I wanted to respond to two major themes in the responses to my piece on the questionable beliefs and practices of gender clinicians, which can be summed up as “These people are evil” and “These people are idiots.” I am not going to deny there are bad actors—and
If we don't understand and accept that a large portion of the people promoting and acting on these ideas are largely driven by good intentions and their genuine belief they are saving lives, we are closing off perhaps the only pathway to getting them to see the harm they're doing and reclaiming their critical thinking skills. It understandably makes people shut down or get angry at giving anything that feels like grace to people who have done so much harm - personal harm for some of us - but ultimately all I care about is finding the fastest way to get as many of them out of this as possible.
I don't think this is true. The fastest way to get them to stop is insurance no longer paying for this stuff, and criminal charges for doing this stuff to kids.
There is no pathway to getting them to see the harm they're doing. As Helen Joyce has explained, they cannot allow themselves to understand the evil they have done. They will never be able to acknowledge it.
Instead, we must outnumber and defeat them politically, as is happening now in multiple red states.
So you think there is a surplus of nurses, doctors, surgeons etc and "we" can defeat them politically and they will all go up in a puff of smoke? Then "we" will bring in the platoons of "good" medical professionals waiting for us to win the gender war?
They won't go up in a puff of smoke (alas), they will simply be legally enjoined from continuing their evil ways, as they already are in the multiple red states that have passed laws preventing their butchery. And will be in California if we can get this initiative onto the ballot: https://protectkidsca.com
Other less direct methods include advocating for (and fundraising for) lawsuits by detransitioners to drive up malpractice insurance costs for their butchery. This too is already having an effect.
Sadly they will very likely escape any true justice for their manifold crimes against humanity, but we can and will stop them from continuing.
In my country there are almost no surgeons so those wanting to transition raise money on give-a-little or similar to go to South Asia for their surgeries and they order the hormones through the post. I think in the USA, it's also possible to go to South America.
I agree that malpractice lawsuits and denial of insurance to doctors will make a huge difference (already starting in Australia) and that's great but this will drive transition back underground not stop it. Especially hormones which are available for many legal purposes and will be easy to make available on a semi-black market.
I don't love the way that people in a country which is notorious and unique for the number of mass gun killings and other forms of serial killing haven't learned that making things against the law does not solve problems.
Excellent thought-provoking piece. I'm sure you're right about human nature. It's as though the clinicians themselves have been groomed. But maybe they need the sharp slap of reality when they do harm. In other professions there is accountability. In UK for example, teachers undergo regular and rigorous OFSTED inspections. They can endure devastating criticism for failing to achieve one aspect of a list of targets. But in the UK, after the scandal of child harm at the Tavistock gender clinic, I understand that the pro-affirmation clinicians are still working and believing. They cannot pretend not to know, because there's a government inquiry into the scandal. A young person took them to court for harm and won. They must have a huge capacity for blocking out information, or feeling anything at all for their patients. You can only get so far on smugness. It would be interesting to see an analysis of the personality type. Who could persist with harming children when the evidence of serious risk is so available?
Those who have been convinced that gender medicine is necessary don't see "serious risk". Very early on, they were convinced that these kids would commit suicide etc if their "true identity" was not affirmed and treatment forthcoming. For them that is the serious risk. They are being told repeatedly whenever the topic comes up that Keira Bell (Tavistock case detransitioner) and others are plants or being misled by political actors and regardless incredibly rare. The people I know who believe are very caring and good people. It's tremendously sad. I believe the only thing that will convince them is a flood of detransitioners.
Yes. The problem is that we need open and transparent debate on trans policies and practices. Denial that detrans exist is part of the refusal to have open debate.
I have heard that they tell the patient this will solve all their problems, but they can reverse the surgery. The inside out mini penis can be flipped and it’s all good again. They may need voice lessons or whatever, to get rid of the deep robotic voice. “You’re not a freak, but you will be when the team is through with you.”-- Dr Frankenstein
I am sure there is a lot of truth in this. This ideology is being pushed very hard and a lot of people in society at large have fallen into it. It has gained so much traction also because of unquestioned assumptions again in our culture generally but particularly in the medical profession about what bodies are. They are seen as, essentially, machines, which one gets working by imposing one's ideas about how it should be (although machines are treated better: one doesn't put unleaded petrol into a car which runs on leaded fuel.) This is the paradigm that needs changing. We are our bodies and they are self-healing living entities.
Bodies are the temple of the soul. They need treating right. I like the idea of not putting unleaded petrol into a machine that runs on leaded fuel. My own daughter’s body was treated as though male, being prescribed testosterone which is not designed or even safe for women! No respect for her body. Surely doctors need to look at the fact she was already self harming and on autistic spectrum. No, they were blackmailed by the suicide myth. After starting testosterone her suicide attempt was very nearly “successful.”. Testosterone was detected in her blood with anti depressant. She had overdosed. No respect for bodies.
Females do have testosterone in their bodies along with other hormones. It’s just that females don’t have T at the levels males do. All these kids are self-harming in the name of “finding their authentic self”, which unfortunately, they will be searching for until they realize they were fed a lie and medical staff fed them enabled it. I do hope your daughter discovers who she really is very soon.
The application of testosterone cream to the skin is a type of self harming ritual such as cutting, having tattoos drawn on skin. It is prescribed far too readily to young women wanting to be masculinised. After many years we will find out what harm it does. Never in history have women been given high doses of testosterone for years. Our daughters are willing victims in a research experiment.
Many highly skilled, intelligent people are driven primarily not by altruism or ethics but by their desire to solve hard problems. The scientists who developed the atom bomb weren't thinking about possible human extinction, at least not in the early stages. They just wanted to figure out how to make atoms release vast amounts of energy. Similarly, the digital technology that we all rely on, some of which has arguably done more harm than good, is the result of thousands of engineers challenging themselves to solve difficult problems. In gender medicine, the challenge is to make a man aesthetically and functionally a woman, or vice versa; people with this mindset are unlikely to give much thought to consequences for the patient (who has usually been convinced that these are worthy goals). Are scientists, engineers, and physicians evil for wanting to prove that something can be done? No, they are only human, which is sometimes a very dangerous thing to be.
This seems especially the approach of the Dutch clinicians (as well as endocrinologists everywhere)... the British in the 1990s were very curious in the patient's experience and uses of a trans identity. The Dutch... not so much. How can we intervene early and get more convincing cosmetic results?
Awesome post -- some very cogent and quite damning insights. Reminds me of the movie The Tenth Level, with William Shatner, about the Milgram Experiment and the related Stanford Prison experiment. I vividly remember Shatner's character, in the denouement, asking himself, "What the fuck have we, have I done?" (Excuse my French ...)
Apropos of which, I really don't envy Jazz Jennings' mother and various "gender affirmation doctors" if they're ever forced to ask themselves the same question.
Somewhat more broadly on the "sex-change" issue -- a phrase that really chaps my hide when it's used in the unquoted form -- you might have some interest in Melanie Phillips' book on the topic:
There are more recent analyses of the Milgram experiment which suggest that the response of the students who were the experimental subjects has been greatly simplified and exaggerated.
