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Child Abuse Sanctioned by the State—Until Now
The willingness of almost every segment of our society to abuse our children is mind-blowing. How is it possible that parents, the medical and psychiatric community, teachers, and legislators are prepared to destroy lives by promoting transgender treatments with little scientific data to support their efforts? Even as information emerges that their ideology is false and unethical, they persist in pursuing their goals. Fortunately, Gov. Ron DeSantis and his Surgeon General, Joseph Ladapo, refuse to comply with the demands of these ideologues. They are stopping the Medicaid funding for transgender procedures.
Recently a young 17-year-old woman named Chloe Cole spoke at a public hearing in Florida about her own disastrous experience:
‘I really didn’t understand all of the ramifications of any of the medical decisions that I was making,’ Chloe Cole, 17, said at a public hearing Friday. She said she was medically transitioned from ages 13 to 16, taking so-called puberty-blocking drugs and testosterone, and undergoing surgery to remove her breasts at age 15. ‘I was unknowingly physically cutting off my true self from my body, irreversibly and painfully.’
SG Ladapo confirms her assessment and warned against transgender medical interventions for children:
‘Medicalization of minors with gender dysphoria might advance the political views of physicians involved in their care, but the data showing any benefits for the actual children is extraordinarily thin,’ the surgeon general told Fox News Digital. ‘The affirmation model runs an unacceptably high risk of harm.’
‘Parents are threatened with fears of suicide, but the treatments have not been shown to actually reduce this risk,’ he added. ‘These patients need compassionate care of their emotional and mental well-being—not to be in embroiled in political views about sex/gender.’
Although there is no consensus about transgender interventions, there is plenty of support for doing more research before these actions are taken:
Dr. Matthew Benson, a board-certified pediatric endocrinologist in Jacksonville, testified that he agrees with the AHCA’s rule. ‘I think the data on which the gender-affirmative model is based is not scientific,’ he said. He cited studies from Sweden and Denmark showing extremely high rates of suicide among people who took transgender interventions, and concluded, ‘We need better data, we need long-term perspective trials where we can look at adverse effects. We need much more robust data to justify these kinds of very robust therapies.’
When the Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) proposed this new rule, several organizations pushed back, such as the LGBTQ groups and the American Pediatric Association, and supporters of the rule were characterized as extremist and religious advocates.
This is a summary of the rule:
The proposed rule centers on treatment for gender dysphoria, which the federal government defines as clinically ‘significant distress that a person may feel when sex or gender assigned at birth is not the same as their identity.’
Under the proposed rule, the Medicaid program would not cover puberty-blocking medication, hormones and hormone ‘antagonists,’ sex-reassignment surgeries and any ‘other procedures that alter primary or secondary sexual characteristics.’
The proposal also would establish that such treatments don’t meet a definition of ‘medical necessity.’ That is important because, by law, services provided in the Medicaid program must be deemed medically necessary.
The agency, which oversees the state’s Medicaid program, issued a report last month to back denying coverage of the treatments, which it said were ‘not consistent with generally accepted professional medical standards and are experimental and investigational.’
Although it isn’t clear when the rule will go into effect, it does not need to be enacted by the legislature. DeSantis’s critics claim he has approved the rule in anticipation of the 2022 election. Yet all the arguments supporting the rule included here point to the lack of scientific data, lack of long-term research, lack of medical necessity, and lack of medical standards.
More governors need to call out this misuse and abuse of Medicaid funds.
They have an obligation to protect our children.
Published in Healthcare
I suspect not. In domestic disputes, the venue may move with one or another party. I’d be surprised if that’s true when suing someone for professional services rendered in another state. But, again, perhaps a lawyer will weigh in.
I follow this issue and you’re correct; suicide rates are basically the same regardless of transition status.
Which supports the claim I’ve been making all along: there’s an underlying mental health issue that is not addressed by affirmative care and transitioning.
The actual problem is being ignored.
It’s the only way they can perpetuate their propaganda.
Ignored — and, in most instances today, magnified. That is, I think the truly psychologically troubled “trans” community has now been swamped by people pretending at, rather than actually experiencing, gender dysphoria.
In her very interesting book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, author Helen Joyce points out that the vast majority of young children who exhibit strong gender-nonconformity will get over it — and, frequently, simply mature into homosexual adults. So-called “affirmation” actually pushes kids onto a track that leads to extreme outcomes that they wouldn’t normally have to face.
As regards young women and rapid onset gender dysphoria, I don’t think there’s actually much wrong with most of them. Young women are particularly susceptible to social contagions, social media is seductive, and adolescence — especially for girls — can be awkward and uncomfortable. I think we’ve just made it too easy for young people to flirt with this nonsense, climb on board, and follow it to its tragic conclusions.
But yes, I agree: those pained by true gender-dysphoria have emotional problems and should start with counseling.
So the abuse is not only the affirmation care and abusive medical procedues, it’s also the ignoring and not treating whatever the underlying issue.
It’s like being admitted to the hospital for heart problems and being treated for Covid, even though you’ve tested negative. Oh wait … I actually know someone that happened to.
