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.

One of the world’s best universities has been captured by trans-obsessed zealots

I came to Cambridge because I wanted to learn how to think, not what to think: how to weigh arguments, test premises, spot evasions and follow a thought wherever it leads, even when it becomes uncomfortable. I did not come to be preached at, or for slogans. I expected the university – which for generations has jostled for position as the best in the world – to be a place where everything was up for discussion. Although I had long-held settled views on the sex-gender debate, they were not something I dwelt on.

That changed over the Easter holidays last year, when I attended a talk featuring the writers Julie Bindel and Helen Joyce. I met women that day who changed the course of my life. Not because they proselytised, or demanded loyalty, but because they spoke plainly, without fear. It became impossible to remain comfortably disengaged. I read Joyce’s book – Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality – and returned to Cambridge with it, as well as Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls. Both women, as well as Bindel, have been pilloried (that’s putting it mildly) for stating the truth: that biological sex and women’s rights must trump gender identity.

Back in college, I showed the books to a friend. I had been self-censoring on this subject for some time: trimming sentences and avoiding questions. I believed that a careful, private introduction to these ideas would be safe. I was wrong. Soon after, I was systematically ostracised by people I had considered close friends. Many told me they could no longer speak to me because of my views. I was branded a Terf (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) and the word was scratched into the board on my door. I was told that buying books written by bigots was morally equivalent to being one. Argument was unnecessary; association enough to convict.

Read the rest here.

As New York goes hard left, San Francisco edges back towards the center

...It’s a bicoastal split screen that speaks to a realignment of America’s progressive power base. In New York, Mamdani, a democratic socialist who took office on Thursday, was swept into power on promises of free buses, childcare and widespread rent freezes. In San Francisco, Mayor Daniel Lurie, an heir to the billion-dollar Levi Strauss fortune, has focused on austerity measures, beefing up policing, reviving a hollowed-out downtown core and supporting the booming artificial-intelligence industry.

San Francisco, once an incubator to a host of modern progressive ideas from the LGBTQ+-rights movement to ethnic studies in classrooms and protections for undocumented immigrants, has changed. Even progressives acknowledge it isn’t the liberal trendsetter of yesteryear.

That shift has already upended the national political narrative around the city. For decades a lefty caricature and punching bag for conservatives, pundits and politicians on the right are now racing to make Mamdani the face of the Democratic Party in the midterms. Meanwhile, moderates in San Francisco, while celebrating their victories, hold their city up as a warning sign for what they cast as the excesses of the left.

“The message is you can take things too far,” said Nancy Tung, chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party and a moderate who’s helped lead the city’s centrist shift. She added, “Don’t expect that voters won’t notice forever.”

Or as Chris Larsen, a billionaire crypto titan who has been pouring money into local elections, put it: “The cost issue was the overriding thing in New York. Whereas, in San Francisco, it was cleaning the mess that the far left created over the last decade … It was safe, clean streets and getting back our reputation, which I think we largely have now.”

Read the rest here

In the News

Hegseth boat strike fallout, war crime allegations: What to know 

Pete Hegseth ‘pushed top Navy admiral who questioned boat strikes to resign’

Trump pardons former top entertainment executive who was charged by his own Justice Department

Trump pardons Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar

Trump 'garbage' rhetoric about Somalis draws cheers from administration, silence from Republicans and alarm from critics

Poll: Trump's own voters begin blaming him for affordability crisis

Trump's current poll numbers

New York Times sues over Pentagon press access rules

Oklahoma university instructor on leave after failing Bible-based essay on gender

America’s Magical Thinking About Ukraine

Putin authorised 2018 Novichok poisoning of ex-Russian spy Skripal, UK inquiry says

U.S. Institute of Peace renamed for Trump

Von der Leyen pushes ahead with reparations loan for Ukraine as Belgium maintains its opposition

Analysis Kicking the Corpse: Netanyahu's Pardon Request Caps the Slow Death of Law in Israel

Crisis looms in Israel over ultra-Orthodox conscription bill

CDC Panel Meets to Vote On Hepatitis B Vaccine Amid Anti-Vax Push

Andrew Sullivan Takes on the Extremism in the Alphabet+ Movement

To be honest, I am astonished that this was actually published by the New York Times. Mr. Sullivan just picked up a stick and and took a very big swing at one of the radical left's most sacred hornets nests. One hopes he is wearing an asbestos suit because I think he may have just supplanted J.K. Rowling as their new public enemy #1. 

Read it here.

A (rare) Victory for Legal Sanity

LONDON — Britain’s highest court ruled Wednesday that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex.

Bret Stephens- D.E.I. Will Not Be Missed

In December 2015 the Obama administration decided to allow women to serve in all combat roles. “There will be no exceptions,” Ashton Carter, then the secretary of defense, announced. Women would be accepted as “Army Rangers and Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Marine Corps infantry,” among other demanding roles previously open only to men.

As for physical standards, those would not change: “There must be no quotas or perception thereof,” Carter said.

