork.com/view/bezwoda-1985-breast-cancer-transplant-study-fraudulent
-"79% of oncologists believed that HDC/BMT was an appropriate treatment for women with locally advanced breast cancer."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-dose_chemotherapy_and_bone_marrow_transplant
Politicians took a side - also note the support from major academic medical centers here;
"There was also political pressure. In October 1993 54 members of congress wrote to demand that the Office of Personnel Management cover the procedure.23 They cited statistics from a report at Duke University claiming transplantation and high dose chemotherapy were “eight times more effective than conventional dose therapy.” (The statement was loosely based on an article on bone marrow transplantation in high risk primary breast cancer reporting a 72% 5-year survival rate compared to 35% in historical controls.24) In June 1994 the directors of five major academic cancer treatment programmes wrote to the office, presenting even more favourable data. Finally, Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton led a hearing in August 1994, with testimonies from federal employees who had been denied coverage. Despite hearing the National Cancer Institute position that “formal scientific evaluation (ought) to proceed the routine use of such a toxic and expensive therapy”25 she called for the Office of Personnel Management to re-evaluate its policy."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1123033/