Links - 27th December 2019 (1) (Trans Mania)

Vermont set to join handful of states in removing SRS minimum age for Medicaid recipients - "Vermont is a rural state with a small population. Yet, even with its small population, the NGO Outright Vermont “serves over 2,100 LGBTQ youth and their families, and nearly 5,000 educators and service providers in every county in Vermont.”The numbers of children and young people seeking gender services in Vermont have grown rapidly in recent years. And one reason for this rapid growth may have to do with the activities of this small but very influential charity. Charity Navigator.com, which provides information about a large number of charities, lists Outright Vermont – inexplicably – as a disaster relief organization. It was founded in 1989 for the laudable purpose of supporting lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth. However, if you look at its activities in recent years, it seems to be largely concentrated on transgender issues.One of the ways the charity uses its funds (some of which are provided from government sources) is to run summer camps and provide gender-identity programs to Vermont public schools. Outright Vermont has more than 60 volunteers who go into schools across the state. Because the charity fails to consider the possibility that social contagion may account for a significant portion of the increase in transgender-identifying kids, it fails to see how much it may be perpetuating the very distress it seeks to alleviate... efforts to raise public awareness about anorexia created a contagion among adolescent girls in Hong Kong in the mid-1990s, see the first chapter of Crazy Like Us by Ethan Watters... Is the charity simply unaware of the increasing number of desisters and detransitioners? Surprisingly, no. The website links to a document developed by the University of Vermont that states “many children who are trans will end up identifying with their sex assigned at birth post puberty.” The document even acknowledges that “there is no way to predict which children will persist or desist as adults.” At the same time, the Outright Vermont website states that no age is too young for transition... Although Littman’s is the first study to focus exclusively on the possibility of social contagion, other studies have suggested the role it may play... this 2015 qualitative study surveyed 17 gender clinics around the world; some clinicians pointed out the influence of the Internet... wouldn’t it make more sense for this charity to spend its resources on looking at ways, other than transition, to help girls and boys become more comfortable in their bodies without the need to become medical patients for the rest of their lives? Perhaps the most distressing part about the Vermont proposed rule is this statement near the end of it:
“Vermont Medicaid does not cover reversal or modification of the surgeries approved under this rule.”
If incongruence between your biological sex and your perceived gender is sufficiently distressful to put you at risk of suicide, then it would work the same way in the other direction, wouldn’t it?... The word “youth” suggests adolescents. But in reality the rule opens the possibility of surgery at any age, including prepubescent children... The Swedish Pediatric Society recently published a statement [English translation] saying that “giving children the right to independently make life-changing decisions [about hormonal interventions for gender dysphoria…] lacks scientific evidence and is contrary to medical practice.”... This rule change opens the door to the government paying not only for double mastectomies for 12-year-old girls but also the removal of the penises and testicles of prepubescent boys. Can under-18 phalloplasties be far behind?"

4-year-old can begin transgender transition, says UK court - "The High Court of the United Kingdom has affirmed the right of a 4-year-old boy to live as a girl.As reported in the media, the facts of the case are a bit complicated and all names have been removed from reports. It appears that a foster couple was sending their their four-year-old son to school in a girl's uniform. Social workers accused them of being too quick to recognise the child (“H”) as suffering from gender dysphoria. They complained that the couple had “actively encouraged” the child and threatened to remove the child... They have another child, “R”, aged 13, who socially transitioned at 7-years-old. H is adopted and transitioned at 4; he is now 6. Another foster child (age unknown), who was with the family for three and a half years and left in 2007, also had gender identity issues."

