Excellent reporting. One thing that gets lost in the “transing the gay” mantra is that with a 70% increase in pediatric gender clinic referrals from 2020-2021 (Reuters) and the vast majority of gender diverse COVID kids being female, most of the girls I know opted out of being female, not bc of sexual orientation but bc of the stress young women are under to measure up to an unattainable beauty standard, I would hypothesize that this is one significant reason why during COVID lockdown, there was a significant increase in post pubescent youth coming out as gender diverse. Many of the kids I know are not “feminine boys” or “masculine girls” and most still present as their birth sex, but still get medicalised.
Great film. But let’s be clear about Edwards-Leeper - she is no hero. Read her AAP article and see how she categories “Trans-kids” by the toys they like, their haircut choices, and other nonsensical stereotypical gender roles. She was trans’ing kids who would have grown up to be gay. She is the Mother of transitioning kids in the United States. She brought medicalization of children here. https://open.substack.com/pub/ourduty/p/friend-or-foe-which-best-describes?r=m4hpz&utm_medium=ios
Edwards-Leeper, Cass, and others allow that some kids may benefit, so there's a view that families with full knowledge should retain the ability to consent to blockers (and in England, Finland, Sweden, etc. they will be closely followed in a clinical trial). Another viewpoint is that parents should not be able to consent to treatments that have known harms to future sexual function and fertility. What's indisputable right now is that there is no reliable way to predict if or which kids will benefit.
“Trans” is a term for human sexual mimicry, sexual mimicry being a well-examined biological phenomenon, if you follow ethnobiology and evolutionary biology.
Men mimic women to avoid sexual and social competition with other men, and to gain access to female-only enclaves for sexual gratification and reproductive opportunity, like male sexual mimics in a variety of species. Women mimic men to avoid male sexual attention and to asset authority over resources for themselves to reproduce as female sexual mimics do in other animals, particularly mammals.
Essential to advanced mimicry is belief that it’s not mimicry, since the mimic doesn’t accidentally signal deception. Perfect rationality is less effective than the appearance of instinct, and is a feature of game theoretic thinking. The more people you can induce into the belief that it’s not mimicry, the more efficient and effective it is.
We humans are animals particularly adept at cross-sex mimicry because in grooming we constantly wash off sex scent markers, and women ovulating give off no pheromones - hidden estrus. As well we cover our genitals constantly with clothing, and can easily pad and adjust clothing to change body shape. Men routinely feminize themselves in grooming by removing facial hair. It’s hard to _not_ to find examples of cross-sex mimicry possibilities when you consider how we groom, clothe, speak, smell and entertain ourselves.
Medicine is completely lost biologically with the story on trans, by not understanding and interpreting it as a type of natural, compulsive, delusional sex mimicry. The available science research and thought on sex mimicry has advanced substantially since Dr Money sexually mutilated and tortured male children to prove the mutability of the fiction of “gender”. It’s worth deep reading on the subject before assessing the value of medical atrocities perpetrated on children again, and again. You might start with Richard Dawkins who had some good observations on male cuttlefish who are able under cognitive control present female on a side facing a male, and present male on a side facing a female, simultaneously, to impregnate the female without competition.
Psychiatry is correct in saying that affirming a delusion harms the person and those around them. They failed collectively (though clearly not individually) to understand this behavior is a “bizarre” class delusion (denying easily observable reality). Affirming delusion creates a delusional-induction network, or folie à plusieurs, or mass psychosis, or mass psychogenic illness.
Because of this, are no benefits from affirming the delusion, it only furthers the break from reality for the person, and increases the chance of self-harm, harm to others, a life-threatening psychotic break from reality, and completed suicide. Forget child genital mutilation, these are views on adults.
There is no circumstance where you can morally, ethically, or logically claim mutilating the genitals of children chemically or surgically is to their benefit.
I respect your work, it’s exemplary.
Extend it and avoid the epistemic closure of medicine within the richer world of biology.
Do read on sex mimicry. It is an incredibly simple, accurate, elegant explanation for a constellation of emergent behaviors.
Humans tend to deny that they are animals and operate like them in innumerable ways. Especially grating is finding out that our apparently complex psychology can be often be reduced to a chemical signal, or metabolism, or genetics.
