https://wisconsinspotlight.com/the-damage-of-woke-indoctrination/

JAN 12TH, 2023 | 7:01 AM |

THE DAMAGE OF WOKE INDOCTRINATION

By M.D. Kittle

Wisconsin Spotlight | Jan. 12, 2023

MADISON — Chloe Cole this week told a Washington, D.C. think tank that she was coerced into taking puberty blockers and having her breasts surgically removed.

She was 15 years old.

“It’s important to know how awful it really is,”  Cole told the Heritage Foundation about her double mastectomy.”Really, it’s like Nazi-era experiments.”

Cole, 18, de-transitioned when she was 16. Today she is a passionate activist against transgenderism and the gender-identity ideology that she says is routinely making victims out of young people like herself.

Cole is one of several experts scheduled to appear at a panel discussion in Pewaukee later this month to discuss ways to combat the woke indoctrination occurring in Wisconsin’s schools.

“Stolen Innocence: A Panel on the Insidious Ideology Infecting Your Children’s Education”, is scheduled for 6-9 p.m., Jan. 26 at the Ingleside Hotel in Pewaukee. Tickets are $10, $40 including a 5 p.m. cocktail hour.

The event is sponsored by Parents on Patrol, an organization “of individuals working to inform and educate parents and taxpayers about the insidious woke agenda in America schools,” according to the educational nonprofit group.

The national nonprofit No Left Turn in Education is co-sponsoring the session. Both groups say they emphasize the “role of the parent as the primary custodian and authority of their child.”

Alexandra Schweitzer, a southeast Wisconsin parents rights activist, will host the event.

“We want to educate parents, give them a toolkit on how they can stop the woke agenda in their schools,” Schweitzer told Empower Wisconsin.

From the focus on skin color and divisiveness of critical race theory to the gender-identity ideology push, many parents have had quite enough of the woke takeover, Schweitzer said. For young people like Chloe Cole, the consequences have been heartbreaking.

“Social media introduced this idea that I could be a boy,” Cole told The Daily Signal Podcast this week.

She began telling her friends and family that she was a boy when she was 12 after she was introduced to gender-identity ideology on social media. She started taking testosterone and puberty blockers at 13 and had a double mastectomy at 15.

She realized she had made a terrible mistake.

“I decided to stop transitioning entirely,” Cole says. “It was too much for me, and I knew that I couldn’t keep lying to myself.”

Cole has said she plans to sue the doctors who approved her surgery and “gender-affirming care.”

The panel discussion also will include:

Jaimee Michell, founder and president of Gays Against Groomers — a coalition of gays against the sexualization, indoctrination and medicalization of Children, according to the group’s website.

Sara Higdon, an Army veteran and Bronze Star recipient who, as a transexual woman, hosts the TRANSform to Freedom podcast and is communications director for Trans Against Groomers.

Jeanette Cooper, co-founder of Partners for Ethical Care. Its mission, according to its website, is to “raise awareness and support efforts to stop the unethical treatment of children by schools, hospitals, and mental and medical healthcare providers under the duplicitous banner of gender identity affirmation. We believe that no child is born in the wrong body.”

Cory Brewer, attorney at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty focusing on legal and policy issues related to K-12 education. The Milwaukee-based public interest law firm has done a lot of legal work in the field of parental rights.

“WILL has been contacted by parents all around the state concerned about what is going on in their school districts,” Brewer said. “There’s a lack of transparency and engagement with parents going on right now. We think this is a valuable event to be a part of to let parents know what they can do at a local level.”

Some conservative state lawmakers say they will make parental rights in education a crusade again this year, after Democrat Gov. Tony Evers vetoed legislation last session aimed at requiring greater transparency and accountability in the state’s K-12 schools.

State Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R-Menomonee Falls) on Wednesday issued a statement saying she will not “support adding one more dollar to a broken education system that has vacated the mission of teaching children reading, writing and arithmetic and substituted it with racism and sexism.”

“I call upon my republican colleagues to join me in insisting that our precious resources, provided by the taxpayers, are used in a responsible manner,” said Brandtjen, a candidate for the 8th Senate District seat. “The only increases that should be included in the next budget are increases in accountability, which are clearly lacking. Public education has no business glorifying and promoting propaganda about race, gender or sexuality. Encouraging transgender lifestyles in children is nothing short of child abuse.”

That point of view has garnered some threats against parental rights activists.

Schweitzer said she has received threatening communications after announcing she would serve as emcee of the panel discussion.

“One said he’d be surprised if I lived to host the event,” she said.

“They’re not going to scare me. I’m not going to back down to a terrorist,” Schweitzer added. “Our children deserve better than they’re getting right now.” 

Tribunal avoids putting guardrails on how gender identity theory can be taught (NB vs OCDSB)

Pamela BuffoneSeptember 7, 20221 Comment

on Tribunal avoids putting guardrails on how gender identity theory can be taught (NB vs OCDSB)

Case Dismissed

The Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (HRTO) did not find that my daughter’s case vs OCDSB met the criteria for “direct discrimination” and their reasoning was that our daughter was not denied access to education services. They also found our argument that the repeated pattern of instruction in gender identity theory resulted in a poisoned environment and the direct statement (at least once) by the teacher that “there’s no such thing as girls and boys” was adequately corrected; by the teacher using a gender spectrum as a further teaching tool with 6-year-olds and without any recognition of biological sex as a relevant and important personal characteristic. 

