Thanks for sharing your experience and your journey as an MD. Your humanity and your ability to think in nuanced terms is apparent. I hope that these thoughts can be widely disseminated. However, I come down incredibly strongly that there are ( perhaps almost) no circumstances in which “gender affirming” surgery can ever be justified for minors. I think that those of us in opposition should refuse to use that term and should always label it as the genital mutilation of minors. Apparently there is now a segment of the medical community that has totally discarded the admonition , first do no harm.
Johanna has a very twisted way of interpreting "do no harm." I can't find the video clip now, but she has said on video that since trans individuals have high psychiatric burden and doing nothing harms them, it follows that we should "do something." It's just a complete inversion of the admonition, and a demonstration of her hubris. She believes that whatever she does must be BETTER than nothing, when the overwhelming statistical likelihood is that anything ANYONE does will make a complex situation worse. And all the patients are very complex. There are so many possible unintended consequences. As I have mentioned in Manifesto (https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/a-pediatricians-manifesto-for-the ), doctors have understood that false positives and false negatives are very different and false positive results are far, far worse. Johanna deliberately misunderstands this point.
Also her Aristotelian logic is awesome. "We must do something." "Cutting off body parts and starting hormones are something." "We must cut off body parts and start hormones."
Such level of hubris is consistent with a progressive ideology, and her female husband is an avowed Critical Theorist. They believe that they can re-engineer society and the human condition to create utopia. A little psychological, hormonal and surgical abracadabra must even feel trivial.
I respect your approach of curiosity and thank you for writing this article. My youngest child began with learning disabilities, sensory processing disorder, anxiety and a few other comorbidities and added gender confusion to the mix, where none previously existed. The opposite gender affirmation my child received at school caused a great deal of iatrogenic harm, much greater confusion, suspicion, increased academic problems, and more than I am comfortable discussing publicly.
I sincerely wonder why there is not more said about how "affirming" treatment is most likely a placebo effect. It is known that placebo (just the thought that this is the right treatment) produces a substantial positive effect. Dr. Julia Mason, MD also noted that her pediatric patients who were being "affirmed" as the opposite of their biological gender were not actually thriving, even when they believed that "gender affirmation" was the correct road for them.
I hope more professionals will closely examine and critically review the evidence. The current body of knowledge for this is very limited, short term and tainted by personal bias from most of the presenters.
I too have wondered about the lack of discussion of the placebo effect in the context of "gender treatments." Research that is competently conducted usually includes conservative treatment or no treatment groups, but as has been discussed on this site previously, research on trans identified people has often not done so.
Another issue involves cognitive dissonance: We know that the value placed on an outcome typically goes up with the cost of getting to that outcome. This has been shown to be one of the major sources of valuation of exclusive clubs and schools. And these are cases where the person can exit from outcome. When the prospect of reversing the effects of a decision are not good, there is even more motivation to recommit oneself to the original decision.
It's what happens when you marry an avowed Critical Theorist. Their whole schtick is about creating a "New Sensibility," as Marcuse would have it, by denying common sensibility.
Good observation that some people are parasitized by an ideology of victimization. It's a persistent parasite that is difficult to cure once the infection is established. The best treatment is prevention but our schools have become vectors of diseased ideas. Like mosquito infested malarial swamps they need to be drained. The best solution would be to eliminate federal funding for educational programs, schools and organization that propagate their ideology of victimization. That won't completely cure the disease but it would give society a fighting chance to survive this plague.
The fallacious notion that "victim status conveys virtue" is the moral stupidity of this time. Victim status may be overcome by work of the "victims", who are often self-made losers. But it is not virtuous to be a victim.
Yes. Hearing the otherwise woke-leaning GenZer in my life state that having suffered oppression doesn’t automatically make you virtuous or a “good person” gave me some hope for the future.
This expose of Dr. O-K is very important. I thank Dr. Li for taking this brave step. The statistically significant higher risk of cardiovascular disease in both males and females taking wrong sex hormones has definitively been shown in the work of "affirming" Danish "gender" doctor, Dorte Glintborg in vol. 187, issue 3 of European Journal of Endocrinology. Glintborg was trying to figure out if one form of estrogen is better than another, publishing on this for years. This last study involved 2617 individuals on wrong sex hormones, examining the health records, while examining the same content (incidence of cardiovascular disease, blood clots, strokes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol) in 26,700 control individuals not on hormones, age-matched to the "trans" subjects. The data shows 93% higher risk of CVD in men on E compared to male controls and 63% higher risk of CVD in females on T compared to control females. This study was ethical, as it only looked at the records, no names or individual histories given. 5 years of health history was included for each subject. This is very, very significant.
