Look to science, not law, for real answers on youth gender medicine
-
Washington Post Editorial - probably behind a paywall, so here you go:
The Biden Justice Department on Dec. 4 challenged before the Supreme Court a Tennessee law that bans the use of puberty blockers and hormones for gender-transition treatments in minors on the grounds that it unlawfully discriminates based on sex.
The court’s decision will be consequential in the 24 states with these restrictions, but it won’t resolve the crux of the debate over pediatric gender medicine: whether, as the plaintiffs argued, the treatments can be lifesaving or, as some global health authorities have determined, the evidence is too thin to conclude that they are beneficial and the risks are not well-understood.
This unresolved dispute is why Tennessee has a colorable claim before the court; it would be ludicrous to suggest that patients have a civil right to be harmed by ineffective medical interventions — and, likewise, unconscionable for Tennessee to deny a treatment that improves patient lives, even if the state did so with majestic impartiality. The issue is subject to legal dispute in part because the medical questions have not been properly resolved.
Multiple European health authorities have reviewed the available evidence and concluded that it was “very low certainty,” “lacking” and “limited by methodological weaknesses.” Last week, Britain banned the use of puberty blockers indefinitely due to safety concerns.
“Children’s healthcare must always be evidence-led,” British Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting said in a press release. “The independent expert Commission on Human Medicines found that the current prescribing and care pathway for gender dysphoria and incongruence presents an unacceptable safety risk for children and young people.”
The uncertainty is the result of scientists’ failure to study these treatments slowly and systematically as they developed them. Early studies from a Dutch clinic seemed to show promising results, but the research started with only 70 patients (dropping to 55 in a follow-up study) and no control group. Treatment results that look impressive in small groups often vanish when larger groups are studied. That’s why the Food and Drug Administration generally requires large, randomized controlled trials of drugs: to ensure that encouraging initial results aren’t mere statistical noise.
Conducting gold-standard medical research on gender-transition treatment was never going to be easy; it would have been obvious to those in any control group that they were getting placebos, making it impossible to conduct a “double-blind” study. Yet researchers could and should have used randomized control groups, gradually expanding a patient population enrolled in systematic clinical research, to rigorously assess effectiveness, refine treatment protocols, and — crucially — improve their ability to tell which patients benefit, since at least some patients who transitioned later experience regret and suffer the fate the treatments were supposed to avoid: a body that doesn’t match their gender identity.
Yet as other doctors began copying the Dutch, clinical practice outraced the research, especially as treatment protocols rapidly evolved. A British study attempting to replicate the Dutch researchers’ success with puberty blockers “identified no changes in psychological function” among those treated.
Some clinicians appear reluctant to publish findings that don’t show strong benefits. The British lackluster results were published nine years after the study began, after Britain’s High Court ruled that children younger than 16 were unlikely to be able to form informed consent to such treatments. Internal communications from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health suggest that the group tried to interfere with a review commissioned from a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University.
Johanna Olson-Kennedy, medical director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, told the New York Times that a government-funded study of puberty blockers she helped conduct, which started in 2015, had not found mental health improvements, and those results hadn’t been published because more time was needed to ensure the research wouldn’t be “weaponized.” Medical progress is impossible unless null or negative results are published as promptly as positive ones.
The failure to adequately assess these treatments gives Tennessee reason to worry about them — and legal room to restrict them. We have serious reservations when states make decisions about minors’ medical care, rather than leaving them to parents. But in the absence of clear data — and with the possibility of significant publication bias or researchers massaging their results — parents might not have adequate information.
No matter how the court rules, though, the federal government should supply the missing evidence at the heart of this dispute. Randomized trials would be best, though harder to pull off now, since children who are placed in a control group might drop out and seek blockers and hormones elsewhere. Congress should nevertheless fund new research of maximum possible rigor, overseen by scientists who are not gender medicine practitioners. Those studies should set timetables and specify the outcomes to be studied in advance to avoid the risk that researchers will pick and choose what to show the public. Children with gender dysphoria deserve clearer answers.
-
-
Who posted it?
@LuFins-Dad said in Look to science, not law, for real answers on youth gender medicine:
Who posted it?
Editorial Board of the Washington Post.
-
Yeah, it was wish washy enough. The dems are trying to find the off ramp…
-
https://www.christianpost.com/voices/washington-post-trans-insanity-kids-puberty-blockers.html
No, Washington Post, you can’t memory-hole your support for trans insanity
By Brandon Showalter, Opinion writer and social commentator
December 20, 2024Every so often a punchy meme recirculates on X, and it reads: “Start thinking of an excuse why you supported sterilizing children.”
The meme’s background is a pink and blue transgender banner, and its terse message reminds those who supported so-called “gender-affirming care” that the ugly truth will one day be so undeniable as to be inexcusable, even for the most die-hard believers. By the looks of it, some prominent media outlets are slyly starting to memory-hole that enthusiastic support as the ghastly reality of child sterilization and other serious long-term repercussions via this “care” surfaces more widely.
None other than The Washington Post now appears to be backpedaling.
In an Editorial Board column published Sunday, the prominent newspaper’s editors are furrowing their brows as ultra-concerned arbiters of truth and supposed defenders against democracy dying in darkness. They are admitting that the state of Tennessee — at the center of U.S. v. Skrmetti at the Supreme Court on Dec 4 — has legitimate worries about puberty-blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones, and it has legal room to prohibit them for minors, as approximately half the US states have done.