I am sorry but I am one of those lefties who despised MP's interventions into education - "all shall have prizes". Her nonsense claim at the top of her substack that in the 1990s there was "a dangerous upheaval in relationships between men and women. It seemed to me that the bargain between the sexes was breaking down to such an extent that sexual identity itself was in danger of being destroyed." I was living in the UK then and the danger in that country was the level of everyday sexism. I don't know how women with full-time careers like MP can look at themselves in the mirror when they make such claims. They don't live the lives they are promoting.
But I expect you have your ear closer to the ground, at least over there, than I do. So I'd be curious about "MPs interventions into education".
But the title of the book and the preamble seemed worth subscribing for, at least for a month to get the book in 10 chapters. I've only started reading it, but it seems there might be some merit in it. For example:
"Laddish behaviour has become a significant preoccupation of the British government. According to the Home Secretary Jack Straw: ‘Dealing with under-skilled, under-educated young men is the single most serious problem we face’."
But connecting a bunch of dots doesn't mean the result necessarily holds much water.
Laddish behaviour has not been a preoccupation of the UK govt for some time. Jack Straw is ex-Labour Home Secretary - from 1997-2001. He was correct - there's been structural changes in the economy so unskilled male labour is no longer in high demand and inadequate funding of public education so those boys learned very little at school, not helped by British working class resistance to an education system that was often contemptuous of them. MP believes strongly in that traditional education and thinks that not expressing contempt for kids and rejecting bullying and putting in more funding and giving them more support is namby pamby progressivism so I think her solutions won't work - and the book is old!
Robert Jay Lifton’s book Nazi Doctors comes to mind. Although it’s impossible for us today to imagine (the word Nazi now meaning evil), there were true believers in the “goodness” of the Nazi cause, in the rescue of the nation from forces threatening it.
Lifton wanted to understand why doctors in particular participated in Nazi crimes: how did they rationalize the crimes that so patently violated the Hippocratic oath? IIRC, he concluded that those doctors split themselves psychologically--the crimes were good acts in that context, they had to suppress any inner conflict. It’s an interesting study of how people who engage in a helping profession can commit harms in the name of a powerful ideology. It’s more complicated than being “evil.”
"How do decent people end up doing terrible things?" That's the age-old question, isn't it? If anyone can answer it, you can.
I continue to be impressed by your insight and fair-mindedness. You see the blacks, whites and grays, while I see only the blacks and whites. It's a special talent that you have.
The problem is that it's the kids who want these transformations, and children can be very insistent. They've already been brainwashed by trans activists or their friends by the time they get to the clinician. The question for me is, what happened to "Do No Harm"?
It seems to me that setting boundaries or standards shouldn't be so difficult. I keep falling back on this: "Children do not have the emotional maturity to make such decisions on behalf of the adult yet to come." It seems to me that this is an entirely reasonable standard. If there are, indeed, very young children who feel like they were born the wrong sex, asking them to wait 15 years to do something about it may seem cruel, but I remain invested in the idea that the human body must be allowed to develop naturally, and that certain decisions can only be made by an adult. Part of the problem for me is that I am incredulous that there are actually any three-year-old children in the world who want to change sexes. You've been talking mostly about adolescents, Eliza. What does your research tell you about very young children?
Certainly, someone who is fourteen can wait until he or she is eighteen to take action. If not for the very young children who are supposedly clamoring for sex-change treatments, it seems that adulthood is the standard that needs to be adopted.
Unfortunately there is no magic age of adulthood. A lot of people in the transgender community also have other mental health issues. When " gatekeeping" became the enemy and self id the standard things deteriorated for adults as well. The pull is very strong to separate people from their mind and body. Transhumanism wants to delete the natural human.
Well said. Although I believe in a spirit that leaves the body at death, I still see humans as essentially physical creatures. There is no escaping our bodies.
There is a history of males "knowing" they were the wrong sex very early and maintaining that belief throughout their lives. That's what has convinced people that kids can know. Those mid-20th century generations of transwomen are also mainly responsible for the astonishing weight placed on cosmetic surgeries as necessary and for the faith in puberty blockers. They fought for decades to get hormones and surgery and some of them really wanted to make things easier for later generations. I do find blaming the surgical professional bodies and big pharma and the regulatory bodies and major financial donors most convincing. This follows the basic outlines of other medical scandals but it has been turbo-powered by social media and, sadly, by the huge efforts to make medicine more responsive to patients' needs.
Your overview of the situation sounds very accurate to me. Like Eliza, you are able to see both sides a little better than people like me who are polarized. You seem to be saying that the focus on children is coming from a desire to help those trans people whose feelings develop at an early age. Perhaps my position that children must wait to be adults is a little too dogmatic, but I continue to feel that children must be given a chance to outgrow the feelings if that is at all possible.
My spiritual point of view also influences my opinion. I believe in reincarnation, and I believe that the type of trans people you speak of have more than likely chosen the wrong sex before birth. (Yes, even in the spiritual world, mistakes are made.) Having made that mistake, they are still free to transition if they want to (to whatever extent transitioning is even possible), but I still say that transitioning is an adult decision. Wait until you grow up. And if that means you have to be a tall woman, so be it. Waiting until adulthood is the only way to avoid the collateral damage of kids caving to a trend.
Thanks but I don’t mean to suggest that those men’s experiences provide a good basis for current medical practice with young people. I agree strongly with waiting until adulthood. The earlier trans women’s intentions may have been good but what’s happening is unquestionably wrong - the majority of young people do grow out of the belief they are trans. Furthermore that older generation didn’t have early access to hormonal drugs and surgery they just thought it would’ve helped them. Eliza’s post was about understanding that medical professionals involved in trans practices are not ‘evil’ - I believe that’s also true of the trans people. Eliza suggested in a comment that some professions are less aware of the impact of their treatments on patients than others. I think that’s true and I also think some, probably many, of the early trans people had little awareness that others might not need what they felt they needed.
The person I know was born female, came out as trans at age 14, and insisted she had felt like a boy her entire life. Sort of like a He said - She said situation. None of it could be proved.
Most of these clinicians were aware at some point but 'chose' to indulge in self deceit, turn a blind eye and many, many justifications to enable them to not confront the matter (even personally), put their heads above the parapet and do what was right, in order to maintain their jobs and lifestyles. The reality is, those actions are what has allowed the practical implementation of this ideology to literally thrive and spread like the virus that it is.
We have to thank GOD every day for the whistle-blowers and people that refused to enable and be part of pushing this evil. Some people employed moral integrity and sacrifice and walked away and started talking about it on social media platforms, writing about it on blogs and platforms like this, writing to organisationd about it, to make the rest of us aware of what was going on. The truth tellers.
These 'highly intelligent' and qualified clinicians are all accountable for leading vulnerable people, including children, to a horrific fate and are responsible for keeping the deception going. We don't have to walk on eggshells so that they don't feel bad. They should feel very bad for what they participated in. Feeling bad is a valuable consequence of not doing the right thing when circumstances demanded that you needed to but you didn't because it didn't 'benefit' you.
