The Transgender Racket

Whyever should it be necessary to do extensive scientific research to demonstrate that you cannot turn boys into girls or girls into boys? Wishful thinking has its limits. Was it arrogance or stupidity or perversity that made serious medical organizations support and foster transgender transitions?

One reason is a pseudoscientific report, produced by Dutch researchers, that purports to show that transitioning improves mental health.

Now, thanks to the Free Press, we read the results of a study performed by a Finnish adolescent psychiatrist, a distinguished woman of science, by name of Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala. 

In a long and detailed article Dr. Kaltiala sheds some serious light on the controversy. Hopefully, her work will tamp down on the madness, though one imagines that it will require a blizzard of lawsuits to rescue the children who have been mutilated and sacrificed to this pseudoscience.

Initially, the population of the transgendered was comprised mostly of adult men who had been treated with estrogen to allow them to live as women. 

The science shifted in 2011 when a Dutch research group published a paper touting the virtue of treating children with puberty blockers and opposite sex hormones.

She explains:

It became known as the “Dutch protocol.” The patient population the Dutch doctors described was a small number of carefully selected young people—almost all male—who, from their earliest years, insisted they were girls. These patients, apart from their gender distress, were mentally healthy and high-functioning. The Dutch clinicians reported that following early intervention, these young people thrived as members of the opposite sex. The protocol was quickly adopted internationally as the gold standard treatment in this new field of pediatric gender medicine.

Not to be left behind, the Finnish national health service adopted the practice. In time Finnish clinics started seeing an increased demand for gender-affirming care. And yet, the patient population was not what the Dutch protocol would have projected:

But the ones who came were nothing like what was described by the Dutch. We expected a small number of boys who had persistently declared they were girls. Instead, 90 percent of our patients were girls, mainly 15 to 17 years old, and instead of being high-functioning, the vast majority presented with severe psychiatric conditions.

Some came from families with multiple psychosocial problems. Most of them had challenging early childhoods marked by developmental difficulties, such as extreme temper tantrums and social isolation. Many had academic troubles. It was common for them to have been bullied—but generally not regarding their gender presentation. In adolescence they were lonely and withdrawn. Some were no longer in school, instead spending all their time alone in their room. They had depression and anxiety, some had eating disorders, many engaged in self-harm, a few had experienced psychotic episodes. Many—many—were on the autism spectrum.

This confirms the research performed by Lisa Littman at Brown, to the effect that transgenderism became a social contagion. Moreover, it also affirms the views of Abigail Shrier, in her book Irreversible Damage. 

These girls had not been dysphoric until their mothers told them that that was their problem and that transitioning could cure what ailed them:

Remarkably, few had expressed any gender dysphoria until their sudden announcement of it in adolescence. Now they were coming to us because their parents, usually just mothers, had been told by someone in an LGBT organization that gender identity was their child’s real problem, or the child had seen something online about the benefits of transition.

But the foundation on which the Dutch protocol was based is crumbling. Researchers have shown that their data had some serious problems, and that in their follow-up, they failed to include many of the very people who may have regretted transition or changed their minds. One of the patients had died due to complications from genital transition surgery. 

One does not want to skip over the point too quickly, but apparently LGBT groups have been promoting transgenderism.

When it came to reversing the transition, to detransitioning, the children who changed their minds after undergoing biochemical and surgical mutilation, the Dutch report and its avatars was simply false:

There is an oft-repeated statistic in the world of pediatric gender medicine that only one percent or less of young people who transition subsequently detransition. The studies asserting this, too, rest on biased questions, inadequate samples, and short timelines. I believe regret is far more widespread. For example, one new study shows that nearly 30 percent of patients in the sample ceased filling their hormone prescription within four years. 

Dr. Kaltiala suggests that this was not the first time that medicalized groupthink produced something like mass hysteria. It was also responsible for the recovered memory craze:

Medicine, unfortunately, is not immune to dangerous groupthink that results in patient harm. What is happening to dysphoric children reminds me of the recovered memory craze of the 1980s and ’90s.

During that period, many troubled women came to believe false memories, often suggested to them by their therapists, of nonexistent sexual abuse by their fathers or other family members. This abuse, the therapists said, explained everything that was wrong with the lives of their patients. Families were torn apart, and some people were prosecuted based on made-up assertions. It ended when therapists, journalists, and lawyers investigated and exposed what was happening.

We need to learn from such scandals. Because, like recovered memory, gender transition has gotten out of hand. When medical professionals start saying they have one answer that applies everywhere, or that they have a cure for all of life’s pains, that should be a warning to us all that something has gone very wrong. 

Point well taken. Throw some serious doubt on snake oil salespeople, on pseudoscientists who pretend to have the solution to all of your problems. But, what about the political activists who have made this into their own private cause? Should we also start questioning their motives and their truth?

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