Ken Zucker on that landmark Finnish study; Italy sends inspectors into a gender clinic; Europe's paediatricians stand up for a child's 'open future'; and a new systematic review from Germany
Afraid not. Like Alexander Korte, these researchers are in the minority alarmed by Germany's headlong rush into gender-affirming medicalisation. Note that Zepf resigned in protest from the group developing Germany's new treatment guideline.
Please can we stop using the term 'Gender Dysphoria'? It's not real! It was invented by Trans activists working with the DSM. They literally created the condition out of thin air and then developed a 'treatment' regime that has NO empirical basis. I call it FNGD (Fake News/Factually Nonexistent Gender Dysphoria). Every time we use the term GD, we legitimise something that doesn't exist. As a clinical psychologist I have coined the term Harmful Transgender Ideations (HTIs). This is self explanatory. If FNGD6 were real, we would be seeing cases in African countries, China, Russia, the Caribbean, everywhere where kids don't have access to 'lifesaving healthcare'. There would also be clear historical evidence of it. By my very rough calculations, given a population of 1 billion in China, with 1% of youth having FNGD, there should be 100,000 suicides A MONTH of 'GD' kids. There isn't because GD is not real. It is the repackaging and monetisation of developmental, neurobiological and psycho-social conditions that children have had forever. It is a cynical money grab, with children's bodies being used like cash machines
Addressing a problem that doesn't exist and ignoring one that does:
• For Aboriginal children aged 14 years and less, suicide is the second leading cause of death – and they are near 4 times more likely to die by suicide than their non-Aboriginal peers.
• In 2018, suicide was the leading cause of death for 5- to 17-year-olds (26.5%), and in 2015 it was the leading cause of death for young Aboriginal people aged 15 to 35 years (30%).
• Australia there has no documented suicide among the gender dysphoria cohort.
This is *almost* off-topic, but: Ken Zucker's main work was never with "gender dysphoria" (transsexualism) but rather with so-called "gender non-conforming" kids. In the old days, when anxiety about these mostly concerned natal males, they were said to have "sissy-boy syndrome." Beginning in the late 1960s at UCLA, Richard Green and others carried on formal studies of the syndrome, often coupled with behavioral modification therapy, with mixed results. One thing they discovered over the long run was that a lot of their subjects grew up to be homosexuals, which was not thought to be a favorable outcome. (Very few sought to change their physical sex; that was never a significant issue.) In recent years Zucker has attempted to muddy the waters by confusing gender non-conformity with "gender identity disorder" (his old term for GNC) and now with "gender dysphoria," a term that's been around a long time and does not describe either GID or GNC. Moreover, it could not, by its clinical definition, be diagnosed in children. And we can see why that is. Gender non-conformity may happen frequently in pre-adolescent children, but it usually does not indicate actual gender dysphoria.
NOW. The "trope" that Ken Zucker claims has been around now for a number of years—‘Would you rather have a trans kid or a dead kid?'—is something I've seen almost exclusively from people like Zucker and from "gender critical" activists and writers. If you do an internet search for paraphrases of that question, you find it sometimes attributed to parents and sometimes to unnamed therapists. But so far as I can tell, no serious, named physician has offered this claptrap when giving guidance or making a diagnosis. It's something picked up from the media, and often used as a strawman argument (as it is here) because we can disprove it so easily. It's hardly even worth refuting from a statistical basis. Common sense should tell us that a rare, probably undisclosed, condition will not show up in suicide statistics in the first place.
If anyone out there truly *is* invoking that "trope," and doing so seriously, it should be understood as a desperate plea for understanding, not medical consensus or confirmed statistics.
Afraid not. Like Alexander Korte, these researchers are in the minority alarmed by Germany's headlong rush into gender-affirming medicalisation. Note that Zepf resigned in protest from the group developing Germany's new treatment guideline.
Please can we stop using the term 'Gender Dysphoria'? It's not real! It was invented by Trans activists working with the DSM. They literally created the condition out of thin air and then developed a 'treatment' regime that has NO empirical basis. I call it FNGD (Fake News/Factually Nonexistent Gender Dysphoria). Every time we use the term GD, we legitimise something that doesn't exist. As a clinical psychologist I have coined the term Harmful Transgender Ideations (HTIs). This is self explanatory. If FNGD6 were real, we would be seeing cases in African countries, China, Russia, the Caribbean, everywhere where kids don't have access to 'lifesaving healthcare'. There would also be clear historical evidence of it. By my very rough calculations, given a population of 1 billion in China, with 1% of youth having FNGD, there should be 100,000 suicides A MONTH of 'GD' kids. There isn't because GD is not real. It is the repackaging and monetisation of developmental, neurobiological and psycho-social conditions that children have had forever. It is a cynical money grab, with children's bodies being used like cash machines
Addressing a problem that doesn't exist and ignoring one that does:
• For Aboriginal children aged 14 years and less, suicide is the second leading cause of death – and they are near 4 times more likely to die by suicide than their non-Aboriginal peers.
• In 2018, suicide was the leading cause of death for 5- to 17-year-olds (26.5%), and in 2015 it was the leading cause of death for young Aboriginal people aged 15 to 35 years (30%).
• Australia there has no documented suicide among the gender dysphoria cohort.
So Germany is turning on a dime? Is that what I'm reading?
This is *almost* off-topic, but: Ken Zucker's main work was never with "gender dysphoria" (transsexualism) but rather with so-called "gender non-conforming" kids. In the old days, when anxiety about these mostly concerned natal males, they were said to have "sissy-boy syndrome." Beginning in the late 1960s at UCLA, Richard Green and others carried on formal studies of the syndrome, often coupled with behavioral modification therapy, with mixed results. One thing they discovered over the long run was that a lot of their subjects grew up to be homosexuals, which was not thought to be a favorable outcome. (Very few sought to change their physical sex; that was never a significant issue.) In recent years Zucker has attempted to muddy the waters by confusing gender non-conformity with "gender identity disorder" (his old term for GNC) and now with "gender dysphoria," a term that's been around a long time and does not describe either GID or GNC. Moreover, it could not, by its clinical definition, be diagnosed in children. And we can see why that is. Gender non-conformity may happen frequently in pre-adolescent children, but it usually does not indicate actual gender dysphoria.
NOW. The "trope" that Ken Zucker claims has been around now for a number of years—‘Would you rather have a trans kid or a dead kid?'—is something I've seen almost exclusively from people like Zucker and from "gender critical" activists and writers. If you do an internet search for paraphrases of that question, you find it sometimes attributed to parents and sometimes to unnamed therapists. But so far as I can tell, no serious, named physician has offered this claptrap when giving guidance or making a diagnosis. It's something picked up from the media, and often used as a strawman argument (as it is here) because we can disprove it so easily. It's hardly even worth refuting from a statistical basis. Common sense should tell us that a rare, probably undisclosed, condition will not show up in suicide statistics in the first place.
If anyone out there truly *is* invoking that "trope," and doing so seriously, it should be understood as a desperate plea for understanding, not medical consensus or confirmed statistics.