My husband and I approached the school 4 ½ years ago to advocate for our daughter because she had clearly become distressed about how her teacher was instructing her Grade 1 class on the topic of gender. We had not been overly concerned about the “sex-ed” curriculum prior to this experience, but now we’re committed in our belief that children deserve factual and balanced education when it comes to the topic of personal identity. Recognizing that children have a sex, for example, was deemed “not necessary” by the school board and this was noted without disagreement in the ruling. 

The ruling also gave the teacher the benefit of the doubt over our testimony as NB’s parents as to her state of distress. The ruling declared that “cognitive dissonance (that a child might experience) “is simply a part of living in a diverse society” and “a part of growing up” and “arguably necessary if children are to be taught what tolerance itself involves.” 

Exposing the new dogma

Taking this action helped expose the reality of what’s going on in our schools with the full support of the school board administration, and now it seems, the HRTO. Most parents are under the mistaken assumption that what happened in our daughter’s class was the act of a “rogue teacher”. We had initially thought so as well, and friends and neighbours suggested filing a complaint because this teacher must clearly be teaching “outside the curriculum”. 

It turns out that replacing a child’s understanding of themselves in terms of their sex with something called “gender identity” (which can be fluid or not fluid depending on who you ask and what you’re asking about) IS the curriculum – a curriculum within the curriculum. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the HRTO has used our case to double-down on their support for gender identity. Had we won our case, it would have meant an admission from the Human Rights Commission that their own policies had overlooked some critical pieces. This, it seems, is not in the cards. 

“Everyone has a gender identity”, the ruling declared. This statement in and of itself conflates sex and gender. That some people declare they have a gender that is different from their birth sex is an observable fact. Beyond that, it is not possible to prove or assert that gender identity applies to everyone. To do so requires that you ascribe sex and gender identity the same meaning, which is not reflected in the HRTO’s own policies. They don’t seem to be bothered by that particular discrepancy.   

HRTO Reveals Bias

Our hearing presented the HRTO with an opportunity to reflect on the harmful effects that gender identity theory can have on children. Instead, their characterization of our proposed public interest remedy reveals that they have no interest in helping schools ensure they adopt a rational approach to gender that ensures a safe and inclusive environment for all. 

The Tribunal ruling made an “exception” in commenting on the remedies that we were asking for. The guardrails we proposed are based on recent British Department of Education guidance that recognizes the sensitive nature of discussions on the topics of sex and gender in schools and sets out very reasonable parameters. 

The Tribunal ruling refers to them as “complex and detailed” and mischaracterizes them completely by suggesting they ask “that the school board be directed to avoid the issue of gender fluidity”. 

The intent of the guardrails is not to avoid the issue of gender fluidity, but ensure that it is discussed factually, at an age appropriate level and without reinforcing harmful gender stereotypes or suggesting that one’s sex is a fiction. 

We also noticed several glaring mistakes in the ruling, including the suggestion that Aaron Kimberley is an expert in genetics. Was our expert witness ruled out because the Adjudicator thought we were proposing an expert in genetics!? Good Lord. 

We proposed Aaron (a trans-man who happens to have an intersex condition and has clinical experience supporting trans-identified youth) as our expert witness because of this background and his studies and deep knowledge of queer theory. Queer theory is the root of the issue we had wanted to explore because of its insidious influence in our culture and social institutions. And insidious it continues to be.  

Guardrails Needed

Regardless of the outcome, we stand by our call for guardrails on how teachers can instruct the topic of gender in the classroom. 

Our proposed guardrails were adapted from recent updates in Britain:

That the Tribunal instruct the Board to develop publicly available guidance on the sensitive topics of gender and biological sex to ensure that any discussions and/or the use of teaching materials and/or the use of third party organizations do not: 

i) reinforce harmful stereotypes, for instance by suggesting that children might be a different gender based on their personality and interests or the clothes they prefer to wear; 

ii) influence a child’s identity formation by giving preference to understanding oneself in terms of gender identity over understanding oneself based on one’s biological sex observed at birth; or 

iii) suggest that the sex categories of male and female do not exist or exist on a spectrum. 

Further, that the Board ensure resources used in teaching about this topic be age-appropriate, evidence based, and avoid suggesting to a child that their non-compliance with gender stereotypes means that either their personality or their body is wrong and in need of changing, while always treating individual students with sympathy and support.

What Now?

I’ve been reflecting in the past weeks about what good can come from this, even with a decision that is not in our favour. I started Canadian Gender Report after my husband and I decided to go public with our daughter’s case. And the number of people who reach out looking for support or information continues to surprise me.

I’ve met many parents, mental health clinicians, physicians and others who are concerned about the drastic and unexplained increase in the number of mostly girls identifying as something other than their birth sex and seeking medical transition – most of them “non-binary” or some other variation of this in between place that can be found if you think (and are taught) that gender exists on a spectrum. Not to mention all the re-inforcement of this idea in our culture and social media environment that children are able to access. 

If the reason for this was “greater societal acceptance” then the numbers of people declaring a trans identity would be constant across age groups. This is not the case, with adolescents and young people experiencing a drastic and unexplained increase.

Just this summer for example, I was contacted by several young people who have “woken up” from their own experiences following the gender identity rabbit down the rabbit hole. 

I spoke with a young man a few weeks ago who still goes by his chosen feminine name and faces a very difficult time at work and simply existing in society. He told me he knew right after the surgery that he had made a mistake. He found me through Canadian Gender Report and our network has tried to find him appropriate therapy and support. 

