"God either doesn't exist, is powerless, or is a huge asshole."
No matter which way you cut it, he's not worth worshipping.
His best defence for baby cancer would be not existing.
By: Julian Adorney, Mark Johnson and Geoff Laughton
Published: Mar 23, 2024
In The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard tells the story of a jet fighter pilot who was practicing high-speed maneuvers. As Willard puts it, “She turned the controls for what she thought was a steep ascent—and flew straight into the ground. She was unaware that she had been flying upside down.”
What if we were flying upside down? But let’s go further. What if an entire generation was flying upside down–flying through fog and danger, unable to see either ground or sky, and the well-intended adjustments pushed on them by “experts” were just bringing them closer to catastrophe?
That’s the lens through which we interpret Abigail Shrier’s New York Times bestseller Bad Therapy.
There’s no denying that the youngest generation is in crisis. As the Addiction Center notes, members of Generation Z “run a higher risk of developing a substance abuse problem than previous age groups.” A 2015 report found that 23.6 percent of 12th graders use illicit drugs. The American Psychological Association reports that just 45 percent of Gen Zers report that their mental health is “very good” or “excellent,” compared with 51 percent of Gen Xers and 70 percent of Boomers. A concerning 42 percent of Gen Zers have been diagnosed with a mental health condition, and an astounding 60 percent take medication to manage their mental health.
It gets worse. The rate of self-harm for girls age 10-14 increased over 300 percent from 2001 to 2019 (before the pandemic). According to a 2021 CDC survey, 1 in 3 teenage girls have seriously considered killing themselves.
Well-meaning therapists, teachers, and school counselors are trying to help the next generation to rise up. But what if everyone involved is upside down? What if, like the fighter pilot that Willard describes, what they think is rising up is actually bringing them into deeper danger? Shrier makes a strong case that that’s exactly what’s happening.
Lots of educators encourage kids to spend more time checking in with their feelings. In the 2021-2022 school year, 76 percent of principals said that their school had adopted a Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) curriculum. Common SEL practices include: asking students how they’re feeling at the start of each day, teaching that students should be more aware of how they’re feeling in any given moment, and encouraging students to use activities like writing and art to express their feelings.
The problem is that all of this obsession with feelings can actually make students feel worse. As Yulia Chentsova Dutton, head of the the Culture and Emotions Lab at Georgetown University, says, “Emotions are highly reactive to our attention to them.” “Certain kinds of attention to emotions, focus on emotions,” she explains, “can increase emotional distress. And I’m worried that when we try to help our young adults, help our children, what we do is throw oil into the fire.” Or to put it another way: when we ask kids over and over again how they’re feeling, we’re subtly and accidentally encouraging them to feel bad.
The reason is that, as psychiatry professor Michael Linden explains, most of us don’t feel happy all the time. Dealing with life involves ignoring a certain amount of moment-by-moment discomfort: I’m tired, my feet hurt, I’m sore from sitting down all day, I’m a little worried about my mom. When we encourage kids to check in many times per day on how they’re feeling, we’re tacitly encouraging them to bring to the surface–and then dwell on–all the things going on in their minds that are not “happiness.” That’s why, as Linden puts it, “Asking somebody ‘how are you feeling?’ is inducing negative feelings. You shouldn’t do that.”
But it gets worse.
Obsessing over our emotions can actually prevent us from doing the things that might make us feel better. Anyone who’s spent too long wallowing after a bad break-up knows this; at a certain point, you have to shelve your unpleasant emotions so that you can get on with your life. Psychologists describe two mental states that we can occupy at any given time: “action orientation” and “state orientation.” “State orientation” is where you focus primarily on yourself (e.g., how you feel about doing the task at hand, whether your wrist hurts or you’re starting to get sick, etc.). “Action orientation” is where you primarily focus on the task at hand. As a study published by Cambridge University Press notes, only the latter is actually conducive to pursuing and accomplishing goals. “State orientation is a personality that has difficulty in taking action toward goal fulfillment,” the authors warn. By encouraging young people to focus so much on their feelings, we might be hurting their ability to adopt the mindset necessary to accomplish goals in life. If so, that would make them even more unhappy.
But the dangers posed by well-meaning “experts” telling students to fly in the wrong direction–towards the ground instead of towards the sky–go well beyond encouraging unhappiness and depression. Rates of suicide and self-harm for young people are skyrocketing. But in their attempts to cope with the spike, well-meaning administrators might be making the problem worse. Here are questions from the 2021 Florida High School Youth Risk Behavior Survey, administered to students age 14 and up:
During the past 12 months, did you ever feel so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row that you stopped doing your usual activities? During the past 12 months, did you ever seriously consider attempting suicide? During the past 12 months, did you make a plan about how you would attempt suicide? During the past 12 months, how many times did you actually attempt suicide? If you attempted suicide during the past 12 months, did any attempt result in an injury, poisoning, or overdose that had to be treated by a doctor or nurse?
A survey authored by the CDC asked students “During the past year, did you do something to purposely hurt yourself without wanting to die, such as cutting or burning yourself on purpose?” Another survey offered this question to Delaware middle schoolers: “Sometimes people feel so depressed about the future that they may consider attempting suicide or killing themselves. Have you ever seriously thought about killing yourself?”
Administrators may be asking these questions with the best of intentions, but the end result is to normalize suicide in young peoples’ minds. If you were 12 years old and taking a survey like this along with all of your classmates, you might reasonably conclude that suicide, or at least suicidal ideation and/or self harm, were pretty common at your school. Otherwise, why would everyone your age have to take such an exhaustive assessment about it?
One reason this is so dangerous is that, as Shrier writes, “The virality of suicide and self-harm among adolescents is extremely well-established.” Following the release of Netflix’s TV show 13 Reasons Why, which some said valorized a fictional girl who killed herself, several studies found a spike in teen suicide rates. The CDC agrees. In a post warning about the dangers of “suicide contagion,” the CDC said that journalists should avoid things like:
- “Engaging in repetitive, ongoing, or excessive reporting of suicide in the news.”
- “Reporting ‘how-to’ descriptions of suicide.”
- “Presenting suicide as a tool for accomplishing certain ends” (i.e., as a “means of coping with personal problems”).
But this is most of what the surveys described above are doing. They are deluging students with repetitive and excessive discussion of suicide. They are describing different methods for killing yourself (e.g., cutting or burning yourself). One survey, which asks students who have considered killing themselves why they did so (possible answers include “demands of schoolwork,” “problems with peers or friends,” and “being bullied”) is a textbook example of presenting suicide as a “means of coping with personal problems.”
The authors of these surveys seem to at least recognize the risk that students are flying upside down, and that these surveys might take them closer to the ground. One survey concludes by telling students, “If any survey questions or your responses have caused you to feel uncomfortable or concerned and you would like to talk to someone about your feelings, talk to your school’s counselor, to a teacher, or to another adult you trust.” The survey also includes links to different hotlines.
Communicating to kids that suicide is normal and a possible solution to their problems might be the worst way that some schools are failing kids, but it’s also far from the only way.
Schools are increasingly lax about standards, willing to let almost anyone get away with almost anything. Some accommodations do make sense: for example, it makes sense to give a kid with dyslexia more time to complete the verbal component of the SAT. But Shrier argues that standards are falling for perfectly healthy students too. “School counselors—students’ in-school ‘advocates,’” Shrier writes, now “lobby teachers to excuse lateness or absence, forgive missed classwork, allow a student to take walks around the school in the middle of class, ratchet grades upward, reduce or eliminate homework requirements, offer oral exams in place of written ones, and provide preferential seating to students who lack even an official diagnosis.”
Shrier documents stories of students who have been allowed to turn in work late because they were having a “tough Mental Health Day” or because “I was having a rough day and dealing with my gender identity.”
The problem with this is that one of the primary things that children and teenagers do is try to figure out the boundaries of the world. When a child throws a tantrum, it’s not malicious–they’re trying to understand this new world and figure out what they can get away with. As Jordan Peterson writes in Twelve Rules for Life, young children are “like blind people, searching for a wall.” “They have to push forward, and test,” he writes, “to see where the actual boundaries lie.” What’s true of young children is also true of older children and even (to a lesser extent) adults. All of us are trying to figure out the rules of life–that is, what we can get away with. If well-meaning teachers and counselors tell students that one of the rules is that you don’t have to do your homework on time if you say that you’re having a rough day, then we shouldn’t be surprised when more young people seem to manifest rough days.
But this is the opposite of what students need–especially the truly disadvantaged students who so many of these efforts seem to be aimed at helping. In his memoir Troubled, clinical psychologist Rob Henderson writes that, “People think that if a young guy comes from a disorderly or deprived environment, he should be held to low standards.” But, he warns, “this is misguided. He should be held to high standards. Otherwise, he will sink to the level of his environment.”
So kids are depressed, anxious, and poorly behaved. Educators are trying to help them by encouraging them to tap in more to their feelings, by asking them more questions about suicide, and by trying to accommodate their difficulties even more. But all of this is backwards. Educators are encouraging students to do what they think will take them higher–away from the ground and back to the safety of the sky. But both kids and educators are upside down. And every adjustment that the “experts” are telling kids to make just brings them closer to the ground–and a catastrophic collision.