I accept all of this, except the phrase “women ovulating give off no pheromones”. I don’t know whether it’s pheromones, but they give something off. To me it smells approximately like Cerruti 1881 Pour Femme, but gentler, not so extreme.
Most female mammals signal ovulation with pheromones, and body temperature change - they are “in heat”. Pheromones are sensed by male animals and it initiates sex. Pheromones also are relatively odorless. The chemosensory organs of most mammals are quite important to them.
Key is that pheromones are not really something “smelled” like an odor, they are something sensed with what is called the vomeronasal organ coupled with the accessory olfactory bulb. It is usually wired into the brain like any sensory organ.
The human vomoeronasal organ is not wired at all, and we lack an accessory olfactory bulb. We cannot really sense pheromones directly, but we can absorb pheromones nasally and they can activate certain brain regions. That’s not the same as sensing. We have poor chemosensory systems.
Interestingly, the gay male, bisexual male and female, and straight female hypothalamus activate on exposure to androstenedienone, only produced by males, in sweat, semen and saliva.
The lesbian, bisexual male and female, and straight male hypothalamus activates on exposure to estratetraenol which is most present in female urine. It doesn’t change concentration anywhere near the same as other mammals during ovulation.
Unless you are drinking female urine or male semen, ordinary washing is well enough to erase all traces of these chemical signal and obliterating the ability to signal sex.
I agree. None of those children will actually benefit. It's such a shame this Pandora's box was ever opened, so now some children and/or their parents think puberty suppression is a viable option. It's the fault of narrow minded physicians and parents though, not the children. Adults are supposed to take care of children and giving puberty blockers to gender dysphoric or gender non-conforming youth was never a good idea. Misguided to the max.
"Gender dysphoric" is the biggest lie the whole shitshow of "gender medicine" is based on. Most kids go through all sorts of explorations and emotions during puberty/childhood, while absorbing the world around them and finding their own self. Through the twenties, for many...and on. Life is finding our place. The fact this is used to medicalize kids, many who if left alone will be lesbian or gay, is a medical scandal of our time. They are likely also gender non-conforming, that is, defying sex stereotypes. They need support, boundaries, safeguarding, knowledge, adults who care, perhaps therapy if trauma etc, not drugs and surgeries. Never.
Yep, you are right! Gender dysphoric is misleading at best, when it's really just a feeling that is most often a reaction to sex stereotypes that many kids don't feel they measure up to. Adults need to help children learn to say "F that!" (excuse the phrase). It's still possible, since gender nonconformity was considered cool in the 80s when I was young and it was cool, and still is. "Gender conformity" can also be fine, as long as it's not imposed on anyone. "Free to be you and me!" Drugs and surgeries are not a sign of being free.
It is biologically implausible that any child could benefit from any of the components of 'gender-affirming care', ever. And it is abusive for those of us who call ourselves doctors to use the doctrine of informed consent to get parents to to inflict this on their children, to think that children can consent to this, and to think that we can then do this - cut off their breasts, mutilate their genitals, give them wrong sex hormones and tell them they were born in the wrong body. No, never, ever.
That is the difference - we parents don’t believe ANY child should have their future stolen. Nor has anyone been able to tell me which child it benefits and why.
Really appreciate this film. The current White House's "aggressive" tone IMO is a reaction to the past White House's full speed ahead attitude with Levine at the wheel. We have lost the middle ground. I think the trans activists just went too far. Schools were hiding information from parents if that child was socially transitioning. Gov Newson made it illegal for schools to notify parents etc...for every action there is a reaction. I think the film failed to connect the two extremes.
The biggest challenge isn't confronting the gender identity pushers but rather getting past the self-anointed justice warriors who have become the gatekeepers of media. And unfortunately , it is the far left coming from "elite" institutions into positions of influence that are preventing "inconvenient" truths from being published.
Well done, and so very professionally done (which is such a rarity these days). Some people will argue that platforming Laura Edward-Leeper's idea that there is a True Trans (TM) who will Actually Benefit (TM) from cross-sex hormones is ludicrous. But her presence is essential in laying bare the duplicity of WPATH. "I am an insider and I have to speak out against my organization's practices" is a necessary component of any fraud investigation, and we cannot wait for the perfect messenger to deliver such a message.
