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Time for an intervention – an urgent call to end “gender-affirming” treatments for children

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From the Macdonald Laurier Institute

By J. Edward Les

Despite the Cass Review’s alarming findings, trans activists and their enablers in the medical professions continue to push kids into having dangerous, life-altering surgeries and hormone-blocking treatments. It needs to stop.

If nothing else, the scathing final report of the Cass Review released this week (but commissioned four years ago to investigate the disturbing practices of the UK’s Gender Identity Service), is a reminder that doctors historically are guilty of many sins.

Take the Tuskegee syphilis study, one of the greatest stains on the medical profession, in which impoverished syphilis-infected black men were knowingly deprived of therapy so that researchers could study the natural history of untreated disease.

Or consider the repugnant New Zealand cervical cancer study in the 1960s and 1970s, which left women untreated for years so that researchers could learn how cervical cancer progressed.  Or the Swedish efforts to solidify the link between sugar and dental decay by feeding copious amounts of sweets to the mentally handicapped.

The doctors behind such scandals undoubtedly felt they were advancing scientific inquiry in pursuit of the greater good; but they clearly stampeded far beyond the boundaries of ethical medical practice.

More common by far, though, are medical “sins” committed unknowingly, such as when doctors prescribe toxic treatments to patients in the mistaken belief that they are beneficial. When physicians in Europe and Canada latched onto thalidomide in the late 1950s and early 1960s, for instance, they thought it was a wonder drug for morning sickness. Only the fine work of Dr. Francis Kelsey, an astute pharmacist at the FDA, prevented the ensuing birth-defects tragedy from being visited upon American women and children.

And when Oxycontin hit the medical marketplace in the 1990s, physicians embraced it as a marvellous — and supposedly non-addictive — solution to their patients’ pain. But the drug was simply another synthetic derivative of opium, and every bit as addictive; its use triggered a massive opioid overdose crisis — still ongoing today — that has killed hundreds of thousands and ruined the lives of countless individuals and their families.

Physicians in the latter instances weren’t driven by malevolence; but rather by a deep-seated desire to help patients. That wish, compounded by extreme busy-ness, repeatedly seduces doctors into unwarranted faith in untested therapies.

And no discipline in medicine, arguably, is more frequently led astray by the siren song of shiny new things than the field of psychiatry. Which is understandable, perhaps, given the nature of psychiatric practice. Categorizations of mental disorders — and the methods used to treat them — are based almost entirely on consensus opinion, rather than on direct measurement.  Contrast that with other domains of medical practice: appendicitis is diagnosed by imaging the infected organ, and then cured by surgically removing the inflamed tissue; diabetes is detected by measuring elevated blood sugar, and then corrected by the administration of insulin; elevated blood pressure is calibrated in millimetres of mercury, and then effectively reduced with antihypertensives; and so on.

But mental disturbances remain largely the stuff of conjecture — learned conjecture, mind you, but conjecture, nonetheless. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the “bible” of mental health professionals, is the collective effort of groups of tall foreheads gathered around conference tables opining on the various perturbations of the human mind. Imprecise definitions abound, with heaps of overlap between conditions.

The current version (DSM-5) describes schizophrenia, for example, as occurring on a spectrum of “abnormalities in one or more of the following five domains: delusions, hallucinations, disorganized thinking (speech), grossly disorganized or abnormal motor behavior (including catatonia), and negative symptoms.” Each of these five domains is open to professional interpretation; and what’s more, the schizophrenia spectrum is further subdivided into ten sub-categories.

That theme runs through the entire manual – and imprecise definitions lead on to imprecise solutions. Given the blurred indications for starting, balancing, and stopping medications, it’s no accident that many mentally unwell patients languish on ever-changing cocktails of mind-altering drugs.

None of which is to downplay the enormous importance of psychiatry, which does much to address human suffering amidst unimaginable complexity; its practitioners are among the brightest and most capable members of the medical profession. But by its very nature the discipline is submerged in — and handicapped by — uncertainty. It’s unsurprising, then, that mental health professionals desperate for effective treatments are susceptible to being misled.