I hope your life is one of total clarity about the direction you're going in and the decisions you make and you never have regrets. Based on other medical scandals, I expect some - many - of those people will eventually feel extremely bad and they don't need smug people lucky enough to never be in their position trying to make them do so.
Apologies to Eliza here - I appear to have misunderstood her position. She says below that she believes that good intentions do NOT matter. I believe good intentions do matter - those with good intentions are more aware of the people they think they are helping and more likely to respond when they realise that they were not helping. Those out to make a big profit like Dr Sidhbh Gallagher are immoral and callous and self-serving. Quite different.
I'm saying good intentions do not reduce culpability for causing harm. I think it will be impossible to reach people in the good intentions/causing harm camp if we don't recognize why/how they got here. Remains to be seen whether that approach will help people recognize the harm and walk away.
There were many whistle blowers at the Tavistock and others who kept their heads down and choose not to work in the area of gender. Whistle blowers often destroy their careers and lives and are often ignored. Jamie Reed the USA nurse is lucky in one way because there is a huge right-wing movement who want to hear what she has to say. But they won't support her to be the person that she says she is - and the leftish non-standard family anti-trans movement is much smaller. I hope she is doing well work wise and in her community.
This is a much needed perspective. We all forget how deeply motivated we are by social pressures, which act on us unconsciously. Most of the time, those remain completely unconscious. Occasionally, we become aware of a discomfort, a doubt, and suppress it with all sorts of motivated reasoning or distraction. This is perhaps another piece of the puzzle that informs the bigger picture painted in this post - the post focuses on this feature in gender clinicians, but to get a better grasp of it we need to recognise it as a feature of all of us.
The mention of eugenics reminds me of the oft-repeated and reasonable view of the Holocaust, the awful understanding that those perpetrating the most disgusting horrors were also not inherently evil people, and were motivated by some complex mix of terror, indoctrination and helplessness. Gender medicine isn't the Holocaust, but similar pressures act on those involved, including so-called "allies". The terror is of cancellation, job loss, loss of social support from friends and family, poverty, hate mail, even death threats, and the tenets of the indoctrination can seem just reasonable enough to ignore one's doubts, especially when the T is force-teamed with the L, G and B, and endlessly presented as a fight for personal rights.
I stopped discussing it on a forum where I was outnumbered about 20:1 by trans allies, partly because it was hard being verbally beaten up with nonsense over and over, but also because I wasn't fair-minded or self-disciplined enough to keep the perspective Eliza presents here. I swore and berated and insulted them as "morons." Some of those "morons" could write books on different systems of logic or quantum mechanics, yet they insisted everyone - no matter who - absolutely needed "bodily autonomy" - and I was the worst kind of evil moron for not agreeing with them. I also suspect the antagonism entrenches many of them further. Anyway, it's much nicer, and probably much more useful, talking with all the people who have delved deeper, with more freedom to do so, and come to the correct, and very important, views that we have. As our output proliferates, it will eventually overturn the gender woo.
But they are not functioning as humans in their clinical practice. They are functioning as medical professionals.
Therefore their human motivations are not relevant in addressing the plain fact that they are willing to take intellectually dishonest measures to further a cause not supported by reliable evidence.
In some of the old neighborhoods, that's known as malpractice.
Malpractice is not resolved by persuasion, kind or otherwise.
It's still malpractice and abdication of their medical responsibility to patients. Why or how they ended up doing this doesn't mitigate that whatsoever.
Having been drawn into a cult is no excuse. Those who have been drawn in were idiots to allow themselves to be drawn in, and are now evil because of it.
No washing of hands is needed, what is needed is to fight back as hard as possible.
And that starts with never EVER voting for any candidate for any office who endorses these idiotic and evil practices.
Those endorsers currently include Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, EVERY Democrat in Congress (yes, even Joe Manchin), and 99.9% of Democrats holding state or local office.
Don't vote for them!
And if you're in California, help us get this plebiscite (true small-d democracy!) on the ballot:
Having good intentions is NOT an excuse, not mitigating whatsoever. These people are fully culpable for what they have done. But understanding how they came to do it is important.
I hope very much the California Ballot succeeds. I also completely disagree that it is worth voting for the right wing who can be accurately described as ignorant, corrupt and greedy - and totally intolerant of dissent. Their behaviour in congress toward those among their own party who were honest and brave enough to reject Jan 6th and Trump - Liz Cheney etc shows that they do not accept that - to quote Eliza 7/06/22 "that what really happened—and how it happened—matters." They are killing women by denying all abortions in many states - even when the mother's life is in danger and the fetus will not survive. Transgender policies and practices are only one part of what is happening in the world and we must remember the funders include Julia Pritzker - there's no guarantee trans will stay left. Trans practices and policies have to be stopped by convincing the left who are limited and annoying but do struggle with evidence and include many honest people and serious researchers. And I'm sorry but good intentions are mitigating for the reasons I give just above. In a court of law intentions are considered important because they do alter behaviour and outcomes.
The concept of "evil" is embedded in our thinking, a legacy of our Judeo- Christian heritage. It has limited value as a descriptor of reality, and more often than not distorts rather than illuminates the truth. The activists and doctors mutilating dysphoric children don't think they're doing harm. They think they'd be doing harm by permitting them to suffer the bodies they were born into. How to untie this knot? To admit they were wrong is to admit their conservative opponents were right. Will they swallow such a bitter pill? It seems unlikely.
It will happen - not everyone and it will take a long time because the evidence takes time to produce and it is complicated and it is being hidden. The denial of open and transparent debate is one of the most pernicious and worst aspects of transgender ideology. Making the issue into left/right politics and associating it with regressive family beliefs probably won't help change minds either.
I have to disagree with you on the motivation of those in this money-making, misogynistic, child destroying industry. They are joining in and doing harm to affirm themselves as part of the clique, the ones that are always the first to join in the "newest thing" to signal how hip and smart they are as compared to the rest of us rubes. The attack on parental rights and families, and the speed with which this blob of mucous spread, is another red flag about the motivation. This pathetic transhumanist industry is also directly tied to the attack on girls and women's sports, and their legal rights and protections. Never before in the mental health or medical field have I heard of a "treatment" plan that required attacking the rights of others, people that have nothing to do with the patient; in order to treat males, females are required to shut up and take it while the flashers wag their schwangs at them in the locker room. I do understand those in medicine, especially those with a family to support, who choose to not go along but keep their heads down for fear of losing their job and/or having the gestapo after them. Where I do agree with you is on the approach to repairing the damage, but that approach requires both the carrot (the diplomats) and the stick (the hardliners). Those of us taking a hardline are necessary to move the goalpost back across the miles it was moved, while the diplomats (you) do the much harder work of working with the herd that submitted to joining the cult. Thank you for having the strength to do this work.
Yes, I am also a stick and thank God every day I'm in my 60's with grown children. If one of these religious zealots had slithered toward any of my children, there would be one less fanatic on the planet.
