Religion is a Mental Illness

Voting Against ‘Wokeness’ Is Not Single-Issue Voting—It’s Every-Issue Voting

Wokeness is a totalizing worldview—a lens through which nearly every policy area is viewed and scrutinized.

realityslaststand.com

As the election approaches, American voters are compelled to introspect and decide who will earn their vote. Naturally, this decision-making process involves identifying which issues they hold most near and dear. For some voters, a single issue—such as immigration, abortion, or free speech—determines their choice. Increasingly, however, many Americans are also considering their stance on “wokeness”—a term often used to describe the perceived excesses of Critical Social Justice ideology, which encompasses Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, and Postcolonialism—as a potential deciding factor.

In 2021, at a rally in Cullman, Alabama, Donald Tru.mp famously quipped that “everything woke turns to shit,” and that it’s “a shortcut to losing everything you have.” Similarly, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has expressed vehement opposition to wokeness—“Woke needs to die”—and has even signed the Stop WOKE Act, which prohibited the teaching of certain activist concepts surrounding race and gender in schools and businesses. Vivek Ramaswamy, a 2024 presidential candidate, centered much of his campaign on opposing wokeness, even authoring a book in 2021 titled Woke, Inc. Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam.

Critics often dismiss voters primarily motivated by a disdain for wokeness as narrow-minded or overly engaged in the culture wars. For instance, earlier this week, neuroscientist and noted Tru.mp critic Sam Harris, during a debate with conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, labeled these people as “low information voters.” He argued, “[T]here are many people for whom wokeness and far-left identity politics has become a single issue around which they’re going to react.” But is Harris’ characterization of these people as “single issue” voters accurate?

The answer is no, because the reality is that wokeness is multifaceted, and voting to oppose it does not equate to a “single issue” stance like voting based solely on abortion access or climate change policy. The adverse impacts of wokeness are neither peripheral nor trivial. Contrary to portrayals by some on the left, wokeness extends beyond mere debates over bathroom access or children’s library books. It poses a profound threat to a wide range of fundamental values cherished by many Americans. This is because wokeness is a totalizing worldview—a lens through which nearly every policy area, from science and medicine to education and social issues, is viewed and scrutinized. Consequently, a voter primarily driven by opposition to wokeness is closer to an “every-issue” voter than a “single-issue” voter.

Woke concepts like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are used to reshape policies at every level. This worldview challenges some of our most fundamental and valued beliefs, such as equality under the law and valuing individual merit over group identity. Instead of honoring individual achievement, “equity” demands that all disparities—whether in the workplace, the classroom, or the justice system—be eliminated to produce equal outcomes. This is routinely accomplished through preferential treatment based on race, sex, and other identities that comprise the intersectional stack. This represents a perfect reversal of Martin Luther King Jr.’s timeless ethical guidance to judge people “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Elevating group identity over the individual not only fuels racial tensions but also undermines both King’s Dream and the American Dream.

The negative impact of policies rooted in the woke concept of “equity” is profound and not always immediately obvious. Consider the Minnesota African American Family Preservation and Child Welfare Disproportionality Act, signed into law by Governor Tim Walz, Vice President Harris’ running mate, in response to activists’ complaints about racial disparities in the child-welfare system. How is this statistically equal racial outcome achieved, you ask? By making it more challenging to remove black children from abusive and unsafe environments. Such actions have resulted in a rise in the proportion of black child maltreatment deaths. To echo the thoughts of Thomas Sowell, woke equity appears more focused on sounding good than on being effective.

The First Amendment—our fundamental right to free speech—is a primary target of woke ideology. Just weeks ago at the 2024 Forbes Sustainability Leaders Summit, former secretary of state John Kerry described the First Amendment as “a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer [disinformation] out of existence.” Tim Walz also demonstrated a misunderstanding of free speech by stating on multiple occasions that there is “no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech,” despite the Supreme Court’s repeated affirmation that there is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment. Woke DEI policies have become synonymous with censorship, restricting ideas and individuals that don’t align with a narrow view of what constitutes “inclusion.” Therefore, voting against wokeness is not about opposing diversity but about defending open debate and merit-based achievement.

The catastrophic impact of Queer Theory on science and medicine cannot be overstated. Queer Theory contends that reality is merely a construct devised by the powerful to sustain their dominance, positioning itself in stark opposition to scientific principles. It insists that all natural categories, even fundamental biological distinctions such as male and female, must be “queered” out of existence to achieve liberation. This ideology has transformed reality into a farcical Monty Python sketch, where men claim to be women and demand to be treated as such in every conceivable context, including sports, prisons, and sex-segregated public spaces. The influence of Queer Theory on medicine has led to the widespread acceptance of pseudoscientific concepts like the “sex spectrum” and an innate “gender identity” or “brain sex” that purportedly can be misaligned with one’s physical body. These views are used to justify interventions like halting the puberty of confused and troubled children, followed by administering sterilizing cross-sex hormones and conducting extreme and irreversible “gender-affirming” surgeries.

As a scientist committed to the truth, addressing the spread of this harmful pseudoscience and protecting children from permanent bodily harm is a major concern.

Wokeness extends its reach further through Postcolonialism, which reduces all geopolitical events to a binary of oppressor versus oppressed, typically based on perceived colonial status. Nowhere is this more glaring than in the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, especially following Hamas’ October 7th massacre of over 1200 men, women, and children in Israel. The woke “decoloniality” framework labels all Israeli residents as “colonizers,” thereby casting innocent civilians as legitimate targets. Considering the pervasive history of human colonization over past millennia, it suggests that no group could claim legitimate ownership of any land without the possibility of being forcibly expelled or slaughtered. Because of this, I’ve previously described the ideology of decolonization as a woke parallel to jihad.

The examples of the detrimental effects of woke ideology on our society and globally are extensive, and I’m sure readers can identify many more. Importantly, woke ideology is not a marginal belief; its impacts are profound and widespread, representing a degradation at the core of numerous values that Americans hold dear.

Let’s be clear: Tru.mp is the anti-woke candidate. While I’m not in the business of telling people how to vote, it stand to reason that if you agree with my premise that the problem with wokeness is not a single issue but closer an every-issue, then the choice becomes more clear. A vote for Tru.mp is a gamble to purge our institutions of wokeness and its pervasive influence. A vote for Harris would guarantee its further entrenchment. Can they recover?

You may object—didn’t wokeness dramatically intensify during Tru.mp’s first term? Indeed, it did. Even Sam Harris, during his aforementioned debate with Ben Shapiro, expressed concerns, stating, “it will be all woke all the time under Tru.mp.” But wokeness gets more rabid during a Tru.mp presidency for the same reason the possessed girl’s head in The Exorcist started spinning and spewing vomit when the priests began the exorcism process. The woke ideologues possessing our institutions will not relinquish their power voluntarily, and will go absolutely bonkers in the process of losing it. Nevertheless, this should not deter us from initiating the exorcism process.