Instead, let's take LEL's statement at face value (that there is something called true trans (TM), but their numbers are orders of magnitude smaller than the numbers that are currently being prescribed to), in conjunction with what Cass has pointed out (that there is no way one can predict in advance who that True Trans Child (TM) is), and then watch LEL (or anyone else in her camp) twist herself into a pretzel to explain what those predictive criteria are and show that those criteria have predictive power on historical data (like we do in machine learning). The end result will be as it has been in the UK. As The Times (London) reported, even though cross-sex hormones aren't banned in the UK, there has not been a single new pediatric patient receiving cross-sex hormones since the closure of the Tavistock pediatric gender clinic: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/healthcare/article/nhs-swaps-gender-drugs-for-holistic-care-jxhm3b6vk. In the new gender clinics within the NHS, the diagnosis is now holistic, as it should have always been. Let the child go through (as per The Times report) the phalanx of psychologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians, clinical nurse specialists, speech therapists, and occupational therapists, and by the end of it all, he or she would have forgotten why they were in the clinic in the first place.
If that is what we end up with, with LEL still clinging to her religion and believing that there is a True Trans Child (TM) but there's not a single new prescription for any of these hormonal interventions, and the FTC and law firms like Campbell Miller Payne swooping down on the existing gender clinics (if they are still open), we who want to end this unscientific, barbaric practice might not have won the argument, but we will have effectively won the war.
Thank you for this. I hope it gets wide play. But I fear that only those of us who already get it will see it, and those who are wedded to the myth of "transitioning" will do what they always do -- the metaphorical equivalent of closing their eyes, sticking their fingers in their ears, and shaking their heads.
WPATH is a political lobbying outfit, not a medical organization. Its so-called guidelines are a farce and an assault on bodily integrity, not to mention basic biology. Their actions to stifle medical research are in, in my opinion, criminal, and I wish they would be sued into oblivion. It kills me that Edwards-Leeper is still a supporter and member of this corrupt organization. "Rachel" Levine is a man. And a fraud. He, too, has done untold damage to people, especially children.
I agree with Jamie Reed that Trump's Executive Order might actually do more damage, because those in my tribe -- liberals -- are only digging in their heels deeper. I despise Trump with every fiber of my being, but I acknowledge the adage that even a stopped clock is right twice a day (in his case, the "gender" EO and the DEI EO). So while his EO was the right thing to do, the knee-jerk reaction from the left is to oppose it.
(One quibble with the documentary format itself -- and I know this will never change, and all documentaries do it -- is that it's too difficult to read text and hear someone speaking at the same time and comprehend both. The human brain doesn't do a good job of that. With this and all other docs, I find myself having to go back and pause in those spots, either to read what's on the screen or listen to what the voice is saying, and then go back and vice-versa.)
Hearing Levines voice did it to me. I’m a pediatrician appalled by the ideological capture of my professional org. Seeing him speak at a session that I used to attend and being considered a woman by all these educated pediatricians makes me want to puke. His voice is a man’s voice. He is a man. This is the emperors new clothes enacted with no one able to say (except the protestor) that this is a man.
Also when he assumed a certain aggressive stance towards the female reporter when he refused to be interviewed. He was displaying his greater physical power as a male.
Really well done. Spot on from my perspective. You ended on a bit of a (exquisitely grammatically correct) cliffhanger. Whom does it serve? When will we find out?
Excellent reporting. One thing that gets lost in the “transing the gay” mantra is that with a 70% increase in pediatric gender clinic referrals from 2020-2021 (Reuters) and the vast majority of gender diverse COVID kids being female, most of the girls I know opted out of being female, not bc of sexual orientation but bc of the stress young women are under to measure up to an unattainable beauty standard, I would hypothesize that this is one significant reason why during COVID lockdown, there was a significant increase in post pubescent youth coming out as gender diverse. Many of the kids I know are not “feminine boys” or “masculine girls” and most still present as their birth sex, but still get medicalised.