These results only make sense, considering that we have known for a long time that Hormone Replacement Therapy with "same sex" hormones is correlated with increased risk of cardiovascular events in both sexes as well as breast cancer in women. I would note here that testosterone is native to both sexes, and it has been known for a long time that athletes of either sex who use these steroids to change their muscle development are taking on risks to their health.
I'd love to have an analysis of the data Dr. Glintborg presents, in terms of exactly what 93% higher risk of CVD in men on estrogen means. I sense there is actual researcher bias in this mathematical presentation of rather alarming data, because most civilians do not understand what increased relative risk is. A higher risk like 93% to me means, basically, that man on estrogen for years is going to get high blood pressure, blood clots, heart disease, stroke, basically, 9 out of 10 times. In the reporting on this in the New York Post, there was the 2.2 times more women on testosterone risk of CVD, which I interpret as more than twice times risk of high blood pressure, stroke, high cholesterol and related heart diseases for those women. I met one young woman like this. She identified as male, did not pass as male, but is obese and told me she has high blood pressure. I do not comprehend how a doctor could prescribe estrogen to such an individual. The combine obesity, wrong sex hormone and documented high blood pressure are a recipe for disaster. All in the name of "preventing suicide." This woman is in a relationship with another woman, so-called "heterosexual" marriage. Just, why? I hope that Colin Wright will see this and write us a clear explanation of the way the data is analysed; relative risk, absolute risk, and ways to compare control data and select group data. The gender ideologues take advantage of the general public's lack of skills for understanding the presentation of this data.
Typo: I do not comprehend how a doctor could prescribe testosterone to a female who is obese, has high blood pressure (God knows what her cholesterol is, she runs a meat-based food operation) because of an ideation in her mind.
Also it would be interesting to look at increased cancer risk in men taking estrogen for feminization purposes. Estrogen is a main driver of hormone-dependent cancers. What is the incidence of breast cancer in these male-to-female transgender transitions? It would also increase prostate cancer risk.
I really gave some thought when comparing gender doctors to jihadi. I bet I can sit down and have a coherent conversation with some jihadi in some prison, who while in ISIS raped women and blew up children because they believed doing this is good. Evil is banal, as they say.
"a large, non-refundable deposit used to signal loyalty"
Sorta like the way the Mafia used to require a recruit to commit a murder before he became a 'made man' -- no going back to a normal life. Or the way that child soldiers, similarly, are forced to do something like kill their father and rape their mother -- or die -- on their recruitment. No going back.
" I don’t have any issue with adults choosing to present and live in a manner that aligns more with what’s more typical of the opposite sex, if it enhances their well-being without imposing a serious cost on other people. "
Actually, "transgenderism" in all its forms imposes an extremely serious cost, not only on mentally disturbed and vulnerable children, but on all women and men, the whole of human society. I don't care how pleasant Johanna Olson-Kennedy seemed. To me she's Dr. Mengele with a smile.
Absolutely. Tranniehood is the elevation of a monstrous lie - that a male body can contain a female brain, and that the body can be modified to align the body with the brain. This is monstrous, because it encourages the deluded children to mutilate their bodies.
Just take a look at Johanna Olson-Kennedy's clinical social worker "husband," a biological female on higher doses of steroids than Arnold Schwarzenegger ever dreamed of. The two of them with their professional credentials are simply a pair of over-educated "trans" activists, hellbent on converting as many vulnerable children to their twisted lifestyle. Take away their licenses, and let them run off to a circus sideshow.
I think that’s the crux of the matter! Lies are spread around like horse manure, and the rest of us are supposed to lap it up . If we don’t like the taste, we are” bigots” or worse! Truth is buried under the lies, just like in Stalinist Russia! It is high time to stand up and fight against this tyranny! Truth must prevail !
It is amazing that intelligent and personable, compassionate people can be found supporting any number of really bad ideas.
And regarding the Zahavian signal idea it is obviously a totally flawed hypothesis. People make bad and costly choices for a huge variety of reasons, one of which the v author notes here.
