Let Them Come With The Armies Of Hell!

Update 435 Mulling Special. #BeMorePorcupine

Lord Justice Sedley in Redmond-Bate v Director of Public Prosecutions [1999] EWHC Admin 733:

'Free speech includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative provided it does not tend to provoke violence. Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having. What Speakers' Corner (where the law applies as fully as anywhere else) demonstrates is the tolerance which is both extended by the law to opinion of every kind and expected by the law in the conduct of those who disagree, even strongly, with what they hear.

From the condemnation of Socrates to the persecution of modern writers and journalists, our world has seen too many examples of state control of unofficial ideas.'

Thanks to one of the readers mentioned below for the next choice in the Heroes season and this time the hero is a queen! This is the famous speech delivered by Queen Elizabeth 1 to her troops at Tilbury on 7 August 1588 as they waited for the Spanish Armada. As to whether she delivered the speech, like Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, clad in armour and on horseback is another question. Great speech though:

‘When the day of battle is ended

We meet again in heaven

Or on the field of victory’.

Albeit that a game of bowls may be more famous than this speech! For those who don’t know, the head of the English Navy, Sir Francis Drake , famously said that he was going to finish his game of bowls first when told that the Armada were in sight!

Now who does Cate Blanchett look like? If you say Angela Rayner - shame on you!

Thanks as ever to two wonderful readers for suggested pieces.

Let’s Have A Mull

EDI Jester often has a mull ( as he calls it) so I thought I’d have one. This was inspired by a reader (correctly) bemoaning the difficulty of getting people to come forward and join the Terf Resistance. This is also in the context where it is clear that five years of a Labour Government is going to be very, very tough for us Terfs! A Conversion Practices Bill will be coming shortly. The Higher Education ( Freedom of Speech) Act has not been brought into force and is likely to be repealed. Following the riots, the Government have signalled their intent to crack down further on protest and increase the restrictions on freedom of speech including online ( see Andrew Doyle’s piece below). Shocking sentences have already been given to people who simply made offensive or inaccurate comments online. The Labour Manifesto contained the promise to bring in the equivalent of self ID for gender recognition. It is not at all clear that the Government will not simply withdraw the draft guidance that is in place for schools regarding gender identity and sex education. Wes Streeting has made a great start as Health Secretary but he is likely to face a battle royal when he tries to make the ban on puberty blockers for children permanent.

Some of the below will be teaching granny to suck eggs, so apologies for that.

Peaking The World

The more people we can peak, the more we can build the resistance. Sarah Phillimore and Al Peters edited a whole book called Transpositions which featured lots of stories as to how individuals peaked. Peaking people, making them realise the truth of this gender madness, centrally involves getting the information through to people. We can do this directly to friends, family, work colleagues and even strangers we meet. Those of us with platforms of some sort can put this out wider but anyone can share information from those platforms or spread it around.

Sometimes people plugging away at an issue ( such as puberty blockers) can result in something enormous like the Cass Review which, of course, has been vital in the NHS stopping the provision of puberty blockers to children ( query the position with NHS Scotland!?).

Free speech is fundamental to this and I don’t know what more I can say than we should try and keep telling the truth such as this is a man not a woman, you can’t change sex, non-binary is nonsense and transitioning children is profound abuse ( now where did I get all that from? 😀).

Lobbying

We have to keep lobbying politicians, schools and other organisations as Sex Matters are doing today at Parliament ( report to follow in due course). I have written four times to my new Labour MP ( I didn’t vote for her I hasten to add!) since the General Election. She hasn’t responded but I’m not stopping. There are also consultations to get involved in and events such as Let Women Speak rallies. My wife and I hope to be at the one at the end of September.

Legal Challenges

I have to say that I think that legal challenges are going to be absolutely central to the Resistance. There are already cases brought by detransitioners rolling forward. We have seen many successful cases where someone has, for example, been dismissed for expressing gender critical views. I think there may be major Human Rights Act challenges ( especially around the right to freedom of expression) against legislation and policies from this Government. The Free Speech Union are already threatening legal action with regard to the proposed repeal of the Freedom of Speech Act. The For Women Scotland appeal regarding the Equality Act is coming before the Supreme Court later this year ( see further below).