Another recent inquiry is from the family of a young woman who would like her breasts back. She’s in her early 20’s and living on disability with severe anxiety that she has had since she was a child. She was able to access transition services without a problem. Trying to get help and support to transition back is turning out to be not as easy. Stay tuned for a possible fundraiser if she has to travel out of province to access care.

It’s these types of situations that keep me going and help me know that Canadian Gender Report is a necessary and worthwhile endeavour. 

But that’s actually a very big problem, isn’t it? 

Should it not worry all of us that people are finding Canadian Gender Report because they have no where else to turn!? These are extremely serious and sensitive situations. Canadians in this kind of situation should be able to turn to therapists and physicians for help – and feel free to have a conversation with a neighbour or friend about what they’re going through. What is happening here in Canada and why?

Until we come to terms with the answers to this question, there will be much need for those of us willing to stick our heads above the parapet.

National Post calls for reform of transgender treatments in line with UK’s new approach: Now what?

HEALTHCARE, POLICY

Canadian Gender ReportAugust 23, 2022Leave a Comment

on National Post calls for reform of transgender treatments in line with UK’s new approach: Now what?

In a surprisingly direct editorial on Saturday, the National Post called for Canada to ban gender surgeries for minors and “take inspiration” from the recent reforms in Finland, Sweden and the UK to ensure Canadian gender questioning children receive appropriate and multi-disciplinary care. This significant statement by one of Canada’s leading media outlets came just weeks after the UK announced the closure of the Tavistock gender clinic for children and youth after an independent commission determined the current model was “not a safe or viable long-term option”.

We welcome the National Post’s support in calling for oversight and reform and we agree that the UK situation parallels Canada’s.

How close is Canada to achieving what the UK National Health Service has done? In this review, we’ll break down the key elements that led to the closure of the Tavistock and the UK’s decision to overhaul their gender identity services. Is Canada making any progress along the same lines? Let’s take a look:

Key factors that led to the closure of the Tavistock

Three elements were necessary and played a key role in the closure of the Tavistock: 1) the role of whistleblowers, 2) the commissioning of an independent review and 3) media scrutiny.  

These conditions have already changed in Canada over the past month since the UK National Health Service announced it would be closing the Tavistock gender clinic and replacing it with regional centres that would adopt a more “holistic model of care”. 

The decision by the UK National Health Service sent shockwaves throughout the world. It’s not every day that a medical model of care that has been applied to children is declared unsafe – let alone one that is enmeshed with a civil rights movement and intense political activism. 

The UK will be setting up regional clinics that will offer a holistic model of care. This emphasis on “holistic” is a key change and means that the rush to medicalize children and young people who present with a gender identity that is different from their birth sex will be met with a more cautious duty of care. 

The Role of Whistleblowers

The UK has had several whistleblowers come forward over the past years to question the model of care being applied by the clinic. These include Sue Evans clinical staff, Dr David Bell former staff-Governor at the Tavistock and Marcus Evans, clinical psychologist and former director of the Trust that oversaw the Tavistock Clinic. 

Of course, there was also a lawsuit by a former patient of the Tavistock. Keira Bell argued that the care she received rushed her into medical transitioning without challenging her to understand other factors that may be influencing her then teenaged-self to seek out changing her body as an answer to the issues she was struggling with at the time. 

A respected Canadian pediatrician and gender expert, Dr Joey Bonifacio, has just stepped forward and is publicly calling for caution and for Canadian clinicians to “slow down” their approach. His remarks have been very measured and diplomatic thus far, but this only makes his impact more powerful. 

Dr Bonifacio cannot be dismissed as someone who is against any and all forms of gender transition for young people. What he’s pointing out is that the model of care known as “gender-affirming care” is at great risk of being misinterpreted and misapplied. 

In the National Post he says: “They think affirmative care is you follow whatever pronouns (patients) care to use and start medication as soon as possible.”

Yet he pointed out that the term is actually supposed to refer to the importance of holistically supporting the patient in their identities and needs and “refrain from directing a child toward any particular identity.” or, needless to say, medicalization. 

Dr Bonifacio is a former Medical Director of the SickKids Hospital gender clinic in Toronto. Why is he no longer there? 

He is also a former named researcher of the TransYouthCan puberty blocker “study” underway across 10 gender clinics in Canada. Why is he no longer affiliated with this group? 

Learning precise answers to these questions isn’t necessary. Dr Bonifacio has first-hand knowledge of the major players setting the direction for youth gender transitioning in Canada. He has also participated in reviewing the practices of other physicians engaged in gender healthcare, at the request of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario. 

He has said he doesn’t discount the idea of peer or other social influences encouraging children and young people into a transgender identity (the social contagion question) and has done his own research on gender transitioning which called for outcomes tracking and more research given all the gaps in understanding that plague the current system.  

His point of view is broadly aligned with the determination of the independent review in the UK (the Cass Review) that gender transition needs to be considered within a broader framework of child and adolescent health. This developmentally informed approach is a welcome change from the child-led approach that is being promoted in North America and at Canadian gender clinics such as SickKids Hospital in Toronto.  

Consider the difference between these 2 statements:

From the UK Cass Review:

“Staff should maintain a broad clinical perspective in order to embed the care of children and young people with gender uncertainty within a broader child and adolescent health context.”