Great film. But let’s be clear about Edwards-Leeper - she is no hero. Read her AAP article and see how she categories “Trans-kids” by the toys they like, their haircut choices, and other nonsensical stereotypical gender roles. She was trans’ing kids who would have grown up to be gay. She is the Mother of transitioning kids in the United States. She brought medicalization of children here. https://open.substack.com/pub/ourduty/p/friend-or-foe-which-best-describes?r=m4hpz&utm_medium=ios
Edwards-Leeper, Cass, and others allow that some kids may benefit, so there's a view that families with full knowledge should retain the ability to consent to blockers (and in England, Finland, Sweden, etc. they will be closely followed in a clinical trial). Another viewpoint is that parents should not be able to consent to treatments that have known harms to future sexual function and fertility. What's indisputable right now is that there is no reliable way to predict if or which kids will benefit.
“Trans” is a term for human sexual mimicry, sexual mimicry being a well-examined biological phenomenon, if you follow ethnobiology and evolutionary biology.
Men mimic women to avoid sexual and social competition with other men, and to gain access to female-only enclaves for sexual gratification and reproductive opportunity, like male sexual mimics in a variety of species. Women mimic men to avoid male sexual attention and to asset authority over resources for themselves to reproduce as female sexual mimics do in other animals, particularly mammals.
Essential to advanced mimicry is belief that it’s not mimicry, since the mimic doesn’t accidentally signal deception. Perfect rationality is less effective than the appearance of instinct, and is a feature of game theoretic thinking. The more people you can induce into the belief that it’s not mimicry, the more efficient and effective it is.
We humans are animals particularly adept at cross-sex mimicry because in grooming we constantly wash off sex scent markers, and women ovulating give off no pheromones - hidden estrus. As well we cover our genitals constantly with clothing, and can easily pad and adjust clothing to change body shape. Men routinely feminize themselves in grooming by removing facial hair. It’s hard to _not_ to find examples of cross-sex mimicry possibilities when you consider how we groom, clothe, speak, smell and entertain ourselves.
Medicine is completely lost biologically with the story on trans, by not understanding and interpreting it as a type of natural, compulsive, delusional sex mimicry. The available science research and thought on sex mimicry has advanced substantially since Dr Money sexually mutilated and tortured male children to prove the mutability of the fiction of “gender”. It’s worth deep reading on the subject before assessing the value of medical atrocities perpetrated on children again, and again. You might start with Richard Dawkins who had some good observations on male cuttlefish who are able under cognitive control present female on a side facing a male, and present male on a side facing a female, simultaneously, to impregnate the female without competition.
If you’re a journalist, then try google scholar:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=sex+mimicry+in+higher+animals+&btnG=
It’s a lot to read.
Psychiatry is correct in saying that affirming a delusion harms the person and those around them. They failed collectively (though clearly not individually) to understand this behavior is a “bizarre” class delusion (denying easily observable reality). Affirming delusion creates a delusional-induction network, or folie à plusieurs, or mass psychosis, or mass psychogenic illness.
Because of this, are no benefits from affirming the delusion, it only furthers the break from reality for the person, and increases the chance of self-harm, harm to others, a life-threatening psychotic break from reality, and completed suicide. Forget child genital mutilation, these are views on adults.
There is no circumstance where you can morally, ethically, or logically claim mutilating the genitals of children chemically or surgically is to their benefit.
I respect your work, it’s exemplary.
Extend it and avoid the epistemic closure of medicine within the richer world of biology.
There's no end to the complexities here, thank you for the comment and reading recs.
Do read on sex mimicry. It is an incredibly simple, accurate, elegant explanation for a constellation of emergent behaviors.
Humans tend to deny that they are animals and operate like them in innumerable ways. Especially grating is finding out that our apparently complex psychology can be often be reduced to a chemical signal, or metabolism, or genetics.
I accept all of this, except the phrase “women ovulating give off no pheromones”. I don’t know whether it’s pheromones, but they give something off. To me it smells approximately like Cerruti 1881 Pour Femme, but gentler, not so extreme.
Most female mammals signal ovulation with pheromones, and body temperature change - they are “in heat”. Pheromones are sensed by male animals and it initiates sex. Pheromones also are relatively odorless. The chemosensory organs of most mammals are quite important to them.
Key is that pheromones are not really something “smelled” like an odor, they are something sensed with what is called the vomeronasal organ coupled with the accessory olfactory bulb. It is usually wired into the brain like any sensory organ.
