September 12, 2023 - 7:00pm
First comes the pushback, then the pullback.
Yesterday, the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital announced that doctors there will no longer prescribe puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones to children and adolescents. This decision follows months of controversy and comes in the wake of a new law that just went into effect in Missouri, which limits hormonal and surgical interventions for gender transition to patients over the age of 18.
Under a “grandfather clause” in the new law, the Transgender Center could have continued to prescribe puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to current patients. However, it decided to back away from these interventions altogether:
The Center first came under intense scrutiny earlier this year, when former case manager Jamie Reed blew the whistle on what she had come to see as dangerous practices within the clinic. In an article for The Free Press, Reed reported that:
I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there. By the time I departed, I was certain that the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to ‘do no harm.’ Instead, we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care.”
Reed catalogued “red flag” cases to keep track of “the kind of patients that kept my colleague and me up at night” and documented cases of youth with serious mental health struggles rushed onto life-altering drugs and even undergoing surgeries they soon regretted. The Transgender Center rejected Reed’s assessment and conducted their own internal investigation — an investigation in which they never bothered to speak to Reed — before declaring her allegations “unsubstantiated”.
But the case for youth gender transition has been unravelling this year, under pressure from state officials and legislators and increased scrutiny from the media. At the end of August, St. Louis Circuit Court Judge Steven Ohmer allowed Missouri’s ban on hormonal and surgical interventions for youth to go into effect, writing that the evidence for youth transition “raises more questions than answers”.
Hence the “unsustainable liability” Washington University cited in its decision to pull back from this area of healthcare. That’s because Missouri’s new law also extended the period of time former patients have to sue for damages to 15 years. Perhaps, when the Washington University investigated themselves, they found more merit to Reed’s allegations than they were willing to acknowledge publicly. They fear being made to pay for it.
Medical scandals tend to end quietly: the “chemical lobotomy” phased out the lobotomy-lobotomy. The Satanic Panic choked not on its own absurdities but in courtrooms and insurance offices. Public reckonings are few and far between. “Unsustainable liability” may be the beginning of the end for youth gender transition.
Eliza Mondegreen is a graduate student in psychiatry and the author of Writing Behavior on Substack.
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SubscribeIn other words, as long as we had no risk of liability for malpractice, we were happy to keep performing malpractice, but if you are gonna be able to actually suit us for that malpractice, well, that is a different story.
I said this insanity would end when the lawyers got involved.
I said that once enough of these kids got older and woke up and realized what they had done and their parents and schools and the medical profession had enabled, they would be enraged and suit.
For a lot of these places this was never about the kids, it was about making a boat load of money on kids with mental issues.
Well, looks like that time has come.
If you haven’t read the original Tavistock decision you should. It is very well written. It shows that when you remove activist intimidation from the equation the entire house of cards immediately collapses.
Unfortunately the tentacles of the Tavistock have spread elsewhere.
This is exactly what Abigail Shrier predicted in her book “Irreversible Damage.” She draws a comparison with the “recovered memory” fad in the 90’s, which mysteriously stopped being “diagnosed” as soon as the lawsuits started flying.
I don’t think there’s any amount of money that would compensate for losing healthy body parts, sexual function, bone density etc on account of the dumbest belief system since Flat Earth, but hopefully at least some the butchers responsible for it will end up losing substantial sums.
Correction: hospitals don’t prescribe anything, physicians do. Either way, puberty blockers are criminal child abuse ( assault and battery ) and those who promote and prescribe them should be prosecuted, not protected.
Yes
Those who promote and prescribe puberty blockers are pimping for sadistic paedophilia.
I believe that those physicians who medically or surgically mutilate children should be dealt with in the same way as a previous generation of mengele-medics.
I suspect there may be quite a lot of organisations looking for away out of this provided they can divert the flak.
Rejoice. Just rejoice.
The medicalization is just the worst of the damage. For every child that transitions medically there are hundreds more that are being victimized by this ideology by being deeply confused and encouraged to have make believe entities. There should be no rejoicing until this cancer is completely removed from our school systems.
The ideology vanishes with laughter.
It’s too silly to survive on its own.
All anyone needs to do is to stand back and view it in its total & utter incomprehensibility.
There sadly is not just the physical damage done to these abused children, but also the mental anguish caused by this abuse! They will suffer from mental health problems for the rest of their lives is my thought.
And the BBC has just axed Roisin Murphy from its music show for criticising this madness. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-12510045/amp/BBC-axe-Roisin-Murphy-following-puberty-blockers-trans-comment.html
The BBC will incur no liability for peddling this thought pollution, so they can continue merrily on, while the doctors and surgeons who actually carry out this butchery can finally be brought to justice.
BBC = “thought pollution”. Excellent! Spot on!