The dark history of frontal lobotomies, seized upon by psychiatrists as a miracle cure but long relegated to the trash heap of medical barbarism, is well known. The procedure (which garnered its inventor the Nobel Prize in Medicine) basically consisted of driving an ice pick through patients’ eye sockets to destroy their frontal lobes; thousands of patients were permanently maimed before saner heads prevailed and the practice was halted. Many of its victims were gay men: “conversion therapy” with a literal, brain-altering “punch.”

Similarly, the fabricated “recovered memories of sexual abuse” saga of the 1980s and early 1990s suckered mental health practitioners into believing it was legitimate. Hundreds of professional careers were built on the “therapy” before it was all exposed as a fraud, leaving many lives ruined, families torn asunder, and scores of innocent men imprisoned or dead from suicide. In a 2005 review, Harvard psychology professor Richard McNally pegged the recovered memory movement as “the worst catastrophe to befall the mental health field since the lobotomy era.”

Until now, that is. That scandal pales in comparison to the “gender transition/gender affirming care” craze that has befogged the medical profession in recent years.

Without a shred of supporting scientific evidence, many doctors — led by psychiatrists, but aided and abetted by endocrinologists, surgeons, pediatricians, and family doctors — have bought into the mystical notion of gender fluidity. What was previously recognized as “gender identity disorder” was rebranded as gender “dysphoria” and recast as part of the normal spectrum of human experience, the basic truth of binary mammalian biology simply discarded in favour of the fiction that it’s possible to convert from one sex to another.

Much suffering has ensued. The enabling of biological males’ invasion of women’s spaces, rape shelters, prisons, and sports is bad enough. But what is being done to children is the stuff of horror movies: doctors are using medications to block physiological puberty as prologue to cross-gender hormones, genital-revising surgery, and a lifetime of infertility and medical misery — and labelling the entire sordid mess as gender-affirming care.

The malignant fad began innocently enough, with a Dutch effort in the late 1980s and early 1990s to improve the lot of transgendered adults troubled by the disconnect between their physical bodies and their gender identity. Those clinicians’ motivations were defensible, perhaps; but their research was riddled with ethical lapses and methodological errors and has since been thoroughly discredited. Yet their methods “escaped the lab”, with the international medical community adopting them as a template for managing gender-confused children, and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) enshrining them as “standard of care.” Then, as American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is the latest to observe, the rise of social media torqued the trend into a craze by convincing hordes of adolescents they were “trans.” Which is how we ended up where we are today, with science replaced by rabid ideology — and with condemnation heaped upon anyone who dares to challenge it.

An explanation sometimes offered for the massive spike in gender-confused kids seeking “affirmation” in the past fifteen years is that today it’s “safe” for kids to express themselves, as if this phenomenon always existed but that — as with homosexuality — it was “closeted” due to stigma. Yet are we really expected to believe that the giants of empirical research into childhood development —brilliant minds like Jean Piaget, Eric Erikson, Lev Vygotsky, and Lawrence Kohlberg — somehow missed entirely the trait of mutable “gender identity” amongst all the other childhood traits they were studying? That’s nonsense, of course. They didn’t miss it — because it isn’t real.

The fog is beginning to dissipate, thankfully. Multiple jurisdictions around the world, including the UK, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and France have begun to realize the grave harm that has been done, and are pulling back from — or halting altogether — the practice of blocking puberty. And the final Cass Report goes even further, taking square aim at the dangerous practice of social transitioning and concluding that it’s “not a neutral act” but instead presents risk of grave psychological harm.

All of which places Canada in a rather awkward position. Because in December of 2021 parliamentarians gave unanimous consent to Bill C-4, which bans conversion therapy, including “any practice, service or treatment designed to change a person’s gender identity.” It’s since been a crime in Canada, punishable by up to five years in prison, to try to help your child feel comfortable with his or her sex.