Even a big loss such as Tickle v Giggle ( see recent updates) can peak many people who look at Mr Tickle and say, to quote Kellie-Jay Keen, he’s a man!

My waffly ideas here are meant to engender discussion. So please get discussing. If you have never commented on one of my updates before, please comment. I want to hear from you! This is a free speech forum. Let us know what you think.

And, to help you in the process, please watch this great short documentary from Lesbian Resistance NZ ( I was at the Birmingham LWS event that there is a short excerpt from - I reported on that here: https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/a-big-brummie-welcome?utm_source=publication-search ).

Sex Matters

Well done to Sex Matters for organising a lobby of Parliament today about the Equality Act ( see further below) and women’s single sex spaces. My Terfy friend from Derbyshire will be there 😃

I hope to report further in the next update but here is an initial report from EDI Jester:

The Equality Act

EDI Jester has reported on Anneliese Dodds, the (Anti) Women and Equalities Minister, stating that this Government will not amend the Equality Act to make it clear that ‘sex’ in the Act means biological sex. I commented ( and do correct me if I’m wrong) on this:

‘Don’t panic, Captain Mannering - well, not just yet! Dodds is relying on the Court of Appeal judgment that said that the GRA trumped biological sex in the EQA. For Women Scotland are taking that to the Supreme Court later this year. The SC are currently quite conservative. If they uphold the FWS argument then Dodds will have to consider amending the EQA herself and that would involve her saying the quiet bit out loud - that she wants men in dresses to be counted as women under the EQA. If she does that then we can don our armour and start the battle. Barry, I will meet you in heaven or on the field of victory.’

Free Speech

As ever, great piece from Andrew Doyle on his substack:

Online censorship will only make matters worse

The ban on X in Brazil is just the latest stage of a sinister global trend.

Sep 10, 2024

We are rapidly moving into a new era of state censorship. Governments across the globe are seemingly convinced that all societal ills could be cured if only the speech of citizens was more carefully regulated. In Brazil, this has been taken to chilling extremes. The decision of the supreme court justice to block X is an incredible affront to the freedom of its citizens. And those who attempt to access X via a VPN can be fined thousands of pounds.

This is the kind of action one would expect from a police state. Other countries that have banned X include China, North Korea and Iran. Surely this is not a gang that one should yearn to be joining. In his recent piece on Spiked, Fraser Myers identified the key problem:

“The Brazilian elites loathe X for precisely the same reason as the elites across the rest of the democratic world do – they blame it for the spread of so-called disinformation, particularly since it was taken over by Musk and its content-moderation policies were relaxed.”

One suspects that other countries are itching to follow suit. Over the past few weeks the Guardian has repeatedly called for restrictions to X or even the intervention of the police. In a piece written by Robert Reich, a former labour secretary under the Clinton administration, we had the following: “Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X.” And Jonathan Freedland wrote a piece entitled “You know who else should be on trial for the UK’s far-right riots? Elon Musk”. When a mainstream newspaper is cheerleading for state authoritarianism, you know there’s a major problem.

Might the Labour Party go so far as to ban social media platforms? After the riots, it would have been prudent for Keir Starmer to condemn the violence while acknowledging that there may be legitimate underlying concerns. I have absolutely no doubt that had the public been able to engage openly and honestly about the potential problems of mass migration, the two-tier policing that led to the grooming gangs scandals, and the challenges of multiculturalism, we would not have seen violence on the streets. But rather than opening up the conversation, our leaders evidently believe that further censorship is the answer. Instead of treating the cancer in society, the government has chosen to give the carcinogens a boost.

