Medical Associations Trusted Belief Over Science on Youth Gender Care

American advocates for youth gender medicine have insisted for years that overwhelming evidence favors providing gender dysphoric youth with puberty blockers, hormones and, in the case of biological females, surgery to remove their breasts.

It didn’t matter that the number of kids showing up at gender clinics had soared and that they were more likely to have complex mental health conditions than those who had come to clinics in years earlier, complicating diagnosis. Advocates and health care organizations just dug in. As a billboard truck used by the L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy group GLAAD proclaimed in 2023, “The science is settled.” The Human Rights Campaign says on its website that “the safety and efficacy of gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary youth and adults is clear.” Elsewhere, these and other groups, like the American Civil Liberties Union, referred to these treatments as “medically necessary,” “lifesaving” and “evidence-based.”

The reason these advocates were able to make such strong statements is that for years, the most important professional medical and mental health organizations in the country had been singing a similar tune: “The science” was supposedly codified in documents published by these organizations. As GLAAD puts it on its website, “Every major medical association supports health care for transgender people and youth as safe and lifesaving.”

But something confounding has happened in the last few weeks: Cracks have appeared in the supposed wall of consensus.

After expressing concerns about the evidence base in 2024, on Feb. 3, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons became the first major American medical group to publicly question youth gender medicine since its widespread adoption. The organization published a nine-page “position statement” advising its members against any gender-related surgeries before age 19 and noting that “there are currently no validated methods” for determining whether youth gender dysphoria will resolve without medical treatment. (The document also acknowledged a similar level of uncertainty surrounding blockers and hormones, though that’s less directly relevant to the practice of plastic surgeons.)

The next day, the American Medical Association — which has long approved of such procedures — announced that “in the absence of clear evidence, the A.M.A. agrees with A.S.P.S. that surgical interventions in minors should be generally deferred to adulthood.”

These statements were released days after a woman named Fox Varian became the first person to win a malpractice case after undergoing gender transition care and later regretting it. Ms. Varian and her lawyer argued that her psychologist and plastic surgeon in suburban New York, despite her serious mental health problems and apparent ambivalence over her transgender identity, failed to safeguard her by going forward with a double mastectomy when she was 16. (Many gender medicine practitioners and advocates believe that to carefully scrutinize or even explore claims of a transgender identity is to engage in de facto conversion therapy.) The jury’s $2 million award will most likely give pause to hospitals and clinics that continue to provide these treatments without substantial guardrails.

Read the rest here.

Study on treatment of gender dysphoria goes unpublished over political concerns

An influential doctor and advocate of adolescent gender treatments said she had not published a long-awaited study of puberty-blocking drugs because of the charged American political environment.

The doctor, Johanna Olson-Kennedy, began the study in 2015 as part of a broader, multimillion-dollar federal project on transgender youth. She and colleagues recruited 95 children from across the country and gave them puberty blockers, which stave off the permanent physical changes — like breasts or a deepening voice — that could exacerbate their gender distress, known as dysphoria.

The researchers followed the children for two years to see if the treatments improved their mental health. An older Dutch study had found that puberty blockers improved well-being, results that inspired clinics around the world to regularly prescribe the medications as part of what is now called gender-affirming care.

But the American trial did not find a similar trend, Dr. Olson-Kennedy said in a wide-ranging interview. Puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements, she said, most likely because the children were already doing well when the study began.

“They’re in really good shape when they come in, and they’re in really good shape after two years,” said Dr. Olson-Kennedy, who runs the country’s largest youth gender clinic at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles.

That conclusion seemed to contradict an earlier description of the group, in which Dr. Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues noted that one quarter of the adolescents were depressed or suicidal before treatment.

In the nine years since the study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, and as medical care for this small group of adolescents became a searing issue in American politics, Dr. Olson-Kennedy’s team has not published the data. Asked why, she said the findings might fuel the kind of political attacks that have led to bans of the youth gender treatments in more than 20 states, one of which will soon be considered by the Supreme Court.

“I do not want our work to be weaponized,” she said. “It has to be exactly on point, clear and concise. And that takes time.”

Read the rest here.

The Guardian: Why don’t whales get cancer?

Read it here.

UK: Most children who think they’re transgender are just going through a ‘phase’

Most children who believe that they are transgender are just going through a “phase”, the NHS has said, as it warns that doctors should not encourage them to change their names and pronouns.

NHS England has announced plans for tightening controls on the treatment of under 18s questioning their gender, including a ban on prescribing puberty blockers outside of strict clinical trials.