"We Really Really Tried." A 2017 Letter from GIDS Clinicians Ignored by The Guardian - "there is an article about the current controversies surrounding Tavistock GIDS, and the concerns expressed by current and former GIDS clinicians and senior members of staff over the past few months.It has been a great disappointment to many on the Left that the Guardian has been largely silent on this issue. But two former GIDS clinicians sent a letter to the Guardian back in 2017 to alert them to serious concerns about what was going on within GIDS. One of the authors of the submission to the Guardian commented to us “we really really tried.” However, rather than jumping to publish such a devastating testimony – the kind of exclusive most journalists would give their right arm for – the Guardian chose to ignore it...
'These are young people for whom complex and profound confusion and turmoil is being collapsed into a one size fits all concrete explanation. ‘Trans’ can be used not as the compassionate realisation that some people need to take the always radical and courageous step to live their lives as though they had been born into the other sex role, but as a phoney panacea which seeks to shut down textured and nuanced discussion about these children and young people’s internal lives. If we can’t bear to hear the diversity within gender dysphoria then truly something has gone wrong – and believe me it has... The sloppiness of the language of both the internet and the politicians does you no favours with their conflation of sex and gender. This chimes so well in the era of post Truth anti expert hatred. I am really thinking that you are too young to be making decisions which will affect you and your body for the rest of your life: too young to drink, get married, have intercourse yet able to ‘consent’ to medical intervention. You should know that there is no unequivocally shared consensus on what you are undertaking; and the evidence, such as it is, suggests no greater health or happiness. Most of us at your age did not cherish our fertility, and the imagined easy alternative of adoption or surrogacy is far from that'"

Politicised trans groups put children at risk, says expert - "School counsellors and mental health service providers are bowing to pressures from ‘highly politicised’ transgender groups to affirm children’s beliefs that they were born the wrong sex, a leading expert has warned.Marcus Evans, a psychotherapist and ex-governor of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, whose Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) is the only NHS clinic to provide gender counselling and transitioning, said many experts were living in fear of being labelled transphobic, which was having an impact on their objectivity... Evans quoted the experience of “Dagny”, a woman who identified as a trans man in her teens, has now detransitioned and says she was influenced by views expressed on the social network, Tumblr.“One of these unhealthy beliefs I held was the belief that if you have gender dysphoria, you must transition,” Dagny has said. “And anyone that appeared to stand in my way was a transphobe – an alt-right bigot.”Evans resigned as a governor of the trust in February in protest at its response to criticism from a former member of its council of governors, David Bell, who had raised concerns from 10 members of staff... “The mind that is free to think or ask difficult questions is treated as a real threat; TV producers and journalists continually report that while people are willing to speak in confidence to them about their reservations about treatment in these areas, they shy away from being named, for fear of being accused of being bigoted and transphobic and sometimes either disciplined or even sacked for speaking their mind.”Since his high-profile resignation, Evans’s concerns have broadened as parents approach him for advice about their children.“They confirm that a gender-affirmative approach is being adopted by many school counsellors and CAMHS (Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services)”... the trust had data showing that children who took hormone blockers had reported an increase in thoughts of suicide and self-harm... The Newsnight expose followed an open letter posted online by a former clinician at the Leeds branch of GIDS, Dr Kirsty Entwistle, who warned that “traumatic early experiences”, which might be a factor in a young person’s desire to transition, were not being investigated by medical staff out of fear of being labelled transphobic."

The purge of trans-sceptical academics - "Sarah Honeychurch, one of the editors of the journal Hybrid Pedagogy, received a formal email from Chris Friend, the journal’s managing editor, asking her to resign her position. This was all because she had signed a letter to The Sunday Times, in which a number of academics critiqued the close relationship between the LGBT charity Stonewall and UK universities. The letter argues that via the education section of the Stonewall Diversity Champions Programme, trans-awareness workshops are being delivered to academics which present only one set of ideas on gender, some of which are anti-scientific yet presented as objective fact. In the second instance, Michele Moore (full disclosure: I have just co-edited a book with her), another signatory of The Sunday Times letter and honorary professor at Essex University, found herself the subject of a petition demanding her resignation from the journal Disability and Society, where she is editor-in-chief... Friend, in justifying his decision to push out Honeychurch, says that ‘just as marginalised students who feel unsafe in school face obstacles to learning, marginalised authors who feel unsafe in journals face obstacles to writing’. ‘Before any debate can take place, our authors must be safe’, he continues. ‘[This] is not a matter of shutting down an argument or censoring a perspective. It is about holding space for a group that needs protection against the entrenched powers of authority already in place.’... Under the banner of ‘diversity and inclusion’, academics as well as students are busy building a pampering culture, in which there is a refusal to countenance any view that challenges transgender ideology.These people are campaigning not for freedom of speech, but freedom from speech"
If you feel threatened by academic freedom, just fire anyone who disagrees with you!