I really wonder at the way people slither so easily into advocating vigilante violence as if it were a solution. Did your children really never do things you desperately disagreed with? Did you really succeed in controlling all the knowledge and people they had access to? The actual trans parents don't find violence is an option or that the threat is someone out there. It is their child who has taken up these beliefs who is their problem.
It occurred to me that me pulling out a revolver when a freak was coming at me on a dark, deserted road during a car breakdown was me "advocating violence." Better I should have just stood there and taken whatever violence he had in mind. Instead, whatever violence he intended was averted as he beat a retreat. The child abusers of Big trans also have a choice to beat feet when a parent tells them to keep their freak away from that parent's child. They can choose wisely, or not.
I've never advocated vigilante violence, but I do advocate protecting one's children. As far as the rest of what you stated, that's like saying the pedophile who convinced the child to get in the car and further manipulated the child into adult sex acts is not the problem, it's the child that went along with it that is the problem. I never advocate violence and the snake can avoid it when I give my warning. If they were to choose to put their violent, religious zealot hands on my child, then I will respond in kind. You just seemed to imply that adults mutilating and sterilizing children, along with trying to legislate away the rights of the parents to protect their children, is akin to children doing something I disagreed with. All I can say is WOW. BTW, there is no such thing as a "trans parent" or a "trans child."
I want to be really annoying and push back slightly on this take, which I agree with 90%. Idk if it’s just because I have family members who work in the medical industry, but I do think there’s something other than just good intentions at play with the people that actually perform these procedures. Doctors are trained to help people, not be nice. Lots of doctors are actually very unpleasant people, because it’s not their bedside manner they’re training for 4 years of undergrad, 4 years of med school, 3-7 years of residency, and then however many years of fellowship after that. If you’re booking a knee replacement, and you’re very overweight- ANY surgeon worth her/his salt (worth paying) should refuse. You shouldn’t WANT the surgeon to agree to operate on you, but even if you really did, the surgeon has committed to an oath to refuse harm- it is the surgeon’s responsibility to take these steps to minimize potential harm. It doesn’t matter how bad the patient wants something (surgery, pain meds, etc). Doctors are people with special training and enormous responsibility, and we recognize that by giving them elevated social status and gobs of money.
So while I agree that the way forward socially and culturally is mostly what you outline here (recognizing that we can do horribly things out of kindness), there does need to be significant pressure to hold doctors (surgeons, endocrinologists, psychiatrists) responsible when they see and exploit an opportunity for money, status, power, unfettered access to freely experiment on people society has agreed don’t have value, etc.
The opioid epidemic couldn’t have happened without both doctors who just wanted to help people in terrible pain AND predatory doctors and businesspeople who saw a chance to wave aside their moral qualms for the prospect of some fat cash and the chance to live out their savior fantasies. It’s both that are responsible. But it’s important to state that the latter aren’t being motivated by kindness, and they make up a significant percentage of doctors (in the same way that many people become cops out of very pure desire to serve their community, but many become cops for the chance to dominate others).
>> it is the surgeon’s responsibility to take these steps to minimize potential harm.<<
100% totally agree. I think doctors have absolutely abdicated their responsibility to patients here to evaluate them and prescribe appropriate care. And definitely there are people in the mix to make money, make their names, 'innovate' at expense of patients (whether they realize this or not, maybe they're indifferent).
It is a really strange cultural movement bc it’s so intertwined with medicine. A trans identity wouldn’t really exist without endocrinologists and surgeons choosing to experiment on usually unstable people, so I guess I hold these doctors at the top of the list of “people responsible.”
I’m really interested to see how lawsuits by detransitioners work out- particularly the open lies by (imo, predatory) surgeons. For example, perhaps a lawyer will argue that it is a crime to refer to penile-inversion procedures as “vaginoplasties” and to refer to aspects of the procedure with gynecological terms. To me, this would be a good way to prove that patients couldn’t give informed consent because they were not only not clearly informed, but were actively mislead about the very nature of the procedures and body parts involved. I guess we’ll see how this plays out, as lawsuits proceed.
>> For example, perhaps a lawyer will argue that it is a crime to refer to penile-inversion procedures as “vaginoplasties” and to refer to aspects of the procedure with gynecological terms. To me, this would be a good way to prove that patients couldn’t give informed consent because they were not only not clearly informed, but were actively mislead about the very nature of the procedures and body parts involved. I guess we’ll see how this plays out, as lawsuits proceed. <<
I've thought about this a lot, along these lines: that what's being promised is impossible and thus inherently misleading.
In my experience, surgeons have been some of the most vocal critics of loosening the standards for surgery, most notably in response to the idea that nothing should prevent the patient from getting access to the ‘life saving’ procedure. They really dislike having bad outcomes, regardless of whether that’s driven by ego or concern for patients.
Their resistance has been challenged consistently... especially thanks to the ideas from critical theory that have gained traction. BMI, for instance, is now being challenged as racist by many leaders- including some within WPATH. It’s hard to maintain high standards of care when the people your industry looks to for guidance says that your standards are racist. It’s an effective tool to manipulate people, as most people don’t want to be racist and also don’t want the social and professional consequences that come from being labeled as such.
I still believe they should be held accountable for the outcomes they ultimately caused, but they aren’t the only ones responsible- not by a long shot. Regardless, it will probably take significant financial and reputation loss due to lawsuits for the industry in general to begin pushing back. We only have to look at the history of medicine for many examples of that.
ILooking back at many years of working in the medical field, including in plastic surgery (inc gender services, tiny back then), I cannot tell you how many people we turned away because they wanted a better nose, or new breasts, to make them "feel better". It was accepted that - even in quite extreme cases (to the patient, that is) - they would have to save their pennies and go privately - and maybe in the meantime think about some self-esteem boosting therapy. Basically, the NHS simply cannot afford to spend the many many millions that gender transition (and reversal) would cost if we indulged every whim. This never comes up, does it? We hear about expensive drugs not being available for genuinely ill folk, but endless drug therapies, gender affirming surgeries, clinician time, are not questioned. People on the frontline simply must "gatekeep" each and every disturbed or confused teen and adult who is demanding, at the end of the day, the bloody impossible.
I see the same thing happening with the parents of self-identified "trans" kids. For the most part, they're neither stupid nor evil. They're just doing their best to go along with what they're told is the right thing, even if it seems totally wrong to them. After all, the "experts" know best. And so it just continues...
If we don't understand and accept that a large portion of the people promoting and acting on these ideas are largely driven by good intentions and their genuine belief they are saving lives, we are closing off perhaps the only pathway to getting them to see the harm they're doing and reclaiming their critical thinking skills. It understandably makes people shut down or get angry at giving anything that feels like grace to people who have done so much harm - personal harm for some of us - but ultimately all I care about is finding the fastest way to get as many of them out of this as possible.
I don't think this is true. The fastest way to get them to stop is insurance no longer paying for this stuff, and criminal charges for doing this stuff to kids.
There is no pathway to getting them to see the harm they're doing. As Helen Joyce has explained, they cannot allow themselves to understand the evil they have done. They will never be able to acknowledge it.