The services, which will replace the controversial Tavistock clinic, will be led by medical doctors rather than therapists and will consider the impact of other conditions such as autism and mental health issues.

The plans, which are currently under public consultation, are for an interim service for young people with gender dysphoria whilst Dr Hilary Cass continues her review into the treatment offered by the NHS.

They note that there is a need to change the services because there is currently “scarce and inconclusive evidence to support clinical decision-making”.

NHS England says that the interim Cass Report has advised that even social transition, such as changing a young person’s name and pronouns or the way that they dress, is not a “neutral act” that could have “significant effects” in terms of “psychological functioning”.

Parent groups and professionals have long raised concerns that NHS medics have taken an “affirmative” approach to treating children, including using their preferred names and pronouns.

The proposals say that the new clinical approach will for younger children “reflect evidence that in most cases gender incongruence does not persist into adolescence” and doctors should be mindful this might be a “transient phase”.

Instead of encouraging transition, medics should take “a watchful approach” to see how a young person’s conditions develop, the plans state.

Read the rest here. (paywalled)

Didn't I see this in a movie?

Ten thousand years after woolly mammoths vanished from the face of the Earth, scientists are embarking on an ambitious project to bring the beasts back to the Arctic tundra.

The prospect of recreating mammoths and returning them to the wild has been discussed – seriously at times – for more than a decade, but on Monday researchers announced fresh funding they believe could make their dream a reality.

The boost comes in the form of $15m (£11m) raised by the bioscience and genetics company Colossal, co-founded by Ben Lamm, a tech and software entrepreneur, and George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School who has pioneered new approaches to gene editing.

The scientists have set their initial sights on creating an elephant-mammoth hybrid by making embryos in the laboratory that carry mammoth DNA. The starting point for the project involves taking skin cells from Asian elephants, which are threatened with extinction, and reprogramming them into more versatile stem cells that carry mammoth DNA. The particular genes that are responsible for mammoth hair, insulating fat layers and other cold climate adaptions are identified by comparing mammoth genomes extracted from animals recovered from the permafrost with those from the related Asian elephants.

These embryos would then be carried to term in a surrogate mother or potentially in an artificial womb. If all goes to plan – and the hurdles are far from trivial – the researchers hope to have their first set of calves in six years.

“Our goal is to make a cold-resistant elephant, but it is going to look and behave like a mammoth. Not because we are trying to trick anybody, but because we want something that is functionally equivalent to the mammoth, that will enjoy its time at -40C, and do all the things that elephants and mammoths do, in particular knocking down trees,” Church told the Guardian.

Read the rest here.

Miami's new plan for climate change and rising sea levels

It looks like a lot of crossed fingers and hoping for a best case scenario. I live in south Florida, on the other coast, about 20 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. Given my age, I doubt I will live long enough to see it. But I am more or less resigned that my home and a lot of this end of the state is going to be underwater by the 2050s. Most people are in serious denial about how much of the coastal US is in danger. 

Here's Miami's plan. 

Worries are rising over COVID deniers and anti-vaxxers

Story here.

This could be a problem, but I think it's manageable. There are some people who subscribe to pseudoscientific beliefs and or conspiracy theories regarding vaccines and others who simply deny that Covid exists at all or if they concede its existence, they claim it is being overblown and that the reports of mass infections and deaths are false. Happily those subscribing to these delusional views are not huge in numbers. But there are enough that in some situations they could pose a serious health risk if you get a bunch of unvaccinated people in large groups.

On the one hand I dislike direct coercion in matters of conscience. So I would be opposed to laws mandating vaccination under pain of fine or jail. But on the other hand it is a well established principle of law that society does have the right to impose reasonable regulations to protect the public health. So my response would be to take steps to limit the ability of vaccine resisters to pose such a threat.

* Require all persons booking commercial airplane flights anywhere in the US, or overseas if bound for the US, to affirm under penalty of perjury that all those booking have been vaccinated. No vaccination... no plane trip.

* Ditto interstate bus and train tickets and all cruise ships/ocean liners.

* Require affirmation of vaccination as a condition for applying for or renewing a US passport.

* Hotels should be encouraged to require registering guests to affirm that they have been vaccinated.

* States should require students registering for schools and university to provide evidence of vaccination.

None of these measures are unreasonable as a public health response to a dangerous pandemic. People will still be able to refuse vaccination, but there will be consequences that for many will be inconvenient. They could still travel by private vehicle and children could be home schooled. Obviously, any such regulations should not be imposed until a vaccine has been available to the general public for a sufficient amount of time that anyone wanting one will have had the opportunity to get the jab.