In some ways, the policy has produced inspiring results. More than 140 women have completed the Army’s elite Ranger School, and a few have passed the Marines’ Infantry Officer Course (though none, as yet, have become SEALs). Women serve with distinction in other combat roles, including as fighter pilots and tank commanders.

In other ways, however, the policy has realized the worst fears of its early critics. Though it has elevated women who meet the same physical standards as their male counterparts, it has also led to an erosion of standards. From the initial laudable goal — equality of opportunity for all, regardless of gender — the military has been sliding toward something else: equality in outcomes. That is what today is usually meant by the word “equity,” at least in the context of diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I.

Take the Army’s efforts to create gender-neutral fitness requirements, known as the Army Combat Fitness Test. The test, developed over a decade, was designed to be rigorous, requiring soldiers of either sex to meet physical standards appropriate to the roles they might perform — with the toughest requirements for jobs like artillery soldiers, which require a lot of muscle.

But that caused a problem: Women were failing the test at noticeably higher rates, according to a RAND study. Among active-duty enlisted soldiers, the fitness test had a pass rate of 92 percent among men but only 52 percent among women. (Female officers did better, with a pass rate of 72 percent.) Democratic senators, including New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand, were also putting pressure on the Army to delay implementation of the test, arguing, as The Washington Post reported in 2020, that it “could undermine the goal of creating a diverse force.”

The Biden administration yielded to this complaint.

Read the rest here.

The woke left and religion

We don’t tolerate prejudice at work. Why, pray, do we allow it in church?

HT: Dr. Tighe

All culture warriors are inherently authoritarians. Anyone who thinks they have a right to coercively dictate how other people should live their lives, what they can or cannot say or believe &c, is dangerous and should not be allowed anywhere near political power.

One of the few upsides to Trump's (re) election

Some Democrats are finally waking up and realizing that woke is broke.

Donald Trump won a majority of white women and remarkable numbers of Black and Latino voters and young men.

Democratic insiders thought people would vote for Kamala Harris, even if they didn’t like her, to get rid of Trump. But more people ended up voting for Trump, even though many didn’t like him, because they liked the Democratic Party less.

I have often talked about how my dad stayed up all night on the night Harry Truman was elected because he was so excited. And my brother stayed up all night the first time Trump was elected because he was so excited. And I felt that Democrats would never recover that kind of excitement until they could figure out why they had turned off so many working-class voters over the decades, and why they had developed such disdain toward their once loyal base.

Democratic candidates have often been avatars of elitism — Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and second-term Barack Obama. The party embraced a worldview of hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation, and it supported diversity statements for job applicants and faculty lounge terminology like “Latinx,” and “BIPOC” (Black, Indigenous, People of Color).

This alienated half the country, or more. And the chaos and antisemitism at many college campuses certainly didn’t help.

“When the woke police come at you,” Rahm Emanuel told me, “you don’t even get your Miranda rights read to you.”

Read the rest here.

Some Democrats have been worried about the crazy cult of identity politics for years. A lot of others are now seeing its perils. (FTR I am not a Democrat. Although I briefly considered it after leaving the GOP in 2016, far too many of their political views are anathema to me. I am  a registered Libertarian.)

Presbyterian troubles

And then there is this.

On Campus, a New Social Litmus Test: Zionist or Not?

I'm not going to excerpt this. Read it here.

The Vatican Says "NO" to Gender Ideology

VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican on Monday declared gender-affirming surgery and surrogacy as grave violations of human dignity, putting them on par with abortion and euthanasia as practices that it said reject God’s plan for human life.

The Vatican’s doctrine office issued “Infinite Dignity,” a 20-page declaration that has been in the works for five years. After substantial revision in recent months, it was approved March 25 by Pope Francis, who ordered its publication.

From a pope who has made outreach to the LGBTQ+ community a hallmark of his papacy, the document was received as a setback, albeit predictable, by trans Catholics. But its message was also consistent with the Argentine Jesuit’s long-standing belief that while trans people should be welcomed in the church, so-called “gender ideologies” should not.

In its most eagerly anticipated section, the Vatican repeated its rejection of “gender theory,” or the idea that one’s biological sex can change. It said God created man and woman as biologically different, separate beings, and said people must not tinker with that or try to “make oneself God.”

Read the rest here.

The pope is (mostly) right. Now there is a sentence I haven't written in a long time. I think I need to lie down for a few minutes. 

When a Big Company Decides Your Skin Color is Problematic

The Alliance between Palestine and the Left

Rod Dreher: Wokery verging on authoritarianism

Believe it or not, the Trial of the Century just happened in a courtroom in Helsinki. The Finnish parliamentarian and physician Päivi Räsänen this week returned to the dock to face hate crimes charges for having quoted the Bible in defense of Scripture’s teaching on homosexuality.