As far as I know, no one has been charged, let alone imprisoned, since the bill was passed into law. But it certainly has cast a chill on the willingness of providers to deliver appropriate counselling to gender-confused children: few dare to risk it.

A conversion therapy ban had been in the works for years, triggered by concerns about disturbing and harmful practices targeting gay children. But by the time the bill was presented in its final form to Parliament for a vote it had been hijacked by trans activists, with its content perverted to the degree that there is more language in the legislation speaking to gender identity than to homosexuality.

To be clear, likening homosexuality to pediatric “gender fluidity” is a category error, akin to comparing apples to elephants. The one is an innate sexual orientation, the acceptance of which requires simply leaving people be to live their lives and love whomever they wish; the other is wholly imaginary, the acceptance of which mandates irreversible medical (and often surgical) intervention and the transformation of children into lifelong (and usually infertile) medical patients.

And the real “elephant” in the room is that in a troubling number of cases pediatric trans care is conversion therapy for gay children because for some people, it’s more acceptable to be trans than it is to be gay.

Bill C-4 received unanimous endorsement from all parliamentarians, including from Pierre Poilievre, now the leader of the Conservative Party. No debate. No analysis. Just high-fives all around for the television cameras.

It’s possible that many of the opposition MPs hastening to support the ban did so for fear of being painted as bigots. Yet the primary responsibility of an opposition party in any healthy democracy is to oppose, even when it’s unpopular. In 2015, when NDP Opposition leader Tom Mulcair faced withering criticism for resisting anti-terror legislation tabled by Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, he cited John Diefenbaker’s comments on the role of political opposition:

“The reading of history proves that freedom always dies when criticism ends… The Opposition finds fault; it suggests amendments; it asks questions and elicits information; it arouses, educates, and moulds public opinion by voice and vote… It must scrutinize every action of the government and, in doing so, prevents the shortcuts through democratic procedure that governments like to make.”

In the case of Bill C-4 the Conservatives did none of that. And by abdicating their responsibility they helped drive a metaphorical ice pick into the futures of scores of innocent children, destroying forever their prospects for normal, healthy lives.

We’re long overdue for a “conversion”: a conversion back to the light of reason, a conversion back to evidence-based care of children.

In 1962, when the harms of thalidomide became known, it was withdrawn from the Canadian market. In 2024, now that the serious harms of “gender-affirming care” have been exposed, it remains an open question as to when Canada’s doctors and politicians will finally take the difficult step of admitting that they got it wrong and put a stop to the practice.

Dr. Edward Les is a pediatrician in Calgary who writes on politics, social issues, and other matters.

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UK pediatrician who led review of child ‘transitions’ says US medical groups ‘misleading the public’

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Dr. Hilary Cass, author of the Cass Review

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

The typically left-wing New York Times published an interview on Monday with consultant pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass on her comprehensive review of so-called “gender medicine” in the United Kingdom, indicating that awareness of the damage due to surgical and chemical “transitioning” continues to spread despite the best efforts of LGBT activists.

Released in April, 366-page Cass Review was commissioned by National Health Service (NHS) England following ongoing scandals about the practices of British “gender clinics” such as the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), operated by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. The four-year project consisted of comprehensive reviews of current research and international standards, as well as extensive interviews with gender-confused children and adults, family members, detransitioners, doctors, and activists.

It found that “gender medicine” is “built on shaky foundations” and that while such interventions require a great deal of caution, “quite the reverse happened in the field of [so-called] gender care for children,” and that “[w]hile a considerable amount of research has been published in this field, systematic evidence reviews demonstrated the poor quality of the published studies, meaning there is not a reliable evidence base upon which to make clinical decisions, or for children and their families to make informed choices.” Her findings led NHS to stop prescribing puberty blockers to children with gender confusion earlier this year.

Speaking to the Times, Cass explained that she was planning her retirement when she was first asked to tackle the project and was initially apprehensive about wading into the controversy.