Contra Conspiracy

Ignore the conspiracy theories: scientists know Covid-19 wasn't created in a lab.

There is a lot to be upset with China over, including aspects of how they handled the pandemic. But it is extremely unlikely it was man made by them or anyone else. 

More on the state of academia

A world-renowned expert in animal bone identification has lost her position at the University of Victoria (UVic), she believes for telling school kids politically incorrect facts about polar bears.

Zoologist Dr. Susan Crockford is routinely hired by biologists and archeologists in Canada and abroad to identify the remains of mammals, birds and fish. She has helped catalog museum collections, and assisted police with forensic analyses. But UVic students will no longer benefit from her expertise, and her ability to apply for research grants has come to a screeching halt. In May, the Anthropology Department withdrew her Adjunct Professor status, depriving her of a university affiliation.

Crockford describes her expulsion as “an academic hanging without a trial, conducted behind closed doors.” After being renewed unanimously in 2016 for a three-year term, her adjunct status was not renewed the next time around.

Crockford is the author of a popular blog, polarbearscience.com, as well as five books about these animals. Polar Bear Facts and Myths has been translated into four languages. She says that, contrary to the claims of environmental activists, polar bears are currently thriving and are at no risk of extinction from climate change.

Informing the public of these plain facts now appears to be unacceptable to UVic. After 15 years, Crockford was advised in May that an internal Appointment Reappointment Promotion and Tenure (ARPT) committee had “voted not to renew your Adjunct Status.” No reasons were provided. Having undergone hip surgery in the interim, Crockford is only now going public.

When contacted by the National Post recently, UVic spokesman Paul Marck refused to say how many people were on the ARPT committee, how many voted against Crockford, or how many were zoologists in a position to make an informed decision about her abilities.

The position of Adjunct Professor is unpaid. In exchange for mentoring students, sitting on thesis committees, and delivering occasional lectures, adjuncts gain official academic standing and full access to library research services. When asked what safeguards ensure that adjuncts can’t be excommunicated merely for expressing unpopular ideas, spokesman Marck declined to respond, citing provincial privacy legislation. In his words, the university doesn’t disclose “information about internal processes. We must respect the privacy rights of all members of our campus community.”

In this case, the university is not protecting Crockford’s right to privacy. Instead, it is using a privacy smokescreen to protect members of a committee who have decided to purge an adjunct professor without reason or explanation.

Read the rest here.

Eat Less Red Meat, Scientists Said. Now Some Believe That Was Bad Advice.

The evidence is too weak to justify telling individuals to eat less beef and pork, according to new research. The findings “erode public trust,” critics said.

Details.

My take... a hundred years from now we are all going to be fertilizing a well manicured lawn somewhere. Obsessing about this sort of thing is pointless. All things in moderation and enjoy life.

Wilbur Ross wants to turn the moon into a gas station

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told CNBC on Thursday the future of commercial space projects depends on colonizing the moon.

"I think a lot depends upon how successful we are in turning the moon into a kind of gas station for outer space," Ross told "Squawk Box." "The plan is to break down the ice [there] into hydrogen and oxygen, use those as the fuel propellant."

Rockets would not need as much thrust leaving Earth if they only had to get to the moon, he said. "Then at the moon, you have very low gravity so you don't need so much thrust to go from the moon to Mars, for example, or another asteroid."

Ross, a former private-equity investor with more than 55 years experience, has emerged as the point man for promoting commercial space projects. President Donald Trump has previously emphasized federal efforts to spur private space projects.

The Trump administration is also pushing to get Americans back to the moon. Additionally, the administration announced plans earlier this month to have private entities take over operations in low Earth orbit from the International Space Station.

Read the rest here.

Orthodox Religion, Unorthodox Medicine: The Rise of Romania’s Christian Doctors

A new breed of Romanian doctors wants to place faith at the heart of their practice, alarming those who believe religion and medicine do not mix.

Cardiologist Ciprian Fisca barely got any sleep on last night’s shift, and his next one starts early tomorrow morning.

But right now, eight hours before he returns to hospital, there is nowhere he would rather be than in the kitchen of a religious retreat, deep in rural Transylvania, peeling horse-radishes.

The 27-year-old is volunteering his services as a kitchen-hand in the isolated retreat of St John the Evangelist, helping the priests with tomorrow’s meal. Among the small group assisting with the catering are a pharmacy student and Ciprian’s younger sister, who hopes to study medicine herself.