While it is not altogether surprising that yet another Christian has been brought up on charges of blaspheming against LGBTs—who have been elevated from ordinary people, as equal as anybody else, into liberalism’s divinities—a statement the Finnish prosecution made in the trial’s opening raised the proceedings from an ordinary example of post-Christian liberalism’s contempt for the faith and free speech, into something epochal. Attention must be paid.

In her opening statement on Thursday, the Finnish prosecutor said, of a 2004 pamphlet authored by Dr. Räsänen, “The point isn’t whether it is true or not, but that this is insulting.”

Think about that: The point is not whether these words true or not, but that someone’s feelings were hurt by them.

This is the essence of totalitarianism: the demand to control reality. The Finnish state attempts to outlaw not simply expression it does not like, but facts it finds offensive. This little statement by grim-faced prosecutor Anu Mantila is what makes this two-day legal proceeding the Trial of the Century.

It’s like this: If, in a liberal democracy, the state has the power to declare truth subordinate to ideology, then you live under totalitarianism. It might be a soft totalitarianism—fines for thought criminals like Päivi Räsänen, instead of the gulag—but it is totalitarianism nonetheless.

It is telling that Mantila initially asked the appeals court not to let Dr. Räsänen and her co-defendant, Lutheran bishop Juhana Pohjola, even testify. It was as if she only wanted her allegations heard, with no defense from the accused. The court denied the prosecution’s request, but that it was even made tells you the kind of tyrannical mindset we’re dealing with.

Read the rest here.

HT: Dr. Tighe

More leftist idiocy

Normally I don't condone this sort of thing. But if leftists can tear down statues they find offensive, and vandalize both public and private property to promote their cause de jour; one can hardly complain here. This is simply asinine and whoever came up with the idea should be sacked. Meanwhile, waiting for the condom dispenser in the lady's bathroom. 

HT: Brian.

New England Knavery

Bat $&!# crazy idiocy from Vermont. Calvin Coolidge must be turning in his grave.

Cancelling the hecklers

Now an emeritus professor at George Washington University Law School, Banzhaf, 82, is among the most accomplished and aggressive public interest lawyers in the United States. His first legal jihad, waged in the 1960s against Big Tobacco, resulted in strict advertising restrictions on cigarettes as well as a ban on smoking in airplanes. Since then, Banzhaf has led litigious crusades against fast food chains, religious universities, and private clubs, using legal action—or the mere threat of it—to effect social change.

He’s hardly a right-wing zealot. It was Banzhaf who proposed and popularized the idea of appointing a special prosecutor to investigate former president Richard Nixon, setting in motion the legal drama that would ultimately end his presidency. A half century later, he filed a complaint with Georgia election officials over former president Donald Trump’s 2021 call to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger—in which the former president pressured Raffensperger to overturn the state’s election results—leading to a multi-year investigation and several subpoenas.

Now, though, this self-proclaimed "legal terrorist" has set his sights on an unlikely target: the Stanford Law School students who shouted down Fifth Circuit appellate judge Kyle Duncan.

Banzhaf told Stanford earlier this month that he will file a character and fitness complaint against the students with the California state bar.

"It appears that you have not taken any steps to discipline or otherwise sanction the student violators," Banzhaf said in a letter to Jenny Martinez, the law school’s dean, who has since ruled out punishing the hecklers. As such, the complaint "will have links to video recordings of the disruption so that bar officials can judge the students’ conduct for themselves."

The California bar requires applicants to demonstrate "respect for the rights of others and for the judicial process." That means the students who disrupted Duncan—in part by telling him "we hope your daughters get raped"—could be in for a rude awakening if Banzhaf makes good on his threat.

This incident "seriously calls into question whether these students have proper temperament to practice law," Banzhaf told the Washington Free Beacon. "It is completely unacceptable to shout down any speaker—much less a federal judge—and then face no consequences."

Such statements have made Banzhaf the strange bedfellow of Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas), who this month urged the Texas bar to "take particular care" with graduates of Stanford Law School. The horseshoe suggests that outrage about Duncan’s treatment crosses partisan divides—and offers a blueprint to fill the disciplinary void left by other elite law schools, which have refused to punish blatant violations of their free speech policies.

Read the rest here.

Reparations for Black Californians could top $800 billion

SAN FRANCISCO -- It could cost California more than $800 billion to compensate Black residents for generations of over-policing, disproportionate incarceration and housing discrimination, economists have told a state panel considering reparations.

The preliminary estimate is more than 2.5 times California's $300 billion annual budget, and does not include a recommended $1 million per older Black resident for health disparities that have shortened their average life span. Nor does the figure count compensating people for property unjustly taken by the government or devaluing Black businesses, two other harms the task force says the state perpetuated.

Black residents may not receive cash payments anytime soon, if ever, because the state may never adopt the economists' calculations. The reparations task force is scheduled to discuss the numbers Wednesday and can vote to adopt the suggestions or come up with its own figures. The proposed number comes from a consulting team of five economists and policy experts.

Read the rest here.

California; the world's largest lunatic asylum masquerading as a state.