Links - 6th May 2020 (Trans Mania)

Transition as Treatment: The Best Studies Show the Worst Outcomes - "More and more children and adolescents are being diagnosed and are undergoing medical treatment prior even to completing puberty.For those who express caution or concern there is a familiar retort— “trust the experts”.This argument, however, makes mockery of the fact that three of the most influential sex researchers of the last couple decades—Ray Blanchard, Michael Bailey, and the recently vindicated Ken Zucker, all have problems with the affirmation-only transition narrative currently being promoted. You could add to this list names like James Cantor, Eric Vilain, Stephen Levine, Debra Soh and Lisa Littman... the literature is fraught with study design problems including convenience sampling, lack of controls, cross-sectional design, low sample sizes, short study lengths, and enormously high drop-out rates. Very few studies on transition evade these issues. For example, in Nobili’s 2018 systematic review of quality of life studies of transitioned adults, she rates only 2 of 29 studies as high quality. Two of the largest issues are study length (or time since treatment) and loss-to-follow-up rates. It is well recognized in the literature that the year after medical transition is a “honeymoon period” which “does not represent a realistic picture of long-term sexual and psychological status.”... Most recently Simonsen 2016 (Denmark) studied a group of 104 post-SRS transsexuals where the follow-up time was 16.4 years for MtFs and 10.2 years for FtMs. For the first time in a long-term study with little loss to follow-up (2%) there were comparisons prior and post treatment of objective measures. Concerning psychiatric morbidity, “No significant differences were found between the number of MtF and FtM individuals suffering from psychiatric morbidity pre- and post-SRS”. While psyschological problems improved for some in the group, for others it worsened and there was no statistically significant net benefit to the group... Out of the six long-term outcome studies (>10yrs) which have useful data for mental or psychological functioning, five report mixed or poor outcomes... Results for mental health and employment were highly mixed, leading the author to conclude “it seems reasonable to expect only marginal improvement psychosocially after surgery. Rauchfleisch (Switzerland) found significant deterioration in his post-SRS clinical sample and states that the negative outcomes, including a high percentage of regret and inability to work, were likely a function of time... A pattern begins to emerge as we survey some of the best and longest outcome studies on transition—the longer the studies and the better the methods, the more negative the results... Jellestad 2018 (Switzerland) found not only a lower mental quality of life for the surgically-transitioned group than the general population, but that neither hormone treatment nor surgery predicted positive quality of life... Given that treatment of gender dysphoria includes such drastic measures as the removal of healthy, functioning body parts, the protracted and experimental use of cross-sex hormones, and the permanent circumvention of the normal pubertal process, this is nothing short of scandalous."
If transsexual pre- and post-transition suicide rates are the same, and overall there was no change in psychological problems, that suggests that transitioning does not help. So it's wasted money, if nothing else (note too the data on hormone treatment not helping)

Democratic Presidential Candidates Are Out of Touch on Gender - "So far, not a single Democratic presidential candidate has demonstrated an understanding of two basic facts. First: that each letter of “LGBT,” etc., and the interest group it claims to represent, is distinct. Second: that today’s tirade of alphabet activism is far removed from the historic gay-rights movement which fought for sexual minorities to have access to basic health care, the right to privacy, and equality under the law. Indeed, only sheer ignorance or reckless disregard can explain why every Democratic presidential candidate has backed the Equality Act. This law, a misnomer, would force women’s spaces (such as battered-women’s shelters) and sports teams (such as the high school girls in Connecticut) to include men. It would also set a dangerous precedent for the medicalization of gender-confused youth through an Orwellian hijacking of the term “conversion therapy.”It’s worth noting here that, in some states, girls as young as 13 have lost their healthy breasts to this ideology, while children as young as eight have been injected with (sterilizing) cross-sex hormones. And that this new definition of “conversion therapy,” when enshrined in law, renders non-intrusive alternatives to such interventions illegal (with or without parental consent.) It is also worth noting (as the mainstream U.K. press has done repeatedly) that a significant portion of these effeminate little boys and these boyish little girls undergoing grueling “transitions” would — if treated with watchful waiting — grow up to be gay. To anyone paying attention, then, the real conversion therapy involves not talk therapy for gender-dysphoric youth, but castrating — chemically or surgically — young people who haven’t yet had the opportunity to come to terms with their sexual development and desires... Regrettably, what is often lost in the coverage of Trump’s so-called transgender military ban is that it extends only to those with gender dysphoria. The administration has clarified that a self-identified transgender person, who does not require special accommodations, “should be permitted to serve.” As for why gender dysphoria constitutes “special accommodations” (and is therefore disqualifying), Department of Defense data gives an idea. Between October 1, 2015, and October 3, 2017, the 994 active-duty service members diagnosed with gender dysphoria account for 30,000 mental health visits. Service members with gender dysphoria are eight times more likely to attempt suicide than service members as a whole...
'Thanks to trans ideology, conversion therapy bans intended to prohibit protocols attempting to change one’s sexual orientation, have been coopted to mandate the ultimate conversion from one sex to the other (which is never truly possible, only the outward presentation thereof).'"