Now’s a good time to emphasize that this isn’t all schools, all teachers, or all administrators–not by a long shot. There are heroic educators working every day to help students to rein in their problems, stop taking advantage of accommodations that they don’t need, and develop the emotional resilience to deal with the problems of adolescence. But the problems documented above do represent a trend. And while it’s not every school, the trend is too big to ignore.
What will happen if this trend continues–if an entire generation keeps going “up” until they crash into the ground? Most severe and most damaging is the harm to the generation itself. Shrier tells the story of Nora, a 16-year-old girl who helps put a human face on all of the brutal statistics described in the introduction to this piece. Nora describes her friends as going through a litany of serious mental health problems: “anxiety,” “depression”; “self-harm” (as Shrier notes, “lots of self-harm”) including “Scratching, cutting, anorexia,” “Trichotillomania” (pulling your hair out by the roots); and more. As Shrier writes, “Dissociative identity disorder, gender dysphoria, autism spectrum disorder, and Tourette’s belong on her list of once-rare disorders that are, among this rising generation, suddenly not so rare at all.”
But the dangers can also ripple out beyond just one generation. The full danger may be nothing less than an imperiling of our democracy.
As Shrier notes, many kids in school are almost constantly monitored. Her own kids have “recess monitors” at their school–“teachers who involve themselves in every disagreement at playtime and warn kids whenever the monkey bars might be slick with rain.” On the bus home, they have “bus monitors.” Better that kids know they’re being observed by an adult at all times than that one kid push another to give him his lunch money.
One of the most pervasive forms of monitoring is what are called “shadows”—ed techs or paraeducators whose job is to cling closely to one particular student so that they don’t have any issues. The original intention certainly made sense. If a child had autism, a shadow could help the kid to integrate into the main classroom rather than being sent to Special Ed. But, as Shrier notes, scope creep has been substantial. “Today,” she writes, “public schools assign shadows to follow kids with problems ranging from mild learning disabilities to violent tendencies.” Nor is the problem restricted to public schools: “private schools advise affluent parents to hire shadows to trail neurotypical kids for almost any reason.” Shadows monitor and guide almost every interaction with their chosen student, from when to raise her hand to how long to hug a fellow student.
As Peter Gray, professor of psychology at Boston College and an expert on child development, puts it, “Kids today are always under the situation of an observer. At home, the parents are watching them. At school, they’re being observed by teachers. Out of school, they’re in adult-directed activities. They have almost no privacy.”
But when kids spend their entire waking lives being monitored by an adult, they start to think that kind of monitoring is normal. Worse, they start to think that they need it. If a child gets constant guidance from an adult, what are the odds that she’s going to cultivate her own independence? If she expects authoritarian adults to monitor and run every aspect of her life already, what is she going to think of a liberal democracy that more-or-less leaves people free to handle their own affairs?
No wonder just 27 percent of Americans age 18-25 strongly agree with the statement that “Democracy may have problems, but it is the best system of government” (compared to 48 percent of Americans as a whole).
So what’s the solution? If our kids are upside down and getting lower to the ground, then the only thing that makes sense is to help them reverse course. Is there something that’s the opposite of always asking them about their feelings, telling them that life is too much for them or their peers to cope with, and constantly telling them that they’re too fragile to do their homework if they’re having a rough day? Yes. That something is called antifragility.
Antifragility is the idea that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression Greg Lukianoff note in The Coddling of the American Mind, kids are naturally antifragile. That doesn’t just mean that they’re tough. It means that “they require stressors and challenges in order to learn, adapt, and grow.” Not letting a kid hand in homework late doesn’t just teach them to do their homework on time; it also teaches them that they can deal with a 0 in class and not die. They can pick themselves up, brush themselves off, and even earn an A in the class overall if they bust a sweat for the rest of the semester. Telling a kid who’s having a “tough mental health day” that you’re sorry to hear it but they still need to take today’s test doesn’t just teach the kid that low-level excuses don’t fly; it also teaches them that a hard day isn’t enough to stop them. It teaches them that they’re stronger than whatever negative emotions they’re currently experiencing.
It’s time to remind kids that they are strong–before it’s too late.
All quotes not otherwise attributed come from Abigail Shrier’s book Bad Therapy.
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About the Authors
Julian Adorney is a Contributing Writer to FAIR’s Substack and the founder of Heal the West, a Substack movement dedicated to preserving and protecting Western civilization. You can find him on X at @Julian_Liberty.
Mark Johnson is a trusted advisor and executive coach at Pioneer Performance Partners and a facilitator and coach at The Undaunted Man. He has more than 25 years of experience optimizing people and companies. He blogs at The Undaunted Man’s Substack.
Geoff Laughton is a Relationship Architect/Coach, multiple-International Best-Selling Author, Speaker, and Workshop Leader. He is the founder of The Undaunted Man. He has spent the last twenty-six years coaching people world-wide, with a particular passion for supporting those in relationship, and helping men from all walks of life step up to their true potential.
By: Andy L.
Published: Apr 14, 2024
It has now been just little under a week since the publication of the long anticipated NHS independent review of gender identity services for children and young people, the Cass Review.
The review recommends sweeping changes to child services in the NHS, not least the abandonment of what is known as the “affirmation model” and the associated use of puberty blockers and, later, cross-sex hormones. The evidence base could not support the use of such drastic treatments, and this approach was failing to address the complexities of health problems in such children.
Many trans advocacy groups appear to be cautiously welcoming these recommendations. However, there are many who are not and have quickly tried to condemn the review. Within almost hours, “press releases“, tweets and commentaries tried to rubbish the report and included statements that were simply not true. An angry letter from many “academics”, including Andrew Wakefield, has been published. These myths have been subsequently spreading like wildfire.
Here I wish to tackle some of those myths and misrepresentations.
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Myth 1: 98% of all studies in this area were ignored
Fact
A comprehensive search was performed for all studies addressing the clinical questions under investigation, and over 100 were discovered. All these studies were evaluated for their quality and risk of bias. Only 2% of the studies met the criteria for the highest quality rating, but all high and medium quality (50%+) studies were further analysed to synthesise overall conclusions.
Explanation
The Cass Review aimed to base its recommendations on the comprehensive body of evidence available. While individual studies may demonstrate positive outcomes for the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in children, the quality of these studies may vary. Therefore, the review sought to assess not only the findings of each study but also the reliability of those findings.
Studies exhibit variability in quality. Quality impacts the reliability of any conclusions that can be drawn. Some may have small sample sizes, while others may involve cohorts that differ from the target patient population. For instance, if a study primarily involves men in their 30s, their experiences may differ significantly from those of teenage girls, who constitute the a primary patient group of interest. Numerous factors can contribute to poor study quality.
Bias is also a big factor. Many people view claims of a biased study as meaning the researchers had ideological or predetermined goals and so might misrepresent their work. That may be true. But that is not what bias means when we evaluate medical trials.
In this case we are interested in statistical bias. This is where the numbers can mislead us in some way. For example, if your study started with lots of patients but many dropped out then statistical bias may creep in as your drop-outs might be the ones with the worst experiences. Your study patients are not on average like all the possible patients.
If then we want to look at a lot papers to find out if a treatment works, we want to be sure that we pay much more attention to those papers that look like they may have less risk of bias or quality issues. The poor quality papers may have positive results that are due to poor study design or execution and not because the treatment works.
The Cass Review team commissioned researchers at York University to search for all relevant papers on childhood use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for treating “gender dysphoria”. The researchers then graded each paper by established methods to determine quality, and then disregarded all low quality papers to help ensure they did not mislead.
The Review states,
The systematic review on interventions to suppress puberty (Taylor et al: Puberty suppression) provides an update to the NICE review (2020a). It identified 50 studies looking at different aspects of gender-related, psychosocial, physiological and cognitive outcomes of puberty suppression. Quality was assessed on a standardised scale. There was one high quality study, 25 moderate quality studies and 24 low quality studies. The low quality studies were excluded from the synthesis of results.
As can be seen, the conclusions that were based on the synthesis of studies only rejected 24 out of 50 studies – less than half. The myth has arisen that the synthesis only included the one high quality study. That is simply untrue.
There were two such literature reviews: the other was for cross-sex hormones. This study found 19 out of 53 studies were low quality and so were not used in synthesis. Only one study was classed as high quality – the rest medium quality and so were used in the analysis.
12 cohort, 9 cross-sectional and 32 pre–post studies were included (n=53). One cohort study was high-quality. Other studies were moderate (n=33) and low-quality (n=19). Synthesis of high and moderate-quality studies showed consistent evidence demonstrating induction of puberty, although with varying feminising/masculinising effects. There was limited evidence regarding gender dysphoria, body satisfaction, psychosocial and cognitive outcomes, and fertility.
Again, it is myth that 98% of studies were discarded. The truth is that over a hundred studies were read and appraised. About half of them were graded to be of too poor quality to reliably include in a synthesis of all the evidence. if you include low quality evidence, your over-all conclusions can be at risk from results that are very unreliable. As they say – GIGO – Garbage In Garbage Out.