Ultimately, opposing wokeness means upholding fundamental principles cherished by many Americans: equality of opportunity, freedom of speech, scientific integrity, and women’s sex-based rights. To dismiss opposition to wokeness as a “single issue” trivializes the magnitude of the ideological shift at stake and its destructive nature on everything it touches. Voting against wokeness is not single-issue voting—it’s voting to protect nearly every issue that matters.

The choice is yours. And we can still be friends if we disagree.

Dr. Colin Wright is the CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand, an evolutionary biology PhD, and Manhattan Institute Fellow. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, Queer Majority, and other major news outlets and peer-reviewed journals.

HHS Has Misled on Gender Medicine

The Department of Health and Human Services’ documented failures to hold gender medicine to scientific standards have happened under both Re

City Journal

The Department of Health and Human Services’ documented failures to hold gender medicine to scientific standards have happened under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

Studies with robust study designs and larger, defined patient populations assessed with objective endpoints or validated test instruments were given greater weight than small, pilot studies. Reduced consideration was given to studies that were underpowered for the assessment of differences or changes known to be clinically important. Studies with fewer than 30 patients were reviewed and delineated, but excluded from the major analytic framework. Oral presentations, unpublished white papers, and case reports were excluded. Publications in languages other than English were excluded.

Most of these patients had CPP but a handful were transgender kids using the drugs off label. We found no effect on bone (after factoring in catch-up growth), including no increase in fracture risk. We did find increased risk of depression and suicidality, as well as increased seizure risk and we issued [safety labeling changes] to the entire class for these [Adverse Events] (added to [Warnings and Precautions] in 2017). . . . Regarding use of GnRH agonists in the transgender population, no company [that produces puberty blockers] has come in for this indication to date. DUOG [Division of Urology, Obstetrics, and Gynecology] has done a patient listening session with trans kids and separately with trans adults, which I participated in, and there is definitely a need for these drugs to be approved for gender transition, as they are typically not covered by insurance and are expensive out of pocket. It was my understanding that DUOG would take these applications if and when any do come in.

New Evidence Challenges Justification for Child Gender Transitions

New data casts doubt on orthodoxy that 'trans kids become trans adults,' challenging the whole basis for justifying child gender transitions

The New York Sun

A pair of analyses of insurance-claims data each found that the majority of youths diagnosed with gender-related distress saw that diagnosis vanish from their medical chart within six years.

As the question of the constitutionality of banning pediatric gender-transition treatment barrels toward a showdown at the Supreme Court, a parallel philosophical debate over the stability of transgender identity in young people is coursing throughout the global court of medicine and academia — with no end in sight.

The prevailing view among leaders at American pediatric gender clinics holds that if an adolescent experiences persistent gender dysphoria — meaning distress due to a conflict between their biological sex and their gender identity — this will likely remain a lifelong condition. Transgender teens typically become transgender adults, the orthodoxy holds.

A substantial bloc of skeptics, though, including the lead author of Britain’s recent landmark Cass  Review of pediatric gender medicine, argue that the existing science and data are insufficient to back this presumption. The ability of specialists to predict the future of youths with gender dysphoria, such critics claim, is compromised by a woeful lack of long-term follow-up data from the few available studies that follow gender-dysphoric youths over time.

Yet the doctors who dominate this insular medical field in America insist there is no need to even assess the true gender identity of any gender-distressed child who comes into their clinic. 

What the child says goes. 

Hanging in the balance of this intellectual battle are hundreds of thousands of American tweens and teenagers who are distressed — often deeply so — about their gender. Many of them seek hormonal, and in some cases even surgical, treatments to change, in some cases irreversibly, their secondary sexual characteristics.

Now, a pair of new analyses of medical-records data are challenging the orthodoxy on the permanence of adolescent gender dysphoria. German and American investigators found that the majority of gender dysphoria-related diagnoses, including so-called gender incongruence, recorded in a minor or young adult’s medical chart were gone within within five or six years. 

Thomas D. Steensma, a health psychologist at Amsterdam UMC in the Netherlands and a leading pediatric gender medicine researcher, tells the Sun that identity exploration is a central, and perhaps the defining, quality of adolescence. “What we can conclude from these analyses,” he said of the new medical-claims investigations, “is that the prevalence of gender incongruence-related diagnoses has increased over the years; that the diagnosis does not persist in all people diagnosed; and that gender identity is still in development in children and minors.”

The surging population of young people with gender dysphoria today is starkly different from their counterparts who came of age a generation ago and on whom much of the pediatric gender-transition treatment model remains based. Today’s gender-dysphoric youths have a particularly high rate of other psychiatric diagnoses and autism and are much more likely to be natal girls who only began to suffer from gender-related distress in adolescence.

The critical question of whether an adolescent’s gender-related distress is expected to persist into adulthood lies at the heart of the fierce, and fiercely politicized, national debate about whether minors who believe they are trangender should undergo gender-transition treatment with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

The belief that youth gender dysphoria is permanent is likely behind a bold argument recently made by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Wpath is an influential, largely U.S.-based medical activist group that publishes widely followed care and treatment guidelines for trans persons. The organization stated in April that the majority of trans-identified youths would be best served by a medical transition. 

The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law estimates that 300,000, or 1.4 percent, of Americans between 13 years and 17 years old identify as transgender. So the implication of Wpath’s argument is that at least 150,000 teenage minors, or one in 145, should be taking gender-transition drugs in any given year, with 30,000 or more such young medicated people hitting 18 and entering adulthood annually.

The ethics of beginning minors on what is typically meant to be lifelong hormonal treatment are controversial. Such powerful drugs pose the risk of rendering young people infertile and burdening them with permanent sexual dysfunction. And a half-dozen systematic literature reviews — the gold standard of scientific evidence — have found that the use of such medications to treat pediatric gender dysphoria is supported by weak and largely inconclusive research. 

Vocal supporters of broad pediatric access to such medical interventions, such as the Lgbtq nonprofits Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD and the ACLU, frequently seek to tip the ethical balance by claiming that gender-transition treatment is “life saving” for adolescents. The only study ever to assess the veracity of this oft-repeated claim — a paper that was published in February to considerable pushback and scrutiny from the pediatric gender medicine field — found that such treatment was not independently associated with a statistically significant difference in the suicide death rate among young people. 

All these complex ethical considerations notwithstanding, a widely influential 2018 policy statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics on what’s known as the gender-affirming care method for trans-identified minors instructs care providers to show deference to the child’s self-concept and preferences. These can include a medical gender transition.

The AAP policy statement goes so far as to assert that “research substantiates that children who are prepubertal and assert an identity of TDG”—meaning transgender or what’s known as gender diverse — “know their gender as clearly and as consistently as their developmentally equivalent peers” whose sex and gender identity are aligned. 

Dr. Robert Garofalo, director of the gender, sexuality and HIV prevention center at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, was a contributor to the AAP’s policy statement and practices what the organization preaches. He said in a widely viewed — and criticized — video interview that youths typically come into his clinic “knowing exactly what they want.”