The human vomoeronasal organ is not wired at all, and we lack an accessory olfactory bulb. We cannot really sense pheromones directly, but we can absorb pheromones nasally and they can activate certain brain regions. That’s not the same as sensing. We have poor chemosensory systems.
Interestingly, the gay male, bisexual male and female, and straight female hypothalamus activate on exposure to androstenedienone, only produced by males, in sweat, semen and saliva.
The lesbian, bisexual male and female, and straight male hypothalamus activates on exposure to estratetraenol which is most present in female urine. It doesn’t change concentration anywhere near the same as other mammals during ovulation.
Unless you are drinking female urine or male semen, ordinary washing is well enough to erase all traces of these chemical signal and obliterating the ability to signal sex.
That is all extremely interesting. Thank you so much for your detailed response.
"Edwards-Leeper, Cass, and others allow that some kids may benefit"
They have zero evidence for that statement, as you know full well.
I agree. None of those children will actually benefit. It's such a shame this Pandora's box was ever opened, so now some children and/or their parents think puberty suppression is a viable option. It's the fault of narrow minded physicians and parents though, not the children. Adults are supposed to take care of children and giving puberty blockers to gender dysphoric or gender non-conforming youth was never a good idea. Misguided to the max.
"Gender dysphoric" is the biggest lie the whole shitshow of "gender medicine" is based on. Most kids go through all sorts of explorations and emotions during puberty/childhood, while absorbing the world around them and finding their own self. Through the twenties, for many...and on. Life is finding our place. The fact this is used to medicalize kids, many who if left alone will be lesbian or gay, is a medical scandal of our time. They are likely also gender non-conforming, that is, defying sex stereotypes. They need support, boundaries, safeguarding, knowledge, adults who care, perhaps therapy if trauma etc, not drugs and surgeries. Never.
Yep, you are right! Gender dysphoric is misleading at best, when it's really just a feeling that is most often a reaction to sex stereotypes that many kids don't feel they measure up to. Adults need to help children learn to say "F that!" (excuse the phrase). It's still possible, since gender nonconformity was considered cool in the 80s when I was young and it was cool, and still is. "Gender conformity" can also be fine, as long as it's not imposed on anyone. "Free to be you and me!" Drugs and surgeries are not a sign of being free.
It is biologically implausible that any child could benefit from any of the components of 'gender-affirming care', ever. And it is abusive for those of us who call ourselves doctors to use the doctrine of informed consent to get parents to to inflict this on their children, to think that children can consent to this, and to think that we can then do this - cut off their breasts, mutilate their genitals, give them wrong sex hormones and tell them they were born in the wrong body. No, never, ever.
That is the difference - we parents don’t believe ANY child should have their future stolen. Nor has anyone been able to tell me which child it benefits and why.
Really appreciate this film. The current White House's "aggressive" tone IMO is a reaction to the past White House's full speed ahead attitude with Levine at the wheel. We have lost the middle ground. I think the trans activists just went too far. Schools were hiding information from parents if that child was socially transitioning. Gov Newson made it illegal for schools to notify parents etc...for every action there is a reaction. I think the film failed to connect the two extremes.
Appreciate the feedback!
Thanks Jennifer. I’ll restack this. A full documentary is needed. This is a great start.
WPATH, Levine et al are bad actors.
When levine talks it is so false it’s almost as though he’s narrating a Disney film.
When something is so wrong, I disagree with the idea that dissenters can’t do anything. You walk away and whistleblow. En masse.
Stop transing gay kids.
As clear and cogent as that.
This is much needed. Looking forward to more.
The biggest challenge isn't confronting the gender identity pushers but rather getting past the self-anointed justice warriors who have become the gatekeepers of media. And unfortunately , it is the far left coming from "elite" institutions into positions of influence that are preventing "inconvenient" truths from being published.
Well done, and so very professionally done (which is such a rarity these days). Some people will argue that platforming Laura Edward-Leeper's idea that there is a True Trans (TM) who will Actually Benefit (TM) from cross-sex hormones is ludicrous. But her presence is essential in laying bare the duplicity of WPATH. "I am an insider and I have to speak out against my organization's practices" is a necessary component of any fraud investigation, and we cannot wait for the perfect messenger to deliver such a message.