From SickKids Patient Experience team in response to Canadian Gender Report on behalf of parents of children receiving care at SickKids gender clinic:

“Should medical interventions be a part of a youth’s care goals, the care team determines if the patient is capable to make a decision on a medical intervention.”

The broader health context is an afterthought at SickKids as they go on to state “If conditions are identified that warrant mental health intervention, efforts are made to ensure the youth is connected with appropriate care.” 

It is unclear how or when this would happen. For example, we’re aware of a youth who was sexually assaulted a few months prior to suddenly declaring a trans-identity. Although an independent psychologist and expert in gender transitioning recommended against medical transition, this young teenager was able to access hormones at SickKids Hospital.

Under what circumstances would SickKids refrain from offering medical interventions if a child or teenager insisted upon it? (This individual has since detransitioned after several years of hormone use and SickKids also offering the availability of surgery.)

Independent Oversight – The Need for Reviews

Finland, Sweden and the UK have all conducted independent reviews of the evidence behind puberty blockers and other medical interventions being applied to children, as well as the clinical guidance and protocols being followed. In all cases, they have determined that the evidence is “low” and of “low quality” and have determined that the risks of such treatments outweigh the benefits. Supportive psychotherapy is now the first line of treatment in Finland and Sweden and we expect the “holistic” model of care that the UK has signaled will prioritize non-invasive interventions such as supportive therapy over puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and surgeries. 

In all cases in Europe, there was one centralized health authority that took action for the country. In Sweden, the review was sanctioned by the left-leaning Social Democrat Party and was put under the direction of the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare. 

The National Health Service in England in partnership with the NHS’s Improvement Quality and Innovation Committee commissioned the independent review of the Tavistock gender identity development services under the direction of pediatrician Dr Hillary Cass (thus named the Cass Review). 

In Canada, healthcare is a provincial responsibility. This decentralization makes it more difficult to identify and convince the necessary responsible parties to take action. Political and government leaders in Canada are likely to “pass the buck”, hoping someone else will catch this hot-potato issue. It is unlikely that healthcare leaders in Canada will move to voluntarily commission the kind of independent review that Finland, Sweden and the UK have undertaken. We’d love to be proven wrong.  

It is our view that lawsuits will be the necessary and most efficient path to securing the necessary oversight needed. Even then, it is difficult to foresee how an individual medical malpractice lawsuit would have success in Canada given the onus of responsibility being placed on the young patients and their parents in providing “consent” for these procedures. 

This backdrop is why it is particularly important that our media exercise their responsiblity to investigate and develop their own independent view of what is happening in Canada. As the National Post has just recognized, “medical knowledge, as well as the gaps in said knowledge, knows few national boundaries. Canada’s approach to gender care is like skiing down a mountain while blindfolded and ignoring calls to slow down.”

The lack of public debate on youth gender transitioning and the lack of informed reporting by our mainstream media outlets is exacerbating the situation in Canada, not helping it. 

Media Scrutiny

Media outlets in the UK were also slow to respond to the early calls for investigation into what was happening with the exponential rise of young people, now mostly adolescent natal females, seeking medical gender transition. This changed dramatically over the past 5 years as the BBC, The Times and The Guardian began to question and expose the dangerous trend and highlight calls by experts and insiders for the need to review the protocols and practices in place.  

With very few exceptions, the Canadian mainstream media remains eerily silent when it comes to exposing that there is any question or debate happening with respect to medical transitioning of minors. 

The National Post has been paying some attention to the issue over the past 2 years which has led to their recent call for reform of pediatric gender services in Canada. 

W5 aired a balanced documentary last year that profiled a UK based detransitioner and a Canadian young person transitioning to the opposite gender. The detransitioner was representative of the growing and unexplained cohort of adolescent females seeking gender transition, while the other individual represented the classic early onset case of gender dysphoria in natal males. This type of case is now a minority of those seen by Canadian gender clinics.

The Globe and Mail hasn’t run a single story about the debate on medical gender transitioning even though their respected staff and editors are very aware of the growing international debate and pull back on the topic. 

CTV News exposed their tone-deaf ineptitude by running a fluff piece touting dubious research by trans-activist Jack Turban the same week that the UK National Health Service declared that the model of care being applied in Canada was deemed “not safe” for UK children. 

Parents lobbied CTV to retract the article but were only able to gain a modest “correction” at the end to identify a methodology limitation used in the research. 

In defence of the CTV, they had picked up the story from the supposedly trusted source of the AAP (the American Academy of Pediatricians). The AAP retracted its own misleading headline that originally promoted the research as confirmation that social contagion is a myth. The CTV let it stand.

Such is the current state of media reporting on this sensitive topic in Canada.

Thankfully, there is a growing public debate happening in the US and international media, including at the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and The Economist. Several high profile US gender experts have stepped forward to call for caution and re-evaluation of the rush to medicalize youth who declare a transgender identity. We hope that balanced debate in trusted international media will also have spill over effects here.

Conclusion

The Tavistock closure has created new conditions in Canada that have already helped to move us closer to the public discourse and review that needs to happen. The National Post Editorial calling for reform on how medical treatments are being offered to trans-identified children and young people is an enormous and very significant step forward. 

On the announcement of the Tavistock closure, one of the UK whistleblowers, Dr David Bell said: “What must happen now is a cultural overhaul, taking in schools as well as gender clinics.” 

Canada is still far away from this kind of reckoning. But it is an important reminder that what happens next will be a reflection of our culture and whether we value all children and their safe passage through the sometimes-difficult stages of growing up or whether we allow ourselves to be taken in by a movement that would offer unquestioned medicalization for what is being called “gender diversity” in children too young to legally get a tattoo. 