Nonetheless, despite analysing the higher quality studies, there was no clear evidence that emerged that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones were safe and effective. The BMJ editorial summed this up perfectly,
One emerging criticism of the Cass review is that it set the methodological bar too high for research to be included in its analysis and discarded too many studies on the basis of quality. In fact, the reality is different: studies in gender medicine fall woefully short in terms of methodological rigour; the methodological bar for gender medicine studies was set too low, generating research findings that are therefore hard to interpret. The methodological quality of research matters because a drug efficacy study in humans with an inappropriate or no control group is a potential breach of research ethics. Offering treatments without an adequate understanding of benefits and harms is unethical. All of this matters even more when the treatments are not trivial; puberty blockers and hormone therapies are major, life altering interventions. Yet this inconclusive and unacceptable evidence base was used to inform influential clinical guidelines, such as those of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which themselves were cascaded into the development of subsequent guidelines internationally.
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Myth 2: Cass recommended no Trans Healthcare for Under 25s
Fact
The Cass Review does not contain any recommendation or suggestion advocating for the withholding of transgender healthcare until the age of 25, nor does it propose a prohibition on individuals transitioning.
Explanation
This myth appears to be a misreading of one of the recommendations.
The Cass Review expressed concerns regarding the necessity for children to transition to adult service provision at the age of 18, a critical phase in their development and potential treatment. Children were deemed particularly vulnerable during this period, facing potential discontinuity of care as they transitioned to other clinics and care providers. Furthermore, the transition made follow-up of patients more challenging.
Cass then says,
Taking account of all the above issues, a follow-through service continuing up to age 25 would remove the need for transition at this vulnerable time and benefit both this younger population and the adult population. This will have the added benefit in the longer-term of also increasing the capacity of adult provision across the country as more gender services are established.
Cass want to set up continuity of service provision by ensure they remain within the same clinical setting and with the same care providers until they are 25. This says nothing about withdrawing any form of treatment that may be appropriate in the adult care pathway. Cass is explicit in saying her report is making no recommendations as to what that care should look like for over 18s.
It looks the myth has arisen from a bizarre misreading of the phrase “remove the need for transition”. Activists appear to think this means that there should be no “gender transition” whereas it is obvious this is referring to “care transition”.
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Myth 3: Cass is demanding only Double Blind Randomised Controlled Trials be used as evidence in “Trans Healthcare”
Fact
While it is acknowledged that conducting double-blind randomized controlled trials (DBRCT) for puberty blockers in children would present significant ethical and practical challenges, the Cass Review does not advocate solely for the use of DBRCT trials in making treatment recommendations, nor does it mandate that future trials adhere strictly to such protocols. Rather, the review extensively discusses the necessity for appropriate trial designs that are both ethical and practical, emphasizing the importance of maintaining high methodological quality.
Explanation
Cass goes into great detail explaining the nature of clinical evidence and how that can vary in quality depending on the trial design and how it is implemented and analysed. She sets out why Double Blind Randomised Controlled Trials are the ‘gold standard’ as they minimise the risks of confounding factors misleading you and helping to understand cause and effect, for example. (See Explanatory Box 1 in the Report).
Doctors rely on evidence to guide treatment decisions, which can be discussed with patients to facilitate informed choices considering the known benefits and risks of proposed treatments.
Evidence can range from a doctor’s personal experience to more formal sources. For instance, a doctor may draw on their own extensive experience treating patients, known as ‘Expert Opinion.’ While valuable, this method isn’t foolproof, as historical inaccuracies in medical beliefs have shown.
Consulting other doctors’ experiences, especially if documented in published case reports, can offer additional insight. However, these reports have limitations, such as their inability to establish causality between treatment and outcome. For example, if a patient with a bad back improves after swimming, it’s uncertain whether swimming directly caused the improvement or if the back would have healed naturally.
Further up the hierarchy of clinical evidence are papers that examine cohorts of patients, typically involving multiple case studies with statistical analysis. While offering better evidence, they still have potential biases and limitations.
This illustrates the ‘pyramid of clinical evidence,’ which categorises different types of evidence based on their quality and reliability in informing treatment decisions
The above diagram is published in the Cass Review as part of Explanatory Box 1.
We can see from the report and papers that Cass did not insist that only randomised controlled trials were used to assess the evidence. The York team that conducted the analyses chose a method to asses the quality of studies called the Newcastle Ottawa Scale. This is a method best suited for non RCT trials. Cass has selected an assessment method best suited for the nature of the available evidence rather than taken a dogmatic approach on the need for DBRCTs. The results of this method were discussed about countering Myth 1.
Explainer on the Newcastle Ottawa Scale
The Newcastle-Ottawa Scale (NOS) is a tool designed to assess the quality of non-randomized studies, particularly observational studies such as cohort and case-control studies. It provides a structured method for evaluating the risk of bias in these types of studies and has become widely used in systematic reviews and meta-analyses.
The NOS consists of a set of criteria grouped into three main categories: selection of study groups, comparability of groups, and ascertainment of either the exposure or outcome of interest. Each category contains several items, and each item is scored based on predefined criteria. The total score indicates the overall quality of the study, with higher scores indicating lower risk of bias.
This scale is best applied when conducting systematic reviews or meta-analyses that include non-randomized studies. By using the NOS, researchers can objectively assess the quality of each study included in their review, allowing them to weigh the evidence appropriately and draw more reliable conclusions.
One of the strengths of the NOS is its flexibility and simplicity. It provides a standardized framework for evaluating study quality, yet it can be adapted to different study designs and research questions. Additionally, the NOS emphasizes key methodological aspects that are crucial for reducing bias in observational studies, such as appropriate selection of study participants and controlling for confounding factors.
Another advantage of the NOS is its widespread use and acceptance in the research community. Many systematic reviews and meta-analyses rely on the NOS to assess the quality of included studies, making it easier for researchers to compare and interpret findings across different studies.
As for future studies, Cass makes no demand only DBRCTs are conducted. What is highlighted is at the very least that service providers build a research capacity to fill in the evidence gaps.
The national infrastructure should be put in place to manage data collection and audit and this should be used to drive continuous quality improvement and research in an active learning environment.
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Myth 4: There were less than 10 detransitioners out of 3499 patients in the Cass study.
Fact
Cass was unable to determine the detransition rate. Although the GIDS audit study recorded fewer than 10 detransitioners, clinics declined to provide information to the review that would have enabled linking a child’s treatment to their adult outcome. The low recorded rates must be due in part to insufficient data availability.
Explanation
Cass says, “The percentage of people treated with hormones who subsequently detransition remains unknown due to the lack of long-term follow-up studies, although there is suggestion that numbers are increasing.”
The reported number are going to be low for a number of reasons, as Cass describes:
Estimates of the percentage of individuals who embark on a medical pathway and subsequently have regrets or detransition are hard to determine from GDC clinic data alone. There are several reasons for this:
Damningly, Cass describes the attempt by the review to establish “data linkage’ between records at the childhood gender clinics and adult services to look at longer term detransition and the clinics refused to cooperate with the Independent Review. The report notes the “…attempts to improve the evidence base have been thwarted by a lack of cooperation from the adult gender services”.
We know from other analyses of the data on detransitioning that the quality of data is exceptionally poor and the actual rates of detransition and regret are unknown. This is especially worrying when older data, such as reported in WPATH 7, suggest natural rates of decrease in dysphoria without treatment are very high.
Gender dysphoria during childhood does not inevitably continue into adulthood. Rather, in follow-up studies of prepubertal children (mainly boys) who were referred to clinics for assessment of gender dysphoria, the dysphoria persisted into adulthood for only 6–23% of children.
This suggests that active affirmative treatment may be locking in a trans identity into the majority of children who would otherwise desist with trans ideation and live unmedicated lives.
I shall add more myths as they become spread.
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It's not so much "myths and misconceptions" as deliberate misinformation. Genderists are scrambling to prop up their faith-based beliefs the same way homeopaths do. Both are fraudulent.
Source: quackometer.net
#Andy L.#Cass Review#Cass Report#Dr. Hilary Cass#Hilary Cass#misinformation#myths#misconceptions#detrans#detransition#gender affirming healthcare#gender affirming care#gender affirmation#affirmation model#medical corruption#medical malpractice#medical scandal#systematic review#religion is a mental illness
"I'd ask [God] why he keeps trying to kill us all with disease, pestilence, and natural disasters. I'd ask why 99% of all species there ever were are now extinct. If God works in mysterious ways, that way is mysteriously genocidal." -- Neil deGrasse Tyson
By: Zack K. De Piero
Published: Mar 12, 2024
At best, AI obscures foundational skills of reading, writing, and thinking. At worst, students develop a crippling dependency on technology.
Educators are grappling with how to approach ever-evolving generative artificial intelligence — the kind that can create language, images, and audio. Programs like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot pose far different challenges from the AI of yesteryear that corrected spelling or grammar. Generative AI generates whatever content it’s asked to produce, whether it’s a lab report for a biology course, a cover letter for a particular job, or an op-ed for a newspaper.
This groundbreaking development leaves educators and parents asking: Should teachers teach with or against generative AI, and why?
Technophiles may portray skeptics as Luddites — folks of the same ilk that resisted the emergence of the pen, the calculator, or the word processor — but this technology possesses the power to produce thought and language on someone’s behalf, so it’s drastically different. In the writing classroom, specifically, it’s especially problematic because the production of thought and language is the goal of the course, not to mention the top goals of any legitimate and comprehensive education. So count me among the educators who want to proceed with caution, and that’s coming from a writing professor who typically embraces educational technology.