Stay healthy people and keep a close eye on your babies. We’re on our own.
Every one of the scores of TG people I have treated has had deep underlying psychological issues. Usually bad depression, some are bipolar, some have personality disorders. None are intact. To have such self-loathing as to be transgender speaks for itself. We should love these people and support them in finding sanity, not promote their harmful delusions.
From #25: The high number of celebrities and other high social status people who claim to have “transgender” children does support the suggestion that at least some of the promotion of “transgenderism” may be more about the parents than about the children.
Spot on. TGism is a social phenomenon. In the city where I recently practiced, it was fashionable to be gay but more so to have a trans partner.
How about this as an idea. We don’t yield to suicide threats. You wanna kill yourself, go ahead, bucko.
Or you can straighten up and fly right. It’s not that hard.
That sounds good in principle. Unfortunately, I can count three adolescent/teen suicides in just my friend group over the last year and a half — and I don’t have all that many friends (for pretty obvious reasons).
So, no. I don’t mind playing hardball with kids, but I probably wouldn’t adopt quite that aggressive a stance.
Don’t forget autism. Autistic children seem to be especially vulnerable. I saw a friend of my daughter’s last week; she works in a live-in home for autistic teenagers in UT. She said every single one of her charges is transgender.
I asked if the issue was addressed; she said that nothing beyond affirmative care is done.
The only thing that I’d add is that I’m not sure what you mean by “love these people.” Love must be tough sometimes, I think. Jesus sure was tough on people, on occasion.
So if “love them” means tolerating or coddling their perverse behavior, I don’t agree.
This has a ring of truth – I could imagine a child having the naïve view that the only way to get the object of one’s heart’s desire is to be the opposite sex of said object. Being gay is probably a larger step than that.
So why are we erasing and butchering homosexuals?
This, too, sounds right. Autistic people know they’re different and at a disadvantage. They have reason to adopt anything that might help them – maybe a new gender is what is missing.
And btw, people who mess with autistics are jerks, but people who are rude to transgenders are monsters. So there may be advantage in becoming a government protected species.
You are not alone in asking that question.
I was chatting with a pro-trans loudmouth on Twitter the other day. This fellow (I think it was a fellow) trotted out the usual “well, non-binary genders are actually an old idea practiced by yada yada yada,” implying that this or that primitive culture understood something deep about human sexuality that modern man has lost.
Of course, there could be some truth to that. But I think the evidence suggests something less flattering. In many primitive cultures, and particularly in strongly patriarchal ones, homosexual men are considered offensive. Some cultures responded to that by saying, in essence, “No, that person who is attracted to men isn’t a man, because men aren’t like that. That person is something else.” It was a way of pretending that male homosexuality doesn’t really exist.
In at least some instances today, that remains the case: it’s trendy to have a trans kid, less so to have an effeminate son who might prove to be gay.
In that Trans book I mentioned earlier, the author quotes workers in one sex clinic quipping words to the effect that, “at this rate, there won’t be any gay people left.”
No lie. I was looking at some pictures of a drag show being put on for children. Some kids didn’t look to be much older than three or four but they were sitting on their parents’ laps wondering what the h*ll was going on.
Child abuse takes a number of forms; this was one of them.
In civil cases you may be able to establish a case if the business you want to sue (in this scenario a doctor) advertises in your state to entice customers (patients) to travel to the state of the business (doctor) to have the procedure done.
That makes sense. I assumed there probably had to be some sense in which the enterprise interacted explicitly with the plaintiff’s state in order to establish a basis for venue.
Well, if true, that might be a good unintended consequence of the trans thing. I don’t buy it myself.
Imagine a man who says that he is “trans” and is actually a woman, and goes ahead and has himself emasculated and altered hormonally and chemically into a simulacrum of a woman, and is sexually attracted to men. The end result is not a heterosexual “trans-woman.” It is a homosexual man who is also castrated.
On your characterization of the attitude of strongly patriarchal primitive cultures toward homosexuality, do you include Christianity as one such culture? Say, American Christianity of the past 20 years?
I guess that I’m curious about whether you think that I am a patriarchal primitive. I will confess to being patriarchal.
Hank, I appreciate this reference. I was able to check out Joyce’s book as an e-book from my library, and am in the process of working through it.
I did find the following on page 57:
I looked into this myself, and wrote a series of posts about these issues, a couple of years ago. Except for the last part about ‘effeminate’ behavior, which I did not investigate, Joyce’s assertions on these issues are factually wrong (with caveats).
The leading twin studies, three of them, did not establish a statistically significant genetic or shared environmental effect. They did establish a nonshared environmental effect. This is the opposite of Joyce’s claims. The caveat is that there is some evidence that genetics or the uterine environment (which would be part of the shared environment) play small roles, though this is not established. What is established is that the nonshared environment is the most important factor.
Further, conversion therapy did not fail. To the contrary, the overwhelming evidence is that it was successful, with a Cohen’s d in the 0.6-0.8 range (which is a moderately effective treatment). The American Psychological Association report on sexual orientation change efforts (here) acknowledged, on page 28, that they found six studies “all conducted in the early period of research” that “used rigorous experimental procedures.” They didn’t report on the results of those studies, and it’s been a while since I looked them up, but the general result was what I said.