Robust science, not red-state laws, should settle this hot-button dispute, these elite editors opine.
Along with the many unknowns of these risky interventions, they further noted how doctors like Johanna Olson-Kennedy delayed releasing results of federally-funded research on puberty blockers because her findings, as she told The New York Times, might be politically “weaponized.” The WaPo editors additionally observe that “some patients who transitioned later experience regret and suffer the fate the treatments were supposed to avoid: a body that doesn’t match their gender identity.”
Dear Washington Post editorial board, if you’re genuinely trying to break free from the clutches of transgenderism, let me help you out here with a fresh, heaping helping of unwavering clarity.
No human has ever “transitioned” their sex — nobody ever will, not even those who experience body dysmorphia, and there is no such thing as a “gender identity.” All of it is a lie.
No scientific evidence exists for an amorphous “gender” inside a person apart from their sex — no brain imaging scan, no blood test, no genetic marker, nothing. It’s an entirely fictitious construct, one that psychologically dissociates us. Nor is a “body that doesn’t match their gender identity” a thing. There aren’t two parts to be matched. Your words here are predicated on the notion of a false, split self, not a whole human person. This is basic reality and basic science. It’s not complicated.
While I have a hunch that your editorial board op-ed wouldn’t have seen the light of day had Vice President Kamala Harris eked out a win on Nov. 5, since you now appear to be pivoting with all this nuance, let’s take a trip down memory lane, shall we?
Remember this heavily slanted article from January 2018 that was, for all intents and purposes, a cheery advertisement for pediatric gender clinics? Among the many troubling assertions in it, some of the most alarming were from Dr. Stephen Rosenthal of the University of California, San Francisco. His claims went unchallenged (except for brief, tepid criticism from Erica Anderson, a man who claims to be a woman, no less) when he said that puberty blockers pose a “theoretical” harm to bone development, and how youth patients in the clinic must "determine their gender" by age 14. What does that even mean? Also uncritically reported was how UCSF gender clinicians "anticipate a future in which trans women will be able to carry their own babies to term, thanks to medical breakthroughs such as uterine transplantation."
For the record, editors, "trans women" are men and they cannot and will never give birth, and anyone who attempts transplanting a uterus in a male body is committing a medical atrocity.
As one who has reported extensively on these issues and co-produced several seasons of a documentary podcast, if you’re serious about delving into the truth, here are a few pointers.
Come clean and admit that your coverage of these issues was one-sided and painfully biased. Ask tough questions of the activist doctors you relied upon and scrutinize their activities in many hotly contested cases nationwide. I recommend starting with Rosenthal and Olson-Kennedy. Those two involve themselves in legal matters of all kinds from contentious child custody disputes to lawsuits against states like Alabama that are trying to safeguard children. Talk to Ted Hudacko, whose son, as a minor, underwent a surgical procedure to implant a puberty-blocking device in his arm at the pediatric gender clinic Rosenthal co-founded, in clear violation of a court order.
You might also explain to Katherine Cave why you dismissed her. Cave, as you may recall, detailed in The Public Discourse how she got nowhere with you in 2017 when she alerted you to the enormous depth of this scandal. We know you were at least aware of it then; some of us were reporting on these subjects when almost no one else was.
Consider apologizing to the American College of Pediatricians for your hit piece that you published in June of last year, and for this similarly dishonest 2020 article characterizing the radical feminist Women’s Liberation Front as “right-wing” (they are not).
You should self-reflect that you were part of an insular information ecosystem that declined to review watershed works like Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, and tuned out radical feminists like Kara Dansky who has labored tirelessly for years, pointing out the dangers of gender medicalization in her books The Abolition of Sex: How the ‘Transgender’ Agenda Harms Women and Girls: and The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls. You might also engage other thoughtful left-wing voices, like Lisa Selin Davis, who has tried for years to cover these issues fairly in mainstream outlets.
You should also contact Jennifer Bilek, whose astonishing investigative work tracing the money trail behind the trans industry connected the dots for so many who were struggling to discern what was driving this behemoth. While you’re at it, speak with Dr. Michael Laidlaw, an endocrinologist who has been FOIA-ing the NIH and other government entities, uncovering appalling anecdotes — such as Olson-Kennedy lowering the age for the cross-sex hormone cohort inclusion criteria from 13 to 8 in the same study she withheld.
If you want to be courageous and cutting-edge, reach out to the extremely brave women at Reduxx and inquire about the group of seedy academics who write sadistic pornography, and whose online forum their journalists infiltrated. Some of those castration-enthusiast men have shaped transgender health guidelines for years.
Be forewarned, it’s a dark abyss.
If you start doing good journalism along these lines, maybe you will earn back the public trust. Until then, it seems you’d rather have us believe that you want to see scientific integrity and more caution with these experimental medical practices and that you have never thought otherwise.
For many of us in these brutal trenches, that won’t fly given how you’ve carried water for this reprobate movement, only occasionally allowing a few words of criticism to appear in your pages. This is called a “limited hangout,” right? It has been beyond infuriating to watch you refuse to do your job as thousands of children were irreversibly sterilized and maimed and countless families were fractured.
Amid these changing cultural, scientific, and political winds I’d advise that you ‘fess up, Washington Post. Remember, confession is good for the soul, and I’ll remind you that screenshots and Wayback Machine are forever.
Some of us have kept the receipts on your derelict reporting.