Britain's first official transgender student officer suspended - "Britain's first official ‘transgender students’ officer’ has been suspended over allegations that she posted explicit photographs on an online blog.Jess Bradley, who was born male but refers to herself as a ‘nonbinary trans woman’, was the first person to be elected to the full-time paid role by the National Union of Students (NUS).But she was suspended from her post last week while the NUS carries out an internal investigation into claims that she published pictures of male genitalia under the headline Exhibitionizm on her personal blog... Ms Bradley previously attracted controversy when she defended an attack by transgender activist Tara Wolf, who was born male, on a 60-year-old feminist campaigner in London’s Hyde Park last September"

Satiria - Posts - ""Testosterone is important for normal male brain maturation. Here is a report of an 11 y/o boy on puberty blockers: IQ dropped 11% (80 to 71) after 17 mo. As the EIC of the BMJ has said, PB are being used in a state of “profound scientific ignorance.”"
"The huge jump may be partly because @TaviAndPort advertised their service on a BBC children's TV programme first shown in 2014, and repeated numerous times since then. In this clip, Dr Polly Carmichael talks about the 'benefits' of taking hormone #pubertyblockers."
"72 reasons BBC Newsround's promotion of #PubertyBlockers as harmless is not a scandal & should not be investigated by the #BBCtrust."

Yeyo on Twitter - "Puberty blockers to children has the potential to become the Thalidomide scandal of our time https://t.co/iMxrJvvMvN"

Blaire White on Twitter - "Anyone who says that trans women aren't women I curse with the cramps and diarrhea I'm having today. #Girlslikeus #PMS #TransWomenareWomen #TransWomenPMS #TransIsBeautiful"
"Trans women do not PMS. Your diarrhea seems to be due to the fact that you're full of shit."
If a trans woman claims she has PMS, can we say she has mental illness>

Leftist Celebrates “Gender Transition” of His 4-Year-Old Son - "A leftist on Twitter celebrated the “gender transition” of his 4-year-old son, triumphing the fact that “Waylon” had become “Willow”.Mike Ginicola tweeted, “It’s official, we have a 4 year old daughter! Waylon is now Willow. Took A LOT of paperwork to make the gender transition.”He posted an image of a birth certificate where the child’s name had been changed... The notion that a 4-year-old child has any idea about sexuality or ‘gender transitioning’ is deranged"

Court orders Christian to pay $55,000 to trans politician for calling him ‘biological male’ - "A B.C. human rights tribunal has ruled that a Christian activist discriminated against a man who claims to be "female" by distributing flyers that referred to the man, who was running for political office at the time, as a "biological male." ... the tribunal further declared there’s no room for any public debate in the matter... Whatcott’s lawyer, Dr. Charles Lugosi, intended to give evidence that Oger was, in fact, a biological male as a defense.Tribunal judge Devyn Cousineau, however, ruled “the ‘truth’ of the statements in the flyer is not a defense.”... The ruling, penned by Cousineau, declared that even questioning transgenderism is discriminatory."
Science is transphobic

Canada's oldest rape crisis centre stripped of city funding for refusing to accept trans women - "Canada's oldest rape crisis centre has been stripped of city funding for refusing to accept trans women in some of its services.Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter said it was the victim of “discrimination against women in the name of inclusion” after refusing to change its policy of only offering some services to female-born women... Councillor Christine Boyle said the centre's policy went against the city's policy of welcoming all people... Vancouver Rape Relief, which opened in 1973, strictly bans men from its premises to protect its clients, all of whom are recovering from male violence.“Even deep voices, male insignia like baseball caps and boots can make women nervous,” Lee Lakeman, one of the centre's founders, wrote in 2006."
Too bad this won't make people ask why men are being discriminated against in the first place

"KILL TERFS": Vancouver’s women-only rape shelter vandalized with death threats, rat nailed to door - "A Vancouver rape relief shelter alleges they have been the target of vandalism and death threats over their “woman-only” policy.Photos shared by the official Vancouver Rape Relief & Woman’s Shelter Twitter account show several threats and messages scrawled on the centre’s windows like “KILL TERFS” and “TRANS POWER”... According to the shelter, they have had past instances where dead animals like skunks were shoved through the mail slot of the building. In one case rape victims attending the shelter encountered a dead rat which was nailed to the door. “The women who found it were from our support group so they are battered women and rape victims, and one of them said: Haven’t we suffered enough,” said Kerner.Since the tweet was released, Kerner claims that the shelter has received an outpouring of support and donations from concerned members of the public."