And this is only going to get worse. It seems that many of our politicians simply don’t understand free speech or why it’s so important. Activists in the US are attempting to see the first amendment modified so that “hate speech” is not protected, seemingly not anticipating that such a nebulous concept will forever be open to exploitation by future governments intent on silencing their political opponents. It’s as though they haven’t done any basic reading on the subject. If only someone had written a short and accessible book that covered the topic…

Social media is now the de facto public square, and X in particular is one of the few remaining platforms that makes some effort to ensure that a range of views can be represented. Compare this with YouTube, where content that represents a challenge to the ideology of the ruling class is either demonetised, slapped with a warning, or deleted entirely. So while X may be far from perfect, at least one is able to declare that human beings cannot change sex without being flogged for it.

The fear of the written word is one that we have seen before. The development of the printing press in Europe in the Middle Ages generated a kind of hysteria among the elites. Virtually overnight, the plebeians were able to read about world events unmediated by those in power. In 1501, Pope Alexander VI threatened to excommunicate those who printed texts without the permission of the church.

For obvious reasons, the dissemination of knowledge is a significant threat to those whose power depends on keeping the masses uninformed. When content moderators, government officials, or “fact checkers” refer to “disinformation”, they typically mean information that challenges the narrative they wish to promote. It is based on a contempt for the people; many of those in positions of authority simply do not trust their citizens to think critically. This is why so many politicians blamed “Russian bots” for Brexit, as though the electorate comprised of mindless drones who act on cue to commands issued on social media.

Rarely do these politicians stop to consider the plausibility of their position. Yes, there are some who are happy to submit to authority and whose opinions seem to derive from prejudice or fashion rather than individual reflection. But most people are perfectly capable of thinking for themselves, and would rather not be herded one way or the other. As Eduard Bernstein put it: “men have heads”.

Besides, why would we trust Silicon Valley tech giants, those who stated goal is the accumulation of as much money as possible, to decide which opinions are acceptable? Is there anyone who genuinely believes that true objectivity is possible when it comes to content moderation? Were those online accounts that were banned for suggesting that the Covid virus may have leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan really guilty of spreading “disinformation”? Or were they simply speaking out before others came around to their point of view?

The online space offers an ideal forum for bad ideas to be tested with better information and analysis. Censoring views that are inaccurate or misleading not only has a glamorising effect, it also highlights them. This is known as the “Streisand effect”, so called because Barbra Streisand’s lawsuit in 2003 against a photographer who had published a photograph of her home in Malibu drew even more attention to the image.

Moreover, it is unfeasible to attempt to eliminate falsehoods from human discourse. All of us are wrong about many things, and it is only through discussion and debate that we are able to edge closer to the truth. And what happens when the censors get it wrong? This is an inevitability that has been repeated wherever authoritarianism has prevailed. We saw it when the inquisition kept Galileo under house arrest for endorsing the Copernican theory of the earth’s motion around the sun. More recently, we saw it in Twitter’s decision to suppress the news story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. To trust any censor is to assume infallibility on their part.

It is a curiosity of our times that many self-proclaimed “leftists” now cheer on multi-billion-dollar corporations in their efforts to control the limits of free speech. Many of these same voices have become champions for state censorship, as though they have forgotten that this is a common factor in all totalitarian regimes. Those who fear the people speaking freely should admit that they mistrust democracy. Yet their anti-liberal instincts are invariably couched in euphemism and misdirection.

By escalating its assault on online speech, the UK government is seemingly falling for the same misconception that was expressed by the Guardian columnist who argued that free speech is “nothing more than a political ploy, a ruse, a term the far right wilfully abuse to spread hatred”. We have seen a similar view expressed by Gavan Titley in his book Is Free Speech Racist? (2020), in which he claims that freedom of speech “has been adopted as a primary mechanism for validating, amplifying and reanimating racist ideas and racializing claims”.