The draft WPATH Standard of Care v8 for adolescents noted that “gender diversity” should no longer be considered “rare” as almost 10% of the US youth population rated themselves as “gender diverse”. The question being posed by the WPATH adolescent standards committee was:  do we really understand which children we are medicalizing and why? 

It is our position that the Canadian healthcare system has lost its way in terms of determining whether medical transition is in a child’s best interest and that schools, activist groups and many seemingly well-intentioned individuals, including some therapists, are recklessly influencing children and young people in a manner that not only “affirms” their so-called gender identity, but creates a new kind of social capital around the idea of being “trans” and pushes young people along a path toward unnecessary and high-risk medical interventions. 

We will continue to call upon the federal and provincial governments to conduct an independent review of current practices affecting children just as Sweden, Finland and the UK have done. In June, we submitted a Briefing to the Federal Standing Committee on Children’s Health requesting this type of independent review. We’ve not heard anything back from the Committee about our submission, but that document is now part of the public record.

An article in Canada’s National Post last week explored how children can socially transition their gender at school without the knowledge of their parents. 

The article received more than 1000 comments, most of them highly critical of the policy to keep a child’s gender change a secret from parents. This practice in schools is becoming a common policy, the article noted. 

“It’s just one way the education system has become intimately involved in the transgender process, which affects an “exponentially” growing number of young Canadians. “

The article also exposed how schools can refer children to gender clinics without parental knowledge or approval. 

Dr Margaret Lawson, a pediatric endocrinologist at CHEO in Ottawa, was interviewed for the article and said that the role that schools are playing has indeed changed and for the better.

She also claims that the theory that the phenomenon of rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) in adolescent girls is driven largely by social contagion has been “conclusively disproven” by one of her studies. The study does nothing of the sort. It is based on a single question in a self-reported survey. The study does not relate the onset of gender dysphoria with the start of puberty, which is one of the defining characteristics of ROGD. In fact, we simply do not know enough about ROGD and schools, clinics, and parents need to be more cautious before starting children on a pathway to irreversible medical changes.

Social gender transition is not a neutral act, and therefore children who are adopting a new name and pronouns at school are implicating the schools in engaging in a form of psychosocial intervention that can lead to a greater potential for medical gender transition. 

James Cantor, a former scientist with Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, pointed out in the article that “The schools’ role is troublesome given evidence that suggests social transitioning makes it more likely for a young person to move on to medical transition, which can include cross-sex hormones and gender-reassignment surgery”. We’re disappointed that Cantor’s point of view was not explored in more depth in the Post’s article.

While Dr Lawson declares that “no one chooses to be transgender,” it’s the experience of many CGR families that the transgender experience of their child was a phase, and in many cases something that was related to the environment the child was in, and not a fixed part of the child’s identity. Therefore, a school environment that teaches and encourages children in transgender identification undermines the family’s role to inculcate children in moral values and creates a wedge between parent and child. This is an unacceptable abuse of power by the education system, and one in which Canadian families are not able to escape given the lack of school choice and lack of parental control over the school environment.  

CGR believes that schools should provide a safe yet neutral space for children who are exploring or questioning their gender. Given the multitude of mental health issues, trauma, or other factors that can influence a child to adopt a transgender identity, it is imperative that parents be informed and aware of this developmental change in their child if the school is to uphold the role of parents as guardians, otherwise, parents are reduced to babysitters during school off-hours. 

A question that really needs to be explored by Dr’s Lawson and others who seem so eager to disprove ROGD and the multiple reasons why young people may adopt a transgender identity (whether by choice or not) is why a disproportionate number of both indigenous and white children are declaring that they’re transgender (vs a much lower number of visible minorities compared to the population expectations). The Trans Youth Can data reveals an extremely disproportionate number of children and young people seeking referrals to gender clinics from disadvantaged backgrounds, including low-income households. Why would this be the case if “greater awareness” is what’s driving the numbers of trans-identified youth? Are there other social factors at play?

Latest demographic data from www.transyouthcan.ca

For Canada to provide a safe and supportive environment for all children to thrive requires that the professionals in white coats who we trust to make good decisions are able to remain open to the many different possibilities driving the recent explosion in transgender identification among youth, and critically explore the most appropriate ways to ensure long term health and well-being. 

Gender-related distress is a complex issue requiring careful consideration. This is why the UK, Sweden, Finland, and other responsible healthcare professional bodies are moving away from unquestioned “affirmation”. The role of adults is supposed to be one of safeguarding children, after all. We can see that in Canada, schools have already adopted gender self-id without regard for the health complexities and moral implications of removing parents from critical decisions such as a child changing their name and using a different washroom or sharing a room with the opposite sex on an overnight school trip because they’ve declared they have a different “gender identity”. All of these are valid safeguarding concerns of parents.

The gender self-ID mandate of schools should require a referendum in each of our provinces and territories given that it is becoming the de facto consequence of the addition of gender identity to our human rights codes. At a minimum, Canadian parents should have a choice of school environment that respects their role as guardians of their child’s well-being.

You might like to forward this brief guidance from Genspect to your school, principal, or teacher:

Top Trans Doctors Blow the Whistle on ‘Sloppy’ Care By 

Abigail Shrier October 4, 2021

https://www.thefp.com/p/top-trans-doctors-blow-the-whistle

In exclusive interviews, two prominent providers sound off on puberty blockers, 'affirmative' care, the inhibition of sexual pleasure, and the suppression of dissent in their field.

