. . . when every expert . . . told me that 99% plus of young people
who are put onto the puberty blockers go on to the cross-sex hormones
and the (inaudible) surgeries and the rest of it. . . .
(based on 25 years in pediatric medicine) what I hear is, this is not a harmless pause.
This is a medication which stops brain development
and concretizes the gender dysphoria, concretizes the cross-gender identification. . . .
there is no diagnostic criteria which leads to that level of precision.
That was the first clue to me that there was something wonky about pediatric gender medicine.
This is what happens over and over (in the gender affirmation medical literature),
this conflation of homosexuality and gender identity. And they are in no way the same thing. . . .
so I look at the AAP paper and see they are really sloppily conflating homosexuality with gender identity . . .
there were all these appeals to authority, and yet the references they were citing were not backing them up.
. . . we’re all really busy and we just assume that if the American Academy of Pediatrics
puts out a policy statement, that they really looked at the science, but they didn’t.
Then you just kind of go down the rabbit hole,
because the level institutional capture is stunning.
And I guess the Georgia Green Party is discovering this as well.
Julia Mason, Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine
Dr. Mason has practiced pediatrics for 25 years, and practices in Oregon. Her work with gender-dysphoric children led her to question standards of care that she believed were not evidence-based. She noticed that every child referred to the gender clinic seemed to obtain a diagnosis of transgenderism. In her opinion, children "are not ready to be locked into a single path" for all their lives.
She pointed to cases of publication of junk-survey data solicited using promises of raffle prizes and for the explicit purpose of advocating for the transgender cause. She pointed also to data showing that detransitioners are motivated by realization that gender dysphoria was not the main cause of their distress, and/or by realization that transitioning didn't resolve their gender dysphoria. Data also indicates that the trans lobby exaggerates rates of suicides in gender-dysphoric children.
The original experimental use of puberty blockers for children, in the Netherlands, screened carefully for co-morbidities and even discouraged "social transitioning" while under study. Dr. Mason stated that puberty blockers sterilize children, adversely affect bone density, and prevent penile development in boys. "Children are unable to give informed consent to be anorgasmic," or to puberty blockers or hormones, she said. When professionals express their wish to study de-transitioning, institutions prohibit it. In published pro-transition research, titles and abstracts often misrepresent the results.
Dr. Mason advocates "gentle exploratory therapy with experienced therapists" for gender-dysphoric children, and that medical decisions should be made not before the mid-20s.