I try and stay as far away from partisan "my team better and smarter than your team" thinking as possible, because of course the temptation to think that way is always present and mostly leads to stupidity and error. But SOMETIMES I genuinely find myself wondering if liberal people are not as capable of deep thought about human motivation. Their ideas often seem to be so facile.
Again, a sweeping thought that one must be very careful to entertain and one that is probably wrong.
I have a similar doubt about Liberal abilities to understand aspects of human behavior.
I speculate that a lot of Liberals struggle to understand scale or the ways that ambiguous signals can be misinterpreted in the direction of self-interest. There may be some productive research to do in comparing perceptions of scale to political beliefs and optimism to political beliefs.
Olson-Kennedy may be pleasant and personable, but she is also a disgusting and child-mutilating liar. She said (in this piece): "In her presentation in 2014, Dr. Olson emphasized that no surgeries were offered to minors under 18."
That's completely false, and was at the time.
She published an article in 2018, in which 44 surgeries to remove breasts were done for children < 18
"For me, an indicator of this “enhanced well-being” would be a substantial reduction in patients’ obsession with their sex traits, allowing them to draw more of their identity from their abilities, values, experiences, and relationships." Should this not be true for all of us? Am I deluding myself when I claim that my sex, gender, and sexuality are NOT the most important parts of my identity. How did gender-identity become so central to the idea of personhood that is makes sense to surgically alter the body and become a life long medical patient?
Speaking as a psychologist who treated quite a few of the original (1990's) cohort of adult male trans-identified patients, I can attest that these individuals represented the whole range of career success, recreational experiences, and values. It was of interest to me that, in my practice at least, the highest achievers were in male-dominated careers and remained in those positions post-transition.
A very sensible thought. I am a normal male, and enjoy sex. It occupies perhaps .1% of my time. The rest of my time is spent on doing stuff not related to sex.
One issue that I think about is the period of time 16-25. During this time, I was learning Russian (not very well), computers, getting my PhD, reading, learning.
For the gender deluded, this time is spent on learning how to be the other sex. The simulation is bad in almost all cases. What useful skills or knowledge are they learning?
This is also a bit of a white pill for parents. You don't have to fight Woke and save your children by being an activist if that is not your cup of tea. All you need to do is create an environment such that your children maximize their time learning skills, building good healthy relationships, having expansive experiences including hard experiences, and from all of those things, building solid values such as taking responsibility. If parents can do all those things, their children will be shielded from woke. Let productivity dysphoria be the source of dysphoria if you ever feel dysphoria-- as an adolescent I felt that intensely and wasting time gave me severe anxiety. It's ultimately a very useful anxiety to have.
I would not paint JOK in as positive a light as this (very good) article did. I guess I'd consider myself a homosexual rights activist and have been medical and queer theory watchdogging this issue since 2015, meticulously documenting things and trying to do what I can on a couple of different websites I run. I have watched all of Olson's videos. I watched her in person at gender conferences. She downplays the dangers of this to proto-gay kids who used to desist from childhood GD in high numbers, treating them as insignificant annoyances to her utopian vision, contemptuously referred to as "tools used against the community" (paraphrasing from Gender Odyssey 2017). I have some videos I have done from an LGB human rights perspective called "Gender Clinicians are not Our Friends." And they are not. I hope more gay people wake up a realize these people have a sociopathic level of apathy about the human right to grow up, and the damage we are already seeing this doing to same-sex attracted (and other) youth and are fine with you having your life destroyed by insane trans activists if you try to talk about it.
I believe both Sam Harris and James Lindsay have made the point that pernicious ideology effectively makes someone who is not a sociopath behave like a sociopath. I am confident Johanna Olson-Kennedy does not have a diagnosable clinical dark triad personality, but gender ideology and her being married to an avowed Critical Theorist make her effectively behave like she is a sociopath. Hence I conclude by emphasizing the primacy of having truth, not utopian vision, as the north star. All utopians are supremacists with God complex, and even ancient human beings know that people with that level of hubris deserve fall and disdain.
I loved the writing, I love clinical sounding text that is human in feeling.
Your remarks about the "down payment" remijdede instany of a strange Russian cult.