By Abigail Shrier

For nearly a decade, the vanguard of the transgender-rights movement — doctors, activists, celebrities and transgender influencers  — has defined the boundaries of the new orthodoxy surrounding transgender medical care: What’s true, what’s false, which questions can and cannot be asked. 

They said it was perfectly safe to give children as young as nine puberty blockers and insisted that the effects of those blockers were “fully reversible.” They said that it was the job of medical professionals to help minors to transition. They said it was not their job to question the wisdom of transitioning, and that anyone who did — including parents — was probably transphobic. 

They said that any worries about a social contagion among teen girls was nonsense. And they never said anything about the distinct possibility that blocking puberty, coupled with cross-sex hormones, could inhibit a normal sex life.

Their allies in the media and Hollywood reported stories and created content that reaffirmed this orthodoxy. Anyone who dared disagree or depart from any of its core tenets, including young women who publicly detransitioned, were inevitably smeared as hateful and accused of harming children.

But that new orthodoxy has gone too far, according to two of the most prominent providers in the field of transgender medicine: Dr. Marci Bowers, a world-renowned vaginoplasty specialist who operated on reality-television star Jazz Jennings; and Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist at the University of California San Francisco’s Child and Adolescent Gender Clinic. 

In the course of their careers, both have seen thousands of patients. Both are board members of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the organization that sets the standards worldwide for transgender medical care. And both are transgender women.

Earlier this month, Anderson told me she submitted a co-authored op-ed to The New York Times warning that many transgender healthcare providers were treating kids recklessly. The Times passed, explaining it was “outside our coverage priorities right now.”

Over the past few weeks, I have spoken at length to both women about the current direction of their field and where they feel it has gone wrong. On some issues, including their stance on puberty blockers, they raised concerns that appear to question the current health guidelines set by WPATH — which Bowers is slated to lead starting in 2022. 

WPATH, for instance, recommends that for many gender dysphoric and gender non-conforming kids, hormonal puberty suppression begin at the early stages of puberty. WPATH has also insisted since 2012 that puberty blockers are “fully reversible interventions.” 

When I asked Anderson if she believes that the psychological effects of puberty blockers are reversible, she said: “I’m not sure.” 

When asked whether children in the early stages of puberty should be put on blockers, Bowers said: “I’m not a fan.”

When I asked Bowers if she still thought puberty blockers were a good idea, from a surgical perspective, she said: “This is typical of medicine. We zig and then we zag, and I think maybe we zigged a little too far to the left in some cases.” She added “I think there was naivete on the part of pediatric endocrinologists who were proponents of early [puberty] blockade thinking that just this magic can happen, that surgeons can do anything.”

I asked Bowers whether she believed WPATH had been welcoming to a wide variety of doctors’ viewpoints — including those concerned about risks, skeptical of puberty blockers, and maybe even critical of some of the surgical procedures?

“There are definitely people who are trying to keep out anyone who doesn’t absolutely buy the party line that everything should be affirming, and that there’s no room for dissent,” Bowers said. “I think that’s a mistake.”

Bowers is not only among the most respected gender surgeons in the world but easily one of the most prolific: she has built or repaired more than 2,000 vaginas, the procedure known as vaginoplasty. She rose to celebrity status appearing on the hit reality-television show “I Am Jazz,” which catalogues and choreographs the life of Jazz Jennings, arguably the country’s most famous transgender teen. 

In January 2019, Jeanette Jennings threw her famous daughter a “Farewell to Penis” party.  Over a million viewers looked in on guests feasting on meatballs and miniature wieners in the Jennings’ Mediterranean-style Florida home. Family and friends cheered as Jazz sliced into a penis-shaped cake. The rather complicated upcoming procedure came to seem as little more than a Sweet Sixteen. 

By that point, Jazz was already Time magazine’s top 25 most influential teen, the co-author of a bestselling children’s book and the inspiration for a plastic doll. She had served as youth ambassador to the Human Rights Campaign, and she had about one million Instagram followers. Hers was no longer just a personal story but an advertisement for a lifestyle and an industry. 

On the day of the procedure — dutifully recorded for Instagram — Jazz’s sister, Ari, teasingly wiggled a sausage in front of the camera. As Jazz was about to be wheeled into the operating room, she snapped her fingers and said, “Let’s do this!”

The vaginoplasty she underwent is what surgeons call a “penile inversion,” in which surgeons use the tissue from the penis and testicles to create a vaginal cavity and clitoris. With grown men, a penile inversion was eminently doable. With Jazz, it was much more difficult. 

Like thousands of adolescents in America treated for gender dysphoria (severe discomfort in one’s biological sex), Jazz had been put on puberty blockers. In Jazz’s case, they began at age 11. So at age 17, Jazz’s penis was the size and sexual maturity of an 11-year-old’s. As Bowers explained to Jazz and her family ahead of the surgery, Jazz didn’t have enough penile and scrotal skin to work with. So Bowers took a swatch of Jazz’s stomach lining to complement the available tissue. 

At first, Jazz’s surgery seemed to have gone fine, but soon after she said experienced “crazy pain.” She was rushed back to the hospital, where Dr. Jess Ting was waiting. “As I was getting her on the bed, I heard something go pop,” Ting said in an episode of “I Am Jazz.” Jazz’s new vagina  — or neovagina, as surgeons say — had split apart.

