Libs reconsider tranny surgery

American ambulance chasers may save a generation of confused kids

All opinion pieces in the New York Times now reflect the opinion of the paper’s staff after the staff succeeded in getting an editorial page editor fired after running a column by Senator Tom Cotton.

With that in mind, I am encouraged by the Gray Lady (as it calls itself) abandoning its blind support of transgender surgery and puberty blockers for kids. Supporters of this travesty call it gender affirming care. I call it butchering and poisoning.

Columnist Pamela Paul wrote, “As Kids, They Thought They Were Trans. They No Longer Do.”

She began the piece with the story of Grace Powell.

Paul wrote, “At 17, desperate to begin hormone therapy, Powell broke the news to her parents. They sent her to a gender specialist to make sure she was serious. In the fall of her senior year of high school, she started cross-sex hormones. She had a double mastectomy the summer before college, then went off as a transgender man named Grayson to Sarah Lawrence College, where she was paired with a male roommate on a men’s floor. At 5-foot-3, she felt she came across as a very effeminate gay man.”

Now 23, the woman literally is trapped in a man’s body. The people who ensnared her were supposed to protect her. They took the money and ran.

Paul wrote, “At no point during her medical or surgical transition, Powell says, did anyone ask her about the reasons behind her gender dysphoria or her depression. At no point was she asked about her sexual orientation. And at no point was she asked about any previous trauma, and so neither the therapists nor the doctors ever learned that she’d been sexually abused as a child.”

Powell’s story does not throw shade on tranny surgery for kids. Her story is a total eclipse of the heart, soul and mind.

Paul talked to many others who now have grave doubts about the tranny surgery for kids.

She wrote, “Health care professionals and scientists who do not think clinicians should automatically agree to a young person’s self-diagnosis are often afraid to speak out. A report commissioned by the National Health Service about Britain’s Tavistock gender clinic, which, until it was ordered to be shut down, was the country’s only health center dedicated to gender identity, noted that ‘primary and secondary care staff have told us that they feel under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach and that this is at odds with the standard process of clinical assessment and diagnosis that they have been trained to undertake in all other clinical encounters.’”

Reading the piece is like listening to the opening argument in a lawsuit against the doctors and the hospitals that enable them to cut kids up. I almost heard Paul Newman’s voice from The Verdict as I read passages of the piece.

In my years of writing editorials, my bosses pushed me to write about tort reform. I advised them that the best tort reform is to not have one to begin with. To be sure, West Virginia courts were a fairy land of liberalism in the 1990s and early 21st century, but the Chamber of Commerce demand to sacrifice our rights at altar of economic convenience never appealed to me.

Paul’s piece was different from her previous writing on the subject. She still calls it gender-affirming care but this time around she wants it reserved for adults.

She wrote, “Instead of promoting unproven treatments for children, which surveys show many Americans are uncomfortable with, transgender activists would be more effective if they focused on a shared agenda. Most Americans across the political spectrum can agree on the need for legal protections for transgender adults. They would also probably support additional research on the needs of young people reporting gender dysphoria so that kids could get the best treatment possible.

“A shift in this direction would model tolerance and acceptance. It would prioritize compassion over demonization. It would require rising above culture-war politics and returning to reason. It would be the most humane path forward. And it would be the right thing to do.”

By rising above, I believe she means admitting mistakes.

In June, she began a column, “Scott Leibowitz is a pioneer in the field of transgender health care.”

In 2017, he headed “a working group of seven clinicians and researchers drafting a chapter on adolescents for a new version of guidelines called the Standards of Care to be issued by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). The guidelines are meant to set a gold standard for the field of transgender health care, and this would be the first update since 2012. What Leibowitz and his co-authors didn’t foresee, when they began, was that their work would be engulfed by two intersecting forces: a significant rise in the number of teenagers openly identifying as transgender and seeking gender care, and a right-wing backlash in the United States against allowing them to medically transition, including state-by-state efforts to ban it.”

What had happened in the five year interim was an edict by Obama that turned a boutique practice into a multi-billion-dollar industry that saw clinics pop up at just about every major hospital in America. Paul counted 60.