The pendulum is swinging back faster by the week. All the pessimistic and fatalist commentators on UnHerd need to wake up to this and cheer up.
I imagine the next area that will come under scrutiny will be DEI training. Is it actually helping or hindering the development of tolerant and inclusive workspaces? Helping or hurting minority employment prospects? The same risk aversion that drove corporates into DEI training may – as with hospitals and gender affirming treatments – now start driving them away.
I do not know how this will all end but at present the woke are losing ground.
Remember that when they are down it is not the time to show pity or to let up – it is the time to start kicking. No mercy.
Well said.
I agree about not letting up but I would frame it as keeping up a steady pressure via factual exposés – the rest will follow – rather than your way.
The metaphorical kicking is demanding that people responsible for this lose their jobs – defunding organizations that supported this, doing enquiries into how hospitals let this happen that name names and then publish reports. It is not good enough to let them do the ‘mistakes were made – why don’t we all move on’ – that is happening with Covid and it means no change has occurred.
And criminal prosecution for all parties responsible for this sickness.
I say both.
Absolutely. They need to be completely defeated, their malign influence eradicated from the culture. No quarter.
Please; ‘diversity, inclusion and equity’; better acronym!
Reminiscent of the debacle re Multiple Personality Disorder in 90s America (since renamed Dissociative Identity Disorder).
Great book on this by Joan Acocella: ‘Creating Hysteria’. From zero to thousands of diagnoses in a matter of years. An entire industry created overnight by gullible therapists and psychs. Fizzled out when the costs became unsustainable, largely because the ‘treatment’ didn’t work but never ended.
Hopefully lawsuits will curb enthusiasm in the States and public outcry at taxpayer funded harm to children will do the same in the UK.
Sorry to sound mean in asking this question: was this evenly spread between men and women, or largely a female phenomena? Recovered memory syndrome is similar.
Entirely female.
As was the anorexia fad.
Anorexia is a real mental illness and there are people still dying from this mental aberration today! It sometimes starts in childhood with children thinking or being told/teased by parents, school mates or family friends, they are too fat for their age and then they take it upon themselves to do something about it and starve themselves. When they lose weight by doing this they feel they have control over their body and others’ opinions, but subsequently lose control and go to extremes, refusing to eat with obvious consequences; they die. This body dysphoria also results from glamour magazines and social media having influence on teenagers and young children to be skinny like the models in the mainstream media and on television etc..
Not at all mean. Entirely accurate.
It’s of great credit to British civil society that the Tavistock judgement on teenage ‘gender affirmation’ treatment has influenced the American campaign against puberty blockers, hormone and sex-change surgery for young teenagers.
I’ve seen how Judith Butler and her cheerleaders genuinely loath as potent enemies the ‘F–ist feminists’ who led this British charge to restore child protection from wayward medicine.
These priestesses of the Far Left have also been slowed down in their quest to supplant feminism with Queer theory, although these Gen X and older women have had to accept a lot of bile and sometimes violent aggressions to do so.
Feminism itself needs to be supplanted.
Assault occasioning Grievous bodily harm (GBH), Maximum sentence 5 years..
Should be revised to be a capital crime.
These people are pimping for sadistic paedophilia, and belong on the sex offender wings of maximum security prisons.
I honestly believe that many of these cases could meet the test for criminal negligence – knowingly or recklessly exposing others to serious harm.
For example Canadian Criminal Code
219 (1) Every one is criminally negligent who
(a) in doing anything, or
(b) in omitting to do anything that it is his duty to do,
shows wanton or reckless disregard for the lives or safety of other persons.
Definition of duty
(2) For the purposes of this section, duty means a duty imposed by law.
Agreed. 5 years punishment is woefully inadequate.
You have to ask why this whole “movement” rose to prominence and power so quickly.
Leaving aside the influence of money, which is HUGE, and of transactivist terrorism in all its manifestations, which was also telling, I think we need to demand that the medical profession confront its profound MISOGYNY, dating back centuries if not millennia. (My hero in regards to confronting the medical establishment was Ignaz Semmelweis.) If the medical profession–and surgery in particular, which is notoriously misogynist–were not so deeply a part of The Patriarchy, they might have had the moral courage to resist the blandishments and threats from this Men’s Rights Movement.
That they did not will be to their eternal disgrace and chagrin.
I don’t know Romi – the modern progressive matriarchy has driven this through our institutions. However I agree ultimately it is perverted men who fantasize about sexually controlling and harming young women are at the core of this movement.
Huh?
You must have majored in Woke jargon, but there’s more to life than that.
The insurance industry saves the nation. Not just from unnecessary medical interventions but apparently climate change will now become a “thing” after the insurance companies withdraw from certain disaster-prone regions. This is the way capitalism saves itself: eventually you have to follow the money.
Yep. Vote with your wallet.