It should go without saying that speech is the most common mechanism by which grisly racist ideas are communicated. But this does not make speech itself a problem to be fixed. To restrict freedom of speech because we do not approve of how some people choose to exercise it is to abandon the very same principle that enables us to counter their views. If we renege on our commitment to this most fundamental of liberal values, we rob ourselves of the means to oppose the very worst ideas in society. Speech can spread bad ideas, but it can also see them quashed.

In other words, defending free speech means defending the rights of those whose speech we despise. Uncontroversial ideas require no such protection. History teaches us that censorship never eliminates unpleasant opinions; it merely protects them from scrutiny and allows them to grow.

And this strikes me as the fundamental problem that we currently face. Governments that are cracking down on online speech believe that this will be some kind of panacea to the conflicts within society. The precise opposite is the case. They are setting a trap for themselves and do not even realise it. I can only hope that the public is strong enough to resist these authoritarian trends.

And see the quote from Lord Justice Sedley at the beginning of this update.

https://andrewdoyle.substack.com/p/online-censorship-will-only-make

Universities

As you, dear readers, will probably know, the universities are the source of much of the gender ideology madness. Over to Charlotte Gill on her excellent substack, Woke Waste:

Universities UK: The charity that's received over £17m in taxpayer funding since 2019

But the Government "cannot afford to neglect" the Higher Education sector, says its CEO

Sep 09, 2024

“We cannot afford to neglect [the Higher Education] sector”, were the wise words of Vivienne Stern, CEO of Universities UK, on X today.

Damn straight. If it wasn’t for universities, after all, we’d have never had research on “Menstruation at the Movies”, “gay ‘pig’ masculinities” and “pregnant men”, among other groundbreaking discoveries. [ Dusty - gissajob!].

In her X video, Stern made clear that “Universities are a 'profit centre' for the country”, and that the Government can’t afford not to invest in them.

Very true…

But tragically universities have been ravaged by cuts, just like every other taxpayer-funded institution in Britain.

Take University UK’s accounts on the Charity Commission. It’s had to make do with a measly £3.82 million in government contracts and £13m in government grants since 2019 - just over £17 million in total.

Hashtag: austerity!

Please pray for everyone in the sector, especially Universities UK - whose charity work is desperately needed.

Otherwise, how would we know that universities are amazing?

And that we should give them more money?

https://www.charlottecgill.co.uk/p/universities-uk-the-charity-thats?r=7ogxh&triedRedirect=true

It’s Not Cricket

The New Zealand men’s cricket team will be playing Afghanistan where women are, of course, not even allowed to play cricket…sorry, any sport! As reported by Garwhoungle on The Ministry Has Fallen:

It's just not cricket

Three ways NZ bureaucrats and leaders are showing contempt for women

Sep 09, 2024

Cricket NZ: Playing cricket with the worst of women-haters

Women in Afghanistan can’t leave the house without male permission, can’t exercise, can’t look at men, can’t show any part of their face or body outside of the home, can’t run a business, and certainly can’t get an education. This year the ruling Taliban, the orchestrator of these violations, has doubled down: women must not speak or laugh if they can be heard outside the home, women are disappearing, women are being whipped and women are being stoned to death for alleged adultery. Australia repeatedly refuses to play Afghanistan in cricket because of the Taliban’s treatment of women and girls but Afghanistan’s good status among certain players remains. It’s still part of the International Cricket Council (ICC) despite ICC’s own rules that each member must support a national women’s cricket team (women haven’t been able to play sports in Afghanistan since September 2021). As for New Zealand, as I write the Black Caps are about to start playing a one-off Test against Afghanistan in India.

NZ Cricket has claimed that it’s better to play and advocate for Afghan women than boycott. This rings hollow. We don’t see any evidence that NZ Cricket is condemning the Taliban and its violence against women. In fact, in this weird video below, captains of the Afghan and New Zealand cricket teams jointly grin while removing a black veil from a trophy. It seems nothing short of gloating. It’s called an unveiling and anyone with an inkling of concern about what’s going on in Afghanistan would surely find this dark. We see a brotherhood and an inanimate trophy given the light of day denied to some 20 million human beings.