Instead, we must outnumber and defeat them politically, as is happening now in multiple red states.
So you think there is a surplus of nurses, doctors, surgeons etc and "we" can defeat them politically and they will all go up in a puff of smoke? Then "we" will bring in the platoons of "good" medical professionals waiting for us to win the gender war?
They won't go up in a puff of smoke (alas), they will simply be legally enjoined from continuing their evil ways, as they already are in the multiple red states that have passed laws preventing their butchery. And will be in California if we can get this initiative onto the ballot: https://protectkidsca.com
Other less direct methods include advocating for (and fundraising for) lawsuits by detransitioners to drive up malpractice insurance costs for their butchery. This too is already having an effect.
Sadly they will very likely escape any true justice for their manifold crimes against humanity, but we can and will stop them from continuing.
In my country there are almost no surgeons so those wanting to transition raise money on give-a-little or similar to go to South Asia for their surgeries and they order the hormones through the post. I think in the USA, it's also possible to go to South America.
I agree that malpractice lawsuits and denial of insurance to doctors will make a huge difference (already starting in Australia) and that's great but this will drive transition back underground not stop it. Especially hormones which are available for many legal purposes and will be easy to make available on a semi-black market.
I don't love the way that people in a country which is notorious and unique for the number of mass gun killings and other forms of serial killing haven't learned that making things against the law does not solve problems.
Of course making things against the law does not eliminate them, but it usually does drastically reduce them. That's why have laws in the first place.
Excellent thought-provoking piece. I'm sure you're right about human nature. It's as though the clinicians themselves have been groomed. But maybe they need the sharp slap of reality when they do harm. In other professions there is accountability. In UK for example, teachers undergo regular and rigorous OFSTED inspections. They can endure devastating criticism for failing to achieve one aspect of a list of targets. But in the UK, after the scandal of child harm at the Tavistock gender clinic, I understand that the pro-affirmation clinicians are still working and believing. They cannot pretend not to know, because there's a government inquiry into the scandal. A young person took them to court for harm and won. They must have a huge capacity for blocking out information, or feeling anything at all for their patients. You can only get so far on smugness. It would be interesting to see an analysis of the personality type. Who could persist with harming children when the evidence of serious risk is so available?
>> They must have a huge capacity for blocking out information, or feeling anything at all for their patients.<<
I think it's the former. Very hard to accept that good intentions led to a bad place. Massive cognitive dissonance shuts people down.
Those who have been convinced that gender medicine is necessary don't see "serious risk". Very early on, they were convinced that these kids would commit suicide etc if their "true identity" was not affirmed and treatment forthcoming. For them that is the serious risk. They are being told repeatedly whenever the topic comes up that Keira Bell (Tavistock case detransitioner) and others are plants or being misled by political actors and regardless incredibly rare. The people I know who believe are very caring and good people. It's tremendously sad. I believe the only thing that will convince them is a flood of detransitioners.
The problem being, though, that they don't want to believe that those detransitioners even exist.
Yes. The problem is that we need open and transparent debate on trans policies and practices. Denial that detrans exist is part of the refusal to have open debate.
I have heard that they tell the patient this will solve all their problems, but they can reverse the surgery. The inside out mini penis can be flipped and it’s all good again. They may need voice lessons or whatever, to get rid of the deep robotic voice. “You’re not a freak, but you will be when the team is through with you.”-- Dr Frankenstein
I am sure there is a lot of truth in this. This ideology is being pushed very hard and a lot of people in society at large have fallen into it. It has gained so much traction also because of unquestioned assumptions again in our culture generally but particularly in the medical profession about what bodies are. They are seen as, essentially, machines, which one gets working by imposing one's ideas about how it should be (although machines are treated better: one doesn't put unleaded petrol into a car which runs on leaded fuel.) This is the paradigm that needs changing. We are our bodies and they are self-healing living entities.
" about what bodies are" - yes, huge part of this
Bodies are the temple of the soul. They need treating right. I like the idea of not putting unleaded petrol into a machine that runs on leaded fuel. My own daughter’s body was treated as though male, being prescribed testosterone which is not designed or even safe for women! No respect for her body. Surely doctors need to look at the fact she was already self harming and on autistic spectrum. No, they were blackmailed by the suicide myth. After starting testosterone her suicide attempt was very nearly “successful.”. Testosterone was detected in her blood with anti depressant. She had overdosed. No respect for bodies.
I'm so sorry. We have some very inhuman ideas about the human body in medicine right now.
Females do have testosterone in their bodies along with other hormones. It’s just that females don’t have T at the levels males do. All these kids are self-harming in the name of “finding their authentic self”, which unfortunately, they will be searching for until they realize they were fed a lie and medical staff fed them enabled it. I do hope your daughter discovers who she really is very soon.
The application of testosterone cream to the skin is a type of self harming ritual such as cutting, having tattoos drawn on skin. It is prescribed far too readily to young women wanting to be masculinised. After many years we will find out what harm it does. Never in history have women been given high doses of testosterone for years. Our daughters are willing victims in a research experiment.
Many highly skilled, intelligent people are driven primarily not by altruism or ethics but by their desire to solve hard problems. The scientists who developed the atom bomb weren't thinking about possible human extinction, at least not in the early stages. They just wanted to figure out how to make atoms release vast amounts of energy. Similarly, the digital technology that we all rely on, some of which has arguably done more harm than good, is the result of thousands of engineers challenging themselves to solve difficult problems. In gender medicine, the challenge is to make a man aesthetically and functionally a woman, or vice versa; people with this mindset are unlikely to give much thought to consequences for the patient (who has usually been convinced that these are worthy goals). Are scientists, engineers, and physicians evil for wanting to prove that something can be done? No, they are only human, which is sometimes a very dangerous thing to be.
This seems especially the approach of the Dutch clinicians (as well as endocrinologists everywhere)... the British in the 1990s were very curious in the patient's experience and uses of a trans identity. The Dutch... not so much. How can we intervene early and get more convincing cosmetic results?
Awesome post -- some very cogent and quite damning insights. Reminds me of the movie The Tenth Level, with William Shatner, about the Milgram Experiment and the related Stanford Prison experiment. I vividly remember Shatner's character, in the denouement, asking himself, "What the fuck have we, have I done?" (Excuse my French ...)
Apropos of which, I really don't envy Jazz Jennings' mother and various "gender affirmation doctors" if they're ever forced to ask themselves the same question.
Somewhat more broadly on the "sex-change" issue -- a phrase that really chaps my hide when it's used in the unquoted form -- you might have some interest in Melanie Phillips' book on the topic:
https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-sex-change-society-e58
There are more recent analyses of the Milgram experiment which suggest that the response of the students who were the experimental subjects has been greatly simplified and exaggerated.
I am sorry but I am one of those lefties who despised MP's interventions into education - "all shall have prizes". Her nonsense claim at the top of her substack that in the 1990s there was "a dangerous upheaval in relationships between men and women. It seemed to me that the bargain between the sexes was breaking down to such an extent that sexual identity itself was in danger of being destroyed." I was living in the UK then and the danger in that country was the level of everyday sexism. I don't know how women with full-time careers like MP can look at themselves in the mirror when they make such claims. They don't live the lives they are promoting.