Gender dysphoria, which Jazz had suffered from since age two, is very real, and by all accounts, excruciating. For the nearly 100-year diagnostic history of gender dysphoria, it overwhelmingly afflicted boys and men, and it began in early childhood (ages two to four). According to the DSM-V, the latest edition of the historical rate of incidence was .01 percent of males (roughly one in 10,000). 

For decades, psychologists treated it with “watchful waiting” — that is, a method of psychotherapy that seeks to understand the source of a child’s gender dysphoria, lessen its intensity, and ultimately help a child grow more comfortable in her own body. 

Since nearly seven in 10 children initially diagnosed with gender dysphoria eventually outgrew it — many go on to be lesbian or gay adults — the conventional wisdom held that, with a little patience, most kids would come to accept their bodies. The underlying assumption was children didn’t always know best.

But in the last decade, watchful waiting has been supplanted by “affirmative care,” which assumes children do know what’s best. Affirmative care proponents urge doctors to corroborate their patients’ belief that they are trapped in the wrong body. The family is pressured to help the child transition to a new gender identity — sometimes having been told by doctors or activists that, if they don’t, their child may eventually commit suicide. From there, pressures build on parents to begin concrete medical steps to help children on their path to transitioning to the “right” body. That includes puberty blockers as a preliminary step. Typically, cross-sex hormones follow and then, if desired, gender surgery.

The widespread use of puberty blockers can be traced to the Netherlands. In the mid-1990s, Peggy Cohen-Kettenis, a psychologist in Amsterdam who had studied young people with gender dysphoria, helped raise awareness about the potential benefits of blockers —  formerly used in the chemical castration of violent rapists. Pharmaceutical companies were happy to fund studies on the application of blockers in children, and, gradually, what’s called the Dutch Protocol was born. The thinking behind the protocol was: Why make a child who has suffered with gender dysphoria since preschool endure puberty, with all its discomforts and embarrassments, if that child were likely to transition as a young adult? Researchers believed blockers’ effects were reversible — just in case the child did not ultimately transition. 

Cohen-Kettenis later grew doubtful about that initial assessment. “It is not clear yet how pubertal suppression will influence brain development,” she wrote in the European Journal of Endocrinology in 2006. Puberty is not merely a biochemical development; it is also “a psycho-social event that occurs in concert with one’s peers,” Doctor William Malone, an endocrinologist and member of the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine, told me. Hormones do not merely stimulate sex organs during puberty; they also shower the brain. 

But at the very moment when Dutch researchers were beginning to raise concerns about puberty blockers, American health providers discovered it. In 2007, the Dutch Protocol arrived at Boston Children’s Hospital, one of the preeminent children’s hospitals in the nation. It would soon become the leading course of treatment for all transgender-identified children and adolescents in the United States. One of them was Jazz Jennings.

In 2012, a surgeon implanted a puberty blocker called Supprelin in Jazz’s upper arm to delay the onset of facial hair and the deepening of her voice, among other things. Without these conventional masculine features, it would be easier, down the road, for doctors to make her look more feminine — more like the budding young woman she felt she was deep inside. 

At the time, doctors knew less than they do now about the effects of puberty blockers. “When you enter a field like this where there’s not a lot of published data, not a lot of studies, the field is in its infancy, you see people sometimes selling protocols like puberty blockers in a dogmatic fashion, like, ‘This is just what we do,’” Bowers told me.

Once an adolescent has halted normal puberty and adopted an opposite-sex name, Bowers said: “You’re going to go socially to school as a girl, and you’ve made this commitment. How do you back out of that?”

Another problem created by puberty blockade — experts prefer “blockade” to “blockage” — was lack of tissue, which Dutch researchers noted back in 2008. At that time, Cohen-Kettenis and other researchers noted that, in natal males, early blockade might lead to “non-normal pubertal phallic growth,” meaning that “the genital tissue available for vaginoplasty might be less than optimal.” 

But that hair-raising warning seems to have been lost in the trip across the Atlantic.

 Many American gender surgeons augment the tissue for constructing neovaginas with borrowed stomach lining and even a swatch of the bowel. Bowers draws the line at the colon. “I never use the colon,” she said. “It’s the last resort. You can get colon cancer. If it’s used sexually, you can get this chronic colitis that has to be treated over time. And it’s just in the discharge and the nasty appearance and it doesn’t smell like vagina.”

The problem for kids whose puberty has been blocked early isn’t just a lack of tissue but of sexual development. Puberty not only stimulates the growth of sex organs. It also endows them with erotic potential. “If you’ve never had an orgasm pre-surgery, and then your puberty's blocked, it's very difficult to achieve that afterward,” Bowers said. “I consider that a big problem, actually. It's kind of an overlooked problem that in our ‘informed consent’ of children undergoing puberty blockers, we’ve in some respects overlooked that a little bit.”

Nor is this a problem that can be corrected surgically. Bowers can build labia, a vaginal canal, and a clitoris, and the results look impressive. But, she said, if the kids are “orgasmically naive” because of puberty blockade, “the clitoris down there might as well be a fingertip and brings them no particular joy and, therefore, they’re not able to be responsive as a lover. And so how does that affect their long-term happiness?”

Few, if any, other doctors acknowledge as much. 

The Mayo Clinic, for instance, does not note that permanent sexual dysfunction may be among puberty blockers’ risks.

