I Was Told to Approve All Teen Gender Transitions. I Refused.

[Valin]

The Free Press

For six years I worked at a hospital that said all teenagers with gender dysphoria must be affirmed. I quit my job to blow the whistle.

Tamara Pietzke

February 5, 2024

Perhaps you read the long investigation about detransitioners published in this weekend’s New York Times. It is comprehensive and sober and we highly recommend it.

It’s also a piece we are confident would never have made it into the paper were it not for independent publications like ours taking the journalistic and reputational risk over the past few years to pursue the subject of “gender-affirming” care and the subsequent harms inflicted on vulnerable young people. In this, we are proud to stand alongside Hannah Barnes, Lisa Selin Davis, Hadley Freeman, Helen Joyce, Leor Sapir, Abigail Shrier, Jesse Singal, Kathleen Stock, Quillette and others, who took the arrows so that the mainstream press could finally start reporting on what’s really happening. 

What is immensely clear is that individual testimonies—whistleblower accounts like those we’ve published by Jamie Reed and Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala—have made the change we are now beginning to see. 

And that change is now impossible to deny: witness the arrival of lawsuits from young people who say they have suffered the consequences of these life-altering treatments. 

Today, therapist Tamara Pietzke adds her voice to those of our other whistleblowers, and tells how she could no longer go along with the pressure to transition her patients.

(snip)

I remember in 2019 seeing signs of how gender dysphoria arose among many of my most vulnerable female clients, all of whom struggled with previous psychological problems. 

In 2019, I started seeing a 16-year-old client after her pediatrician referred her to me for anxiety, depression, and ADHD. When I first met her, she had long blonde hair covering her eyes, to the point you could barely see her face. It was like she was going through the world trying to be invisible. 

In 2020, during the pandemic, she told me she had started reading online a lot about gender, and said she started feeling like she wasn’t a girl anymore. 

Around this time, her anxiety became so debilitating she couldn’t leave her house—not even to go to school. After taking a year off school during the pandemic, she enrolled in an alternative school for kids struggling with mental health. I was relieved that she was making friends for the first time, and seemed to be feeling a lot better.

Then she started using they/he pronouns, identified as pansexual, and replaced the skirts and fishnet stockings she often wore with disheveled and baggy clothes. Her long hair became shorter and shorter. She started wearing a binder to flatten her breasts. She tried out a few different names before settling on one that’s gender neutral.

The official diagnosis I gave her was “adjustment disorder”—an umbrella term often applied to young people who are having a hard time coping with difficult and stressful circumstances. It’s the type of diagnosis that doesn’t follow a child forever—it implies that mental distress among kids is often transient.

She came out as transgender to her family in 2021. Her mother was supportive, but her dad wasn’t. Regardless, she went to her pediatrician seeking a referral to a gender clinic. 

In 2022, she went to Mary Bridge Children’s Gender Health Clinic for the first time, where the clinicians informed her and her parents that if she didn’t receive hormone replacement therapy, she could be “at increased risk for anxiety, depression, and worsening of mental health/psychological trauma,” according to her patient records. Her dad refused to start his daughter on testosterone, and so all the clinic could do was prescribe birth control to stop her period due to her “menstrual dysphoria,” or distress over getting her period. Which is something I thought all teenage girls experienced. 

Five months later, she swallowed a bottle of pills and her mother had to rush her to the emergency room. 

By early 2023, my client logged on to our weekly session, which we started doing by Zoom, and she told me she identified as a “wounded male dog.” She explained to me that this was her “xenogender,” a concept she had discovered online, which references gender identities that go “beyond the human understanding of gender.” She said she felt she didn’t have all of the right appendages, and that she wanted to start wearing ears and a tail to truly feel like herself. 

I was stunned. All I could do was silently nod along. 

After the session, I emailed my colleagues looking for advice. “I want to be accepting and inclusive and all of that,” I wrote, but “I guess I just don’t understand at what point, if ever, a person’s gender identity is indicative of a bigger issue.”

I asked them: “Is there ever a time where acceptance of a person’s identity isn’t freely given?”

The consensus from my colleagues was that it wasn’t a big deal.

“It sounds like this isn’t something that’s ‘broken,’ ” one colleague wrote me back, “so let’s not try to ‘fix’ it.” 

(Snip)

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If this is NOT Insane or Right From The Pit Of Hell 2+2=48

 

[Valin]

WHO quietly admits there’s no solid scientific backing for giving kids ‘gender affirming care’

Scientific findings on the long-term consequences of child sex changes are "limited and variable," according to the WHO.
Robert Schmad
February 5, 2024

(Daily Caller News Foundation) — The World Health Organization (WHO) announced that it would not be issuing recommendations on “gender affirming care” for children or adolescents, citing the lack of scientific literature addressing it.

The WHO is in the process of developing guidelines for the “health of trans and gender diverse people,” but has declined to extend those guidelines to people under the age of 20, according to a Jan. 15 document released by the agency. Scientific findings on the long-term consequences of child sex changes are “limited and variable,” according to the WHO.

“The scope will cover adults only and not address the needs of children and adolescents, because on review, the evidence base for children and adolescents is limited and variable regarding the longer-term outcomes of gender affirming care for children and adolescents,” the document reads.

The WHO defines anyone between the ages of 10 and 19 as an adolescent, according to its website.

(Snip)

[Valin]

HHS Says It Has Only Two Pages Of Scientific Evidence Backing Its Support For “Gender-Affirming Care”

Watchdog says Rachel Levine's failure to defend radical gender views explains "why trust in government health officials has evaporated."
Luke Rosiak
Feb 6, 2024

The Department of Health and Human Services said it has only two pages of literature supporting Assistant Secretary Rachel Levine’s assessment that “gender-affirming care” is “necessary” for transgender youth, prompting allegations that the transgender-identifying Biden administration official has violated the Department’s scientific integrity policies by baselessly claiming it’s settled science.

Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT), a nonprofit watchdog, filed a Freedom of Information Act request for “records of scientific evidence, studies, and/or data to support the Assistant Secretary’s claim that ‘gender-affirming care is medically necessary, safe, and effective for trans and non-binary youth,'” as well as for “records of surveys of medical professionals regarding the value and importance of ‘gender-affirming care’ for minor children.”

In response, HHS produced only a single document—a two-page PDF called “Gender-Affirming Care and Young People.” The document is also on HHS’ website and is not a scientific study, but rather a brochure that declares that “research demonstrates that gender-affirming care improves the mental health and overall well-being of gender-diverse children.”

(Snip)