Hollywood for you ... 🙂
But I expect you have your ear closer to the ground, at least over there, than I do. So I'd be curious about "MPs interventions into education".
But the title of the book and the preamble seemed worth subscribing for, at least for a month to get the book in 10 chapters. I've only started reading it, but it seems there might be some merit in it. For example:
"Laddish behaviour has become a significant preoccupation of the British government. According to the Home Secretary Jack Straw: ‘Dealing with under-skilled, under-educated young men is the single most serious problem we face’."
But connecting a bunch of dots doesn't mean the result necessarily holds much water.
Laddish behaviour has not been a preoccupation of the UK govt for some time. Jack Straw is ex-Labour Home Secretary - from 1997-2001. He was correct - there's been structural changes in the economy so unskilled male labour is no longer in high demand and inadequate funding of public education so those boys learned very little at school, not helped by British working class resistance to an education system that was often contemptuous of them. MP believes strongly in that traditional education and thinks that not expressing contempt for kids and rejecting bullying and putting in more funding and giving them more support is namby pamby progressivism so I think her solutions won't work - and the book is old!
So I'll take her book with a grain or two of salt then ... 🙂
Robert Jay Lifton’s book Nazi Doctors comes to mind. Although it’s impossible for us today to imagine (the word Nazi now meaning evil), there were true believers in the “goodness” of the Nazi cause, in the rescue of the nation from forces threatening it.
Lifton wanted to understand why doctors in particular participated in Nazi crimes: how did they rationalize the crimes that so patently violated the Hippocratic oath? IIRC, he concluded that those doctors split themselves psychologically--the crimes were good acts in that context, they had to suppress any inner conflict. It’s an interesting study of how people who engage in a helping profession can commit harms in the name of a powerful ideology. It’s more complicated than being “evil.”
Yep, one of the pieces I link above is my piece about RJL's The Nazi Doctors.
https://elizamondegreen.substack.com/p/ok-lets-actually-talk-about-nazi
And those Nazi doctors were both idiots and evil.
Ah yes, I did read your wonderful piece on this!
"How do decent people end up doing terrible things?" That's the age-old question, isn't it? If anyone can answer it, you can.
I continue to be impressed by your insight and fair-mindedness. You see the blacks, whites and grays, while I see only the blacks and whites. It's a special talent that you have.
The problem is that it's the kids who want these transformations, and children can be very insistent. They've already been brainwashed by trans activists or their friends by the time they get to the clinician. The question for me is, what happened to "Do No Harm"?
It seems to me that setting boundaries or standards shouldn't be so difficult. I keep falling back on this: "Children do not have the emotional maturity to make such decisions on behalf of the adult yet to come." It seems to me that this is an entirely reasonable standard. If there are, indeed, very young children who feel like they were born the wrong sex, asking them to wait 15 years to do something about it may seem cruel, but I remain invested in the idea that the human body must be allowed to develop naturally, and that certain decisions can only be made by an adult. Part of the problem for me is that I am incredulous that there are actually any three-year-old children in the world who want to change sexes. You've been talking mostly about adolescents, Eliza. What does your research tell you about very young children?
Certainly, someone who is fourteen can wait until he or she is eighteen to take action. If not for the very young children who are supposedly clamoring for sex-change treatments, it seems that adulthood is the standard that needs to be adopted.
Unfortunately there is no magic age of adulthood. A lot of people in the transgender community also have other mental health issues. When " gatekeeping" became the enemy and self id the standard things deteriorated for adults as well. The pull is very strong to separate people from their mind and body. Transhumanism wants to delete the natural human.
Well said. Although I believe in a spirit that leaves the body at death, I still see humans as essentially physical creatures. There is no escaping our bodies.
There is a history of males "knowing" they were the wrong sex very early and maintaining that belief throughout their lives. That's what has convinced people that kids can know. Those mid-20th century generations of transwomen are also mainly responsible for the astonishing weight placed on cosmetic surgeries as necessary and for the faith in puberty blockers. They fought for decades to get hormones and surgery and some of them really wanted to make things easier for later generations. I do find blaming the surgical professional bodies and big pharma and the regulatory bodies and major financial donors most convincing. This follows the basic outlines of other medical scandals but it has been turbo-powered by social media and, sadly, by the huge efforts to make medicine more responsive to patients' needs.
Your overview of the situation sounds very accurate to me. Like Eliza, you are able to see both sides a little better than people like me who are polarized. You seem to be saying that the focus on children is coming from a desire to help those trans people whose feelings develop at an early age. Perhaps my position that children must wait to be adults is a little too dogmatic, but I continue to feel that children must be given a chance to outgrow the feelings if that is at all possible.
My spiritual point of view also influences my opinion. I believe in reincarnation, and I believe that the type of trans people you speak of have more than likely chosen the wrong sex before birth. (Yes, even in the spiritual world, mistakes are made.) Having made that mistake, they are still free to transition if they want to (to whatever extent transitioning is even possible), but I still say that transitioning is an adult decision. Wait until you grow up. And if that means you have to be a tall woman, so be it. Waiting until adulthood is the only way to avoid the collateral damage of kids caving to a trend.
Thanks but I don’t mean to suggest that those men’s experiences provide a good basis for current medical practice with young people. I agree strongly with waiting until adulthood. The earlier trans women’s intentions may have been good but what’s happening is unquestionably wrong - the majority of young people do grow out of the belief they are trans. Furthermore that older generation didn’t have early access to hormonal drugs and surgery they just thought it would’ve helped them. Eliza’s post was about understanding that medical professionals involved in trans practices are not ‘evil’ - I believe that’s also true of the trans people. Eliza suggested in a comment that some professions are less aware of the impact of their treatments on patients than others. I think that’s true and I also think some, probably many, of the early trans people had little awareness that others might not need what they felt they needed.
The person I know was born female, came out as trans at age 14, and insisted she had felt like a boy her entire life. Sort of like a He said - She said situation. None of it could be proved.
Most of these clinicians were aware at some point but 'chose' to indulge in self deceit, turn a blind eye and many, many justifications to enable them to not confront the matter (even personally), put their heads above the parapet and do what was right, in order to maintain their jobs and lifestyles. The reality is, those actions are what has allowed the practical implementation of this ideology to literally thrive and spread like the virus that it is.
We have to thank GOD every day for the whistle-blowers and people that refused to enable and be part of pushing this evil. Some people employed moral integrity and sacrifice and walked away and started talking about it on social media platforms, writing about it on blogs and platforms like this, writing to organisationd about it, to make the rest of us aware of what was going on. The truth tellers.
These 'highly intelligent' and qualified clinicians are all accountable for leading vulnerable people, including children, to a horrific fate and are responsible for keeping the deception going. We don't have to walk on eggshells so that they don't feel bad. They should feel very bad for what they participated in. Feeling bad is a valuable consequence of not doing the right thing when circumstances demanded that you needed to but you didn't because it didn't 'benefit' you.
