Trumping gender
The electoral verdict is not affirmative
“So, it does feel like we’re getting the sense that ‘gender’ as a broad issue played a significant part in the results that we saw in the election. What is not clear is how much the general public was considering gender medicine, paediatric gender medicine, sports fairness, or just the exhaustion with overall DEI.”—US gender clinic whistleblower Jamie Reed of the LGBT Courage Coalition, comment to GCN, 7 November 2024
Video: Donald Trump sets out his policy on medicalised gender change, 1 February 2023
Augean stables
Florida’s Surgeon General, Dr Joseph Ladapo, an opponent of irreversible gender medicalisation for minors, would be a good appointment as the next secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HSS), according to the state’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis, whose November 7 tweet suggesting this has had more than one million views.
In April 2022, Dr Ladapo criticised Biden-era HHS guidance for a misleading claim that, “Research demonstrates that gender-affirming care improves the mental health and overall well-being of gender diverse children and adolescents.” Florida’s health authorities noted the European shift to caution following systematic reviews showing the low quality of the evidence for hormonal treatment of minors with gender distress.
At the time, Dr Ladapo said: “The federal government’s medical establishment releasing guidance failing at the most basic level of academic rigor shows that this was never about health care. It was about injecting political ideology into the health of our children. Children experiencing gender dysphoria should be supported by family and seek counseling, not pushed into an irreversible decision before they reach 18.”
As a Biden appointee, HHS assistant secretary Dr Rachel Levine, a paediatrician and transgender-identifying male, claimed in 2022 that, “There is no argument among medical professionals—paediatricians, paediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, etc—about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care.”
Earlier this year, court documents revealed that Dr Levine’s office had pressured the World Professional Association for Transgender Health to abandon minimum ages for medical interventions with minors.
Screenshot: California detransitioner Chloe Cole wants to see the back of Dr Levine (who is appears here with Sam Brinton, a non-binary “they/them” engineer who worked for the Biden Administration until he pleaded guilty to airport luggage theft)
JD Vance: “I wouldn’t be surprised if me and Trump won the ‘normal gay guy’ vote, because they just wanted to be left the hell alone. And now you have all this crazy [LGBTQIA2S+] stuff on top of it. [And the gay guys say,] ‘We didn’t want to give pharmaceutical [puberty blocker] products to nine-year-olds who are transitioning their genders. We just wanted to be left the hell alone’.
“And is there a dynamic that’s going on [among middle- and upper-middle class whites] where, if you become ‘trans,’ that is the way to reject your white privilege, right? That’s the social signifier, the only one that’s available [to whites] in the hyper-woke mindset is, if you become gender non-binary.
“[I asked my trans friend,] ‘Are you not at all a little bit worried about how rich people are getting by prescribing experimental therapeutics to 9-,10-, 12-year-old kids?’ Like, this used to be something that the American Left would have gone crazy about.
“We take that normal adolescent confusion and then we try to medicalise it. And nobody’s saying, oh, when we do medicalise it, by the way, a lot of pharmaceutical companies get very rich.—Senator JD Vance, Trump running-mate, podcast talk with Joe Rogan (15 million views), 1 November 2024
Follow the science
On November 7, former Democrat Robert F Kennedy Jnr said Mr Trump wanted him in office to “[c]lean up the corruption in our government health agencies [and return] those agencies to their rich tradition of gold-standard, evidence-based science.”
Physicist and science advocate Lawrence M Krauss has tweeted his hope that in the new Trump Administration, “Elon Musk and co [might] replace heads of US science agencies, who have wasted enormous sums and manpower on divisive, dysfunctional & misplaced diversity initiatives, to return [the] nation’s focus to supporting science and innovation.”
America’s regulatory Food and Drug Administration has faced scrutiny over the issue of hormone suppression medicine used off-label to interrupt the natural puberty of minors.
Republican Senator Marco Rubio has called on the National Institutes of Health to investigate a $5.7 million-funded study in which gender clinician Dr Johanna Olson-Kennedy said she had withheld discouraging data on puberty blockers out of fear this would be “weaponised” by opponents of “gender-affirming care.”
