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Sunday, February 18, 2024

Links - 18th February 2024 (2 - Trans Mania)

Lefties losing it: Trans activist demands bewildered employee to supply tampons for men - YouTube
If you don't accommodate mental illness, you are a transphobic bigot. Companies need to lose money catering to a tiny minority or they will lose ESG points

World’s first tampons for men are an ‘insult’ to women - "The world’s first tampons for men have been criticised by feminist campaigners as an “insult” to women who suffer period discrimination.  Vuokkoset, a Finnish company released the controversial new sanitary product earlier this month to coincide with Transgender Awareness week and International Men’s day. The product comes in a dark blue box which bears the words “For Men” on one side, but then extends this phrase around the packaging so it eventually reads “For Menstruation”.  On another side of the packet it is stated that “periods are not a gender issue”.  Vuokkoset has said in a statement online that it launched the period product to “raise the issue of genderness of hygiene products and the anxiety related to menstruation in trans men”... They added that studies show that 93 per cent of trans men have experienced menstrual-related gender dysphoria – a sense of unease a person may have because of a mismatch between their biological sex and gender identity... Anna Melamed, a midwifery lecturer, said: “For so many girls around the world period shame and a lack of period products is very much part of the sex-based inequality they experience.  “To make out that ‘periods are not a gender issue’ is a backward step for those of us trying to educate young people and quite frankly is an insult to the sexism girls and young women suffer every day because of their periods.”  Milli Hill, feminist writer and author of a bestselling book on female puberty titled My Period, said: “I would have no complaint if it was clear on the packaging that this product is for people who identify as trans men, but they are saying this product is specifically “for men”.  “I just think these companies need to stop changing the definition of words such as men and women to support a lie that people can change sex when biological sex is immutable. “It’s also interesting that the packaging on women’s period products is being desexed and neutralised and yet here we have a period product shouting about the fact that it’s ‘for men’.”"

Meme - End Wokeness @EndWokeness: "This is not care. This is mutilation. One day society will look back at this in horror & wonder how we allowed this."
"This is what doctors did to my daughter's formerly healthy arm. I do not forgive them."
"To create the penis, doctors usually choose from three different areas of the body: the arm, the leg, or the abdomen. Your doctor will work with you to find the best choice for your body. All phalloplasties do not include each of the steps above. You have a choice over which of these options you would like, based on your goals for your penis."

William Watson: At issue with CBC's At Issue on trans issues - "The country’s most-watched political panel, At Issue, is the one segment of CBC’s The National our household never fast-forwards through. The rest of the show? Not so much. If there’s likely to be a high woke ratio in a story or it’s another exposé from Marketplace on what evil places markets are or an over-produced Fifth Estate investigation, we hit the double-arrow and take back a few minutes of our lives. Strange to say, a panel whose regular members are three Toronto columnists usually provides decent diversity of opinion... In the past little while, however, there has been almost no disagreement among the Big Three on one question: trans issues. Somebody time-transported here from as little as 10 years ago might think I left a word out of that last sentence. Trans-what issues? Trans-Canada issues? Transatlantic? Trans-Siberian Railway issues? And yet the At Issue panel has been unusually agitated that ordinary Canadians themselves seem unusually agitated at relatively suddenly having to buy into entirely new conceptions of gender and sexuality... I suspect the great majority of Canadians who are at least somewhat agitated over the new rules they are being asked to accept — more told to accept, really — are in fact decent, un -hating folk who wish others well with their personal gender struggles and/or triumphs but would prefer not to have a completely new way of thinking about life legislated onto them. (And might also like to go back to a time when people didn’t feel they had to share every detail of their private life — a term that gets quainter every day.) Above all, however, they want children protected. They don’t want anyone’s children making irrevocable physical decisions under what may be the undue influence of a loud lobby that has its own very clear agenda in these matters. And they certainly don’t want third parties helping their own children begin a transition, if only just a pronoun and name transition to start, without their knowing about it. I haven’t met a parent yet who doesn’t think that. It’s not a hard point to understand. It’s a bit of a mystery the At Issue panel doesn’t get it. Some on the panel seemed to believe there haven’t been any gender-affirming surgeries on people under 18 in Canada. (Was that by intention, or simply because everyone in Canada wanting elective surgery has to wait a long time?) There actually have been surgeries on minors. But even if there had been no such surgeries, outlawing them wouldn’t do much harm, would it? And it really isn’t worth the debate. The panellists pointed out almost gleefully that conservatives don’t usually want the state interfering in private life, which is true, though we don’t actually disapprove of paternalism regarding children. As Danielle Smith pointed out, Alberta does have a child protection act that will be used if parents react harshly to their children’s assignment struggles. No one favours revoking child protection... Are Liberals and their fellow travellers beginning to see a flicker of a hint of an appreciation that complex decisions are best made by the adults who will be most affected by them and (in part for that reason) know most about them? So that, for instance, governments really shouldn’t try to run an economy, make cars or build houses for people. For when they do, it’s likely to end at least as badly as immaculately informed opinion evidently thinks following Danielle Smith’s trans policies will end."
CBC media bias is a myth