Anxious parents, he said, will sometimes assume the clinic’s role is to assess whether their child “is really trans.” At that point, he said with a self-assured grin, “I’ll turn to the child and be like, ‘Yeah, so what gender identity do you have?’” 

Dr. Garofalo said he re-orients these parents’ expectations by explaining to them the reality of what transpires — or does not transpire — after a child seeking puberty blockers sets foot in a typical pediatric gender clinic. He tells the parents: “There’s no form, there’s no scale, there’s no psychological battery of tests that needs to be done” to assess the child’s true gender identity.

Psychologist Diane Ehrensaft and psychiatrist Jack Turban are both professors at the University of California, San Francisco, and are prominent figures in the pediatric gender-clinic field. In April, they published a paper in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry outlining the major facets of the Wpath-recommended assessments of pediatric patients who seek gender-transition treatment. They echoed Dr. Garofalo by instructing care providers to communicate to adolescents “that the goal is not to determine whether patient ‘is really transgender’.” 

Only vaguely alluding to what’s known as desisting or detransitioning —meaning reverting from a trans identity back to identifying as one’s biological sex, or perhaps switching to a nonbinary identity, in which an individual identifies as somewhere between male and female, or as neither  — the pair of UCSF academics further advised discussing with the adolescent what they characterized as “the small but non-zero possibility of one’s understanding of their gender identity evolving over time.” 

Dr. Turban has gone so far as to strongly suggest in his recent book about transgender kids that these assessments should be done away with altogether. Families, he suggests, should essentially decide for themselves whether to begin an adolescent on gender-transition treatment according to what’s known as an informed-consent model—a process involving no greater guardrails than what it takes to secure a pediatric prescription for an antidepressant.

Drs. Turban, Garofalo, and Ehrensaft did not return a request for comment.

The threat of litigation from detransitioners might scare gender doctors away from the lax prescribing Dr. Turban appears to advocate. 

The AAP policy statement itself has prompted a lawsuit against the organization, filed in October by the Texas law firm Campbell Miller Payne on behalf of a detransitioner, Isabelle Ayala. As a teenage girl, Ms. Ayala received cross-sex hormones from the author of the policy statement, Brown University’s Dr. Jason Rafferty, during the time when, still a medical resident, he was drafting the document.

Ms. Ayala alleges that the information Dr, Rafferty and his colleagues provided that led her parents to provide informed consent for the treatment was insufficient and misleading — in other words, allegedly coercive. Regretful of the testosterone treatment she received, she now worries about her fertility and laments the changes the treatment caused to her body.

More broadly, new academic inquiries call into question the certainty held by gender-clinic doctors that their gender-distressed adolescent patients are necessarily so clear-eyed about their future.

Leor Sapir, a research fellow at the Manhattan Institute, analyzed insurance-claims information from a database covering about 85 percent of insured Americans and spanning from 2017 to 2023. Publishing his findings on August 30 in the institute’s lay publication, City Journal, Dr. Sapir estimated that overall, about 320,000 to 400,000 minors received a gender dysphoria-related diagnosis during this period.  

Dr. Sapir zeroed in on a cohort of about 6,600 adolescents who in 2017 were between 12.5 years and 17.5 years old, had a gender dysphoria-related diagnosis in their medical chart that year, and for whom doctors continuously filed medical claims through 2023. He found that at the end of this six-year period, only about 45 percent of these young people had such a diagnosis entered in their file. 

In a similar analysis Dr. Sapir conducted that began with a wider cohort of about 9,150 people who were in 2017 between 7.5 years and 17.5 years old, he found that just between 42 percent and 45 percent of them retained a gender dysphoria-related diagnosis in their chart by 2023.

In June, a German team published a similar study in Deutsche Aertzeblatt, for which they analyzed 2013 to 2022 medical claims data in Germany among those who were 5 to 24 years old. They found that the annual diagnosis rate of gender dysphoria-related conditions in these young persons increased eightfold over the course of the decade, with 15- to 19-year-old natal females consistently posting the highest diagnosis rates.

The investigators found that of the nearly 7,900 young persons with gender dysphoria-related diagnoses in 2017, just 36 percent, including the majority of all age groups, still had such a diagnosis entered in their file in 2022. The steepest drop-off was among the group of natal females who were in their late teens in 2017, just 27 percent of whom retained such a diagnosis five years later.

“These studies are very important because we have had too few longitudinal studies in this area,” said Erica Anderson, a psychologist and former head of Wpath’s U.S. division, who has recently become one of the organization’s most vocal critics. Too many pediatric gender specialists, she said, “have relied upon self-attestation of gender and presumed that desistance is rare. These studies directly challenge that approach.” 

A key limitation of insurance-claims analyses such as those from Dr. Sapir and the German team, however, is that they cannot reflect the various precise reasons why a healthcare provider entered—or did not enter—a diagnosis into a patient’s chart in any given year. It remains possible that some young people never identified as transgender despite having a gender dysphoria diagnosis. Otherwise, young people who only temporarily had such a diagnosis entered into their chart might have maintained a trans identity and dysphoria alike without prompting any doctor to file an insurance claim based on the latter condition.

If these patients were indeed receiving ongoing treatment for gender-related distress, whether through mental health care or gender-transition medications, and sought insurance coverage for it, their doctors would likely have had cause to repeatedly enter a gender dysphoria-related diagnosis code when filing for reimbursement. So at the least, a lack of one of the related diagnosis codes suggests a lack of treatment for dysphoria during a given year.

Sarah Burke, a senior researcher in the department of psychiatry at the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands, noted that Dr. Sapir’s analysis has not been peer reviewed, and that the German study was published in what she called “only a local journal.” She said, “So I somewhat doubt the significance of these data.”

Kenneth Zucker, a veteran psychologist in the pediatric gender field, said of Dr. Sapir’s analysis, “If I could be reassured that there is accuracy in the inference of desistance based on these data, then I would say that this is a really important data set that should be published in a peer-reviewed journal.” 

Dr. Burke’s reservations about the new analyses notwithstanding, she said their findings were in keeping with those of her own recent study, which examined what she dubbed “gender noncontentedness” among young people. Publishing their paper on February 27 in the Archives of Sexual Behavior (of which Dr. Zucker is the editor), she and her coauthors analyzed long-term survey responses among Dutch youth to the statement “I wish to be of the opposite sex.” Importantly, this single question can’t pinpoint youth with gender dysphoria in particular. While 11 percent of those in early adolescence expressed such a wish, by their mid-20s, just 4 percent did. 

Dr. Burke said that her study findings “tell us that gender diversity should be much more de-pathologized, and that feelings of gender incongruence are a normal part of development for many youths, and that there is probably an overdiagnosis” of gender dysphoria and gender incongruence.

Stephen Rosenthal, a professor of pediatrics in the division of pediatric endocrinology and the emeritus medical director of UCSF’s Child and Adolescent Gender Center, added that the pair of new insurance-claims analyses are limited by the fact that they don’t provide information about the context in which the gender dysphoria-related diagnoses were made. “In particular,” he said, “was there a thorough assessment by a qualified mental health gender specialist ​prior to making a determination of gender dysphoria and initiating some form of gender-related care?”