“Voters have reflected that there is a massive political and cultural change occurring. Journalists acted as activists, politicians like actors, and doctors the bringers of harm and pain. America says, no more! Extremist views are unpopular, and most of the population doesn’t want to be called a bigot or a N*zi for wanting to keep their kids healthy and whole.”—Detransitioner Prisha Mosley, tweet, 7 November 2024
“This election was a crushing defeat for political lawfare, critical race theory, woke campuses, biological males in women’s sports, genital mutilation of teenagers, the Ivy League, the legacy media, and Hollywood.”—Historian Niall Ferguson, analysis, The Free Press, 7 November 2024
“The dismissiveness with which liberals treated [voters’] concerns was part of something else: dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes. Concerned about gender transitions for children or about biological males playing on girls’ sports teams? You’re a transphobe.”—Journalist Bret Stephens, opinion article, The New York Times, 6 November 2024
Who’s who?
Two members of a panel developing a trans health guideline for the World Health Organisation have been implicated in an alleged attempt to suppress data showing the lack of evidence for gender medicine, according to a British Medical Journal investigation by journalist Jennifer Block. The 21-member panel had already been criticised for apparent selection bias in favour of the gender-affirming treatment approach.
The new controversy arises from court documents suggesting that the US-based World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) sought to prevent publication of discouraging results from the systematic evidence reviews it had commissioned with Johns Hopkins University in preparation for its latest treatment guideline, known as SOC-8.
The university’s research lead, Dr Karen Robinson, was told in October 2020 that WPATH wanted a veto over publications of results from the reviews. “It is paramount that any publication based on the WPATH SOC-8 data is thoroughly scrutinized and reviewed to ensure that publication does not negatively affect the provision of transgender healthcare in the broadest sense,” the WPATH message to Dr Robinson said.
In the BMJ investigation, Block reports that the proposed WPATH “approval process was to be overseen by the organisation’s president elect at the time, Walter Bouman, a specialist in trans health at the University of Nottingham, UK. Gail Knudson, a physician at the University of British Columbia and former WPATH president, had also signed the letters to Robinson. Bouman and Knudson were appointed to WHO’s guideline development group for transgender health and remain members. Neither responded to The BMJ’s request for comment.”
In August 2020, Dr Robinson had stated that “we found little to no evidence about [treatment of] children and adolescents.” Block quotes US psychologist Dr Laura Edwards-Leeper, who co-wrote the WPATH SOC-8 chapter on adolescents, as saying: “We were told by WPATH leadership that Johns Hopkins couldn’t do a review for the child or adolescent chapters because there weren’t enough studies to review, so we just needed to write the guidelines based on expert consensus, essentially.” The claim that insufficient research data precludes a systematic review is contrary to the principles of evidence-based medicine.
Block reports: “The presence of WPATH executives on WHO’s guideline development group is especially troubling to watchdogs such as Zhenya Abbruzzese, co-founder of the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine. ‘If WHO continues to ignore the evidence that two of its guideline development group members led a recent effort to suppress evidence related to treatments in this area,’ she says, ‘it may harm WHO’s reputation in other areas of medicine, where its clinical guidance is sorely needed’.”
Video: Canada-based journalist Mia Hughes on the revelations of the WPATH files
It would seem totally inappropriate for HHS assistant secretary Dr Rachel Levine, a paediatrician and transgender-identifying male to have any role in addressing issues involving gender policy.
That aside I plead tolerance as I paste the following:
It is noteworthy that despite the oft quoted ‘suicidality’ among children diagnosed with gender dysphoria (GD) there have been no related suicide in this cohort in Australia and few, if any, elsewhere.
The fact that ‘suicidality’ often accompanies GD is not particularly surprising given the fact mental health conditions in the GD cohort are orders of magnitude above those in the general population. One example being autism spectrum disorder (ASD) that is around five times the prevalence in children presenting with GD compared with the normal population. A meta-analysis of 52 studies found that 37% of autistic participants had experienced suicidal ideation.
It does not require a mathematician to link the cause and effect
If addressing child suicide is to be a priority for the paediatricians in Australia’s children’s hospitals then the efforts to address it need be focussed where the problem exists.
Here’s one option:
The age-standardized rate of completed suicide for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children is 8.3 deaths per 100,000 children, compared to 2.1 per 100,000 for non-Indigenous children, a factor of four times!
Having worked for many years as a doctor in remote indigenous communities in WA and the NT I have been involved first-hand in the suicide of an indigenous child. Aside from misery that engulfed the family and the small community in which she lived there was no national outrage and as far as I know none of the cohort of professionals attending the GD cohort have suggested a changed their priority.
I liked Donald Trump’s proposed policies on Transgender Medicine. Finally a grown up will take charge and sanity might return to this area which has little resemblance to Medicine as I know it.