January 10, 2024 - 4:00pm
Over the past two years, trans activists and gender clinicians in the United States have been pushing back against state restrictions and bans on youth gender transition while desperately trying to control the public conversation. In the process, activists and clinicians have demonstrated their willingness to deceive the public in service of their cause, covering the full spectrum from evasiveness to bald-faced lies.
This is all coming to a head in Ohio this week — as the governor, state legislature, and activists clash over whether and how to regulate youth gender transition. The way the debate over youth gender transition has unfolded in the state has been misleading at best, with gender-affirming clinicians, the Ohio Children’s Hospital Association, and activists insisting that — in attempting to ban gender surgeries on minors — legislators are effectively trying to ban the free circulation of unicorns by legislating a non-issue.
The status of youth gender transition in Ohio is currently in flux. Late last year, the legislature passed a bill that would have banned hormonal and surgical interventions for minors. Governor Mike DeWine vetoed it, describing the issue as one for doctors and parents, not politicians, to decide. (Today, the Ohio House is expected to vote to override DeWine’s veto.) Governor DeWine also issued an executive order last Friday banning gender transition surgeries for minors, effective immediately.
But for something that’s emphatically not happening, activists certainly don’t want a ban on youth gender surgeries signed into an executive order or written into the law. The advocacy organisation TransOhio denounced the new rules as “unnecessary and harmful”, and plugged an “emergency fund” to help Ohioans seek “gender-affirming care” out of state.
If you suspect activists may be protesting a bit too much, you’re right. Yesterday, an Ohio parent shared screenshots with me from a private Facebook group for “parents of transgender youth” being treated at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital’s Transgender Health Clinic. This Facebook group contains frank discussions of mastectomies for girls as young as 14, and is a place where parents swap tips on navigating the surgical referral process for gender-questioning teens, naming — and praising — Ohio surgeons willing to operate on patients under the age of 18.
Deception by gender-affirming clinicians and trans activists takes many forms.
Jamie Reed, the whistleblower from the St. Louis Children’s Hospital’s gender clinic, noticed that doctors from her clinic lied in their testimony to the Missouri legislature, claiming that gender surgeries for minors were “off the table”. What they meant, apparently, was that gender surgeries for minors were off the discussion table — not the operating table. While St. Louis Children’s Hospital itself did not perform such surgeries, clinicians handed out lists of surgeons who were ready and willing to operate on underage patients. Giving patients and their parents lists of surgeons allowed clinicians to claim they weren’t referring young patients for surgeries.
Others try to obscure the paper trail, burying controversial procedures under vague billing codes like endocrine disorder (not otherwise specified) or downright dishonest ones, like billing double mastectomies for teenage girls as breast reductions, as surgeons in Indiana and other states have done.
What we’re seeing here is a strategy playbook being put into action. At the recent US Professional Association for Transgender Health conference in Denver, Colorado that I attended, presenters shared ways to mislead policymakers and the public about the substance of “gender-affirming care”. Naturally, they didn’t put it in those terms. Instead, presenters spoke of the need to push back against “Right-wing disinformation” by avoiding giving details about patients, ages, and procedures to “dinosaurs”, as health policy wonk Kellan Baker put it.
What Baker meant was: “the dinosaurs” aren’t ready for “the full expansiveness of gender”. Too many details about double mastectomies at 14 may lead the public, policymakers, and the media to draw the wrong conclusions: that trans healthcare has gone off the rails and will not — or cannot — regulate or reform itself.
Eliza Mondegreen is a graduate student in psychiatry and the author of Writing Behavior on Substack.
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Subscribethe governor, state legislature, and activists clash over whether and how to regulate youth gender transition.
Did you ever imagine this being a topic? We have adults playing god with the lives of children as if society has fundamentally changed with regards to how kids grow up.
It remains perfectly normal for boys and girls who do not follow stereotypical gender norms to grow into adult men and women anyway. That dynamic has played out forever. A separate article on this site today unwittingly shows – as the comments make clear – how efforts in social engineering to benefit women have not helped either sex. The ghouls have now moved on to the children. Because they always come for the children.
“Did you ever imagine this being a topic?”
Yes I did to be honest.
It’s an inherent feature of the progressive paradigm to divide into smaller and smaller causes as each interest group seeks to establish its own claim to victimhood and the venerated status which comes with it.
That the fool in the picture is wearing a mask outside tells you all you need know about him/they/that/it… Oh dear.
There is no such thing as transgender children, just adults using children to further an agenda.
I would argue that there’s no such thing as transgender adults either.
No doubt we will next hear infibulation for young women supported as a health procedure to spare them from worrisome sexual feelings – nothing to do with conservative cultural customs.
Of course you want to lie and confabulate when the dinosaurs might think differently.
There’s actually an interesting question here. If the girl actively sought infibulation, on what basis would it be refused? And at what age would she be considered old enough to make the decision herself? If a girl of 16 (say) could seek, and be given, a double mastectomy, on what basis would we refuse infibulation to a girl of the same age?