“Unfortunately, in my opinion,” Dr. Rosenthal said, “this interdisciplinary model of care is not followed by all gender clinics.” 

In stark contrast to his junior colleague, Dr. Turban, Dr. Rosenthal suggested that a wider adoption and optimization of such comprehensive assessments could help identify which adolescents with gender dysphoria are most likely to see the condition persist.

“Can thorough mental health assessments be more widely integrated into care and optimized so that those who really need or benefit from gender-related care can be more clearly identified?” Dr. Rosenthal asked. 

Amsterdam UMC’s Dr. Steensma agreed with Dr. Rosenthal’s interpretation that the new analyses highlight what he asserted was the vital importance of such assessments. He further said that the populations captured by the analyses were possibly different from those who seek help from gender clinics.

Given how difficult it can be to secure a first appointment at such clinics, the clinics’ patient populations are at least arguably more likely than gender dysphoric youth as a whole to experience the condition severely and persistently; and thus the likelihood that this condition will persist may accordingly be higher among that group than among those who are only diagnosed with dysphoria by doctors outside of such clinics.

“What is important is that gender dysphoria or incongruence does not necessarily imply the need for medical gender-affirming treatment,” Dr. Steensma said.

M.I.T. philosophy professor Alex Byrne, on Monday published a letter to the editor in the Archives of Sexual Behavior in which he summed up the persistent enigma about this medical field: “Is childhood-onset gender dysphoria that persists into early puberty — or, alternatively, worsens with early puberty — highly persistent in adolescence and adulthood if untreated?” he asked. “In the opinion of many experts, yes. But the published evidence does not bear this out. The persistence rate, like the detransition rate, is unknown.”

Referring to pediatric gender medicine, Dr. Sapir said in an email, “The field is virtually built on the assumption that, unlike childhood gender dysphoria which almost always desists, adolescent GD almost never does, resulting in a favorable risk: benefit ratio and ethical justification. At minimum, the evidence simply isn’t there.”

He continued: “Nor is the retreat to ‘true trans’ persuasive. As noted by the Cass Review, there is no diagnostic test that’s reliable enough to pick out the true trans kids from the temporary trans kids. And even if such a test existed, the vast majority of gender clinicians (it would seem) are not even trying to make such distinctions.”

Dr. Stephen Levine, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Ohio and an influential critic of pediatric gender-transition treatment, put the matter more starkly.

“A high percentage of affirmatively treated people will not continue with medicalization,” Dr. Levine predicted of youths with gender dysphoria. “Some will be tragic outcomes.” 

Why Queer Theory Appeals to Young People (and What We Can Do About It)

Queer theory takes marginalized young people, who already feel that their lives are built on a foundation of sand, and tells them that even

realityslaststand.com

It’s hard to be a human being when the world is so chaotic that you can’t find your right direction can’t find a life that aligns with your inner purpose and you feel inauthentic and unfulfilled like an actor who hates the role he plays.

The genes get the ball rolling on the first draft of the brain, but the brain is “expecting” the child to engage in thousands of hours of play—including thousands of falls, scrapes, conflicts, insults, alliances, betrayals, status competitions, and acts of exclusion—in order to develop. Children who are deprived of play are less likely to develop into physically and socially competent teens and adults.

We assume the Self is transcendent—it just exists, constant and universal. And we reason from there. It was exactly this certainty that Foucault wanted to attack…Foucault understood how we think of the Self as constructed, no less a cultural artifact than a vase, a chair, or a building.

...among their list of 72 genders, MedicineNet lists “Egogender.” What is egogender? “It is a personal type of gender identified by the individual alone. It is based on the person’s experience within the self.” MedicineNet also lists “Cloudgender: The person’s gender cannot be comprehended or understood due to depersonalization and derealization disorder.” This ideology tells people who already feel alone or isolated that any attempt to connect with others is hopeless, for their immutable characteristics (in this case, gender) make it impossible. A core part of an individual cannot be “comprehended,” “identified,” or “understood” by anyone else.

Repeating what is already learned can be comforting and therefore desirable; students’ learning things that question their knowledge and identities can be emotionally upsetting. For example, suppose students think society is meritocratic but learn that it is racist, or think that they themselves are not contributing to homophobia but learn that in fact they are. In such situations, students learn that the ways they think and act are not only limited but also oppressive. Learning about oppression and about the ways they often unknowingly comply with oppression can lead students to feel paralyzed with anger, sadness, anxiety, and guilt; it can lead to a form of emotional crisis.

Not surprisingly, some educators choose not to teach such information or to lead students to uncomfortable places. In fact, in response to my presentations on anti-oppressive education in conferences and classrooms, university educators and students have questioned whether it is even ethical to knowingly lead students into possible crisis by teaching things that we expect will make them upset. Felman (1995) suggests that learning through crisis is not only ethical, but also necessary when working against oppression. What is unethical, she suggests, is leaving students in such harmful repetition….Therefore, educators have a responsibility…to draw students into a possible crisis.

Julian Adorney is a columnist at Reality's Last Stand and the founder of Heal the West, a substack movement dedicated to preserving liberalism. He’s also a writer for the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR). Find him on X: @Julian_Liberty.

Mark Johnson is a trusted advisor and executive coach at Pioneering Leadership and a facilitator and spiritual men's coach at The Undaunted Man. He has over 25 years of experience optimizing people and companies—he writes at The Undaunted Man’s Substack and Universal Principles.

Geoff is a Relationship Architect/Coach, multiple-International Best-Selling Author, Speaker, and Workshop Leader. He has spent the last twenty-six years coaching people world-wide, with a particular passion for supporting those in relationship, and helping men from all walks of life step up to their true potential. Along with Mark, he is a co-founder of The Undaunted Man.

Medical institutions must treat the Cass review as a significant event and act upon it

Publication of the Cass review in April 2024 was a seminal moment in contemporary medicine. Hilary Cass, a consultant paediatrician, was com

The BMJ

Publication of the Cass review in April 2024 was a seminal moment in contemporary medicine. Hilary Cass, a consultant paediatrician, was commissioned by NHS England to report independently on “the services provided by the NHS to children and young people who are questioning their gender identity or experiencing gender incongruence.” The background was an increase in referrals—of mainly “birth registered females in early teenage years”—to gender identity clinics from 2014 at an “exponential rate.”

The conclusions of the Cass review should not be surprising to anyone who has watched the promotion of medical interventions as necessary or curative in young people with gender dysphoria. As Cass states, there is a “lack of evidence” on the long term impact of hormonal prescriptions in young people, for example. Work now begins on how to design better, more evidence based, holistic services. The conclusion that services “must operate to the same standards as other services seeing children and young people with complex presentations and/or additional risk factors” is astonishing, in that it needed to be said. We need, says the report “a different approach to healthcare, more closely aligned with usual NHS clinical practice.” In other words, this suggests that the approach the NHS has taken with respect to gender dysphoria has been at odds with the usual, evidence based approach taken elsewhere. This should be deeply discomfiting. As the dust settles, and we reflect on the report’s conclusions, we should ask why this has happened.