You and you readers may not be aware of the "Skopsi", a bizarre Russian Christian cult that began in the 17th century that persisted until the 21st century even under severe repression. They practiced castration and full emasulation (removal of both penis and testicles) of men with a red-hot iron (a possible origin of trying he term "baptism by fire") and they excised or burned the breasts off women as well as sometimes the labia and clitoris. The burn areas were referred to as greater or lesser seal.
When you read of "trans teens" referring to their scars by a euphemism for crossing some barrier, it's even clearer it's 100% cult.
I'm interested in what laws are available for use to control cult abuse...
James Lindsay has done extensive work exposing Queer Theory as Queer Gnosticism.
Ultimately, people in the gender cult believe that they are gods, rebelling against the Prison of Being which includes the mortal body. The Gnostic secret knowledge about being souls imprisoned in mortal, mutable, sexed bodies is what leads to Liberation (of the gendered soul) and true realization of one's status as a god.
This wacky belief system is old, and rehashed. What is new is hormonal and surgical technology.
I have to say, I've even been quite impressed with the work of plastic surgeons who flip genitals inside out. I've listened to lectures by such surgeons and their level of confidence is through the roof, which comes across as very persuasive and attractive.
Being more certain of your belief than the evidence allows is what defines hubris.
It is interesting how prevalent self torture and mutilation has been in the world's religious practices. Appears to be another one of the kinks in human evolution, as this kind of anti-survival behavior is not seen in any other animal species I know of. A related behavior is torture of one human being by another for the sake of the torturer's pleasure or some authority's sense of power.
There was another one known as the Priests of Cybele. They were a Roman cult that worshipped the goddess Cybele. She was a fertility goddess, so the priests would have orgies in which they would dance themselves into a frenzy, then castrate themselves "during sexual pleasure," as the references say. This might have been masturbatory pleasure. I doubt if it lasted through the castration.
The priests dressed in women's clothes and wore a lot of makeup when they were walking around the town. I've seen recent articles about them that may have been written by wokesters, since they said that the priests denied being "eunuchs" and asserted that they were "women."
Polytheistic societies often had distinct social categories operating under the bureaucratic concept of "temples" even if the behavior was not conventional worship (rituals administered by specialists for the general population) since it was easier to claim "we are set apart by the gods" than to argue for integration into the larger society.
If there was, as seems to be, some portion of the population that always feels they are the opposite sex, then grouping them together as a weird "priestly" group is easier than exterminating them. That said, the Roman mockery of the Greeks suggests they were not fond of men dressing up like women.
There is a term over 2000 years old - “Molly” (not the pleasant sexually stimulating “PTSD” treating drug MDMA) - as in “Mollycoddle” is British slang for effeminate men which goes back to Latin “mollus” or soft and pliable, like Molluscs which are oysters and clams... Mollus was a derogatory term for men who had “passive” homosexual sex (Academics need to spend more time watching hardcore gay pornography to dispel the concept of “Passive”). Thus a common insult was to say so-and-so was someone’s wife.
What I had read was that many women in the US in the 1800s were named Molly and that "mollycoddle" referred to overly controlling mothers who left sons unable to fend for themselves.
Thanks for sharing your experience and your journey as an MD. Your humanity and your ability to think in nuanced terms is apparent. I hope that these thoughts can be widely disseminated. However, I come down incredibly strongly that there are ( perhaps almost) no circumstances in which “gender affirming” surgery can ever be justified for minors. I think that those of us in opposition should refuse to use that term and should always label it as the genital mutilation of minors. Apparently there is now a segment of the medical community that has totally discarded the admonition , first do no harm.
Johanna has a very twisted way of interpreting "do no harm." I can't find the video clip now, but she has said on video that since trans individuals have high psychiatric burden and doing nothing harms them, it follows that we should "do something." It's just a complete inversion of the admonition, and a demonstration of her hubris. She believes that whatever she does must be BETTER than nothing, when the overwhelming statistical likelihood is that anything ANYONE does will make a complex situation worse. And all the patients are very complex. There are so many possible unintended consequences. As I have mentioned in Manifesto (https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/a-pediatricians-manifesto-for-the ), doctors have understood that false positives and false negatives are very different and false positive results are far, far worse. Johanna deliberately misunderstands this point.
Also her Aristotelian logic is awesome. "We must do something." "Cutting off body parts and starting hormones are something." "We must cut off body parts and start hormones."