The retreat consists of a modest church surrounded by modern-looking buildings currently under construction, including a canteen, conference centre and accommodation facilities.

The transformation of this remote site hints at the revival of the Romanian Orthodox Church, flexing its muscles after half a century of communist dictatorship.

Once associated with the elderly and the rural poor, the Church now attracts educated youth in the cities, including a conspicuous following of doctors and medical students.

Read the rest here.

Let's Not Move to Mars

IN the early years of the 20th century, zeppelins filled with flammable and explosive hydrogen were all the rage in Germany, a reckless infatuation that ended with the eruption and crash of the Hindenburg in 1937. Sometimes, technology is a triumph of wild-eyed enthusiasm over the unpleasant facts of the real world.

Today we are witnessing a similar outburst of enthusiasm over the literally outlandish notion that in the relatively near future, some of us are going to be living, working, thriving and dying on Mars. A Dutch nonprofit venture called Mars One aspires to send four people to Mars by 2026 as the beginning of a permanent human settlement. In the United States, the nonprofit Inspiration One has plans for a two-person team to fly within 100 miles of the planet, launching from Earth in January 2018. And the entrepreneur Elon Musk, who runs a rocket company called SpaceX, has said he hopes to send the first people to Mars in 11 to 12 years.

Read the rest here. 

Are we alone? Do we want to know?

It was near Green Bank, W.Va., in 1960 that a young radio astronomer named Frank Drake conducted the first extensive search for alien civilizations in deep space. He aimed the 85-foot dish of a radio telescope at two nearby, sun-like stars, tuning to a frequency he thought an alien civilization might use for interstellar communication.

But the stars had nothing to say.

So began SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a form of astronomical inquiry that has captured the imaginations of people around the planet but has so far failed to detect a single “hello.” Pick your explanation: They’re not there; they’re too far away; they’re insular and aloof; they’re zoned out on computer games; they’re watching us in mild bemusement and wondering when we’ll grow up.

Now some SETI researchers are pushing a more aggressive agenda: Instead of just listening, we would transmit messages, targeting newly discovered planets orbiting distant stars. Through “active SETI,” we’d boldly announce our presence and try to get the conversation started.

Naturally this is controversial, because of . . . well, the Klingons. The bad aliens.

Read the rest here.

Actually it's not the Klingons I'm worried about. You can reason with Klingons. Klingons aren't usually genocidal in their conquests. I'm more concerned with... the Borg.

On a serious note, this is actually a legitimate concern. Let's assume for the sake of argument that we are not the only intelligent species in the universe. This seems pretty likely when you think about it. And let's further assume ad argumentum that one or more species have unlocked the secret to interstellar space travel. This proposition is much more problematic since it would require that most everything we think we know about the laws of physics is wrong. But again for the sake of discussion...

Anyone who is capable of hopping from one solar system to another is going to be so far beyond us in technological development, that we might as well still be living in caves. Add to this the extremely unlikely proposition that we are the only intelligent and predatorially aggressive species around and well... you get the picture.

At the very least I think this deserves some discussion at higher levels and some consensus before we start posting interstellar coming out announcements. What these people are doing is rather akin to sending out an invitation to everyone on the block to a party at your place, except you're not the only one who lives there, AND you don't know any of the neighbors. These "scientists" seem to be assuming that we are living in a high quality neighborhood, maybe the Upper East Side of the Milkyway. When in fact we might be living in the galactic projects of Spanish Harlem.

In short, I'd like to know a little more about the neighbors before we invite them over for dinner. If for no other reason than to be sure that we aren't likely to end up as the main course.

More Evidence of Global Warming

All 50 states are currently experiencing sub-freezing temperatures. Yes, even Hawaii.

Climate change: the science is not settled. It's all over the place as greedy opportunists scramble for cash

Until now I’ve never written about global warming. That’s because I’m a coward. I don’t want “climate experts” sneering at me because I dare venture an opinion without knowing as much as they do.

I’m talking about climate sceptics, by the way. It’s their orthodoxy I’ve been too gutless to challenge. I still sometimes move in conservative circles in which it’s taken as read that climate scientists are lying crooks. If I question these sceptics, I will immediately become a “libtard” – part of the EUSSR/Bilderberg/MSM axis. At the very least, Right-wing friends will snub me at parties (as opposed to me snubbing them, which is what I prefer).