Learning to Write Is Learning to Think
At best, generative AI will obscure foundational literacy skills of reading, writing, and thinking. At worst, students will become increasingly reliant on the technology, thereby undermining their writing process and development. Whichever scenario unfolds, students’ independent thoughts and perceptions may also become increasingly constrained by biased algorithms that cloud their understanding of truth and their beliefs about human nature.
To outsiders, teaching writing might seem like leading students through endless punctuation exercises. It’s not. In reality, a postsecondary writing classroom is a place where students develop higher-order skills like formulating (and continuously fine-tuning) a persuasive argument, finding relevant sources, and integrating compelling evidence. But they also extend to essential beneath-the-surface abilities like finding ideas worth writing about in the first place and then figuring out how to organize and structure those ideas.
Such prewriting steps embody the most consequential parts of how writing happens, and students must wrestle with the full writing process in its frustrating beauty to experience an authentic education. Instead of outsourcing crucial skills like brainstorming and outlining to AI, instructors should show students how they generate ideas, then share their own brainstorming or outlining techniques. In education-speak, this is called modeling, and it’s considered a best practice.
Advocates of AI rightly argue that students can benefit from analyzing samples of the particular genre they’re writing, from literature reviews to legal briefs, so they may use similar “moves” in their own work. This technique is called “reading like a writer,” and it’s been a pedagogical strategy long before generative AI existed. In fact, it figured prominently in my 2017 dissertation that examined how writing instructors guided their students’ reading development in first-year writing courses.
But generative AI isn’t needed to find examples of existing texts. Published work written by real people is not just online but quite literally everywhere you look. Diligent writing instructors already guide their students through the ins and outs of sample texts, including drafts written by former students. That’s standard practice.
Deterring Student Work Ethic and Accuracy
Writing is hard work, and generative AI can undermine students’ work ethic. Last semester, after I failed a former student for using generative AI on a major paper, which I explicitly forbid, he thanked me, admitting that he’d taken “a shortcut” and “just did not put in the effort.” Now, though, he appears motivated to take ownership of his education. “When I have the opportunity in the future,” he said, “I will prove I am capable of good work on my own.” Believe it or not, some students want to know that hard work is expected, and they understand why they should be held accountable for subpar effort.
Beyond pedagogical reasons for maintaining skepticism toward the wholesale adoption of generative AI in the classroom, there are also sociopolitical reasons. Recently, Google’s new artificial intelligence program, Gemini, produced some concerning “intelligence.” Its image generator depicted the Founding Fathers, Vikings, and Nazis as nonwhite. In another instance, a user asked the technology to evaluate “who negatively impacted society more,” Elon Musk’s tweeting of insensitive memes or Adolf Hitler’s genocide of 6 million Jews? Google’s Gemini program responded, “It is up to each individual to decide.”
Such historical inaccuracies and dubious ethics appear to tip the corporation’s partisan hand so much that even its CEO, Sundar Pichai, admitted that the algorithm “show[ed] bias” and the situation was “completely unacceptable.” Gemini’s chief rival, ChatGPT, hasn’t been immune from similar accusations of political correctness and censorious programming. One user recently queried whether it would be OK to misgender Caitlin Jenner if it could prevent a nuclear apocalypse. The generative AI responded, “Never.”
It’s possible that these incidents reflect natural bumps in the road as the algorithm attempts to improve. More likely, they represent signs of corporate fealty to reckless DEI initiatives.
The AI’s leftist bias seems clear. When I asked ChatGPT whether the New York Post and The New York Times were credible sources, it splintered its analysis considerably. It described the Post as a “tabloid newspaper” with a “reputation for sensationalism and a conservative editorial stance.” Fair enough, but meanwhile, in the AI’s eyes, the Times is a “credible and reputable news source” that boasts “numerous awards for journalism.” Absent from the AI’s description of the Times was “liberal” or even “left-leaning” (not even in its opinion section!), nor was there any mention of its misinformation, disinformation, or outright propaganda.
Yet, despite these obvious concerns, some higher education institutions are embracing generative AI. Some are beginning to offer courses and grant certificates in “prompt engineering”: fine-tuning the art of feeding instructions to the technology.
If teachers insist on bringing generative AI into their classrooms, students must be given full license to interrogate its rhetorical, stylistic, and sociopolitical limitations. Left unchecked, generative AI risks becoming politically correct technology masquerading as an objective program for language processing and data analysis.
Owen Jones is as much an evolution-denier and creationist as Ken Ham.
Sex-based differences in toy selection are demonstrable in other primates, who don't have a plausible mechanism for social constructivism.
So, for feminist Blank Slateism to say that we alone are immune to the same forces as our ape relatives is overtly a denial of evolution, or at minimum to suggest that these sex-based differences mysteriously disappeared in our evolutionary line alone for no apparent reason, but then re-emerged, identically, as social constructions.
That's creationism.
Thinking English majors who don't understand anything about biology could explain human nature and behavior better than actual scientists is one of the most braindead notions of the last couple of decades.
People who subscribe to "the patriarchy" to explain differences between male and female, woman and man, are evolution-denying creationist cranks and should be treated with the same scorn and derision as people who believe in Noah's magic zoo boat.
Source: twitter.com
By: Olivia Reingold
Published: Apr 15, 2024
CHICAGO — About 300 anti-war activists crowded into the basement of the Teamsters Union’s headquarters on Saturday to hear organizers from all over the country describe their plans to disrupt the Democratic National Convention this August. Joe Biden’s backing of Israel since Hamas’s October 7 attack has turned these left-wing radicals against their own party.
“It’s really inspiring to see that people are just as enthusiastic, and maybe even more enthusiastic, to march on the DNC as they are to march on the RNC,” says Omar Florez, a Milwaukee-based activist. “We can thank Genocide Joe and our movement for that.”
But then a man stumbles to the podium, wiping sweat from his forehead. He grabs the microphone to announce that the Islamic regime of Iran has launched missiles and drones heading straight toward Israel.
“They believe that they will be in Palestinian—I don’t call it Israeli—airspace between two and four a.m., which means about two to four hours from now,” he says. “In addition, there are reports of drones having been fired on Israel from Yemen and Iraq.”
The crowd, all wearing black N95s, erupts into applause. Someone in the back lowers their mask to send a celebratory whistle soaring throughout the room.
The man at the podium, Hatem Abudayyeh, heads the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, “a purported community group which, on information and belief, is an affiliate of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a designated terror organization based in Gaza,” according to a lawsuit over the alleged relations between U.S. advocacy groups and Hamas.
“This is when this country and the world needs us because the United States is going to, quote unquote, defend the criminal Israeli state,” says Abudayyeh, whose home was raided by the FBI in 2010 as part of an investigation “concerning the material support of terrorism.”
“We have to assume that the United States is going to try to retaliate against Iran.”
After the boos and calls of “shame” subside, Abudayyeh says it is “incumbent” upon Americans to “stop the United States from expanding this war and hitting Iran.”
“We’ve got to be the strong, powerful anti-war movement that we are,” he says, placing the microphone down and exiting the stage.
The crowd immediately began chanting, “Hands off Iran.”
A woman in a hot pink gas mask, wielding a matching neon cane and dressed in a “Protect Trans Kids” t-shirt, throws her fist in the air. Nearby, a service poodle is taking a nap under the chair of his owner, who is wearing a leather harness over his t-shirt. Then the group that has joined here from cities across America—Seattle, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles—cheers and claps in celebration.
Joe Iosbaker, an organizer with the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, which called October 7 a “good turn of events” in its press release about the terrorist attacks, tells me he supports Iran. His organization has since released a statement backing Iran, where citizens gathered to shout “Death to America” during their nation’s strike against Israel Saturday night.
“We demand hands off Iran,” the statement says. “The people have power, and we will exercise it in the streets.”
Earlier that day, before news of the attack broke, at a “breakout session” on “the anti-war movement,” Shabbir Rizvi, an organizer with Anti-War Committee Chicago, taught participants how to chant “death to Israel” and “death to America” in Farsi.
“Marg bar Israel,” he chanted, leading a group of about 80 attendees along with him. A man draped in a Soviet flag bearing a gold hammer and sickle clapped his hands.
A man in a full black denim outfit shouted out behind his N95—“Can we get a ‘marg bar America’?”
“We can get a ‘marg bar America,’ ” Rizvi replied.
Then Rizvi raised his hand in the air, leading the crowd like a conductor.
“Marg bar America,” they cheered.
On my way out of the event, I ask a woman smoking a cigarette to fill me in on the latest news regarding Iran’s lobbing of missiles and drones, which were later intercepted with help from forces from France, the U.S., and the UK. Iran said its strike was retaliation for Israel’s hit on the Iranian embassy in Syria earlier this month, which destroyed the consulate building next to the embassy and killed two of Tehran’s top commanders, and that the matter is “concluded”—unless Israel hits back.
“Iran is part of the resistance,” said the woman, who flew in that morning from New Orleans, where she’s been part of an effort to disrupt Israel-bound shipments in her hometown. “Yemen and Iran and Hezbollah, who are also a militant group in Lebanon, and the Syrian government are all parts of the arc of resistance.”
A smile creeps across her face as she tells me: “They’re part of the arc of resistance because the enemies are Israel and the USA.”
==
Remember Mahsa Amini? These insane fuckers don't. They've sided with the brutal Islamic Republic of Iran.
They hate our liberal, secular countries and they want to destroy them. They keep telling us who they are. Do you believe them yet?