 St. Louis Children’s Hospital doesn’t mention it, either. 

Oregon Health & Science University Children’s Hospital and University of California at San Francisco don’t. 

Nor was there any mention of sexual dysfunction in a recent New York Times story, 

“What Are Puberty Blockers?” 

Jack Turban, the chief fellow in child and adolescent psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine, wrote, in 2018: “The only significant side effect is that the adolescent may fall behind on bone density.” 

But lack of bone density is often just the start of the problem. Patients who take puberty blockers almost invariably wind up taking cross-sex hormones — and this combination tends to leave patients infertile and, as Bowers made clear, sexually dysfunctional.

On an episode of “I Am Jazz,” Jazz revealed that she had never experienced an orgasm and may never be able to. But she remains optimistic. “I know that once I fall in love and I really admire another individual that I’m going to want to have sex with them,” Jazz said at 16, in an episode that aired in July of 2017.

In the year after her operation, Jazz would require three more surgeries, and then defer Harvard College for a year to deal with her depression. In 2021, she opened up about a binge-eating disorder that caused her to gain nearly 100 pounds in under two years.

Jazz has insisted she has “no regrets” about her transition. (I reached out to Jazz for an interview and never heard back). But subjecting patients to a course of serious interventions that cannot be scrutinized — even by experts — without one risking being tarred as anti-trans seems unlikely to be in anyone’s best interest.

Bowers told me she now finds early puberty blockade inadvisable. “I’m not a fan of blockade at Tanner Two anymore, I really am not,” she told me, using the clinical name of the moment when the first visible signs of puberty manifest. “The idea all sounded good in the very beginning,” she said. “Believe me, we’re doing some magnificent surgeries on these kids, and they’re so determined, and I’m so proud of so many of them and their parents. They’ve been great. But honestly, I can’t sit here and tell you that they have better — or even as good — results. They’re not as functional. I worry about their reproductive rights later. I worry about their sexual health later and ability to find intimacy.”

Bowers knows what the loss of fertility and sexual intimacy might entail: She has three children, all born before she transitioned, and she spent a decade tending to victims of female genital mutilation. “Those women, a lot of them experience broken relationships because they cannot respond sexually,” she said. “And my fear about these young children who never experience orgasm prior to undergoing surgery are going to reach adulthood and try to find intimacy and realize they don’t know how to respond sexually.” 

In 2007, the year the U.S. began implementing the Dutch Protocol, the U.S. had one pediatric gender clinic, and it overwhelmingly served patients like Jazz: natal males who expressed discomfort in their bodies in the earliest stages of childhood. (At age 2, Jazz reportedly asked Jeanette when the good fairy would turn him into a girl. Jazz’s own social transition did not appear to proceed from peer influence and predated social media.)

Today, the U.S. has hundreds of gender clinics. Most patients are not natal males, like Jazz, but teenage girls. I wrote a book about these girls, “Irreversible Damage,” which was based on interviews with them and their families. Peer influence and exposure to trans influencers on social media play an outsized role in their desire to escape womanhood. Unlike the patients of the Dutch Protocol, who were screened for other mental health comorbidities, these young women almost always suffer from severe anxiety and depression or other significant mental health problems — and those problems are often overlooked or ignored.

When public health researcher and former Brown University Professor Lisa Littman dubbed this phenomenon “rapid onset gender dysphoria” in 2018, the university apologized for her paper and ultimately pushed her out. Activists called the hypothesis of a social contagion among teen girls a “poisonous lie used to discredit trans people.”

But Littman’s research about the sudden spike in teen girl trans-identification has become increasingly difficult to deny: A recent survey by the American College Health Association showed that, in 2008, one in 2,000 female undergraduates identified as transgender. By 2021, that figure had jumped to one in 20.

While both Anderson and Bowers pointed out that “ROGD” has yet to be accepted as a diagnosis, Anderson said: “At our clinic at UCSF, for two years now running, we’re running two to one natal females to natal males.” Two to one.

“As for this ROGD thing,” Bowers said, “I think there probably are people who are influenced. There is a little bit of ‘Yeah, that’s so cool. Yeah, I kind of want to do that too.’”

Anderson agreed that we’re likely to see more regret among this teenage-girl population. “It is my considered opinion that due to some of the — let’s see, how to say it? what word to choose? — due to some of the, I’ll call it just ‘sloppy,’ sloppy healthcare work, that we’re going to have more young adults who will regret having gone through this process. And that is going to earn me a lot of criticism from some colleagues, but given what I see — and I’m sorry, but it’s my actual experience as a psychologist treating gender variant youth — I’m worried that decisions will be made that will later be regretted by those making them.”

What, exactly, was sloppy about the healthcare work? “Rushing people through the medicalization, as you and others have cautioned, and failure — abject failure — to evaluate the mental health of someone historically in current time, and to prepare them for making such a life-changing decision,” Anderson said. 

I asked Bowers about the rise of detransitioners, young women who have come to regret transitioning. Many said they were given a course of testosterone on their first visit to a clinic like Planned Parenthood. “​When you have a female-assigned person and she’s feeling dysphoric, or somebody decides that she’s dysphoric and says your eating disorders are not really eating disorders, this is actually gender dysphoria, and then they see you for one visit, and then they recommend testosterone — red flag!” Bowers said. “Wake up here.”

Abigail Shrier is the author of “Irreversible Damage,” which the Economist named one of the best books of 2020. Read more of her work at her newsletter, The Truth Fairy.

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