Meanwhile, over in the “warmist” camp, there’s no shortage of blind intolerance. Let me draw your attention to a story in today’s Telegraph. Prof Lennart Bengtsson of Reading University says he fears for his “health and safety” after he undermined the alarming predictions issued by the UN’s panel on climate change (IPCC). He’s frightened of the alarmist hardliners among his colleagues: that is, members of the “science is settled” school of thought. These are the people who – back in the heady days of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth – invented the label “denier” to imply that questioning global warming was on a par with rejecting evolution (a “theory” supported by so much data that the science really is settled) or even denying the Holocaust.

Climate science has been dragged into the American-style culture wars that are turning British intellectual life into a battlefield. It’s not an edifying spectacle. Warmist scientists have been caught tinkering with statistics in order to close gaps in their theory (it was thanks to a Telegraph blog post by James Delingpole that the “Climategate” scandal exploded). They just can’t bear to provide their critics with ammunition. Meanwhile, the more voluble deniers suck up to rich American fruitloops who think cavemen had pet dinosaurs – because the earth is only 6,000 years old – and reckon President Obama is a Kenyan-born Antichrist.

Read the rest here.

The Myth of ‘Settled Science’

I repeat: I’m not a global-warming believer. I’m not a global-warming denier. I’ve long believed that it cannot be good for humanity to be spewing tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I also believe that those scientists who pretend to know exactly what this will cause in 20, 30, or 50 years are white-coated propagandists.

“The debate is settled,” asserted propagandist-in-chief Barack Obama in his latest State of the Union address. “Climate change is a fact.” Really? There is nothing more anti-scientific than the very idea that science is settled, static, impervious to challenge. Take a non-climate example. It was long assumed that mammograms help reduce breast cancer deaths. This fact was so settled that Obamacare requires every insurance plan to offer mammograms (for free, no less).

Now we learn from a massive randomized study — 90,000 women followed for 25 years — that mammograms may have no effect on breast-cancer deaths. Indeed, one out of five of those diagnosed by mammogram receives unnecessary radiation, chemo, or surgery.

So much for settledness.

Read the rest here.

US to rescue global warming scientists trapped in ice...

WASHINGTON  - The United States is sending a heavy icebreaker to help free a Russian ship and a Chinese icebreaker gripped by Antarctic ice, the Coast Guard said on Saturday.

The Polar Star is responding to a request for assistance from Australian authorities as well as from the Russian and Chinese governments, it said in a statement.

"The U.S. Coast Guard stands ready to respond to Australia's request," Coast Guard Pacific Area Commander Vice Admiral Paul Zukunft said. "Our highest priority is safety of life at sea, which is why we are assisting in breaking a navigational path for both of these vessels."

A Chinese icebreaker that helped rescue 52 passengers from a Russian ship stranded in Antarctic ice found itself stuck in heavy ice on Friday.

Read the rest here.

Further evidence that God has a sense of humor.

The Russian Church Condemns Surrogate Motherhood

An official document has been issued by the Holy Synod strongly condemning the practice of surrogate motherhood and placing restrictions on the baptism of children born in this manner. You may read it here. I'd say this document is pretty definitive and leaves no room for confusion on the subject.

HT: Byzantine Texas

Attention All Preppers

On a cool September night in 1859, campers out in Colorado were roused from sleep by a “light so bright that one could easily read common print,” as one newspaper described it. Some of them, confused, got up and began making breakfast.

Farther east, thousands of New Yorkers ran out onto their sidewalks to watch the sky glow, ribboned in yellow, white and crimson. Few people had ever seen an aurora that far south — and this one lit up the whole city.

At the time, it was a dazzling display of nature. Yet if the same thing happened today, it would be an utter catastrophe.

The auroras of 1859, known as the “Carrington Event,” came after the sun unleashed a large coronal mass ejection, a burst of charged plasma aimed directly at the Earth. When the particles hit our magnetosphere, they triggered an especially fierce geomagnetic storm that lit up the sky and frazzled communication wires around the world. Telegraphs in Philadelphia were spitting out “fantastical and unreadable messages,” one paper reported, with some systems unusable for hours.

Today, electric utilities and the insurance industry are grappling with a scary possibility. A solar storm on the scale of that in 1859 would wreak havoc on power grids, pipelines and satellites. In the worst case, it could leave 20 million to 40 million people in the Northeast without power — possibly for years — as utilities struggled to replace thousands of fried transformers stretching from Washington to Boston. Chaos and riots might ensue.

That’s not a lurid sci-fi fantasy. It’s a sober new assessment by Lloyd’s of London, the world’s oldest insurance market. The report notes that even a much smaller solar-induced geomagnetic storm in 1989 left 6 million people in Quebec without power for nine hours.

Read the rest here.