Colorado transgender woman's REFUGEE status in Canada is overturned after she claimed she suffered persecution because of her gender identity in the United States - "Transgender woman Daria Bloodworth gained refugee status in Canada after successfully arguing that a combination of gun culture and rising transphobia put her at risk in America"
International law means you need to accept unlimited numbers of refugees from the country leading the world in trans mania

Alberta performed surgery on eight transgender minors in 2022–23 - "In 2022-23, Alberta Health recorded 26 “top” surgeries on people below the age of 18 in the province. Eight of those were treatment for gender dysphoria... “Prematurely encouraging or enabling children to alter their very biology or natural growth, no matter how well intentioned and sincere, poses a risk to that child’s future that I, as premier, am not comfortable with permitting in our province,” Smith said last week. Dr. Kate Greenaway, who specializes in transgender health care, said the infrequency of “top” surgeries for gender dysphoria makes Smith’s policies questionable... “That is a major change that we haven’t seen anywhere in this country, and would be really counter to all of the medical evidence and the international and national guidelines we have on how to treat youth,” Greenaway said... Data compiled by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) indicate that nationally, but excluding Quebec, 66, or seven per cent of all double mastectomies performed for gender-affirming care were on minors in 2022–23"
Once again, the left are doing the usual "this is not happening, and it's good that it is" Jedi mind trick
The next cope after "minors in Canada don't get gender affirming surgery" is disproven (though it'll need to be disproven each time since the left will go on lying) is going to be that Alberta, as a far right transphobic province, is faking the data. The next cope will be that the Canadian Institute for Health Information is not peddling misinformation, but that it's fake news from the National Post, since they are far right and foreign owned and pushing an American agenda
Europe does not exist, as usual

Pierre Poilievre tries to walk a fine line on transgender rights — and blames Trudeau - "The prime minister, Poilievre claimed, was drawing attention to a provincial policy in an attempt to distract Canadians.  "Justin Trudeau wants to use this as a wedge issue," Poilievre said. The Conservative leader claimed Trudeau was also "spreading disinformation" on the subject"
Of course, this being the CBC, they didn't report on the surveys showing that most Canadians reject radical gender ideology - only one about Conservative delegates - because CBC media bias is a myth

Collin Rugg on X - "NEW: Female college volleyball match dominated by *5* biologic males for the entire game as female players were kicked to the bench.     Shocking how quiet all the feminists are.   @RebelNewsOnline  was told that there have been "two major head injuries" to female athletes thanks to the 'transgenders' in the Ontario Colleges Athletic Association in Canada.  The transgender athletes are men who have not had any gender-affirming hormone therapy or surgical removal.  The Rebel News reporter was also hit with a racist attack from what appears to be a gay attendee who said: "You white piece of sh**!"  Clown world."

The Sims 4 adds transgender 'top surgery' scars, chest binders - "A video game series that is marketed to children is coming under attack for its recent update allowing characters to have double mastectomy scars and chest binders.   “The Sims 4,” which calls itself “the ultimate life simulation game” on its website, announced Tuesday that it would allow players to give characters “top scars” that come from breast removal surgery.  The announcement drew a swift backlash online, with many gamers and parents expressing horror that a game, especially one that is marketed to children, would promote transgender surgeries... This is not the first foray into sexual politics that “The Sims,” one of the most popular video game series in the world, has made.   In May 2022, “The Sims 4” issued an update to the game that allowed players to select “they/them” pronouns for non-binary characters."
The left will claim that this is not promotion of trans mania. But at the same time if you include something they don't like, that's promoting and normalising harmful ideas. So they want their cake and eat it too