Revoke citizenship and deport. I wasn't kidding before and I'm still not kidding now.
Source: twitter.com
Fundamentally, advocacy is about helping others, rather than helping yourself… to look good.
And my god, I know, the things I post on this page, certainly do not look good.
No, these issues will not look good on your social media feed, I doubt such discussions will make you many friends at parties either or win you top marks at your next class presentation.
There are no prizes, brand deals, coupon codes, or rounds of applause at @thetinmen.
No book deals. No invites to speak at conferences. Or photo ops with politicians.
You will not be thanked, likely shunned, and will probably find yourself uninvited to that next social occasion.
But these issues are real, and incredibly important.
That’s what advocacy is.
It’s about doing good, not looking good.
And the cult of wokeness has clearly lost sight of this.
Self-serving, self-centred, and painfully virtuous, the SJW guardians of equality have skipped past the area of men and boys' advocacy; clearly unwilling, or uninterested in examining their own failures, or in accepting their own portion of accountability, and would rather keep the self-aggrandising circle jerk going a little longer.
It is a mess.
A backward situation where the people who are doing harm, are not only unaware of said harm, but actually believe they are part of the solution, each of them the hero of their own story.
So, who will stand up to the cult of wokeness run amok?
Who will put their head above the parapet?
Because sadly, if change for men and boys is to arrive, many more of us will have to be sacrificed upon the altar of social justice.
So, who’s joining me?
~ [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/10/boys-delayed-entry-school-start-redshirting/671238/ [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-51313438
Mary Curnock Cook: https://www.independent.co.uk/student/news/head-of-ucas-expresses-concern-as-recent-data-reveals-gender-gap-in-uk-higher-education-is-widening-a6799081.html
==
If your issues need to be spoken about in hushed tones behind closed doors, you're not the "oppressor." If you can demonize and shut down other people by calling them a name or accusing them of some imagined bigotry, you're not "marginalized," you're the hegemony.
For some reason, we're not supposed to notice this, but it's indisputably true. Yes, I see you.
When you get angry, call me a name or expect me to apologize for posting this kind of information, you're telegraphing and admitting that you believe you have the cultural and societal power to do so, and you're not the powerless victim you pretend you are.
By: Suzanne Moore
Published: Apr 9, 2024
The alarm bells have been ringing for some time, but now the entire narrative around adolescent gender dysphoria is breaking apart
I remember as a teenager reading about a strange disorder called anorexia. I had never heard of it – and then I noticed one of my best friends cleaning her teeth several times a day and exercising manically. And it wasn’t just her that was acting weirdly. Several girls I knew were clearly suffering. Then came bulimia, which turned the school loos into sad places in which certain girls spent worrying amounts of time.
Then, as a mother of daughters, I remember reading about an epidemic of cutting among teenagers. Surely this highly unusual behaviour was not rampant? Well, the internet told me it was and an NHS psychiatrist informed me about self-harm circles in certain schools.
These thoughts occur because I am trying to understand how we started talking of “trans children” and thought this was somehow some kind of “progress”. This, after all, is a new phenomenon. In 2010, for instance, with the Equality Act, which made gender reassignment a protected characteristic, the intention was surely to avoid discrimination against adult transsexuals. This is a laudable aim, but no one was talking about children then. The phrase “gender dysphoria” was not bandied about. It was rare to come across a child who had such severe gender issues they needed specialist services. Indeed, in that year, only 75 children were referred to Gids (the NHS’s Gender Identity Development Service, based at the Tavistock Centre in north-west London). By 2021 it was 5,000.
Now we are in a situation where celebrities wear T-shirts saying Protect Trans Kids and where schools, even primary schools, are colluding with the idea that children are whatever they say they are, that their bodies are somehow wrong and that they can change their names without parental consent.
The alarm bells have been ringing for some time about Gids. What was most alarming was this sudden spike in girls presenting with gender dysphoria and the increasing evidence of the harms of puberty blockers.
When Dr Hilary Cass was commissioned to report on standards of care within the NHS, it was as if finally an adult had stepped into the room. She and her team have looked at the evidence and practices that had recently evolved the affirmative model (designed to support and affirm an individual’s gender identity) and found much wanting. She also signalled the high levels of comorbidities with gender dysphoria. A high proportion of these girls who did not want to be girls were autistic. Many had troubled childhoods or had been in care. Many were gay. All of this resulted in the unravelling of Gids and a ban on puberty blockers.
In the full report, which is due to be published this week, Cass is not only concerned with medical intervention (puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, surgery) but is also expected to come out against “social transition”. Though this is not something that happens within the health service, it is, she says, an “active intervention because it may have significant effects on the child or young person in terms of psychological functioning. There are different views on the benefits versus the harms of early social transition… it is not a neutral act and better information is needed about outcomes.”
Some believe that socially transitioning kids will lock them into a gender identity and medical pathway that is detrimental. Cass emphasises that gender expression is indeed fluid and changeable for adolescents and that many may take till their mid-20s to settle. In other words, leave these kids alone.
Indeed, faced with this huge increase in kids saying they are trans, many schools have acquiesced. Yet teachers are not clinicians, nor are they there to diagnose children. Do they understand what they are doing? The entire narrative around trans children has been imported from America, but it is breaking apart.
Those who want to see themselves as compassionate and modern have embraced some seriously dodgy ideas. The evidence against puberty blockers, which were sold as “a pause” and reversible, mounts up. The Mayo Clinic has suggested that these drugs can lead to cancer. There is a court case coming up in Italy, and many predict that once the dam breaks, many who have been prescribed these drugs will sue their doctors.
This has all been allowed to happen because children have been lied to. They are told they can change sex; they are told that puberty will be awful; they are told they will feel suicidal. Anyone who challenges this has been deemed a pariah. So we end up with newly qualified English teachers now deciding that they are doing the right thing by keeping a child’s fantasy identity secret from their parents.
Many are terrified of this issue and go along with what they must know to be dubious. We have yet to see where the Labour Party will go on this, because it too quakes in front of its own activists. Yet any serious person must address the issues around safeguarding. The gender dysphoric child must be protected, of course, but so must the other kids in the class who have a right to single-sex changing rooms.
Now is the time to step back and ask ourselves how we got here. The trans child is a manifestation of a recent story that the culture has told itself. This is a story of social contagion combined with the genuine distress of mostly young girls.
Children cannot be blamed for acting out, but the adults who have encouraged this, while patting themselves on the back for their progressive views, still need to be challenged. Cass is but the start.
GERVAIS: .. Atheism is only rejecting the claim that there is a god. Atheism isn't a belief system. So, this is atheism in a nutshell. You say there's a God. I say, "Can you prove that?" You say no. I say, "I don't believe you then." So, you believe in one God, I assume?
COLBERT: Uhh.... in three persons, but go ahead.
GERVAIS: Okay. But there are about 3,000 to choose from... Basically, you deny one less God than I do. You don't believe in 2,999 gods. And I don't believe in just one more.
By: Bernard Lane
Published: Apr 14, 2024
Nine of the 15 gender clinics in a landmark international survey for the Cass review have admitted they do not routinely collect outcome data on their young patients.
This survey, together with a new evaluation of treatment guidelines for gender dysphoria, gives unprecedented insights into the workings of gender clinics around the world offering puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors.
In the 2022-23 survey, six clinics said they “routinely collected some outcome data”: one of these clinics gave no further detail; one noted the number of patients discontinuing treatment; another used measures of quality of life; two were taking part in cohort studies; and the sixth clinic repeated some baseline assessments. Nine clinics acknowledged “not routinely collecting outcome data.”
The report of the survey results1, published by researchers from the University of York earlier this month, identified clinics by country, not name. Of the clinics that took part, Australia and the Netherlands were prominent with five and four clinics respectively.
Poor data collection was central to the controversy over the London-based Tavistock youth gender clinic.
The Cass review had planned to run a data-linkage study—with help from adult gender clinics—to learn the outcomes of the Tavistock’s 9,000-odd former patients.
The missing long-term data would allow clinicians, young patients and parents to make informed decisions about treatment. The review said it was to be the largest study of its kind in the world.
However, six of the seven adult clinics refused to co-operate. One stated reason was that “the study outcomes focus on adverse health events, for which the clinics do not feel primarily responsible.”
Another adult clinic said, “The unintended outcome of the study is likely to be a high-profile national report that will be misinterpreted, misrepresented or actively used to harm patients and disrupt the work of practitioners across the gender dysphoria pathway.”
On April 12, however, The Times newspaper reported that the uncooperative adult clinics had “bowed to pressure to share [the] missing data”.
Mostly medical
In the York University international survey, ordered by the Cass review, all 15 youth gender clinics said they used a multi-disciplinary team, but researchers concluded there was a “paucity” of psychosocial therapy interventions such as psychotherapy or cognitive behaviour therapy. Five clinics did not offer any of these non-medical interventions in-house.
All gender clinics told researchers that “genital reconstructive surgery”—the creation of a pseudo vagina, for example—was “accessible only from age 18.” The youngest age for “masculinising chest surgery” (a double mastectomy) was reported as 16. In fact, there are documented cases in Australia of 15-year-olds approved for transgender mastectomy. Genital surgery is legally available to minors2 in Australia and practised in America.