"let's resolve this so nobody involved feels bad about it" is not possible, but it's not virtuous either. Some people should feel really really bad.
That's not what Eliza is doing.
I hope your life is one of total clarity about the direction you're going in and the decisions you make and you never have regrets. Based on other medical scandals, I expect some - many - of those people will eventually feel extremely bad and they don't need smug people lucky enough to never be in their position trying to make them do so.
Apologies to Eliza here - I appear to have misunderstood her position. She says below that she believes that good intentions do NOT matter. I believe good intentions do matter - those with good intentions are more aware of the people they think they are helping and more likely to respond when they realise that they were not helping. Those out to make a big profit like Dr Sidhbh Gallagher are immoral and callous and self-serving. Quite different.
I'm saying good intentions do not reduce culpability for causing harm. I think it will be impossible to reach people in the good intentions/causing harm camp if we don't recognize why/how they got here. Remains to be seen whether that approach will help people recognize the harm and walk away.
'I'm saying good intentions do not reduce culpability for causing harm.'
This.....
There were many whistle blowers at the Tavistock and others who kept their heads down and choose not to work in the area of gender. Whistle blowers often destroy their careers and lives and are often ignored. Jamie Reed the USA nurse is lucky in one way because there is a huge right-wing movement who want to hear what she has to say. But they won't support her to be the person that she says she is - and the leftish non-standard family anti-trans movement is much smaller. I hope she is doing well work wise and in her community.
Absolutely. Totally agree on every point you made including Jamie Reid. Yes, I definitely hope she's doing well.
This is a much needed perspective. We all forget how deeply motivated we are by social pressures, which act on us unconsciously. Most of the time, those remain completely unconscious. Occasionally, we become aware of a discomfort, a doubt, and suppress it with all sorts of motivated reasoning or distraction. This is perhaps another piece of the puzzle that informs the bigger picture painted in this post - the post focuses on this feature in gender clinicians, but to get a better grasp of it we need to recognise it as a feature of all of us.
The mention of eugenics reminds me of the oft-repeated and reasonable view of the Holocaust, the awful understanding that those perpetrating the most disgusting horrors were also not inherently evil people, and were motivated by some complex mix of terror, indoctrination and helplessness. Gender medicine isn't the Holocaust, but similar pressures act on those involved, including so-called "allies". The terror is of cancellation, job loss, loss of social support from friends and family, poverty, hate mail, even death threats, and the tenets of the indoctrination can seem just reasonable enough to ignore one's doubts, especially when the T is force-teamed with the L, G and B, and endlessly presented as a fight for personal rights.
I stopped discussing it on a forum where I was outnumbered about 20:1 by trans allies, partly because it was hard being verbally beaten up with nonsense over and over, but also because I wasn't fair-minded or self-disciplined enough to keep the perspective Eliza presents here. I swore and berated and insulted them as "morons." Some of those "morons" could write books on different systems of logic or quantum mechanics, yet they insisted everyone - no matter who - absolutely needed "bodily autonomy" - and I was the worst kind of evil moron for not agreeing with them. I also suspect the antagonism entrenches many of them further. Anyway, it's much nicer, and probably much more useful, talking with all the people who have delved deeper, with more freedom to do so, and come to the correct, and very important, views that we have. As our output proliferates, it will eventually overturn the gender woo.
But they are not functioning as humans in their clinical practice. They are functioning as medical professionals.
Therefore their human motivations are not relevant in addressing the plain fact that they are willing to take intellectually dishonest measures to further a cause not supported by reliable evidence.
In some of the old neighborhoods, that's known as malpractice.
Malpractice is not resolved by persuasion, kind or otherwise.
It's still malpractice and abdication of their medical responsibility to patients. Why or how they ended up doing this doesn't mitigate that whatsoever.
Sorry not sorry, but no.
Having been drawn into a cult is no excuse. Those who have been drawn in were idiots to allow themselves to be drawn in, and are now evil because of it.
No washing of hands is needed, what is needed is to fight back as hard as possible.
And that starts with never EVER voting for any candidate for any office who endorses these idiotic and evil practices.
Those endorsers currently include Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, EVERY Democrat in Congress (yes, even Joe Manchin), and 99.9% of Democrats holding state or local office.
Don't vote for them!
And if you're in California, help us get this plebiscite (true small-d democracy!) on the ballot:
https://protectkidsca.com
Having good intentions is NOT an excuse, not mitigating whatsoever. These people are fully culpable for what they have done. But understanding how they came to do it is important.
I hope the California ballot measure succeeds!
I hope very much the California Ballot succeeds. I also completely disagree that it is worth voting for the right wing who can be accurately described as ignorant, corrupt and greedy - and totally intolerant of dissent. Their behaviour in congress toward those among their own party who were honest and brave enough to reject Jan 6th and Trump - Liz Cheney etc shows that they do not accept that - to quote Eliza 7/06/22 "that what really happened—and how it happened—matters." They are killing women by denying all abortions in many states - even when the mother's life is in danger and the fetus will not survive. Transgender policies and practices are only one part of what is happening in the world and we must remember the funders include Julia Pritzker - there's no guarantee trans will stay left. Trans practices and policies have to be stopped by convincing the left who are limited and annoying but do struggle with evidence and include many honest people and serious researchers. And I'm sorry but good intentions are mitigating for the reasons I give just above. In a court of law intentions are considered important because they do alter behaviour and outcomes.
The concept of "evil" is embedded in our thinking, a legacy of our Judeo- Christian heritage. It has limited value as a descriptor of reality, and more often than not distorts rather than illuminates the truth. The activists and doctors mutilating dysphoric children don't think they're doing harm. They think they'd be doing harm by permitting them to suffer the bodies they were born into. How to untie this knot? To admit they were wrong is to admit their conservative opponents were right. Will they swallow such a bitter pill? It seems unlikely.
It will happen - not everyone and it will take a long time because the evidence takes time to produce and it is complicated and it is being hidden. The denial of open and transparent debate is one of the most pernicious and worst aspects of transgender ideology. Making the issue into left/right politics and associating it with regressive family beliefs probably won't help change minds either.
I have to disagree with you on the motivation of those in this money-making, misogynistic, child destroying industry. They are joining in and doing harm to affirm themselves as part of the clique, the ones that are always the first to join in the "newest thing" to signal how hip and smart they are as compared to the rest of us rubes. The attack on parental rights and families, and the speed with which this blob of mucous spread, is another red flag about the motivation. This pathetic transhumanist industry is also directly tied to the attack on girls and women's sports, and their legal rights and protections. Never before in the mental health or medical field have I heard of a "treatment" plan that required attacking the rights of others, people that have nothing to do with the patient; in order to treat males, females are required to shut up and take it while the flashers wag their schwangs at them in the locker room. I do understand those in medicine, especially those with a family to support, who choose to not go along but keep their heads down for fear of losing their job and/or having the gestapo after them. Where I do agree with you is on the approach to repairing the damage, but that approach requires both the carrot (the diplomats) and the stick (the hardliners). Those of us taking a hardline are necessary to move the goalpost back across the miles it was moved, while the diplomats (you) do the much harder work of working with the herd that submitted to joining the cult. Thank you for having the strength to do this work.
well put. I don't mind that team carrot exists, but I am team stick.