The full piece is here and includes two other pieces on the NZ police and the NZ Ministry of Justice de-sexing information.

https://theministryhasfallen.substack.com/p/its-just-not-cricket?r=7ogxh&triedRedirect=true

Confused Kids

Excellent piece on the substack for Parents with Inconvenient Truths About Trans suggesting the various reasons why kids might think they are ‘trans’.

Reasons Kids Say They Are Trans or Queer

Is “affirmation-only” appropriate?

Sep 10, 2024

Photo by ev on Unsplash

Many people have no idea what gender ideology means. They have difficulty grasping the medicalization of gender identities, which can involve prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children and facilitating surgeries to remove healthy body parts and healthy reproductive organs, usually resulting in sterilization. This alteration of a child’s natural body and physiology is overwhelming to think about or visualize, so many people look away and hope it works out okay.

Then there are trans allies, who usually have intentions originating from positive places of inclusion and love. Yet the trans doctrine encourages them to exclude anyone who disagrees with them and label anyone as “hateful” if they question gender ideology. An ally might have blind spots to the complexity of reasons for why a young person may self-identify as the opposite sex and proceed to medicalize and modify their bodies. They also ignore The Cass Review, which posits that there is insufficient evidence to justify the use of medical interventions for the treatment of gender dysphoria.

Because there are so many reasons a kid might say they are trans or queer, one cannot possibly highlight them all. For simplicity, here is a short list to give a reader who is new to the trans, queer, and gender-identity world (TQ+) an idea of how wide and deep declarations of trans or queer or other gender identities can reach. And along with that complexity, I raise the question of whether affirmation-only is an acceptable response to a child’s self-identification of a “new gender.”

Confusion after exposure to trans or queer persons, reading material, or internet/social media content

Drag queens are reading books to children in libraries and kindergarten classes. Some elementary schools teach about gender identities in classrooms and then encourage students to choose their identities and pronouns during the class. Books and charts such as Genderbread Person are becoming part of the teaching curriculum. Parents report that children are confused and sometimes distressed after returning home from “educational” school sessions that focused on gender identities and expressions, as well as sexual orientation. Children may be too young to understand exposure to a variety of gender/sexual choices, and they may experience discomfort or trauma from the presentation.

Some older children and teens spend prolific amounts of time online, browsing the web and social media. Access is usually not monitored or restricted. Kids have reported confusion and distress with these exposures and sometimes feel pressure to choose an identity not in alignment with their biological sex of girl or boy. They may also be experimenting initially and then find themselves caught in a web that is difficult to extract themselves from.

Internalized homophobia/gay shame

Kids may feel uncomfortable with same-sex attraction due to religious or other belief systems. Kids may “transition” so they can present as heterosexual instead of gay/lesbian. In some cases, the parent pushes the child to medically transition so they feel better about not having a gay kid, and in other cases, the child initiates the change, or the parents and the child initiate it together.

Social contagion

It has been reported in gender clinics that groups of girls who are friends or classmates all declare a “new identity” or express the wish to “transition” at the same time. Sometimes, the girls are socially awkward or on the autism spectrum, and the online groups they find make them feel special and that they belong. Love bombing in the group also helps welcome and bring in a new girl to a cluster of girls identifying as nonbinary or trans. [ Dusty - And see the book by Abigail Shrier Irreversible Damage ].

A cry for help

The child is anxious, depressed, or confused and may have difficulty with puberty or bodily changes. Home life or peer life may be stressful. COVID-19 lockdowns sent kids home from school, and they spent large amounts of time online, looking for ways to cope with the pandemic and the loss of in-person schooling and social interactions/activities. Sometimes, kids go to the internet to escape or seek answers to the distress they are experiencing. Online influencers are looking for distressed kids, and they guide the kids to funnel all their angst into a reason (they were born in the wrong body) and magic solution (medicalizing to present as the opposite sex). Kids get the message that coming out as “trans” and medicalizing their bodies will fix their issues and alleviate their distress.