There are multiple potential explanations. One is alluded to clearly by Cass: “the toxicity of the debate is exceptional,” she writes. Indeed. I know many senior medics who were concerned about the lack of evidence for interventions, but felt their reputation and job would be under threat if they spoke up. Anonymous personal attacks online is one thing; personal abuse from senior medics for raising clinical concerns is quite another. When considered in the context of whistleblowing more broadly, medicine clearly has an ongoing problem.

But when it comes to large, well funded, professional medical organisations, there is even less excuse. The job of medical institutions is in large part to remember the mistakes of history. These organisations should respond with care, consider evidence, uncertainty, and the recurrent tendency of well meaning medicine to do harm with good intentions. Popularity should be resisted over the need for evidence and caution. This requires strong leadership. Shutting down, or trying to shut down debate about serious clinical uncertainties—as has happened—is unacceptable.

This has not been helped by the multiple lobby groups, welcomed by many institutions to influence their policy making in this area. The same rules that we would normally use to guard relationships with any other pressure group—be it promoters of disease “awareness campaigns” or party politicians looking for support—seem to have dissolved against social pressure to achieve a compliance badge on a website.

The other explanation for what has happened that I think pertinent is this. Doctors, quite rightly, have been afraid to make the same mistakes as medicine did when homosexuality was treated as an illness in the 1950s. Then, electric shocks, desensitisation, hormones, and psychotherapy were attempted to be used to “treat” homosexuality—shamefully. What medicine did then was to intervene—ineffectively and harmfully—in something that was not a disease and should not have come under a medical purview. As Cass states, for most young people experiencing gender dysphoria, it is temporary; it is often associated with neurodiversity; it mainly resolves over time, and medical intervention does not benefit the majority. There is a comparison, but it is in favour of medicine backing off from prescriptions and surgery, and understanding why a phenomenon might be happening, why it is being seen in a medical context, and what is the best and least harmful way to respond to such expressed and profound distress.

I urge major medical institutions to treat the Cass review as a significant event, and consider what they have contributed, both negative and positive, to the damning conclusions. Was speaking up in their organisation possible, and welcomed? Did people raising concerns have fair hearings, or were they attacked or dismissed? Did the organisation enable rational debate, or instead attempt to shut it down? Did the organisation acknowledge uncertainty and the potential for harm in current practice? I don’t expect any of that to be easy. But without understanding what has happened, we will only be ready to make the same mistakes again, just in a different set of circumstances.

"Okay, I know you guys are gonna tell me I'm crazy, but I think all gay men would benefit from a gender transition. And it's like, guys, not being gay literally saved my life. It saved my life you guys, and it's like, as a gay man think of all the benefits for you, right.

You get to go through your life without dealing with homophobia or discrimination, you get to date straight guys, and you don't have to deal with, like, being seen as abnormal for being your feminine self. You know, you can be feminine and you're just gonna a be a feminine woman, right.

And it's like, honestly, in the year of 2024, maybe being gay is an outdated concept. Maybe it's just an outdated concept. Because why are we allowing people to live in a dark room where they're seen as a minority when we have the medical advances to make them like the majority, to have a successful gender transition and to live a normal life."

Colin Wright: Sex really is binary. So that should be the least likely for an individual to identify out of.

Reporter: Do you think identifying as a different race is offensive?

Interviewee #1: Um, this is a very good question. I think... I don't know.

Reporter: Why is it socially acceptable to be transgender, but it's not socially acceptable to be transracial?

Interviewee #2: I think that's like, they're very different things. I think that, like, I, I don't know how to phrase this in a way, but I--

Wright: So, I think this really highlights just the ideological nature of what's going on, because if we're going to take two things, sex versus race, no sex really is binary. So that should be the least likely for an individual to identify out of. Whereas, racial categories, they're actually much more fluid. You can actually be biracial and anywhere in between in the mix of all kinds of different races. But the fact that they will allow a person to, you know, identify as the opposite sex, but not an opposite race, really, those should be flipped if they're going to be consistent with their belief system. But as you can see, they just said, that's just sort of the way it is.

Here’s where things get interesting. There’s arguably a better case for identifying as a different (perceived) “race” than a different gender.

The average black American has about 20% European ancestry, and about 5% Native American ancestry. “Race” is a spectrum. On the other hand, every human is either male or female.

Surely it’s no more unreasonable for an ostensibly “black” person to embrace their 15% white Scottish heritage than to embrace their 15% black Ghanan heritage. Why can’t you choose which bits of yourself to “identify” as/with? Why can someone identify as “cupcakegender” (I shit you not 🤡) and demand you use their pronouns, but someone else can’t “identify with” her black great-grandmother? One of these is actually real.

The Pride movement has nothing to be proud of

The LGBT lobby has betrayed gay youngsters in the name of gender ideology.

spiked-online.com

This year’s Pride Month has rarely seemed so pointless. After all, only the truly shameless in the LGBT activist set could feel any pride in 2024 – a year in which the rainbow-flag fliers’ betrayal of gay youngsters in the name of gender ideology was laid bare.

The publication of the Cass Review in April exposed the scandal of the NHS’s treatment of ‘gender confused’ kids. It showed how the NHS’s Gender Identity Development Services (GIDS) subjected troubled, often gay youngsters to life-altering hormones, drugs and treatments. Yet when these same-sex-attracted young people needed a gay movement, it failed them. Stonewall, its principal representative, actively cheered on those encouraging gay youngsters to believe they were born in the wrong body. Former Stonewall CEO Ruth Hunt even warned parents that half their gender-distressed children would commit suicide without puberty blockers. At the same time, leading sections of the gay movement turned on anyone questioning the trans agenda.

You won’t see any reflection on this betrayal of gays and lesbians during Pride Month. There will be no recognition that by embracing gender ideology, the gay-rights movement of today has undermined the gay rights of tomorrow. Instead, an unholy alliance of corporates, trade unions and parading gendercrats will spend weeks celebrating their supposed virtue, while remaining oblivious to the absurdity and growing unpopularity of the movement they represent.

Don’t let the ubiquitous Pride flag fool you over the coming weeks into thinking this is a successful movement. How strong can a ‘gay rights’ movement be if it has allowed its next generation to be chemically castrated? How strong can a movement be that has allowed lesbians like Kathleen Stock or Julie Bindel to be deplatformed, harassed and sacked for standing up to gender ideology?

The new ‘Progress Pride’ flag tells the story of the movement’s corruption. A new trans chevron makes an ugly incursion from the left, with an ‘intersex-inclusive’ purple circle placed on top of it (despite some intersex activists asking not to be included). This is more of a logo now and less of a flag. It symbolises the hostile takeover of the gay-rights movement by gender-identity ideology.

Pride was once our answer to shame. The riposte to being kicked out of your home for coming out. The retort to everyday incidents of homophobia, which are now thankfully a thing of the past in the UK and the West.