Such level of hubris is consistent with a progressive ideology, and her female husband is an avowed Critical Theorist. They believe that they can re-engineer society and the human condition to create utopia. A little psychological, hormonal and surgical abracadabra must even feel trivial.
I respect your approach of curiosity and thank you for writing this article. My youngest child began with learning disabilities, sensory processing disorder, anxiety and a few other comorbidities and added gender confusion to the mix, where none previously existed. The opposite gender affirmation my child received at school caused a great deal of iatrogenic harm, much greater confusion, suspicion, increased academic problems, and more than I am comfortable discussing publicly.
I sincerely wonder why there is not more said about how "affirming" treatment is most likely a placebo effect. It is known that placebo (just the thought that this is the right treatment) produces a substantial positive effect. Dr. Julia Mason, MD also noted that her pediatric patients who were being "affirmed" as the opposite of their biological gender were not actually thriving, even when they believed that "gender affirmation" was the correct road for them.
I hope more professionals will closely examine and critically review the evidence. The current body of knowledge for this is very limited, short term and tainted by personal bias from most of the presenters.
I too have wondered about the lack of discussion of the placebo effect in the context of "gender treatments." Research that is competently conducted usually includes conservative treatment or no treatment groups, but as has been discussed on this site previously, research on trans identified people has often not done so.
Another issue involves cognitive dissonance: We know that the value placed on an outcome typically goes up with the cost of getting to that outcome. This has been shown to be one of the major sources of valuation of exclusive clubs and schools. And these are cases where the person can exit from outcome. When the prospect of reversing the effects of a decision are not good, there is even more motivation to recommit oneself to the original decision.
Agreed.
Breast implants aren't breasts. They are plastic bags with skin over them.
Saying that you can always get your breasts back is a complete lie! I think the good doctor needs to get some brains back! And some conscience .
It's what happens when you marry an avowed Critical Theorist. Their whole schtick is about creating a "New Sensibility," as Marcuse would have it, by denying common sensibility.
Good observation that some people are parasitized by an ideology of victimization. It's a persistent parasite that is difficult to cure once the infection is established. The best treatment is prevention but our schools have become vectors of diseased ideas. Like mosquito infested malarial swamps they need to be drained. The best solution would be to eliminate federal funding for educational programs, schools and organization that propagate their ideology of victimization. That won't completely cure the disease but it would give society a fighting chance to survive this plague.
The fallacious notion that "victim status conveys virtue" is the moral stupidity of this time. Victim status may be overcome by work of the "victims", who are often self-made losers. But it is not virtuous to be a victim.
Yes. Hearing the otherwise woke-leaning GenZer in my life state that having suffered oppression doesn’t automatically make you virtuous or a “good person” gave me some hope for the future.
This expose of Dr. O-K is very important. I thank Dr. Li for taking this brave step. The statistically significant higher risk of cardiovascular disease in both males and females taking wrong sex hormones has definitively been shown in the work of "affirming" Danish "gender" doctor, Dorte Glintborg in vol. 187, issue 3 of European Journal of Endocrinology. Glintborg was trying to figure out if one form of estrogen is better than another, publishing on this for years. This last study involved 2617 individuals on wrong sex hormones, examining the health records, while examining the same content (incidence of cardiovascular disease, blood clots, strokes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol) in 26,700 control individuals not on hormones, age-matched to the "trans" subjects. The data shows 93% higher risk of CVD in men on E compared to male controls and 63% higher risk of CVD in females on T compared to control females. This study was ethical, as it only looked at the records, no names or individual histories given. 5 years of health history was included for each subject. This is very, very significant.
These results only make sense, considering that we have known for a long time that Hormone Replacement Therapy with "same sex" hormones is correlated with increased risk of cardiovascular events in both sexes as well as breast cancer in women. I would note here that testosterone is native to both sexes, and it has been known for a long time that athletes of either sex who use these steroids to change their muscle development are taking on risks to their health.
Can you add the link to this study?
Glintborg D, Rubin KH, Petersen TG, Lidegaard Ø, T'Sjoen G, Hilden M, Andersen MS. Cardiovascular risk in Danish transgender persons: a matched historical cohort study. Eur J Endocrinol. 2022 Aug 5;187(3):463-477. doi: 10.1530/EJE-22-0306. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35900321/
Thanks, so much, Margaret. To be asked this when I've accompanied my guy to the oncologist was just too much.