Desire for attention or to feel special

A youth’s announcement that they are trans gets a lot of attention, so if a kid wants to focus attention on themselves, a trans identity will provide that centering from parents or those at school. Kids who declare they are trans are sometimes celebrated, and many kids want that attention, particularly if their life was boring, average, or “normal” before their announcement. In some cases, a desire to be a rebel might also be at play, with the goal to dismantle the “normative” life of their family and the pathway they believed was expected of them.

Enabled body discomfort or loathing

Many teen girls are uncomfortable with their bodies and may find the changes of puberty difficult. Many girls don’t like their breasts or the attention, comments, and looks they receive. They may have experienced unwanted groping, sexual trauma, or abuse. One way to stop the attention or touching is to hide, bind, or remove their breasts. Due to affirmation-only policies, very few practitioners are allowed to help a girl feel comfortable or accept her natural body. Others may enable a dislike of the body by encouraging measures to alter it. Social media filters and other public images of “ideal body types,” which, in real life, are unobtainable to achieve, also promote issues with body dissatisfaction. Boys can also fit into this category.

Trauma response

Some kids and young adults declare they are trans because of trauma, which might be sexual trauma, a significant relationship loss, or other events in which dysregulation occurs and adaptive coping mechanisms are compromised. For a girl who has been abused or assaulted, she may believe she will have more power if she “transitions” to present as a boy. Or she may just wish to erase her prior life, name, and body presentation to escape or disassociate from the identity and body of the person who had been heartbroken, hurt, abused, or traumatized.

Elevated status for parents

In pockets of the country that are particularly focused on social justice issues, having a trans kid might be considered “progressive” by the parent, who showcases their trans kid to gain an elevated status at work or in the community. Once the parent gets rewards or esteem for saying they have a trans kid, it is hard not to push the kid further down the medicalized pathway. The sunk cost fallacy may also come into play, as it is hard to divest a direction where time, energy, and money have been spent or to acknowledge that self-serving motives were a factor in encouraging their kid to transition.

Disturbing images or porn

Kids are being exposed to drag queens and scantily clad people in pride events and parades, which are often disrespectful to women and disturbing to a child’s mind. There is a trend to normalize mastectomies for girls, and it is easy to find mastectomy scars featured on social media platforms. Online porn is readily available to kids as well, and porn is a big industry. Kids are exposed to fetish porn, too, which has led to paraphilias such as autogynephilia for boys who become sexually aroused by dressing or presenting as a girl or woman. Sadly, online groomers also encourage kids, often boys, to behave or do things online in a sexual way, creating an abuse cycle. Some kids are so traumatized by groomers that they desire to escape from their bodies due to humiliation and shame.

Desire for individuation or autonomy from parents

Some children or young adults who have parents who are overwhelming in their involvement or attachment to the child will move into a trans identity to separate from or achieve autonomy from a parent. The kid’s desire to become independent of the parent takes an extreme form of medicalizing against the parent’s wishes. The desire of a girl to individuate from her mother or a boy to individuate from his father can become strong enough that cross-sex hormones and surgeries seem to be the only solution for the young person. This may be a conscious or unconscious motive.

Black-and-white thinking or autism spectrum disorder consequences

Increasingly, more and more kids who identify as trans are on the autism spectrum. They may not have had an official diagnosis, but they express autistic traits. One of those traits is black-and-white thinking. The kids might not feel comfortable in their bodies or might not fit typical sex-based stereotypes. This body unease is funneled into the concept that they must have been born in the wrong body, and they believe medical procedures to help them present as the opposite sex will fix their discomfort.