“Only five clinics reported routine discussion of fertility3 preferences, and only two discussed sexuality4. Finland was the only country to report routinely assessing for history of trauma5,” the final Cass report says in its commentary on the survey.
In separate studies for the Cass review, three independent reviewers evaluated the quality of 21 guidelines for treatment of gender dysphoria in minors.
Included were international guidelines (from the Endocrine Society and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health or WPATH); documents from North America (for example, the 2018 policy statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics); from Europe (the guideline of the UK Royal College of Psychiatrists, for example, and Denmark’s); as well as guidelines from the Asia-Pacific and Africa.
“WPATH has been highly influential in directing international practice, although its guidelines were found by the University of York appraisal process to lack developmental rigour,” the Cass report says.
The York researchers chart patterns of “circular” cross-referencing between guidelines to create a misleading impression of consensus in favour of the medicalised “gender-affirming” treatment approach.
“The guideline appraisal raises serious questions about the reliability of current guidelines. Most guidelines have not followed the international standards for [rigorous and independent] guideline development. Few guidelines are informed by a systematic review of empirical evidence [the gold standard for assessing the evidence supporting a health intervention] and there is a lack of transparency about how recommendations were developed,” the Cass report says.
“Healthcare services and professionals should take into account the variable quality of published guidelines to support the management of children and young people experiencing gender dysphoria. The lack of independence in many national and regional guidelines, and the limited evidence-based underpinning current guidelines, should be considered when utilising these for practice.”
The Cass report says it is “imperative” that gender clinic staff be “cognisant of the limitations in relation to the evidence base and fully understand the knowns and the unknowns.”
[ Chart: Number of youth gender clinic referrals over time by country. Source: Cass report ]
Bum steer
Staff at the Tavistock clinic misled patients and parents, or failed to correct their misconceptions, according to a new report from the Multi-Professional Review Group (MPRG) given oversight of treatment decisions from 2021.
These shortcomings of clinicians included playing down the extent of the unknowns of hormonal treatment; not explaining that puberty blockers are being used unlicensed and off-label; not challenging the reassuring but false parallel with the licensed use of puberty blockers for precocious (premature) puberty; not discussing the possibility that blockers will pause or slow psychosexual development; and not sharing figures showing the vast majority of children started on puberty blockers will go on to cross-sex hormones supposed to be taken lifelong.
The MPRG was also troubled by clinical documents showing misunderstanding of “the outcome of physical treatments” on the part of patients and parents.
In the York University study of treatment guidelines for gender dysphoria, only two were recommended for use by all three reviewers. These were recent, more cautious policies from Finland and Sweden. Both followed independent systematic reviews showing the evidence base for hormonal and surgical treatment of minors to be very weak and uncertain. Like the Cass review itself, the 2020 Finnish and 2022 Swedish guidelines recognise that puberty blockers are experimental and should not be routine treatment.
Although all the guidelines in the study agreed on the need for a multidisciplinary team to treat gender-distressed minors, the “most striking problem” shown by analysis of these documents was “the lack of any consensus6 on the purpose of the assessment process”, the Cass report says.
“Some guidelines were focused on diagnosis, some on… eligibility for hormones, some on psychosocial assessment, and some on readiness for medical interventions7.
“Only the Swedish and [the 2022] WPATH 8th version guidelines contain detail on the assessment process8. Both recommend that the duration, structure and content of the assessment be varied according to age, complexity and gender development.
“Very few guidelines recommend formal measures/clinical tools to assess gender dysphoria, and a separate analysis demonstrated that the formal measures that exist are poorly validated.”
Nor was there any consensus on “when psychological or hormonal interventions should be offered and on what basis.”
A survey of staff at the Tavistock clinic, undertaken as part of the Cass review, found specialists divided on whether or not “assessment should seek to make a differential diagnosis, ruling out other potential [non-gender9] causes of the child or young person’s distress.”
Arguing for an ambitious research program well beyond a possible clinical trial of puberty blockers, the Cass report says the field of youth gender dysphoria is one of “remarkably weak evidence” where health professionals are “afraid to openly discuss their views” because of vilification and bullying.
“Although some think the clinical approach should be based on a social justice model, the NHS works in an evidence-based way,” the report says.
“The gaps in the evidence base regarding all aspects of gender care for children and young people have been highlighted, from epidemiology through to assessment, diagnosis10 and intervention. It is troubling that so little is known about this cohort and their outcomes.
“Based on a single Dutch study, which suggested that puberty blockers may improve psychological wellbeing for a narrowly defined group of children with gender incongruence [or dysphoria], the practice spread at pace to other countries.
“Some practitioners abandoned normal clinical approaches to holistic assessment, which has meant that this group of [gender-distressed] young people have been exceptionalised compared to other young people with similarly complex presentations.”
[ Chart: Age and sex on referral to the Tavistock clinic from 2018-2022. Source: Cass report ]
Who to trust?
The Cass report says the missing evidence “makes it difficult to provide adequate information on which a young person and their family can make an informed choice.”
“A trusted source of information is needed on all aspects of medical care, but in particular it is important to defuse/manage expectations that have been built up by claims about the efficacy of puberty blockers.
“The option to provide masculinising or feminising hormones from the age of 16 is available, but the [Cass] review would recommend an extremely cautious clinical approach and a strong clinical rationale for providing hormones before the age of 18. This would keep options open during this important developmental window, allowing time for management of any co-occurring [non-gender] conditions11, building of resilience, and fertility preservation, if required.”
The review stresses that “consent is more than just capacity and competence. It requires clinicians to ensure that the proposed intervention is clinically indicated as they have a duty to offer appropriate treatment. It also requires the patient to be provided with appropriate and sufficient information about the risks, benefits and expected outcomes of the treatment.”
“Assessing whether a hormone pathway is indicated is challenging. A formal diagnosis of gender dysphoria is frequently cited as a prerequisite for accessing hormone treatment. However, it is not reliably predictive of whether that young person will have long-standing gender incongruence in the future, or whether medical intervention will be the best option for them.”
Advocates for the gender-affirming approach assert that detransition and treatment regret are vanishingly rare, whereas suicide risk for those denied medical intervention is claimed to be very high.
The Cass report says: “It has been suggested that hormone treatment reduces the elevated risk of death by suicide in this population, but the evidence found did not support this conclusion.”
“The percentage of people treated with hormones who subsequently detransition remains unknown due to the lack of long-term follow-up studies, although there is suggestion that numbers are increasing.”
The report cites three reasons why the true extent of detransition is unlikely to be clear for some time—patients who decide medicalisation was a mistake may not wish to return to their former clinic to announce this fact; there is a post-treatment honeymoon period and clinicians suggest it may take 5-10 years before a decision to detransition; and the surge in patient numbers only began within the last decade.
Faced with uncertainty and a lack of good evidence, those with responsibility—from health ministers and hospital managers down to gender clinicians—rely on treatment guidelines supposed to advise on clinical practice according to the “best-available” evidence and expert opinion.
In the York University guideline analysis, the 21 documents were rated on six domains, the key two being the rigour of their development and their editorial independence.
“[Rigour] includes systematically searching the evidence, being clear about the link between recommendations and supporting evidence, and ensuring that health benefits, side effects and risks have been considered in formulating the recommendations,” the Cass report says.
Only the Finnish and Swedish guidelines scored above 50 per cent for rigour. Only these two documents, the Cass report says, link “the lack of robust evidence about medical treatments to a recommendation that treatments should be provided under a research framework or within a research clinic. They are also the only guidelines that have been informed by an ethical review conducted as part of the guideline development.”
“Most of the guidelines described insufficient evidence about the risks and benefits of medical treatment in adolescents, particularly in relation to long-term outcomes. Despite this, many then went on to cite this same evidence to recommend medical treatments,” the report says.
“Alternatively, they referred to other guidelines that recommend medical treatments as their basis for making the same recommendations. Early versions of two international guidelines, the Endocrine Society 2009 and WPATH 7th version guidelines, influenced nearly all the other guidelines.
“These two guidelines are also closely interlinked, with WPATH adopting Endocrine Society recommendations, and acting as a co-sponsor and providing input to drafts of the Endocrine Society guideline. The WPATH 8th version cited many of the other national and regional guidelines to support some of its recommendations, despite these guidelines having been considerably influenced by the WPATH 7th version.
“The circularity of this approach may explain why there has been an apparent consensus on key areas of practice despite the evidence being poor.”
Sometimes these gender-affirming guidelines seek to buttress a strong evidence claim with a citation to a study that is weak or involves a different patient group.
The Cass report notes that, “The WPATH 8th version’s narrative on gender-affirming medical treatment for adolescents does not reference its own systematic review [of the evidence], but instead states: ‘Despite the slowly growing body of evidence supporting the effectiveness of early medical intervention, the number of studies is still low, and there are few outcome studies that follow youth into adulthood. Therefore, a systematic review regarding outcomes of treatment in adolescents is not possible’.”
Despite WPATH insisting such an evidence review is not possible, this is precisely what health authorities and experts have undertaken since 2019 in several jurisdictions—Finland, Sweden, the UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, Florida, Germany, and University of York research commissioned by the Cass review.
Yet in the 8th and current version of its guideline, WPATH makes the confident statement that, “There is strong evidence demonstrating the benefits in quality of life and well-being of gender-affirming treatments, including endocrine and surgical procedures… Gender-affirming interventions are based on decades of clinical experience and research; therefore, they are not considered experimental, cosmetic, or for the mere convenience of a patient. They are safe and effective at reducing gender incongruence and gender dysphoria”.