You're welcome. My career was in medical research so it's easy for me to find studies!
I'd love to have an analysis of the data Dr. Glintborg presents, in terms of exactly what 93% higher risk of CVD in men on estrogen means. I sense there is actual researcher bias in this mathematical presentation of rather alarming data, because most civilians do not understand what increased relative risk is. A higher risk like 93% to me means, basically, that man on estrogen for years is going to get high blood pressure, blood clots, heart disease, stroke, basically, 9 out of 10 times. In the reporting on this in the New York Post, there was the 2.2 times more women on testosterone risk of CVD, which I interpret as more than twice times risk of high blood pressure, stroke, high cholesterol and related heart diseases for those women. I met one young woman like this. She identified as male, did not pass as male, but is obese and told me she has high blood pressure. I do not comprehend how a doctor could prescribe estrogen to such an individual. The combine obesity, wrong sex hormone and documented high blood pressure are a recipe for disaster. All in the name of "preventing suicide." This woman is in a relationship with another woman, so-called "heterosexual" marriage. Just, why? I hope that Colin Wright will see this and write us a clear explanation of the way the data is analysed; relative risk, absolute risk, and ways to compare control data and select group data. The gender ideologues take advantage of the general public's lack of skills for understanding the presentation of this data.
Typo: I do not comprehend how a doctor could prescribe testosterone to a female who is obese, has high blood pressure (God knows what her cholesterol is, she runs a meat-based food operation) because of an ideation in her mind.
Also it would be interesting to look at increased cancer risk in men taking estrogen for feminization purposes. Estrogen is a main driver of hormone-dependent cancers. What is the incidence of breast cancer in these male-to-female transgender transitions? It would also increase prostate cancer risk.
I'm dealing with my boyfriend's cancer diagnosis. See Margaret Groves' considerate reply please.
I am so sorry to hear that.
typo: the number of "trans" individuals' health records in this study was 2,671
I thoroughly appreciate this kind of nuanced, reasoned, thoughtful essay. This should be the standard for all of our discussions. Sincerely, Frederick
Thank you so much Frederick.
I really gave some thought when comparing gender doctors to jihadi. I bet I can sit down and have a coherent conversation with some jihadi in some prison, who while in ISIS raped women and blew up children because they believed doing this is good. Evil is banal, as they say.
"a large, non-refundable deposit used to signal loyalty"
Sorta like the way the Mafia used to require a recruit to commit a murder before he became a 'made man' -- no going back to a normal life. Or the way that child soldiers, similarly, are forced to do something like kill their father and rape their mother -- or die -- on their recruitment. No going back.
" I don’t have any issue with adults choosing to present and live in a manner that aligns more with what’s more typical of the opposite sex, if it enhances their well-being without imposing a serious cost on other people. "
Actually, "transgenderism" in all its forms imposes an extremely serious cost, not only on mentally disturbed and vulnerable children, but on all women and men, the whole of human society. I don't care how pleasant Johanna Olson-Kennedy seemed. To me she's Dr. Mengele with a smile.
Absolutely. Tranniehood is the elevation of a monstrous lie - that a male body can contain a female brain, and that the body can be modified to align the body with the brain. This is monstrous, because it encourages the deluded children to mutilate their bodies.
No person should endorse a lie.
Yes. A monstrous lie. An evil lie.
Just take a look at Johanna Olson-Kennedy's clinical social worker "husband," a biological female on higher doses of steroids than Arnold Schwarzenegger ever dreamed of. The two of them with their professional credentials are simply a pair of over-educated "trans" activists, hellbent on converting as many vulnerable children to their twisted lifestyle. Take away their licenses, and let them run off to a circus sideshow.
http://www.genderodyssey.org/wp-content/uploads/Aiden-2016-08-04-13.29.41-200x300.jpg
I think that’s the crux of the matter! Lies are spread around like horse manure, and the rest of us are supposed to lap it up . If we don’t like the taste, we are” bigots” or worse! Truth is buried under the lies, just like in Stalinist Russia! It is high time to stand up and fight against this tyranny! Truth must prevail !
Well put! “Dr. Mengele with a smile “ and a comforting “ you can always get your breasts back” lie! Despicable !