Today’s Pride is different. It is not a response to a sense of shame. It is a false pride born of shamelessness. A pride fuelled by the self-righteous embrace of the cause of trans rights. Think of Stonewall CEO Nancy Kelley calling lesbians ‘sexual racists’ in 2021 for not wanting to have sex with biological males. Think of those happily suppressing moderate gay voices for warning that ‘conversion-therapy bans’ simply criminalise ordinary therapy for gender-confused youth. Or how Stonewall did everything in its power to hound gender-critical barrister Allison Bailey out of a job.

If one must take pride in anything during Pride Month, I prefer to find it in the spirited and steadfast work of women and gay people in the UK who, against all the odds, have taken on gender ideology and its champions within the gay movement. Organisations like LGB Alliance and the Gay Men’s Network, which I direct, have done sterling work in defending gay rights from the predations of gender ideology. It has been tough. We have had to battle against an elite consensus. It wasn’t that long ago that both Theresa May and, later, Sir Keir Starmer were promising Pink News that gender self-identification would become law. Now, in part thanks to the efforts of gay-rights activists and gender-critical feminists, the sitting and shadow secretaries of state for health and social care are committed to implementing the findings of the Cass Review.

Pride, the holy month of the rainbow, is now a thoroughly rudderless affair. Its foolish embrace of the specious cause of trans rights has cost it dear. This increasingly silly party now takes place against the backdrop of a generation-defining medical scandal that Pride and its backers endorsed. Even Stonewall seems cowed. It certainly seems less keen to pronounce that transing a two-year-old is a good idea than it was just a few years ago.

Pride should parade its way into irrelevance. The gay-rights activism of the future will need to look very different.

Dennis Kavanagh is a director of Gay Men’s Network.

What Is Queer Theory? A Rejection of the Received Wisdom of Our Ancestors

Because many social norms are generally good, queer theorists’ campaign against all social norms will result in serious harm.

realityslaststand.com

As the very word implies, ‘queer’ does not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate object; it acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence.

Extending modern capitalism and consumption, homonormativity has emerged in queer theory, entrenching a transparent White, neoliberal subject, one who replicates heteronormativity (Duggan, 2004). In this variation, homonormativity anesthetizes queer communities into passively accepting alternative forms of inequality in return for domestic privacy and the freedom to consume (Manalansan, 2005).

Although individuals’ experiences are profoundly complex, schooling often categorizes people in ways that train each of our ways of being into compliance with an inflexible ‘script’ (Keenan, 2017b). That script, which is enforced through formal institutions as well as through social interaction, operates on multiple levels. The script of gender teaches the public not only what gender is in some essential sense – setting up a binary between womanhood and manhood – but that some gendered ways of being are acceptable and others are not. In the USA, for example, many people learn that the most valued boy will be white, engage in rough-and-tumble play with other boys that will toughen him up and straighten him out, allowing him to mature into a man who wears a suit and tie, makes a lot of money, enters into a sexually monogamous marriage with a woman, buys a home, and has enough but not too many children. In other words, a script that may begin with gender shapes how individuals are taught to understand their expected roles in society in ways that extend far beyond gender alone.

I am reminded of the first time my friend Tony pulled down his jeans to show off his new $33,000 penis. As I looked on with fascination, he began razzing me with various invitations, all of which had the words “my dick” and “suck” in them. I quickly found myself immersed in the usual complex reaction I have to the idea of giving head, until it dawned on me that—given the donor site for his graft—I would be sucking off his forearm.

One day in 1867, a farm hand from the village of Lapcourt, who was somewhat simple-minded…was turned in to the authorities. At the border of a field, he had obtained a few caresses from a little girl, just as he had done before and seen done by the village urchins round about him; for, at the edge of the wood, or in the ditch by the road leading to Saint-Nicolas, they would play the familiar game called ‘curdled milk.’ So he was pointed out by the girl’s parents to the mayor of the village, reported by the mayor to the gendarmes, led by the gendarmes to the judge, who indicted him and turned him over first to a doctor, then to two other experts who not only wrote their report but also had it published. What is the significant thing about this story? The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration. 

Deconstruction and postmodernism are not so much a set of truth claims as a set of philosophic tools and ideas for dismantling existing truth claims. That it, is [sic] intended to take knowledge systems apart rather than to suggest what might take their place […] It’s more than a little like Scarlet O’Hara, promising breathlessly that ‘tomorrow…is another day,’ without knowing that tomorrow will be better, or even explaining why it should be. In this sense, postmodernism seems to trade on the assurance that newness itself is filled with enough promise.

Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house.

Julian Adorney is the founder of Heal the West, a Substack movement dedicated to preserving our liberal social contract. He’s also a writer for the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR). Find him on X: @Julian_Liberty.

Unlike gay identity, which, though deliberately proclaimed in an act of affirmation, is nonetheless rooted in the positive fact of homosexual object-choice, queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality. As the very word implies, “queer” does not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate object; it acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. “Queer,” then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative—a positionality that is not restricted to lesbians and gay men but is in fact available to anyone who is or who feels marginalized because of her or his sexual practices. ― David Halperin, "Saint Foucault"

"Lisa, what are you rebelling against?" "Whaddya got?"

The End of a Top Science Journal's Commitment To Pursuing Truth

A new article from the world's leading science journal Nature encourages researchers to incorporate transgender activism to influence how re

buttonslives.news

“Our aim is not to halt scientific enquiry. But when it comes to transgender identity, knowledge cannot be pursued in isolation from the many societal factors that shape how that knowledge is received and acted on.”

"The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true." ― Carl Sagan

"Sex is real... But the belief that we have a moral duty to accept reality just because it is real is, I think, a fine definition of nihilism." ― Andrea Long Chu, gender cultist and lunatic

“The facts may tell you one thing. But, God is not limited by the facts. Choose faith in spite of the facts.” ― Joel Osteen, religious nutcase and lunatic

Support for Stonewall crumbles after Cass review

The LGBT rights charity has come under intense scrutiny for its stance on trans rights, with the NHS and other public bodies reviewing their

thetimes.co.uk

A decade ago, as same-sex marriage became legal, Stonewall was riding high.

Lauded for its key role in pushing for equal rights and campaigning prowess, it was helping government departments and schools expand their diversity offering and become more welcoming to all.

Now, the NHS has distanced itself and other public bodies are reviewing their associations with the charity, as the fallout from a landmark report on gender identity shines a spotlight on the organisation.

Stonewall, Britain’s most well-known LGBT rights charity, has come under intense scrutiny for its stance on trans rights since the publication of the report by Dr Hilary Cass.

Campaigning for transgender people became a key part of Stonewall’s offering from 2015, including backing the prescription of “puberty blockers” for transgender teenagers.

The Times revealed last week that the charity had tried to suppress early warnings to schools about the shaky evidence base, telling teachers to shred a resource pack which highlighted potential dangers.

But Cass found that children experiencing gender distress and wanting to transition had been let down by a lack of research and “remarkably weak” evidence on medical interventions.