We should just ban all gender surgeries. They hurt healthy bodies in the name of an ideology. They shouldn’t be done. Consent should be an irrelevant technicality. “You want your breasts removed so you that you can be a man? Ok. I’ll phone the mental hospital.”
Cutting healthy body parts off children who are not considered legally competent to consent to a tattoo is sickening.
I remain hopeful that a few swingeing law suits will bring a reckoning.
Acceptance of widespread sexual abnormality is a typical symptom of a society already slid far into decadence.
How will History judge us 500 years from now?
At the end of the 20th century archaeologists found the mummified remains of a 15 year old girl, sacrificed by the Incas 22,000 feet up a mountain. The girl was described as “a beautiful and unblemished teenager”.
Western society has struggled to comprehend how 500 years ago the most advanced society in the Americas could engage in such a debased demonic ritual as child sacrifice. Anthropologists speculate that Inca society, strung out along the Pacific Ring of Fire, suffered a form of catastrophism driven by natural disasters and so resorted to human sacrifice to appease angry gods.
What goes through the mind of a Western surgeon at the NHS Tavistock Clinic in London seconds before commencing a modern-day debased demonic ritual best described as child castration? London is not ringed by threatening Andean volcanos but catastrophism is for some reason rumbling in the UK.
Should the remains of a gender reassigned child be discovered by archaeologists 500 years in the future, we can be confident the victim of our historic 21st century barbarity will not be described as “beautiful and unblemished”. Unlike that teenage girl sacrificed by the Incas 500 years ago, 26th century archaeologists won’t find evidence the girl was drugged by coca leaves or alcohol. No they will find a plastic bottle manufactured by Big Pharma and correctly deduce there was no profit in coca leaves or a vial of alcohol.
26th century anthropologists will likely struggle to find a causal link between the elective destruction of a child’s reproductive organs and climate alarmism. They might well conclude we were just evil.
In the case you posit, the archaelolgist was already digusted by our practice of wholesale feticide. Child mutilation is but a drop in the bucket.
Actually, many mastectomies are done to 13-year-olds and at least one 12-year-old at Kaiser in Oakland, California. Looking back to when I was 12 and13, there is no way I was mature enough to make such a decision to cut off my breasts. I wasn’t looking to the future very much and I would not have understood the magnitude of irreversible surgery, puberty blockers and hormones. Ban all of it. When they are 18 they can choose to mutilate their bodies.
This will be looked back on by history as an absolute nightmare. The very idea of parents allowing their immature kids to mutilate their bodies is revolting. The growth of an actual medical industry profiting by this bloody fad pursuit is even worse.
You would know, Mondegreen. You are one of the activists doing it.
I’d ask you to elaborate, but if you had anything at all, you’d have cited it.
I already have. Many times. Here it is again.
https://taliaperkinssspace.quora.com/People-are-born-transgender-they-are-not-mentally-ill-it-is-no-paraphilia-it-is-a-physical-birth-defect-no-more-a-men
None of the papers you linked to prove that people are born transgender.
To the sane, they do.
You have no evidence to the contrary, in contrast.
If you actually look at what is linked to there, you will see what is representative and real about transgender people. From Mondegreen you will only read deceitful propaganda.
It’s all thoroughly outrageous.
I would also point out that the article, as good as it is, is limited in its scope. It does not address the imperative that any medical procedure should not be approved, let alone undertaken, until and unless there is rigorous evidence-based science indicating that, on balance, it will provide short- and long-term benefits to the patient that will significantly outweigh any possible detrimental effects. While such a supportive evidence base is almost entirely lacking in the case of gender reassignment surgery, there is rather more to uphold fears that it can cause lifelong and often profound complications in respect of both physical and mental health.
Oh no! Activists deceiving the public?
“Say it ain’t so, Eliza!”
Do a Google search of “transgender therapists in Ohio” and look at what arises. Gender therapists advertising the letters they write in support of gender affirmation surgeries and that they are “kink-informed” or any number of non evidence-based, non therapeutic interventions. These are not professionals. These are paid friends who tell you want you want to hear. I’ve written the Ohio Governor and members of the Ohio House and Senate asking for a review of these clinics to determine the ethics and evidence-base for their practice. I know this–gender-affirming care is a medical framework. I have not been able to find a clinical mental health modality. Currently reading Gender Dysphoria by Evans & Evans and per that text there is no clinical model known as gender affirmation. Affirmation comes in the form of affirming dignity and respect for the individual but the position of the therapist is one of “deeply engaged neutrality,” per Stephen Levine. Therapists do not affirm the self diagnosis of clients, especially that of children who cannot give informed consent. This is a mess and we need to bombard Ohio legislators with calls, letters, emails. The saying goes…”As goes Ohio goes the nation.” Use that in your correspondence with legislators.