Paul wrote, “Most of the young people today who come to clinics for treatment are affluent and white, live in progressive metropolitan areas and have health insurance. For them, gender-related care has become more accessible since 2016, when the Obama administration included gender identity in a rule against denying health care benefits on the basis of sex. If a provider deems the care medically necessary, it’s possible to get insurance coverage for puberty suppressants, which can be injected or implanted under the skin, and hormone treatments, which can be taken orally, injected or applied as a gel or a patch. Each can cost thousands of dollars a year.”

So the target of tranny surgery and tranny pills is affluent white kids. Good to know. Their parents often are pressured to go along by threats of suicide. Better to have a live daughter than a dead son, right?

In that June piece, she wrote, “In individual cases, teenagers often say that being able to medically transition is lifesaving. Jack Turban, a fellow in psychiatry at Stanford Medical School, has become a major voice in the media and on Twitter among gender-affirming providers including on the question of medications and suicide risk. He leads a research team that worked with data from a 2015 survey of transgender adults in the United States. The survey asked respondents if they remembered taking puberty suppressants or hormone treatments before age 18. Using those adult recollections, Turban’s team published articles in 2020 and 2022 finding an association between taking puberty suppressants and hormone treatments and having lower odds of suicidal thoughts in adulthood. But the studies didn’t find the same link between taking the medications in adolescence and actually planning or attempting suicide. (Through a Stanford spokeswoman, Turban said he didn’t have time to talk to me.)”

A liberal could not find time to talk to the New York Times? Will wonders ever cease?

Liebowitz’s work on tranny treatment for WPATH was called SOC8.

Paul ended her column, “In the run-up to the release of the final SOC8, Leibowitz couldn’t imagine a more nerve-racking moment to make the guidelines public. In early June, the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida asked the state’s health department essentially to ban gender-related medical care for minors — and in addition, to lay the groundwork to take that care away from trans adults with a report that justified ending Medicaid coverage for them.

“Leibowitz said he hoped the SOC8 would improve the quality of care. He knew it wouldn’t settle the larger debates about how well teenagers know themselves and how parents and professionals should respond to them. ‘It’s convenient to say there’s not enough evidence if you don’t believe in the treatment — and that there’s enough evidence, if you do believe,’ Leibowitz said. The clinical experience he had, seeing kids every day, was uppermost. ‘Evidence matters, yes, but common sense matters, too.’”

Why the tranny medical industry cannot wait until their customers are old enough to drink (21) never is explained.

Not everyone at NYT is happy with the Pamela Paul’s latest column.

Via National Review, an anonymous NYT staffer wrote on the company’s Slack outlet, “I wish the leadership of this company could understand that the more ‘perspectives’ we publish that basically amount to ‘there should be fewer trans people in society’ absolutely contributes to a hostile work environment for the queer people who work here and keep this place running.

“I mean, it just feels so degrading that we have in our workforce these very prominent colleagues who are openly transphobic and the transphobia is explicitly sanctioned by this company under the guise of just asking questions/ ‘independent journalism’ when the views that we publish in the paper would absolutely violate harassment and discrimination policies if they were spoken out loud at another employee.

“This company’s commitment to diversity and inclusion is an absolute farce.”

NYT hastily took the post down. Hmm, NYT executives have decided to assert themselves and actually run their asylum.

Last July, I wrote, “Lawyers may end the trans madness.” My hope then as it is now is that litigation by those harmed by this medical procedure would rein in this practice.

I linked a May story in NYT, “How a Few Stories of Regret Fuel the Push to Restrict Gender Transition Care.”

The story began, “When Missouri lawmakers took up bills to ban transition care for minors, Chloe Cole, an activist from California, traveled to Jefferson City to offer her story as Exhibit A.

“After living as a transgender boy for years and getting a mastectomy at 15, Ms. Cole says she felt stifled by a male identity and distraught by her body’s changes. She decided to de-transition, returning to her female identity.

“She also decided to speak out. She has told her story in Florida, and in Idaho, Kansas, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee and Utah. Republican lawmakers typically listen attentively, sometimes in tears. In March, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida relayed Ms. Cole’s story in his State of the State address, while she received a standing ovation.

“As Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed over a dozen bills banning transition care for minors this year and have moved to restrict care for adults, Ms. Cole and fewer than 10 activists like her — people who transitioned and then changed course — have become the faces of the cause, according to a New York Times review of news coverage and legislative testimony.”

Gee, people testifying before a legislative committee suddenly is a bad thing.

Almost a year later, NYT now is questioning the rush to transitioning. Maybe pigs can fly.