U.S. Doctors Are Performing Mastectomies On Healthy 13-Year-Old Girls - "Some physicians in the United States are performing double mastectomies on healthy 13-year-old girls. The justification is gender dysphoria... In a study funded by a $5.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), researchers including Dr. Johanna Olson of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles are supposedly evaluating use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on dysphoric children... Olson dismisses the possibility that gender dysphoria could be caused by psychological disturbance, claiming the only “mental health issue” related to gender dysphoria “comes from the way that the outside world responds” to the confused youth. She states, as though from a medical basis, that gender-dysphoric youth will go through the “wrong puberty” unless she and her cohorts can medicate them early enough in their lives to “put them through the right puberty.”... Olson had 68 surgically diminished girls fill out her “novel” scale (which she acknowledged could be bogus) between one and five years after their surgery. Thirty-three of these girls were under 18 at the time of surgery. Two were only 13 years old, and five were only 14. Assuming these mastectomies weren’t all performed by the same very busy surgeon, that means there are multiple doctors out there willing to mutilate underage girls... Since the mean age for postsurgical participants was 19, with none older than 25, a cautious researcher would hesitate to draw any long-term conclusions about satisfaction. But the data limitations don’t deter Olson from trumpeting the “positive outcome of chest surgery.”... Parents report such outbreaks usually followed “binge-watching” of YouTube transition videos and excessive use of other social media that affirm and advocate transgenderism. In one case a girl who had been teased about her breast size declared that she hated her body and suddenly began identifying as a boy. In another, four girls who were taking instruction from a popular coach “came out” as transgender after the coach did. Although well over 60 percent of these adolescents had previously been diagnosed with a mental-health disorder or neurodevelopment problem, many parents reported that “the [gender specialist] clinician did not explore issues of mental health, previous trauma, or any alternative causes of gender dysphoria before proceeding [with medical transition].” These clinicians seemed to rely primarily on self-reports of the patients who wanted the treatment — patients who came prepared with talking points they had received from their online sources (for example, advice to threaten suicide if treatment demands aren’t met)... “ROGD is a maladaptive coping mechanism” for these adolescents... A similar maladaptive coping mechanism, Littman says, is anorexia—the patient deals with underlying emotional issues by extreme weight control. The parallels between anorexia and gender dysphoria, especially ROGD, are striking... From her own limited “research,” Olson thus concludes that children should be allowed to access body- and life-altering mutilation. She doesn’t mention parental consent, though standard medical guidelines require consent for treatment of minors. Rejecting the guidelines of the (highly politicized) World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which recommends that minors not be considered for surgery until completing at least one year of hormone therapy, Olson advocates for surgery based on “individual need” rather than age or time spent on hormone therapy. She doesn’t mention the need to address warning signs for ROGD... In a breathtaking dismissal of possible regret, Olson also said, “And here’s the other thing about chest surgery: If you want breasts at a later point in your life, you can go and get them.” Well, then. One wonders if Olson takes the same attitude toward regret over the permanent sterilization effected by cross-sex hormones and a gonadectomy. After all, if one later comes to desire children, one can “go and get them” from other sources."
Strange, activists tell us that teens and pre-pubescents only get puberty blockers and social transition. Yet there're 13 year olds getting sex reassignment/sex affirmation/sex change surgery