Even progressive Europe won't go as far as America in child transgender treatments - "What do Europeans know that American medical elites don’t — or, worse, won’t even consider? Western and Northern European countries are generally much more restrictive in transgender treatments for children, with several recently becoming sharply more so. Yet America is doubling down on invasive and irreversible medical interventions for minors at steadily younger ages — with rare exceptions like Utah... Blame radical gender ideology, which blinds American activists to medical reality and the true needs of vulnerable children.   The American approach, “gender affirmation,” assumes gender identity is knowable from as early as toddlerhood, fixed as soon as it is declared and should be medicalized into permanence as soon as possible. It insists merely questioning a minor’s gender self-definition before often-irreversible interventions is harmful.   The American Academy of Pediatrics has embraced an affirm-only/affirm-early policy since 2018, and most states follow its guidance despite withering criticism in peer-reviewed journals.  Western and Northern Europeans generally see affirmation leading to rapid medical interventions as unethical and dangerous. England, Sweden and Finland have largely abandoned gender affirmation for minors in the last three years. Others, such as Ireland and Italy, are raising concerns, even with approaches already more restrictive than America’s. Overall, the most progressive countries in Europe are notably more conservative, with a clear focus on safeguarding children. The evidence supports such caution. There’s an extremely high likelihood — confirmed by almost a dozen studies — that childhood-onset gender incongruence will resolve on its own by adolescence or adulthood. And the sudden rise of transgender identification in youth, especially teen girls, has occurred too fast to properly study, rendering it too new to properly understand, much less medicalize.  Given these realities, European countries increasingly discourage automatic deference to a child’s self-declarations while making long-term psychotherapy a prerequisite for transgender treatments... Dr. Diana Tordoff, often cited in support of giving cross-sex hormones to teenagers, has admitted that patients at Seattle Children’s Hospital gender clinic with “depression, anxiety, or suicidal thoughts” are “not precluded access” to treatments... Consider puberty blockers, known to decrease bone density and contribute to infertility while possibly inhibiting cognitive development. They’re widely prescribed here to minor patients at the earliest hint of puberty — even as young as 8.  Yet a growing number of European countries wait until patients are as old as 13 and require psychotherapy. Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare states children should never receive blockers outside clinical trials, and they must be at least 12. Finland and England are pursuing similar changes.  The contrast is even starker with cross-sex hormones, which result almost immediately in irreversible bodily changes and can lead to sexual dysfunction and infertility. They can also cause major health problems such as strokes, heart attacks and cancer. Our review of 11 of the most progressive Western and Northern European countries shows they almost entirely restrict cross-sex hormones until age 16, once again following psychotherapy sessions. American children can receive cross-sex hormones at 13 (younger in clinical trials).   Finally, there are “gender affirmative” surgeries — the most aggressive and invasive procedures. Every Western and Northern European country we surveyed except one bans surgery until age 16 or, more commonly, 18.  America has documented cases of minors as young as 12 receiving surgeries. While most procedures for underage youth are double mastectomies for teenage girls, cases of genital surgery — such as the inversion of the penis, sometimes with tissue removed from the colon, to create an orifice resembling a vagina — are documented as well...   But the US medical establishment won’t budge. A recent New England Journal of Medicine article called the idea of using psychotherapy to address gender-related distress “inflammatory” while suggesting the need to suppress such “science denialism.”  Yet stifling debate on protecting children is the real affront to science — and a real danger to these vulnerable patients. American policymakers would do well to consider Europe’s caution — and follow Utah’s lead — before the country sacrifices any more children on the altar of gender ideology."
Damn transphobic Europeans!