I agree.
Fantastic piece, articulate and nuanced.
It is amazing that intelligent and personable, compassionate people can be found supporting any number of really bad ideas.
And regarding the Zahavian signal idea it is obviously a totally flawed hypothesis. People make bad and costly choices for a huge variety of reasons, one of which the v author notes here.
I try and stay as far away from partisan "my team better and smarter than your team" thinking as possible, because of course the temptation to think that way is always present and mostly leads to stupidity and error. But SOMETIMES I genuinely find myself wondering if liberal people are not as capable of deep thought about human motivation. Their ideas often seem to be so facile.
Again, a sweeping thought that one must be very careful to entertain and one that is probably wrong.
I have a similar doubt about Liberal abilities to understand aspects of human behavior.
I speculate that a lot of Liberals struggle to understand scale or the ways that ambiguous signals can be misinterpreted in the direction of self-interest. There may be some productive research to do in comparing perceptions of scale to political beliefs and optimism to political beliefs.
Excellent and nuanced article. I am restacking and hope that your perspective will gain a wide audience.
In their beginnings, Ted Bundy, Jim Jones, Hitler, Epstein and many others were engaging, respectful, and charismatic too.
Olson-Kennedy may be pleasant and personable, but she is also a disgusting and child-mutilating liar. She said (in this piece): "In her presentation in 2014, Dr. Olson emphasized that no surgeries were offered to minors under 18."
That's completely false, and was at the time.
She published an article in 2018, in which 44 surgeries to remove breasts were done for children < 18
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29507933/
Right on, Mr. Tyrebyter!
"For me, an indicator of this “enhanced well-being” would be a substantial reduction in patients’ obsession with their sex traits, allowing them to draw more of their identity from their abilities, values, experiences, and relationships." Should this not be true for all of us? Am I deluding myself when I claim that my sex, gender, and sexuality are NOT the most important parts of my identity. How did gender-identity become so central to the idea of personhood that is makes sense to surgically alter the body and become a life long medical patient?
Part of it probably is that these young people do not have skills, experiences, relationships, and values that could shape their identity.
Speaking as a psychologist who treated quite a few of the original (1990's) cohort of adult male trans-identified patients, I can attest that these individuals represented the whole range of career success, recreational experiences, and values. It was of interest to me that, in my practice at least, the highest achievers were in male-dominated careers and remained in those positions post-transition.
If it helped function I fully support those individuals in transitioning as adults.
A very sensible thought. I am a normal male, and enjoy sex. It occupies perhaps .1% of my time. The rest of my time is spent on doing stuff not related to sex.
One issue that I think about is the period of time 16-25. During this time, I was learning Russian (not very well), computers, getting my PhD, reading, learning.
For the gender deluded, this time is spent on learning how to be the other sex. The simulation is bad in almost all cases. What useful skills or knowledge are they learning?
This is also a bit of a white pill for parents. You don't have to fight Woke and save your children by being an activist if that is not your cup of tea. All you need to do is create an environment such that your children maximize their time learning skills, building good healthy relationships, having expansive experiences including hard experiences, and from all of those things, building solid values such as taking responsibility. If parents can do all those things, their children will be shielded from woke. Let productivity dysphoria be the source of dysphoria if you ever feel dysphoria-- as an adolescent I felt that intensely and wasting time gave me severe anxiety. It's ultimately a very useful anxiety to have.
I would not paint JOK in as positive a light as this (very good) article did. I guess I'd consider myself a homosexual rights activist and have been medical and queer theory watchdogging this issue since 2015, meticulously documenting things and trying to do what I can on a couple of different websites I run. I have watched all of Olson's videos. I watched her in person at gender conferences. She downplays the dangers of this to proto-gay kids who used to desist from childhood GD in high numbers, treating them as insignificant annoyances to her utopian vision, contemptuously referred to as "tools used against the community" (paraphrasing from Gender Odyssey 2017). I have some videos I have done from an LGB human rights perspective called "Gender Clinicians are not Our Friends." And they are not. I hope more gay people wake up a realize these people have a sociopathic level of apathy about the human right to grow up, and the damage we are already seeing this doing to same-sex attracted (and other) youth and are fine with you having your life destroyed by insane trans activists if you try to talk about it.