Drag kids are the product of a dangerous American delusion - "“How sexy is that kid?”If anyone thinks that such a sentence is unimaginable, unutterable in our concerned, paedophile-aware times, then let me introduce you to the gateway-phrase: “Drag kid.”This week, the world has become a little more aware of this horrid little phrase because the internet has become a little more aware of it. And that is because of the promotion of a 12-year old ‘drag kid’ known by the name Desmond is Amazing... It’s about the fantastically shallow and ignorant modern American adult delusion that the ‘self’ is a preternatural thing and exists in some orbit of its own. That everybody has a ‘self’ and that this can be ‘known’. That rather than ‘becoming’, a person ‘discovers’ their ‘self’ – a process which is believed to be truer the faster it is arrived at. “Be yourself!” “Don’t let anyone tell you!” and a thousand other sayings from the Hallmarks Cards philosophy of our time all embed this illiterate idea.  The delusion takes no account of the influences affecting us all — influences which profoundly affect every human from birth. American popular culture takes little or no notice of this non-preternatural fact, because if it did, then it would have to do some accounting for its own behaviour, or at least for the diet of entertainment it is willing to pump into the homes and heads of the very young... When he says at the outset of the Mashable video, “Can you come up here, you look gorgeous”, in an affected, nasally voice, there may be people who say (like Mashable) “Here is the true 10-year old child”. But most others will say: “Here is a child who you can see is doing an impression of a highly sexualised type of American adult celebrity.” A clear indication of this is that after saying “gorgeous”, Desmond looks to the adults in the room for laughter, approval and affirmation. The adults in the room (presumably including Desmond’s mother) oblige, and thus does he receive what he seeks.  Likewise, when he talks about “haters” and the importance of ignoring them in this and other videos, this is not the innate wisdom of a child being imparted to a bigoted, post-lapsarian world. It is merely another person – this time a child – chanting one of the taught mantras of the American pop-cultural age: “Haters gonna hate” etc. There is no insight here. It is merely a copy, as drag is. A copy of a copy of a copy... many cultures around the world allow for some form of sexualisation of children. But here it is surprising. The modern West has long exercised such a degree of opprobrium towards the taboo that the slightest hint it might be breaking down affects a great pushback. While people feel distinctly unable to make many moral judgements, about the idea of paedophilia — and that an adult might find a child “sexy” — we are very judgemental indeed. It’s a feeling the tabloid press has harnessed to great effect. Even if there is nothing else we know to be wrong, we know this to be wrong.  By insisting that a child like Desmond should not just be allowed to be something, but should perform as a sexualised adult, and that this should in fact be ‘the future’, it would seem that something further is at work. What is it? It’s unlikely that it is an organised push for tolerance or acceptance of paedophilia. But it does feel like an expression of the ‘Fuck you’ politics of our time. If people are persuaded – and many Americans are – that they live in a cis-hetero-normative, bigoted, patriarchal, homophobic, transphobic society, in which all difference is squeezed out and forbidden, then that belief may do many things to you. One thing it may do, is cause you to push back with every maddening, extreme tool that you have at your disposal. So people must not simply tolerate things. They must be ‘confronted’ with them. Those who have imbibed this idea have already stretched themselves very far. But in pushing ‘Desmond is Amazing’ on the world, they may have reached one of their limits. It is an interesting lesson in its way. People pushing tolerance and acceptance of normal differences end up over-compensating, in the vengeful and extreme tone of the time, and in the process risk not ‘liberalising’ the culture, but toxifying the movements they presume to speak on behalf of. ‘Drag children’ are not the way to break down the instinctive conservatism of the American public. They are the best imaginable way to make any such conservatism rear up again, in the knowledge that this time there is something serious not just to oppose, but to defend."

Sexualized performances not for kids - "children have been pictured rolling around on the performer as he lay on the floor, and in another, a performer put on a strip act that revealed his racy bodysuit.Many male drag performers have social media accounts that are even more explicit than their performances. If their younger audiences look them up, they may well get an eyeful of age-inappropriate content, much of which portrays women and girls as sexualized objects.Our organization, the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), representing many lesbian and bisexual women, takes the position that it’s wrong for public libraries to sponsor sexualized adult entertainment as children’s entertainment. We think of Drag Queen Story Hour as no different from proposing a Playboy Bunny Story Hour, and we think they’re treated differently because of a prejudice toward gay men that’s more likely to be found on the left. Somewhere along the good way of promoting acceptance and fighting negative stereotypes, gay men got typecast as harmless mascots of cultural tolerance.This has been bad for gay men, since they’ve gotten stereotyped as not quite “real men.”... It’s bad to have a class of adults whose behavior is beyond criticism. No one should get a blanket exemption from reasonable boundaries on exposing children to adult sexual themes.Female exotic dancers, for example, are expected to take every step to prevent even their own children from exposure to their work. Gay male adult entertainers instead now perform their acts for other people’s children, at publicly sponsored events... many of the same people who support Drag Queen Story Hour and say that libraries presenting adult entertainment to children is protected speech have objected to a library renting space to plainly dressed women to discuss the impact of allowing self-identification of sex on women’s civil rights... it becomes clear that even clinging to a supposedly nice sex stereotype, about a persecuted minority, has so corrupted public ethics that I think our event would have drawn fewer complaints if we’d planned an afternoon pole dancing show for kids. Maybe some “woke” library would have sponsored such an event themselves."
The board chair of the Women’s Liberation Front turns out to be a "bigot". Quelle surprise !