She said studies had been “exaggerated or misrepresented by people on all sides of the debate to support their viewpoint” and there was a “toxicity” in discussions, with young people being caught in “stormy social discourse”.

Critics have put some of the blame for that at Stonewall’s door.

Baroness Hunt of Bethnal Green, who ran Stonewall between 2014 and 2019, said in an interview with The Times that she had never attempted to shut down debate and that her only regret was trusting the “experts”. She said she did not recognise the characterisation of Stonewall as being a bullying campaign group.

But one source close to the charity said it was Stonewall’s increasing stance of “demanding” change rather than campaigning and enabling progress to be made that had caused issues.

They said: “What Stonewall does now is ‘we demand you agree with this, we demand you agree with that, we demand the next thing’, and it just doesn’t enable that bigger principle which is ‘what support should we be giving to some young people and vulnerable young adults so that they can make the best decisions for their life?’”

They added: “Some people think it shouldn’t be campaigning on trans rights at all, I think that’s up to it and that’s not my point. My point is that actually it just didn’t build broad alliances and it absolutely did no debate.”

Responding to the report, Stonewall said Cass’s recommendations could “make a positive impact” if implemented properly.

But in a review of the recommendations published on Thursday it said hormones and puberty blockers should still be prescribed to children and young people in a “timely manner” — against Cass’s recommendations — if supported by a medical practitioner. In a sign that the charity’s influence is waning, The Times understands NHS England has distanced itself from the organisation, cancelling conference tickets and a planned membership of the charity’s Diversity Champions Scheme.

An NHS spokesperson said: “After consideration, NHS England took the decision to not renew its membership with Stonewall last year.”

Other quangos which The Times revealed last month had kept their memberships, despite a government diktat to withdraw from the scheme, are now reviewing their associations.

Sport England had been part of the Diversity Champions Scheme, which brought in £3.9 million for Stonewall last year. But a spokesman told The Times: “We have reviewed the partnership and Sport England will not be renewing membership.

“As a public body which scrutinises how we spend every penny of public funds, this decision has been taken with value for money as our primary concern.”

Historic England had also paid £3,000 a year for the scheme. It said it was also reviewing whether to renew its membership “based on a value-for-money test” with the Stonewall partnership due to end this month.

Arts Council England, which had a three-month membership which ended in October, is also no longer part of the scheme.

Other government departments have also withdrawn from the scheme over the years, and Kemi Badenoch, the women and equalities minister, said last year: “We have engaged with numerous LGBT groups, but the fact of the matter is that many of them support self-ID.

“That is not this government’s policy. Stonewall does not decide the law in this country.”

A government source added: “Stonewall has gone from being a leading civil rights organisation, to the leading pusher of the dangerous trans ideology that led to the outrageous events documented in the Cass Review.”

They said the government had “made it clear that Stonewall’s divisive schemes aren’t welcome in Whitehall” but that some arms-length bodies and civil society groups still handed over funds. “This needs to stop,” they said.

Stonewall was contacted for comment.

Screen use in transgender and gender-questioning adolescents: Findings from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study

To assess the association between transgender or gender-questioning identity and screen use (recreational screen time and problematic screen

sciencedirect.com

Objective: To assess the association between transgender or gender-questioning identity and screen use (recreational screen time and problematic screen use) in a demographically diverse national sample of early adolescents in the U.S.

Methods: We analyzed cross-sectional data from Year 3 of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive DevelopmentSM Study (ABCD Study®, N = 9859, 2019-2021, mostly 12-13-years-old). Multiple linear regression analyses estimated the associations between transgender or questioning gender identity and screen time, as well as problematic use of video games, social media, and mobile phones, adjusting for confounders.

Results: In a sample of 9859 adolescents (48.8% female, 47.6% racial/ethnic minority, 1.0% transgender, 1.1% gender-questioning), transgender adolescents reported 4.51 (95% CI 1.17-7.85) more hours of total daily recreational screen time including more time on television/movies, video games, texting, social media, and the internet, compared to cisgender adolescents. Gender-questioning adolescents reported 3.41 (95% CI 1.16-5.67) more hours of total daily recreational screen time compared to cisgender adolescents. Transgender identification and questioning one's gender identity was associated with higher problematic social media, video game, and mobile phone use, compared to cisgender identification.

Conclusions: Transgender and gender-questioning adolescents spend a disproportionate amount of time engaging in screen-based activities and have more problematic use across social media, video game, and mobile phone platforms.

Screen-based digital media is integral to the daily lives of adolescents in multifaceted ways [1] but problematic screen use (characterized by inability to control usage and detrimental consequences from excessive use including preoccupation, tolerance, relapse, withdrawal, and conflict) [2], [3], has been linked with harmful mental and physical health outcomes, such as depression, poor sleep, and cardiometabolic disease [4], [5]. Transgender and gender-questioning adolescents (i.e., adolescents who are questioning their gender identity) experience a higher prevalence of bullying (adjusted prevalence ratio [aPR] 1.88 and 1.62), suicide attempts (aPR 2.65 and 2.26), and binge drinking (aPR 1.80 and 1.50), respectively, compared to their cisgender peers [6], [7], [8], [9], [10]. Transgender and gender-questioning adolescents may engage in screen-based activities that are problematic and associated with negative health outcomes but also in a way that is different from their cisgender peers in order to form communities, explore health education about their gender identity, and seek refuge from isolating or unsafe environments [11].

One study found that sexual and gender minority (SGM) adolescents (e.g., lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender), aged 13–18 years old, spent an average of 5 h per day online, approximately 45 min more than non-SGM adolescents in 2010–2011 [12]. However, this study grouped SGM together as a single group, conflating the experiences of gender minorities (e.g., transgender, gender-questioning) with those of sexual minorites (e.g., lesbian, gay, bisexual), and the data are now over a decade old. In a nationally representative sample of adolescents aged 13–18 years old in the U.S., transgender adolescents had higher probabilities of problematic internet use than cisgender adolescents. However, this analysis did not measure modality-specific problematic screen use such as problematic social media, video game, or mobile phone use, which may further inform the function that media use plays in the lives of gender minority adolescents [13]. While this prior research provides important groundwork to understand screen time and problematic use in gender minority adolescents, gaps remain in understanding differences in screen time and specific modalities of problematic screen use in gender minority early adolescents.

Our study aims to address the gaps in the current literature by studying associations between transgender and gender-questioning identity and screen time across several modalities including recreational and problematic social media, video game, and mobile phone use in a large, national sample of early adolescents. We hypothesized that among early adolescents, transgender identification and questioning one’s gender identity would be positively associated with greater recreational screen time and problematic screen use compared to cisgender identification.

I’ve seen first-hand that we’re too quick to help young people change gender

A Scottish clinician warns that girls robbed of their own childhoods are directed unquestioningly towards cross-hormone treatment that may m

thetimes.co.uk

I have worked for 20 years with mental health patients in Scotland. Before the pandemic I saw only two people who were transitioning. Both were men who identified as women.