Instead, let's take LEL's statement at face value (that there is something called true trans (TM), but their numbers are orders of magnitude smaller than the numbers that are currently being prescribed to), in conjunction with what Cass has pointed out (that there is no way one can predict in advance who that True Trans Child (TM) is), and then watch LEL (or anyone else in her camp) twist herself into a pretzel to explain what those predictive criteria are and show that those criteria have predictive power on historical data (like we do in machine learning). The end result will be as it has been in the UK. As The Times (London) reported, even though cross-sex hormones aren't banned in the UK, there has not been a single new pediatric patient receiving cross-sex hormones since the closure of the Tavistock pediatric gender clinic: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/healthcare/article/nhs-swaps-gender-drugs-for-holistic-care-jxhm3b6vk. In the new gender clinics within the NHS, the diagnosis is now holistic, as it should have always been. Let the child go through (as per The Times report) the phalanx of psychologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians, clinical nurse specialists, speech therapists, and occupational therapists, and by the end of it all, he or she would have forgotten why they were in the clinic in the first place.
If that is what we end up with, with LEL still clinging to her religion and believing that there is a True Trans Child (TM) but there's not a single new prescription for any of these hormonal interventions, and the FTC and law firms like Campbell Miller Payne swooping down on the existing gender clinics (if they are still open), we who want to end this unscientific, barbaric practice might not have won the argument, but we will have effectively won the war.
Thank you for your thoughts and feedback, much appreciated.
Great post, and thanks!
Thank you for doing difficult but necessary work.
Congrats on the new Stack, Jennifer! I'm looking forward to reading more from you.
Excellent documentary. Great choice to avoid music and overdramatize what did not need any more dramatization than the shocking facts of this story.
Good point. I appreciated that without noticing!
If people want to hear an audio of the activist yelling "Stop transing gay kids!" at Admiral Levine during the American Academy of Pediatrics conference, I published it here: https://benryan.substack.com/p/stop-transing-gay-kids-biden-admin
Connecting with Ted Balaker might be useful. He has a film on Amazon, Coddling the American Mind. https://thecoddlingmovie.substack.com/
Thank you for this. I hope it gets wide play. But I fear that only those of us who already get it will see it, and those who are wedded to the myth of "transitioning" will do what they always do -- the metaphorical equivalent of closing their eyes, sticking their fingers in their ears, and shaking their heads.
WPATH is a political lobbying outfit, not a medical organization. Its so-called guidelines are a farce and an assault on bodily integrity, not to mention basic biology. Their actions to stifle medical research are in, in my opinion, criminal, and I wish they would be sued into oblivion. It kills me that Edwards-Leeper is still a supporter and member of this corrupt organization. "Rachel" Levine is a man. And a fraud. He, too, has done untold damage to people, especially children.
I agree with Jamie Reed that Trump's Executive Order might actually do more damage, because those in my tribe -- liberals -- are only digging in their heels deeper. I despise Trump with every fiber of my being, but I acknowledge the adage that even a stopped clock is right twice a day (in his case, the "gender" EO and the DEI EO). So while his EO was the right thing to do, the knee-jerk reaction from the left is to oppose it.
(One quibble with the documentary format itself -- and I know this will never change, and all documentaries do it -- is that it's too difficult to read text and hear someone speaking at the same time and comprehend both. The human brain doesn't do a good job of that. With this and all other docs, I find myself having to go back and pause in those spots, either to read what's on the screen or listen to what the voice is saying, and then go back and vice-versa.)
So glad to see you here on Substack. I have subscribed and look forward to your posts.
Hearing Levines voice did it to me. I’m a pediatrician appalled by the ideological capture of my professional org. Seeing him speak at a session that I used to attend and being considered a woman by all these educated pediatricians makes me want to puke. His voice is a man’s voice. He is a man. This is the emperors new clothes enacted with no one able to say (except the protestor) that this is a man.
Also when he assumed a certain aggressive stance towards the female reporter when he refused to be interviewed. He was displaying his greater physical power as a male.
Really well done. Spot on from my perspective. You ended on a bit of a (exquisitely grammatically correct) cliffhanger. Whom does it serve? When will we find out?
Thank you and for the gold star in grammar. I'd love to interview you sometime!