I believe both Sam Harris and James Lindsay have made the point that pernicious ideology effectively makes someone who is not a sociopath behave like a sociopath. I am confident Johanna Olson-Kennedy does not have a diagnosable clinical dark triad personality, but gender ideology and her being married to an avowed Critical Theorist make her effectively behave like she is a sociopath. Hence I conclude by emphasizing the primacy of having truth, not utopian vision, as the north star. All utopians are supremacists with God complex, and even ancient human beings know that people with that level of hubris deserve fall and disdain.
I appreciate your thoughtfulness in your opinions and responses.
You may want to check out Distance Magazine.
Wow! Thank your for an elegant and thoughtful rebuttal to gender ideology from inside the ranks of medicine!
I loved the writing, I love clinical sounding text that is human in feeling.
Your remarks about the "down payment" remijdede instany of a strange Russian cult.
You and you readers may not be aware of the "Skopsi", a bizarre Russian Christian cult that began in the 17th century that persisted until the 21st century even under severe repression. They practiced castration and full emasulation (removal of both penis and testicles) of men with a red-hot iron (a possible origin of trying he term "baptism by fire") and they excised or burned the breasts off women as well as sometimes the labia and clitoris. The burn areas were referred to as greater or lesser seal.
When you read of "trans teens" referring to their scars by a euphemism for crossing some barrier, it's even clearer it's 100% cult.
I'm interested in what laws are available for use to control cult abuse...
James Lindsay has done extensive work exposing Queer Theory as Queer Gnosticism.
Ultimately, people in the gender cult believe that they are gods, rebelling against the Prison of Being which includes the mortal body. The Gnostic secret knowledge about being souls imprisoned in mortal, mutable, sexed bodies is what leads to Liberation (of the gendered soul) and true realization of one's status as a god.
This wacky belief system is old, and rehashed. What is new is hormonal and surgical technology.
I have to say, I've even been quite impressed with the work of plastic surgeons who flip genitals inside out. I've listened to lectures by such surgeons and their level of confidence is through the roof, which comes across as very persuasive and attractive.
Being more certain of your belief than the evidence allows is what defines hubris.
It is interesting how prevalent self torture and mutilation has been in the world's religious practices. Appears to be another one of the kinks in human evolution, as this kind of anti-survival behavior is not seen in any other animal species I know of. A related behavior is torture of one human being by another for the sake of the torturer's pleasure or some authority's sense of power.
I looked this cult up. Incredible. Had not heard of them before!
There was another one known as the Priests of Cybele. They were a Roman cult that worshipped the goddess Cybele. She was a fertility goddess, so the priests would have orgies in which they would dance themselves into a frenzy, then castrate themselves "during sexual pleasure," as the references say. This might have been masturbatory pleasure. I doubt if it lasted through the castration.
The priests dressed in women's clothes and wore a lot of makeup when they were walking around the town. I've seen recent articles about them that may have been written by wokesters, since they said that the priests denied being "eunuchs" and asserted that they were "women."
https://web.sas.upenn.edu/discentes/2020/08/28/blood-lead-and-tears-the-cult-of-cybele-as-a-means-of-addressing-ancient-roman-issues-of-fertility/#:~:text=The%20priests%20of%20the%20cult,in%20Pergamum%20in%20105%20A.D.
Polytheistic societies often had distinct social categories operating under the bureaucratic concept of "temples" even if the behavior was not conventional worship (rituals administered by specialists for the general population) since it was easier to claim "we are set apart by the gods" than to argue for integration into the larger society.
If there was, as seems to be, some portion of the population that always feels they are the opposite sex, then grouping them together as a weird "priestly" group is easier than exterminating them. That said, the Roman mockery of the Greeks suggests they were not fond of men dressing up like women.
There is a term over 2000 years old - “Molly” (not the pleasant sexually stimulating “PTSD” treating drug MDMA) - as in “Mollycoddle” is British slang for effeminate men which goes back to Latin “mollus” or soft and pliable, like Molluscs which are oysters and clams... Mollus was a derogatory term for men who had “passive” homosexual sex (Academics need to spend more time watching hardcore gay pornography to dispel the concept of “Passive”). Thus a common insult was to say so-and-so was someone’s wife.
What I had read was that many women in the US in the 1800s were named Molly and that "mollycoddle" referred to overly controlling mothers who left sons unable to fend for themselves.