But WPATH “overstates the strength of the evidence” for its treatment recommendations, the Cass report says.
--
1 In the survey, there was one clinic each from Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Northern Ireland, Norway and Spain. The response rate was 38 per cent.
2 In Australia there is no good public data on trans surgery for minors.
3 Early puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones are expected to sterilise young people and may also impair future sexual function.
4 Some sizeable proportion of gender clinic patients might grow up in healthy bodies and accept their same-sex attraction were it not for trans medicalisation, according to testimony from detransitioners, clinicians’ reports and data.
5 Trauma from a history of sexual abuse, for example, or exposure to domestic violence is thought to be among the many possible underlying causes of what presents as gender dysphoria. The Multi-Professional Review Group (MPRG), given oversight of Tavistock treatment decisions from 2021-23, was troubled by the lack of curiosity by the clinic’s staff about the effect of a child’s “physical or mental illness within the family, abusive or addictive environments, bereavement, cultural or religious background, etc.”
6 Critics of the “gender-affirming” treatment approach say it is not mainstream medicine because the “trans child” in effect self-diagnoses while clinicians avoid differential diagnosis and attribute mental health disorders and other pre-existing issues to a “transphobic” society.
7 “In most cases [at the Tavistock clinic] children and parents were asking to progress on to puberty blockers from the very first appointment”, according to the MPRG.
8 In the MPRG’s opinion, the patient notes from the Tavistock “rarely provide a structured history or physical assessment, however the submissions to the MPRG suggest that the children have a wide range of childhood, familial and congenital conditions.”
9 Once referred to the Tavistock, patients typically were no longer seen by child and adolescent mental health services.
10 According to the MPRG, gender dysphoria in the diagnostic manual DSM-5 “has a low threshold based on overlapping criteria, and is likely to create false positives. Young people who do not go on to have an enduring cross-sex gender identity may have met the criteria in childhood. And early to mid-childhood social transition may be influential in maintaining adherence to the criteria. Sex role and gender expression stereotyping is present within the diagnostic criteria—preferred toys, clothes, etc—not reflecting that many toys, games and activities [today] are less exclusively gendered than in previous decades.”
11 The MPRG said it was “notable that until the child and family’s first appointment at [the Tavistock] they have received little, if any, support from health, social care, or education professionals. Most children and parents have felt isolated and desperate for support and have therefore turned for information to the media and online resources, with many accessing LGBTQ+ and [gender dysphoria] support groups or private providers which appear to be mainly ‘affirmative’ in nature, and children and families have moved forward with social transition. This history/journey is rarely examined closely by [Tavistock clinicians] for signs of difficulty [or] regret.”
==
Critics have described "gender affirming care" - that is, sex-trait modification - as "medical experimentation." This is incorrect. In a medical experiment, you actually collect data and monitor the participants in the experiment. They don't do that. They're cowboys violating all medical ethics - "first, do no harm" - for ideology, money or both.
Source: genderclinicnews.com
#Bernard Lane#Cass review#Cass report#Dr. Hilary Cass#Hilary Cass#gender affirming care#gender affirming healthcare#gender affirmation#medical scandal#medical malpractice#sex trait modification#medical corruption#World Professional Association for Transgender Health#WPATH#ethics violations#medical ethics#unethical#gender ideology#gender identity ideology#queer theory#intersectional feminism#religion is a mental illness
The World Economic Forum is a (self-anointed) global thought leader on politics, sustainability, innovation and equality.
In fact, I actually know the World Economic Forum quite well, I’ve worked with them professionally dozens of times; we’ve collaborated on important projects, we’ve shaken hands, sat around tables and pretended to laugh at each other’s jokes. I’ve even scaled the icy mountains of Switzerland to spend the week documenting the ultra-VIP Davos conference.
Their Global Gender Gap Report is a highly anticipated and respected annual barometer for how the world is doing on its meandering journey toward equality. But with no sense of irony, the report’s methodology is itself, systemically sexist.
So, let’s turn the beady eye of equality onto those pointing the finger, is the GGGR sexist and how?
It’s time to say GG, to the GGGR
Read it for yourself - https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2021.pdf
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Sources
Source: instagram.com
This level of deranged academic gibberish is a symptom of a degenerative brain disorder resulting from excessive exposure to Judith Butler.
Source: twitter.com
Khaled Barakat (Terrorist): "The 'liberation' of Palestine will mean changing the entire region."
No shit. It means exterminating the Jews and obliterating Israel. The first step on their conquest of the world, just as they've been openly saying for years.
These useful idiots are domestic terrorists and should be treated as such. How the fuck did we get to the point where privileged, first world students at Ivy League colleges are taking meeting with and cheering on terrorists?
I've been saying for weeks that there's no difference between "pro-Palestine" and pro-Hamas.
Source: instagram.com
"Cancel culture doesn't exist!" is a mantra we often hear from its most obstinate practitioners.
In October 2022, the comedian and BBC presenter Graeme Norton suggested that a better term for cancel culture would be "accountability." But is it really fair to harass, defame and ruin people's lives simply for expressing commonly held opinions? What exactly are they being held accountable for? A much better synonym for cancel culture was coined by the singer Nick Cave. He said it was "mercy's antithesis."
Given that the very existence of cancel culture is so often denied, I thought I'd take this opportunity to outline precisely what is meant by cancel culture, and why it matters so much for those of us who still care about liberal values.
But let's begin with that thorny question of definitions. Now, most of us understand what cancel culture means. But perhaps it might be more instructive to consider what it isn't.
If someone criticizes you for something you've said or done, that's not cancel culture, that's free speech. If someone blocks you on social media, that's not cancel culture; someone has just decided you're not worth listening to and is exercising his or her freedom to ignore you. If you've not been invited to speak at a certain event, that's not cancel culture either; no one's entitled to a platform.
No, what cancel culture actually means is a form of public shaming or harassment, often for relatively minor mistakes or unfashionable opinions. It's the difference between criticizing someone for something they've said or done, or systematically attempting to see their reputation and livelihood obliterated. Cancel culture is not criticism, it's denunciation. it's contacting employers and demanding that people are fired because you don't agree with what they've said. It's spreading lies about them online so their future work prospects are diminished. In other words it's a hugely disproportionate and vindictive form of revenge, dressed up in the guise of virtue.
Here's a way to think about it: let's say a colleague has attempted a joke via email and maybe you feel a bit offended by it. Do you have a conversation with them in private and say, "look I think that was a bit misjudged, but I know that wasn't the intention so let's just move on and go for a pint." Or do you screenshot the offending email, post it online, invite all your followers to pile on to the person who wrote it, and denounce them publicly and then demand that the employer fires them for hateful conduct?
Now if you're opting for the latter, I've got some bad news for you. You you're not the good guy here.
"But free speech has consequences," the cancel culture skeptics cry. Well look, I'm inclined to agree. If a person says something stupid or offensive, they can expect criticism, ridicule, counterarguments, even protest. But if the consequences of free speech are that someone becomes the target of a campaign of public shaming and personal ruination, or worse still, that they're arrested for so-called "hate speech," then that's surely unjustifiable.
A common misconception is that cancel culture is simply a matter of holding the powerful to account. The failure of activists to cancel JK Rowling is often cited as evidence that cancel culture is a myth. But as one of the most successful authors of all time, Rowling cannot be cancelled, much to the irritation of those who sender abuse and threats on a daily basis. The vast majority of targets are those with limited means, who don't have the public profile or financial resources to protect themselves from such attacks. This is why the Free Speech Union has been invaluable, offering support to so many people who found themselves at the center of witch hunts.
Perhaps the most sinister aspect of cancel culture is that it has successfully generated a climate of fear, in which many are afraid to express even their most cherished convictions. Once a few high-profile individuals have been cancelled, this can be sufficient to discourage others from speaking out. The relentless and cruel attacks on JK Rowling are driven not by any serious belief that she'll suddenly become impoverished and unemployable. But rather by the desire to send a message to others who share her point of view. After all, who would want to be on the receiving end of such malicious and continual harassment.
And so, the full impact of cancel culture is pretty difficult to quantify. Like "no platforming," which is the practice carried out by universities of denying platforms to individuals with controversial views, most of the targets of cancel culture are pre-emptive. Just as speakers with heterodox views will never know that they've been deprived of an opportunity to speak on campus, many of us will have been passed over for promotions, or not hired at all, simply for the opinions we've expressed in conversation or on social media. We will never know who has been cancelled, because we can only ever be aware of those handful of instances that have been publicized.
So, while the press will report on pop singer Róisín Murphy's cancelled shows, a consequence of her entirely reasonable comments about the dangers of puberty blockers, the supermarket employee who loses his job for an offensive joke on Twitter is unlikely to garner the same attention.
For all that, there have been numerous examples of cancellations that have made the national news. And the evidence of cancel culture is there for anyone who wishes to see it. And although these examples represent a fraction of the problem, they should be sufficient to disabuse those who cling to the comforting misapprehension that cancel culture is just a fabrication of right- wingers. Not least because so many of its victims have been on the left.
And so, to counter the pervasive and false narrative that cancel culture doesn't exist, I thought it might be helpful to provide an overview of just some of its victims. And now, needless to say, this list is by no means exhaustive.