The sinister marriage of woke medics, Biden and Big Tech silencing critics of children's gender treatment - "The American Medical Association, joined by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association, recently delivered a letter to US Attorney General Merrick Garland calling for him to unleash the Justice Department on foes of efforts to transition children.  In so doing, the AMA et al. took a page out of the notorious National School Board Association playbook. The play goes like this: When journalists and activists expose an institution’s radical positions, spurring a damaging backlash, claim that the costly revelations constitute disinformation, that the disinformation is inciting dangerous acts, and that therefore public and private authorities ought to pursue the “disinformers.”   The play is made more effective when the authorities to whom the institution is appealing are already on the institution’s side, as was the case with the NSBA and the Biden administration...   Wisely, unlike the NSBA, the medical organizations were vaguer about the threats their members and medical facilities are purportedly facing and the extent of the gender-affirming jihad they want the government to launch against critics.  The drafters referenced a single bomb threat, noted that children’s hospitals have been beefing up security, and said that social media threats and other “harassing” communications, along with “protestors at health care sites,” are creating an “elevated and justifiable fear among families, patients, and staff.” Unlike the NSBA, they did not cite a list of specific threatening acts that when examined would fall apart, undermining their argument. Less specificity makes it harder to scrutinize the claims. Any credible threats or acts of violence should of course be pursued by authorities, but the content of the letter and the history of the groups making appeals to a Justice Department that has targeted dissenters from ruling-class orthodoxy — of which gender-affirming is a burgeoning component — certainly call into question the claims’ legitimacy.   The AMA likewise neither invoked the Patriot Act nor called on a slew of other national-security offices to pursue critics, as the NSBA had done, shrewdly making the letter marginally less inflammatory...   We must not be allowed to call into question any aspect of radical gender ideology, just as we must not be permitted to question the integrity of our elections, our ruling regime’s COVID-19 policies, critical-race-theory indoctrination in schools, or myriad other third-rail topics. Those who would dare do so, whether conservative commentators like Matt Walsh or mirror-holder to leftist gender radicalism Libs of TikTok, political-activist organizations like the aforementioned Eagle Forum, or everyday parents right and left aghast at the push of developing children away from their sex through treatments up to and including administering puberty blockers, hormones, and genitalia surgeries, are to be threatened not just with deplatforming but with the full force of the law. And that law, as we have seen recently with abortion and many other issues, is applied anything but equal...  there are three major takeaways here.  First, this episode reveals that no matter how contentious the issue and sacrosanct the matter — all the way down to altering the bodies of children — progressively inclined organizations will seek to collude with the government and “private”-sector auxiliaries to punish dissenters, free speech be damned, in pursuit of their radical agenda. In fact, the more contentious and sacrosanct the matter, the more likely such institutions may be to sic the full power of the regime on their foes.  Second, this episode shines a light on just how devoted the state and medical establishment are to encouraging gender transitions for children. There are likely some true believers among both groups in the medical and moral merits of “gender-affirming care.” But there are obviously some cynical motives at work, too: For those in government, the push to transition kids can create a wedge between parents and children to be exploited. It also challenges human biology and normalizes that challenge. That those in the medical establishment seek to collude with the state and Big Tech betrays a base desire simply to protect what has been exposed as a profitable, if sordid, business.  Third, this episode represents still another illustration of science’s capture by woke ideology and the imperative to impose woke-captured science tenets by stamping out dissent. During the pandemic, we saw the push to racially ration COVID-19 treatments. We also saw efforts to quash dissenting views on everything from the disease’s origin to the efficacy of masks, vaccines, and outpatient treatments and now have leading medical schools embracing courses on “medical misinformation.” Now we see the AMA et al. seeking to deputize the Department of Justice and Big Tech to police “disinformation” — challenges to its gender-affirming orthodoxy — on one of the most highly contentious and highly dubious treatment/procedure sets anyone could imagine. Science of course demands openly grappling with competing views. Suppressing them — the aim of the AMA et al. letter to the DOJ — is fatal to science and ultimately to us.  Meanwhile, the fusion of public and private power centers to target political opponents is the textbook definition of fascism. Yet those who call it out are cast as “semi-fascists” and threatened with the ruling class’ punishment. Who will stand up for those forgotten Americans under siege?"
Clearly there is no left wing party in the US, and even the Democrats are centre-right