“The most important concern for me is just how poor the evidence base is in this area,” she said. “Some people have questioned, ‘Did we set a higher bar for this group of young people?’ We absolutely didn’t. The real problem is that the evidence is very weak compared to many other areas of pediatric practice.”

The Times acknowledged that her “findings are in line with several European countries that have limited the treatments [sic] after scientific reviews. But in America, where nearly two dozen states have banned the care outright, medical groups have endorsed the treatments as evidence-based and necessary,” including groups the paper contacted for its latest story. Cass described American medical consensus as “out of date” on the issue.

“When I was president of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, we did some great work with the A.A.P. [American Academy of Pediatrics],” she elaborated. “They are an organization that I have enormous respect for. But I respectfully disagree with them on holding on to a position that is now demonstrated to be out of date by multiple systematic reviews.”

“It wouldn’t be too much of a problem if people were saying ‘This is clinical consensus and we’re not sure,” she added. “But what some organizations are doing is doubling down on saying the evidence is good. And I think that’s where you’re misleading the public. You need to be honest about the strength of the evidence and say what you’re going to do to improve it.”

significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them.

Yet while mounting evidence against youth “gender transitions” is prompting European nations such as the United Kingdom and France, which are normally to the left of America, to move away from the practice, in America, the medical establishment and the Biden administration continues to dig in their heels, despite Biden’s own Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) releasing a since-deleted report last year acknowledging that “lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults are more likely than straight adults to use substances, experience mental health conditions including major depressive episodes, and experience serious thoughts of suicide.”

The White House’s comprehensive pursuit of the transgender agenda has included reopening the military to recruits afflicted with gender dysphoria, promoting gender ideology within the military (including “diversity” and drag events on military bases), holding White House events to “affirm transgender kids,” condemning state laws against underage “transitions” as “close to sinful,” promoting underage “transitions” (potentially at taxpayer expense) as a “best practice,” and trying to force federally funded schools to let males into female athletic competitions and restrooms.

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South Korean president declares low birth rate a ‘national emergency,’ plans new ministry to address it

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From LifeSiteNews

By Andreas Wailzer

President Yoon Suk Yeol announced that he would ask for the parliament’s support to establish a new Ministry of Low Birth Rate Counter Planning after the country reached a new low with an average number of babies per woman of 0.72 in 2023.

South Korea’s president has declared the country’s low birth rate a “national emergency” and announced a new government ministry to address the problem.

In a televised press conference on May 9, President Yoon Suk Yeol said, “We will mobilize all of the nation’s capabilities to overcome the low birth rate, which can be considered a national emergency.”

He announced he would ask for the parliament’s support to establish a new “Ministry of Low Birth Rate Counter Planning.”

South Korea has had the lowest fertility rate in the world for years, and the average number of babies per woman dropped to a new low of 0.72 in 2023, down from 0.78 the previous year.

Despite the government’s efforts to increase the birth rate by spending over $200 billion on initiatives meant to encourage larger families, including infertility treatment, cash subsidies, and childcare services, the country’s birth rate declined for the fourth year in a row in 2023.

A Korean Construction corporation made headlines this year for offering employees $75,000 for each baby they have. “If Korea’s birth rate remains low, the country will face extinction,” Lee Joong-keun, chairman of the Booyoung Group, warned.

READ: New ‘Birthgap’ film shows how explosion in childlessness is driving population collapse

According to YouTuber Stephan Park, who grew up in South Korea and runs the YouTube channel Asian Boss, Korean men face the additional problem of being expected to own a house when they marry, which is very difficult under the country’s current economic conditions.

“There are all the societal pressures that if you get married, guys are the ones that are supposed to buy the house, to have the house ready, which is impossible to have if you are a 30-year-old guy … with the average house prices you’ll never be able to afford one in your lifetime,” Park explained.

“So that’s the most common thing we hear: ‘I cannot afford to get married,’” he added.

According to some projections, South Korea’s and multiple other Western and Asian populations are expected to be cut in half by the year 2100 if the current trends continue.

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