Belief in queer theory

Queer theory is the extreme belief that all norms, traditions, categories, and structures must be blurred, dismantled, dissolved, and destroyed, including the sex categories of female and male. Once biology, the family, schools, organizations, and society are broken of all previously held values and ways of living and behaving, a new society and structure can be created. The current model of this theory seems to consider it progressive to upend and destabilize all previously held beliefs and norms. A particular target to dismantle is cisheterosexuality or cisheteronormative people or structures. What does that mean? People who still identify in adulthood as the sex in which they were born (female or male) and people who are heterosexual or “normal” must be blamed for the ills of society and for keeping people oppressed. Being a victim or identifying as a marginalized category is preferred because being an oppressor is demonized. And if you are not yet marginalized, you can move in that direction by identifying as trans.

Internalized white shame or male shame

Some kids have ingested and internalized that being white and privileged is a bad thing to be (particularly white males) because queer theory teaches the concepts of “oppressor and victim.” The “Wheel of Privilege and Power” diagram is a tool used to teach kids about marginalization. Being a “cisgendered man” and a heterosexual are linked to power and privilege (along with other categories, such as being white, having wealth, being a property owner, and more). By “transitioning,” the kid believes they can move out of or escape from being viewed as a powerful, privileged oppressor, thereby reducing the shame they have internalized by accepting the theory. Boys seem particularly vulnerable to feeling shame, and they sometimes choose to present as girls to lessen what they perceive as hatred toward males, who often are labeled as having toxic masculinity. Furthermore, they have a hard time living up to male ideals and think their life will be easier as a woman. Both boys and girls can also desire an escape from the responsibility of being a man or a woman.

Trapped soul

Some kids believe they have a gendered soul. If their soul is the opposite of their biological sex, they must free the soul from the prison of the wrong body and change their body with cross-sex hormones and surgeries to match their soul. These kids want full and unrestricted access to all procedures of their choice to correct the mismatch of soul and body.

Combinations

Not only are there more reasons kids say they are trans, but many of these reasons are combined to form the trans or gender-identity complex. Due to gender affirmation care, these reasons are not allowed to be explored, which makes medical transitions ripe for scandal, inadequate care, and malpractice. Furthermore, a growing, multibillion-dollar industry enjoys profiting from the unchecked and unchallenged gender medicalization of our youth. While the public grapples with what is happening and the root cause of it all, the gender industry makes money by creating medical patients for life. Quick, promised fixes for distress by offering medicalized procedures can lock in an identity before full maturity or investigation and treatment of underlying comorbidities can occur.

Parents who want their kids’ bodies left alone, and others who do not endorse this medical model of care, are often demonized and labeled as transphobic. With this range of possibilities and reasons for trans identification, is it still appropriate to ask no questions when children or young adults step into new gender identities and wish to medicalize those identities? Many people, books, and films discuss these reasons, and detransitioners also share this information.

How many kids must be harmed by inadequate care from affirmation-only policies followed by adverse reactions to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries before further investigation is pursued? How many kids have to vocalize regrets, whether or not they detransition, before their voices are heard? Some may feel happy with their body modifications, but with no protective safeguards in the US (as of 2024) before medicalization occurs, how will we sort it all out and ensure the medical oath of “Do No Harm” is considered first? It is time to question the merits of affirmation-only for declared gender identities. Our kids deserve better care than an activist-driven medical model, which encourages a medicalization pathway for children instead of looking at, investigating, and treating the root cause of their distress or addressing the reasons they self-identify as trans or queer.

It behooves the uninformed and the ally alike to pause before encouraging, enabling, and cheering on the transitioning of healthy children and young adults with irreversible, drastic medical interventions without first exploring a differential diagnosis and the underlying cause of the individual’s distress or motives for medicalizing their bodies. Giving blanket endorsement for an inadequate care model without investigating the complexity beneath it must stop. And if you inadvertently colluded with stances and policies without fully investigating or understanding them, please cease immediately. We must unite to provide better care to children, the future of our society.

https://www.pittparents.com/p/reasons-kids-say-they-are-trans-or?publication_id=374402&utm_campaign=email-post-title&r=1v403b&utm_medium=email

Endpiece By Liz

#BeMorePorcupine

#XX

#SaveWomensSport

The next update will hopefully be on Friday or Saturday, Terven.

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