Pediatric group says kids should not talk to parents about puberty blockers - "Dr. Morissa Ladinsky, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, lauded a transgender teenager for committing suicide.  In an address about “standing up for gender-affirming care,” Ladinsky eulogized Leelah Alcorn, an Ohio 17-year-old who, in Ladinsky’s words, “stepped boldly in front of a tractor trailer, ending her life,” in 2014, after leaving a suicide note that “went viral, literally around the world.”  Ladinsky’s remarks were captured on video by a horrified onlooker, Oregon pediatrician Dr. Julia Mason, who expressed outrage on Twitter that Ladinsky was “glorifying suicide,” an act she described as “unprofessional and dangerous.”  That isn’t just Mason’s opinion. Technically speaking, it is also the official stance of the AAP, whose website for parents, healthychildren.org, explicitly warns that “glorifying suicide” can have a “’contagious’ effect” and inspire others to take their own lives... In 2016, the AAP established a committee on “LGBT Health & Wellness” to support “children with variations in gender presentation.” Four of the committee’s six members — Jason Rafferty, Brittany Allen, Michelle Forcier, and Ilana Sherer — work in pediatric gender clinics that prescribe puberty blockers to patients as young as 10 and cross-sex hormones to patients as young as 14.  Those treatments are part of the broader model of “gender-affirming” care that the AAP endorsed in its 2018 policy statement, “Ensuring Comprehensive Care and Support for Transgender and Gender-Diverse Children and Adolescents.” The statement, which represents the official position of the AAP, was written by a single doctor, Rafferty, and does not appear to have been reviewed by anyone else at the organization: Rafferty “conceptualized,” “drafted,” “reviewed,” “revised” and “approved” the manuscript himself, a note at the end of the paper reads. Rafferty did not respond to a request for comment. “There was clearly no fact-checking,” one longtime AAP member said. “The AAP thought trans was the next civil-rights crusade and got boondoggled by enthusiastic young doctors.”  The 2018 statement was an extraordinary departure from the international medical consensus... Since then, the gap between the AAP and the rest of the world has only grown...   The AAP has nonetheless maintained its support for the drugs — which it claims have the backing of the “most prominent medical organizations worldwide” — while rejecting calls for more gatekeeping.  “The AAP says kids under 10 can’t cross the street by themselves,” one pediatrician said, referencing the group’s official recommendations on pedestrian safety, “but they can change their gender. How does that make sense?”   The contrast points to a broader tension within AAP guidance: On most kitchen-table issues, from diet to screen time to exercise, the group has long encouraged a kind of safetyism, stressing the need for parental supervision and the pitfalls of pubescent judgment. Yet on trans issues, it has done nearly the opposite, suggesting that minors are mature enough to transition without their parents’ knowledge or consent...   It’s a stark departure from the way the group talks about other forms of body modification: One AAP report recommends that “adolescents speak with their parents” before getting tattoos, because they are “permanent,” “difficult to remove” and “involve significant consequences.” By 2019, Rafferty’s guidance was eliciting quiet concern among rank-and-file doctors affiliated with the AAP. “Normie pediatricians were like, ‘what’s going on,’ ” one doctor said, recalling the hushed conversations she had in the hallways of the AAP’s 2019 national conference, which featured a panel on gender-affirming care. Gender specialists, on the other hand, “considered themselves life-saving heroes.”  Rather than promoting dialogue or compromise between the two camps, the AAP sought to stifle dissent. In October, it urged the Department of Justice to investigate critics of “gender affirming” care, arguing they were spreading “disinformation” that puts lives at risk. That move came after the organization barred the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine, which advocates the watchful-waiting approach, from being an exhibitor at its national conference last year.   In August, it also blocked a resolution calling for a review of the AAP’s current guidance on puberty blockers, which the head of Boston Children’s Hospital’s gender clinic, Jeremi Carswell, says are “given out like candy” at her clinic. The stifling of dissent has created an illusory medical consensus that nonetheless exerts extraordinary influence over public policy and debate. Courts have cited the AAP in cases about transgender children... Talking heads, meanwhile, have invoked the AAP to shut down criticism of childhood gender transition...   At stake in all this, said Marty Makary, a surgeon and public policy researcher at Johns Hopkins Medicine, is not just COVID lockdowns or puberty blockers but the credibility of the medical establishment itself.  “The AAP still puts out many important recommendations that parents should follow,” Makary said, citing the group’s support for the measles vaccine and its guidance on preventing sudden infant death syndrome. “If parents start to distrust the AAP because of its politicization, I worry we’ll see more pediatric deaths.”  Other doctors described families — including families in deep blue areas — who have developed a reflexive distrust of anything the AAP says.  “I now hear parents mock the AAP over even nonpolitical guidance like breastfeeding recommendations,” a pediatrician in Portland, Ore., said. “They’re just tuning everything out.”  For Vinay Prasad, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, it’s hard to blame them.  “The reason to trust modern doctors over ancient healers is that more of what we tell you to do is justified by well-done studies,” Prasad said. “But how do we hold that perch when we just make stuff up?”"
Of course, glorifying euthanasia is good

Zachary Elliott on X - "Basic biology tells us that there are two sexes. Advanced biology tells us how the two sexes evolved and how they develop in individuals across species. Actual advanced biology does not contradict the foundation.
When gender activists say “advanced biology” what they actually mean is you should listen to their misinterpretation of biological knowledge to fit within their predetermined social and political conclusions."
This is a response to that silly left wing comic claiming that "advanced biology" tells us that there're sexes besides male and female

EDITORIAL: Bullying Alberta with its own tax dollars - "The draconian reaction of federal politicians to Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s very sensible announcement of a new policy on invasive medical treatment for young children is disturbing... These policies are similar to those being implemented across Europe and make perfect sense. How adults chose to live their lives is their business, and in that aspect, Smith had good news for the transgender community. Trans people seeking surgeries right now in Alberta must have it done in Quebec. Smith said she hopes to attract surgeons to Alberta to perform the procedures. Oddly, there’s been zero praise for her in that respect... Trans activists are calling for the feds to withhold health transfers under the Canada Health Act to force Smith to back off... If the federal government wants to bully Albertans with their own tax dollars and threaten the fabric of Confederation by intervening in a matter that’s a provincial responsibility and which polls show has the support of a majority of voters, they do so at their peril."

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