My caseload is small because my patients have complex problems. Over the past two and a half years, however, I have looked after nine female patients who wish to be men. Most are in their late teens to early twenties. Emotionally they are quite young.

They are in fact among the most vulnerable patients I have seen, often struggling with multiple mental health issues after difficult childhoods.

Dr Hilary Cass, who wrote the report on the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service in England, addressed the Scottish parliament last week.

Just as she says, some of my patients are on the autistic spectrum, others have survived childhood trauma including neglect and sexual abuse. Among those transitioning are patients with eating disorders, patients using self-harm to cope and patients with borderline personality disorders who struggle with distress.

During our appointments some patients have described growing up without clean clothes or help with basic personal hygiene. They have talked about their poor social circumstances and being unable to afford the normal things most children have. They grew up feeling they were on the outside, ostracised by their parents and their peers.

They have endured all of this, pouring their energy into surviving at the cost of maturing. And then, with little idea of their own identity, they have found the camaraderie of a trans peer group and embraced the idea that they were born in the wrong body.

They now believe it is their body that is wrong and needs to change. This view has then been endorsed by the NHS, schools and even politicians. No one has said to them: “You are fine just the way you are. Let’s help you.”

I read all their psychiatric reports and psychological assessments, and I see little evidence that anyone has worked to help them to accept their bodies. Reference is made to anxiety, depression or trauma, alongside being referred to Scotland’s transgender clinics.

Professionals seem too frightened to question whether changing gender is what these patients really need.

These young people are at different stages in their transitions, but some are taking testosterone. The advice is clear that long-term use of cross-sex hormone treatment can cause infertility, even if the treatment is stopped.

These girls, robbed of their own childhoods, are at a young age potentially losing the chance of ever conceiving or carrying a baby themselves. It is upsetting thinking about their pasts and also what their future may hold.

Some of these patients say they will feel better when their breasts have been removed. That conviction can make it difficult for them to engage with therapy now. They believe their answers lie on the operating table.

My professional judgment is that changing gender will not improve their lives.

Some of these patients are on the autistic spectrum and could have a different perspective if they had been supported at school.

I worry that many will look back at the NHS in a few years and think: “What have you done to me? I have no breasts and I cannot have children. My life is wrecked just like my childhood was wrecked.” I feel I am seeing a medical scandal unfold before my eyes.

The Sandyford gender clinic in Glasgow is not a mental health service. A leak to The Daily Telegraph in 2022 suggested that patients were being offered irreversible treatments with only basic mental health assessments. Staff saw their main role as being to “get them on treatment”.

I am not saying no one should transition, just that the first line of treatment has to include asking and exploring why a person feels they are in the wrong body. Support should be considered in line with that. Helping people to accept the body they have should be fundamental, not taboo.

I have chosen to remain anonymous because otherwise I would be frightened of losing my job or being targeted by trans activists.

We could all say we are non-binary on the basis of gender stereotypes, because none of us fits them. Let us recognise that it is the stereotypes that are harmful here — and not cause further harm.

This is the view of a mental health professional in Scotland on her patients changing gender

Teachers must tell pupils gender ideology is a ‘contested belief’

Gillian Keegan, the Education Secretary, to issue guidance after PM ordered a review into relationships, sex and health education lessons

The Telegraph

Teachers will have to make clear that gender ideology is a “contested belief” rather than fact if they bring it up in lessons, Gillian Keegan will say later this week.

The Education Secretary is set to issue guidance on Thursday following criticism that some pupils were being taught that there were 72 genders.

Schools will not be told to hold lessons on gender ideology, which states that people can be born the wrong sex and that they can change their identity to the opposite sex or other categories such as non-binary.

But if they do hold lessons on the issue, they must make it clear that it is a contested belief.

In other words, they must say that the “gender-critical” belief that there are just two biological sexes is also valid.

The guidance - which will be out for consultation - will also order schools to show parents all classroom material to ensure they are comfortable with what is being taught.

Rishi Sunak ordered the review into relationships, sex and health education (RSHE) lessons last year in response to claims that content was age-inappropriate, extreme and sexualising.

There were claims that children were being taught about oral sex and how to choke their partners safely.

Miriam Cates, a Tory MP, told the Sun: “For too long activist groups have been pushing a politically motivated agenda on children under the cover of RSHE.

“The Cass Review shows how dangerous it is to let ideology overtake facts. We need compulsory guidance to restore common sense and the rights of parents to know what their children are being taught.”

Last year, on a trip to Hiroshima, Mr Sunak said that for the sake of his own children, he wanted to protect Britain’s “precious” pupils by ensuring they only received age-appropriate content in schools.

“First and foremost as a parent... it’s really important that what our kids are exposed to, not just at school but online, is sensitive and age-appropriate,” he said.

“There have been plenty of concerns raised with me. There are too many instances of that not happening. I don’t think that’s right.

“Families up and down the country are concerned about what their children are seeing online and they expect me and the government to put in place protections for that. That’s what we are going to do.”

He added:: “It’s something that really matters to me… What I want is a curriculum that is sensitive and age-appropriate. Our children are precious; they deserve to be protected, sensitively. That’s what I want as a parent first and foremost.”

The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “The PM ordered a review of the guidance on RSHE teaching in schools, following concerns that inappropriate content was being taught.

“We believe parents have a fundamental right to see materials being used in these lessons and the Education Secretary also made that clear when she wrote to parents in October last year.

“The review… will build on this, making sure that children are always taught sensitive content in an appropriate way.

“However, what I would say is we have been consistent that the idea that someone can have a gender identity different from their sex is a contested political belief that must not be taught as fact in our schools.”

Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at women’s rights charity Sex Matters, said: “Commentary suggests that this guidance will require schools to stop presenting gender ideology as fact and to stop hiding PSHE [personal, social, health and economic education] lessons from parents. If true, these are both excellent developments.

“What Sex Matters wants to see is that schools are told in no uncertain terms to stop giving any credence to evidence-free claims that everyone has a gender identity, or that sex is a spectrum or can be changed.

“These claims are not just nonsense, they are regressive and sexist. They mislead and endanger children, and are a big reason why gender distress has become much more common in recent years.”

It's Just A Pronoun, Or Is It?

New Personal Pronouns Can Seem Harmless And Fun, But The Use Of New Personal Pronouns Is Harmful For Developing Children

wrongspeakpublishing.com

Specifically, the mother writes: “Don’t get me wrong, it started off fun and interesting. Pride marches, badges, posters, music, and flags. So many flags! Then the lockdown happened. I started intensely researching and I, a lifelong, radical, alternative woman and feminist did not like what I was learning. ... I am not denying anyone’s existence, we are still loving supportive parents, but I regret not realizing sooner what was going on. ... It became clear, despite all the support and information and discussions, that things were not improving, and we compromised and permitted them to use their new names at school.”

As George Orwell said, “There is no swifter route to the corruption of thought than through the corruption of language.” Children need structure, and they look to adults to provide that for them.