Yes, I am also a stick and thank God every day I'm in my 60's with grown children. If one of these religious zealots had slithered toward any of my children, there would be one less fanatic on the planet.
I really wonder at the way people slither so easily into advocating vigilante violence as if it were a solution. Did your children really never do things you desperately disagreed with? Did you really succeed in controlling all the knowledge and people they had access to? The actual trans parents don't find violence is an option or that the threat is someone out there. It is their child who has taken up these beliefs who is their problem.
It occurred to me that me pulling out a revolver when a freak was coming at me on a dark, deserted road during a car breakdown was me "advocating violence." Better I should have just stood there and taken whatever violence he had in mind. Instead, whatever violence he intended was averted as he beat a retreat. The child abusers of Big trans also have a choice to beat feet when a parent tells them to keep their freak away from that parent's child. They can choose wisely, or not.
I've never advocated vigilante violence, but I do advocate protecting one's children. As far as the rest of what you stated, that's like saying the pedophile who convinced the child to get in the car and further manipulated the child into adult sex acts is not the problem, it's the child that went along with it that is the problem. I never advocate violence and the snake can avoid it when I give my warning. If they were to choose to put their violent, religious zealot hands on my child, then I will respond in kind. You just seemed to imply that adults mutilating and sterilizing children, along with trying to legislate away the rights of the parents to protect their children, is akin to children doing something I disagreed with. All I can say is WOW. BTW, there is no such thing as a "trans parent" or a "trans child."
I want to be really annoying and push back slightly on this take, which I agree with 90%. Idk if it’s just because I have family members who work in the medical industry, but I do think there’s something other than just good intentions at play with the people that actually perform these procedures. Doctors are trained to help people, not be nice. Lots of doctors are actually very unpleasant people, because it’s not their bedside manner they’re training for 4 years of undergrad, 4 years of med school, 3-7 years of residency, and then however many years of fellowship after that. If you’re booking a knee replacement, and you’re very overweight- ANY surgeon worth her/his salt (worth paying) should refuse. You shouldn’t WANT the surgeon to agree to operate on you, but even if you really did, the surgeon has committed to an oath to refuse harm- it is the surgeon’s responsibility to take these steps to minimize potential harm. It doesn’t matter how bad the patient wants something (surgery, pain meds, etc). Doctors are people with special training and enormous responsibility, and we recognize that by giving them elevated social status and gobs of money.
So while I agree that the way forward socially and culturally is mostly what you outline here (recognizing that we can do horribly things out of kindness), there does need to be significant pressure to hold doctors (surgeons, endocrinologists, psychiatrists) responsible when they see and exploit an opportunity for money, status, power, unfettered access to freely experiment on people society has agreed don’t have value, etc.
The opioid epidemic couldn’t have happened without both doctors who just wanted to help people in terrible pain AND predatory doctors and businesspeople who saw a chance to wave aside their moral qualms for the prospect of some fat cash and the chance to live out their savior fantasies. It’s both that are responsible. But it’s important to state that the latter aren’t being motivated by kindness, and they make up a significant percentage of doctors (in the same way that many people become cops out of very pure desire to serve their community, but many become cops for the chance to dominate others).
Not annoying at all.
>> it is the surgeon’s responsibility to take these steps to minimize potential harm.<<
100% totally agree. I think doctors have absolutely abdicated their responsibility to patients here to evaluate them and prescribe appropriate care. And definitely there are people in the mix to make money, make their names, 'innovate' at expense of patients (whether they realize this or not, maybe they're indifferent).
It is a really strange cultural movement bc it’s so intertwined with medicine. A trans identity wouldn’t really exist without endocrinologists and surgeons choosing to experiment on usually unstable people, so I guess I hold these doctors at the top of the list of “people responsible.”
I’m really interested to see how lawsuits by detransitioners work out- particularly the open lies by (imo, predatory) surgeons. For example, perhaps a lawyer will argue that it is a crime to refer to penile-inversion procedures as “vaginoplasties” and to refer to aspects of the procedure with gynecological terms. To me, this would be a good way to prove that patients couldn’t give informed consent because they were not only not clearly informed, but were actively mislead about the very nature of the procedures and body parts involved. I guess we’ll see how this plays out, as lawsuits proceed.
>> For example, perhaps a lawyer will argue that it is a crime to refer to penile-inversion procedures as “vaginoplasties” and to refer to aspects of the procedure with gynecological terms. To me, this would be a good way to prove that patients couldn’t give informed consent because they were not only not clearly informed, but were actively mislead about the very nature of the procedures and body parts involved. I guess we’ll see how this plays out, as lawsuits proceed. <<
I've thought about this a lot, along these lines: that what's being promised is impossible and thus inherently misleading.
The field of gender medicine could spawn a great modern Frankenstein novel. Modern Prometheuses indeed.
In my experience, surgeons have been some of the most vocal critics of loosening the standards for surgery, most notably in response to the idea that nothing should prevent the patient from getting access to the ‘life saving’ procedure. They really dislike having bad outcomes, regardless of whether that’s driven by ego or concern for patients.
Their resistance has been challenged consistently... especially thanks to the ideas from critical theory that have gained traction. BMI, for instance, is now being challenged as racist by many leaders- including some within WPATH. It’s hard to maintain high standards of care when the people your industry looks to for guidance says that your standards are racist. It’s an effective tool to manipulate people, as most people don’t want to be racist and also don’t want the social and professional consequences that come from being labeled as such.
I still believe they should be held accountable for the outcomes they ultimately caused, but they aren’t the only ones responsible- not by a long shot. Regardless, it will probably take significant financial and reputation loss due to lawsuits for the industry in general to begin pushing back. We only have to look at the history of medicine for many examples of that.
ILooking back at many years of working in the medical field, including in plastic surgery (inc gender services, tiny back then), I cannot tell you how many people we turned away because they wanted a better nose, or new breasts, to make them "feel better". It was accepted that - even in quite extreme cases (to the patient, that is) - they would have to save their pennies and go privately - and maybe in the meantime think about some self-esteem boosting therapy. Basically, the NHS simply cannot afford to spend the many many millions that gender transition (and reversal) would cost if we indulged every whim. This never comes up, does it? We hear about expensive drugs not being available for genuinely ill folk, but endless drug therapies, gender affirming surgeries, clinician time, are not questioned. People on the frontline simply must "gatekeep" each and every disturbed or confused teen and adult who is demanding, at the end of the day, the bloody impossible.
I see the same thing happening with the parents of self-identified "trans" kids. For the most part, they're neither stupid nor evil. They're just doing their best to go along with what they're told is the right thing, even if it seems totally wrong to them. After all, the "experts" know best. And so it just continues...
"Sometimes it is not enough to do our best; we must do what is required." - Winston Churchill
(And what is required is to go against the so-called experts)
Eliza, you are a genius. Such clarity of thought and expression.