So, in June 2015, the Nobel prizewinning biochemist Tim Hunt was forced to resign from his honorary position at University College London after a journalist misrepresented jokes he'd made at a conference in Seoul in South Korea.
In August 2019, school teacher Christian Webb lost his job when it emerged that he'd been performing viral comedy rap videos under the pseudonym MC Devo in the mid 2000s.
In December 2021, choreographer Rosie Kay was compelled to resign from her own dance company after investigation processes began because she expressed her gender-critical views at a gathering with dancers in her own home. And although she had cooked them a meal and invited the company to her house, some of those present took it upon themselves to report her to the board.
In December 2018, tax expert Maya Forstater lost her job for saying that women are female and human beings cannot change sex. The decision of the tribunal was initially upheld, so she was forced to take the case to the High Court, which eventually ruled that gender-critical beliefs are protected by law.
The comedy writer Graham Linehan has been unable to work in the comedy industry for six years due to his gender-critical beliefs. His musical adaptation of his hit sitcom "Father Ted" has been halted by the rights owners, Hat Trick Productions, who had offered Linehan a substantial sum of money to have his name removed from the project.
In 2018, barrister Allison Bailey, a lesbian with a long history of gay activism, raised concerns about her chamber's decision to join Stonewall's "Diversity Champions" program due to its uncritical stance on gender self-identification. For raising these concerns, she was labeled as "transphobic" by Garden Court Chambers, who publicly announced that Bailey was under investigation. Bailey later won a court case for discrimination.
In 2018, the children's author Rachel Rooney published a book called "My Body is Me," which challenged sexist stereotypes and promoted a positive self-image for children. It was branded as "transphobic" and Rooney was subjected to a campaign of harassment by figures in the publishing industry. Some bookshops capitulated to activists and stopped stalking her work, and her publisher told her to stop expressing her opinions on the subject of gender.
In June 2023, it was reported that Sibyl Ruth, an editor at Cornerstones literary consultancy, was dropped because of her gender-critical views. Following an employment tribunal she received an apology and substantial damages.
In October 2023, Newcastle United fan Lindsay Smith was banned from the football club stadium for three seasons for her belief that sex is immutable, and that men shouldn't have access to women's changing rooms or compete in women's sports. In addition to her ban, she was investigated by a secret unit at the Premier League, who created a dossier on what they described as their "target." They attempted to find a home address, they assessed photographs from her social media accounts, and they even downloaded images in which Smith could be seen walking a dog.
Dr. Neil Thin experienced what he described as a devastating couple of years when he was falsely accused of racism by student activists. Thin is a senior lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, and he had criticized a conference called "Resisting Whiteness" because it offered racially segregated spaces. He also objected to the renaming of the David Hume Tower as 40 George Square. It had been renamed on the grounds that Hume had written some passages in an essay in 1753 that would today be deemed offensive. Thin stepped back from teaching while an investigation was underway and was eventually exonerated in September 2021.
Also in 2021, the actor James Dreyfus was dropped from the audio range of Doctor Who stories for signing a letter to Stonewall calling for an open and respectful debate on the subject of gender identity ideology and its impact on the rights of women and gay people. The company not only dropped him but erased his episodes from a compilation in which he was meant to be featured.
In July 2020, the children's author Gillian Philip was dropped by her publisher for tweeting in support of JK Rowling. She's since retrained as a trucker and has written that the haulage industry is far more supportive and inclusive, and a lot less misogynistic, than the world of children's writing.
Criminology Professor Jo Phoenix was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after a campaign of harassment by colleagues after she co-founded a gender-critical research network. In early 2024, she won her constructive dismissal case against the Open University.
In November 2021, social worker Rachel Meade was sanctioned by her employer Social Work England because of gender-critical posts she had shared and liked on Facebook. This led to her being suspended on charges of gross misconduct by Westminster City Council. Meade later won her claim for discrimination against her employer and the judge ruled that the disciplinary procedure amounted to harassment.
In June 2020, Nick Buckley, the founder of charity organization Mancunian Way, was ousted for criticizing the radical politics of the Black Lives Matter movement, most notably its calls to defund the police and abolish capitalism.
In August 2020, Sasha White, an assistant at the Tobias Literary Agency in New York, was fired after a campaign by trans activists who took offense at statements posted on her Twitter account expressing her view that gender neutral pronouns were unhelpful to the feminist cause.
In January 2020, veteran television presenter Alastair Stewart was forced to resign after tweeting a quotation from Shakespeare which included the phrase, "an angry ape." This was misinterpreted as racist because he was replying to a black Twitter, user even though it was a phrase he had used previously in conversation with white people.
In April 2019, philosopher Roger Scrutin was sacked as housing adviser to the Conservative government as part of the "Building Better, Building Beautiful" commission. And this was after a journalist at the New Statesman doctored his statement in an interview in order to make them appear racist.
In June 2019, Asda Supermarket worker Brian Leech was fired after sharing a video online by the comedian Billy Connelly which mocked Islamic suicide bombers, even though the source of the offending excerpt was from a DVD sold by the company that employed him. He was later reinstated following an outcry.
In June 2019, BBC Books removed the writer Gareth Roberts from a Doctor Who short story anthology because he expressed his view that the trans activist movement reinforces outdated gender stereotypes.
In June 2021, the textile artist Jess de Wahls had her artwork removed from sale in the Royal Academy gift shop, having already been driven out of her hairdressing salon in the Soho theater. Simply for her gender-critical opinions. She was bombarded on Twitter with vitriolic messages and calls for her to commit suicide.
In June 2021, it was reported that the Reverend Dr Bernard Randall, a school chaplain at Trent College in Derbyshire had been reported to Prevent, that's the government's anti-terrorism program, and this was because he delivered a sermon on why it was reasonable to challenge ideological viewpoints. And this was in response to a training session that he'd been obliged to attend in which school staff were told to chant "smash heteronormativity."
In June 2021, the cricketer Ollie Robinson was banned from playing for eight months due to offensive tweets that he posted as a teenager. In addition to the ban from the Cricket Discipline Commission, he was fined £3,200 and was compelled to participate in anti-discrimination training.
In June 2021, it was reported that law student Lisa Keogh had been investigated by authorities at Abertay University in Scotland for saying that "women have vaginas." Although she was cleared, she described the two-month investigation as needlessly cruel given that it coincided with her final examination period.
In October 2021, the philosopher Kathleen Stock resigned from the University of Sussex following a campaign of abuse and harassment from student activists who claimed that her very presence excludes and endangers trans people.
Ann Henderson, rector of Edinburg University until February 2021, was falsely smeared by activists as "transphobic" and antisemitic and not fit to hold office simply for tweeting about a meeting at the House of Commons on proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act. She experienced a vicious campaign in which the University refused to tackle her abusers.
So that's just a sample of some of the victims of cancel culture.
And if it's true that cancel culture isn't real, it's got a hell of a lot of casualties.
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They know it's real, because they think it's good.
Until it comes for them.
Source: youtube.com
Hii! This may be a bit of an unusual question, but would you tell your (little) children that Santa Claus exists? Or do you think it is better to teach them the truth from a young age and not encourage any false beliefs?
I don't think I'd need to tell them about Santa Claus, as it's culturally pervasive. But I wouldn't ruin it for them, as I wouldn't want them to miss out on the fun. Nor ruin it for other kids. You can show a child, "hey, that's Santa Claus," the same way you would point at someone dressed as Aladdin at Disney Land and say, "hey, that's Aladdin." You don't have to claim he's actually real. You just go to see Santa each year and get a photo taken, the same way you get your photo taken with Goofy.
Keeping children's imaginations alive as long as possible is also a virtue as well - crushing a child with unvarnished reality at a young age is just unnecessarily cruel.
It's worth noting that we don't perpetuate the belief that Santa is real into adult and terrify children into sticking to believing it no matter what doubts they form about it. Nor do we make Santa a part of everyday life. Children figure out he's not real, and we don't contest it or claim it's a moral failing. It's a transient idea that falls away naturally.
And when they do start to doubt, we can say things like, "what do you think?" to help them examine what they understand or think is likely or real.
I don't think it's necessary to be obsessively honest with kids, especially younger ones. It's okay to fudge things, simplify them down, or leave out some details so they can comprehend them.
But it's important not to scare them with a false understanding of the world. Santa Claus isn't scary. Telling a kid about hell, or that if they eat all their Christmas candy, they'll balloon up and won't fit through the door any more is a great way to give them unhealthy fears and obsessions.
Ultimately, as a parent, your household is not a democracy, and not everything is a debate. My mother used to say, "I don't have time for three good reasons why." While a general preference for the truth - or the vicinity of the truth - is desirable, I think it's okay to pick your battles on what's important to be truthful about, and what ultimately won't matter in the long run. Lying about their "immortal soul" being damned to eternal hellfire is not one of those "won't matter" type of things.
And in more cases than I think people realize, the easiest thing is to not suggest anything at all to the child and ask what they think.
Freedom of religion is also freedom from religion.
You're free to believe in disembodied, metaphysical gender thetans that are born into "the wrong body." And I'm free to disbelieve you, notice that it doesn't make sense, is indistinguishable from a Xian "soul," and decline to participate in your prayers and rituals. Just like any other religion.
Source: twitter.com