For example, the APA report said: “Only one of these experiments (Tanner, 1974) assessed treatment outcomes in comparison to an untreated control group.” But they ignored Tanner’s conclusion (here), which was: “The results of this study (summarized in Table 1) support earlier findings that aversive conditioning is effective in modifying some aspects of homosexual behavior in males.” Tanner’s abstract explained that his results included a significant decline in erectile response to male slides, in self-rated arousal to male slides, while increasing significantly more on report of frequency of sex with females, frequency of socializing with females, and preponderance of sexual thoughts about females as opposed to males.
Joyce’s views of the psychological literature on homosexuality seem to be completely contrary to the facts, both as to the significance of genetic or shared environmental causes, and as to the mutability of homosexual orientation. This is not a surprise, as the truth is available if you dig into the literature, but the summaries put out by organizations like the APA are full of lies.
Oh, I agree. But what has been suggested is that not everyone agrees, and that some would prefer to say “that person is neither man nor woman” than to say “that is a gay men, which is a thing.” That fact that you and I agree that the person in question is in fact a gay man is beside the point I was making.
(cont’d)
I was referring specifically to that small handful of cultures that invented sexes other than male and female, ostensibly (the argument goes) as a way of avoiding the uncomfortable truth of male homosexuality. As far as I know, no historical Christianity-imbued culture has invented such a dodge, so, no, I wouldn’t include Christianity-imbued cultures in that discussion.
Of course not, Jerry. There’s nothing primitive about you, and I can’t speak to your patriarchal tendencies because I don’t know you that well. (I know myself pretty well, and my patriarchal tendencies are pretty strong.)
Please keep in mind that arguing that “some cultures may have invented alternative sexes in order to avoid admitting that men can be gay” does not logically imply that all cultures that have a strong distaste for male homosexuality must therefore invent alternative sexes as a way of dealing with that distaste.
I’ve read your comments on this and don’t think they actually contradict what you quoted from Joyce’s book. I will quote your argument in full, so this will spill into additional comments.
For example:
Joyce’s claim (at least as quoted) is that “male sexual orientation is, often or nearly always, set early in life and thereafter unchangeable.” I don’t see how your comment (above) contradicts either of those observations. Charles Murray has observed that parental/home environment plays a surprisingly small role in the “nurture” aspects of personal development, with non-family, non-shared experiences having a much larger role, so even twins both raised in the same home could have influences early in life that predispose them to particular sexual orientations. I simply don’t think this contradicts Joyce’s point.
(cont’d)
I am not convinced that achieving a “significant decline in erectile response to male slides,” for example, is synonymous with making a person no longer homosexual. Suppose we repeated Tanner’s experiments using adverse stimuli applied to heterosexual individuals. Would we cause a significant decline in erectile response to female slides” in males so (mis)treated? And, if so, would we say that we have cured (for want of a better word) those individuals of their heterosexuality?
Or would we simply, to use Tanner’s own words, have been “effective in modifying some aspects of [heterosexual] behavior in males?”
I’m sorry, but I’m just not convinced that creating a negative psychological response to a particular stimuli is equivalent to changing a deeply established sexual preference, however much it may change the expression of that preference.
Regarding that last point, about the “preponderance of sexual thoughts about females as opposed to males”:
Some men in prison for extended periods engage in sex with other men. It seems clear that the inability to engage in sex with women has led them to resort to having sex with men. These men, upon leaving prison, will probably resume having sex with women.
Perhaps what Tanner demonstrated was that even some homosexual men will, if prevented from achieving satisfaction with men, seek women.
As I explained above, I think you are mistaken in your criticism of her book — or, at least, of the portion of the book you quoted.
Hank, sorry if I was unclear. The comment of mine that you are referencing did not specifically address Joyce’s claim about male sexual orientation being set early and life and thereafter unchangeable (which is false – more in a moment). The referenced portion of my comment addressed Joyce’s suggestions about a genetic influence or uterine role. She is incorrect about these claims, or perhaps misleading, because as I noted, there is some possible evidence of a small genetic or uterine role. What is clear, though, is that the nonshared environment is the major contributor.
Joyce’s main claim is rebutted by the data presented in one of my prior posts, which I referenced generally but did not link. My post was over 3 years ago, here. It reviews two papers reporting the results of longitudinal studies in adolescence or young adulthood, both of which showed quite high changes in sexual orientation.
You can read the whole thing, but one result was from a paper by Savin-Williams (2007), reporting on changes in same-sex attraction between ages 17 and 22. Among young men, of those who initially reported same-sex attraction, 78.0% changed — 69.8% to opposite-sex attraction and 8.2% to both-sex attraction.
There were other studies, with a range of outcomes. All showed some change, with generally higher rates of change for women and generally higher rates of change for younger people.
Jerry, thanks for the clarification. I’ll read your earlier posts before commenting further — except to note that Joyce doesn’t attribute a degree of significance to the genetic/in utero factors, but merely mentioned that some researchers assert that they exist. I think that’s consistent with your comment above.