Media WATCH
The Dallas Morning News, as part of its “objective" news reporting, is lamenting that transgender kids won't be able to get puberty blockers anymore at a recently disbanded clinic.From a Dec. 6 article labeled “News”, not "Analysis" or "Commentary" (bold added throughout). The lead sentence gives the game away:
A pioneering care program in Dallas for transgender youth is cutting off hormone and other medical treatments for new patients, a move that goes against the standards of care for eligible adolescents set out by transgender health experts.
Genecis — which stands for Gender Education and Care, Interdisciplinary Support — was a highly-acclaimed 7-year-old program created by Children’s Health and UT Southwestern Medical Center to provide transgender and gender-diverse youth with health care, including mental health counseling and hormone therapy.
The entire scope of the article is dedicated to the overriding theme that this is a catastrophe:Health experts warn that withholding gender-affirming medical treatment from adolescents risks psychological distress and increased chances of abuse and stigmatization. The Dallas hospitals’ decision to cut off hormone therapy for new patients, according to one physician who specializes in adolescent care, raises serious questions about equity and continuity of care.
“It almost goes without saying that this seems inequitable and flatly wrong,” said Steve Rosenthal, medical director of the child and adolescent gender center for the University of California, San Francisco Benioff Children’s Hospitals. “Where are these patients going to go? And what’s the reason you’re not going to do it anymore?”
The paper wants to make it clear: Mutilating kids is proper medical treatment:The News consulted medical best practices and spoke with experts about the widely accepted proper standards of care for transgender children. Here is what we found out.
This is highly disturbing:Mental health professionals can help children and their families explore who they are in safe spaces. They don’t tell children who they are or how they should identify, Baker said, but instead allow kids to figure that out on their own in a secure environment.
Some children might transition socially, which means they may begin expressing a new or different gender identity through clothing, hair cuts or what name they go by.
Medical interventions, like puberty suppressants... should only be offered once someone has at least experienced the beginning of puberty so that they can assess how they feel once their body starts to change, said Rosenthal, who is also a member of the WPATH [World Professional Association for Transgender Health] board of directors and former president of the Pediatric Endocrine Society.
The paper’s assertions as to the safety of puberty blockers on young bodies are grotesquely misleading. There is a huge controversy over whether puberty suppressants are fully reversible but the Morning News takes things further regardless, advocating irreversible changes as part of standard care for adolescents:Puberty suppressants are drugs that cause a temporary pause in a person’s puberty by blocking sex hormones, like testosterone and estrogen. The treatment was originally created outside of the transgender health care setting, to treat kids going through puberty at a very young age.
These drugs offer adolescents with gender dysphoria the opportunity to further explore their gender identity with a mental health professional without the sometimes distressing effects associated with going through a puberty that doesn’t match how they identify.
Puberty suppressants are fully reversible, meaning that once someone stops taking them, their puberty will continue as normal.
If an adolescent’s gender identity does not change after being on puberty suppressants for some time, doctors can add in sex hormones to match. Some changes caused by these hormones may need reconstructive surgery to reverse, while other changes, like a deepening of a voice caused by testosterone, are not reversible.
The Morning News is parroting a party line by repeating the "it’s just a pause" myth. Transgender child “doctor” Rosenthal leans on it heavily. From a 2016 article published by UCSF:“You can take those kids who are really suffering, put puberty on pause, and give them time to figure out what their gender identity really is,” Rosenthal says. “The beauty of the blockers is that a girl doesn’t have to worry about having an Adam’s apple or a deepened voice. The quality of life for someone blending in according to their gender identity is much better.”
The reality: It's a lot more complicated than that. Two pro-transgender doctors have revealed grave doubts about puberty blockers. In fact, they admit they really don’t know just what the long-term effects will be on adolescents. Abigail Shrier reports:WPATH, for instance, recommends that for many gender dysphoric and gender non-conforming kids, hormonal puberty suppression begin at the early stages of puberty. WPATH has also insisted since 2012 that puberty blockers are “fully reversible interventions.”
When I asked [Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist at the University of California San Francisco’s Child and Adolescent Gender Clinic] if she believes that psychological effects of puberty blockers are reversible, she said: “I’m not sure.” When asked whether children in the early stages of puberty should be put on blockers, [Dr. Marci Bowers, a world-renowned vaginoplasty specialist who operated on reality-television star Jazz Jennings] said: “I’m not a fan.”
When I asked Bowers if she still thought puberty blockers were a good idea, from a surgical perspective, she said: “This is typical of medicine. We zig and then we zag, and I think maybe we zigged a little too far to the left in some cases.” She added “I think there was naivete on the part of pediatric endocrinologists who were proponents of early [puberty] blockade thinking that just this magic can happen, that surgeons can do anything.”
From a rabidly pro-transgender kid New York Times article in May:But while puberty blockers are commonly referred to as “fully reversible,” more research is needed to fully understand the impact they may have on certain patients’ fertility. There is also little known about the drugs’ lasting effects on brain development and bone mineral density....
The impact of puberty blockers on brain development is similarly hazy. The Endocrine Society guidelines point to two studies: A small one published in 2015 showed that the drugs did not seem to impact executive functioning (cognitive processes including self-control and working memory), while a 2017 study of rams treated with GnRH agonists suggested chronic use could harm long-term spatial memory. (Of course, rams are not humans.)...
How irresponsible is this statement?“Medications are rarely without side effects,” [Dr. Jessica Kremen, a pediatric endocrinologist for Boston Children’s Hospital’s Gender Multispecialty Service] said. “That is usually not enough of a reason to allow a child, who is telling you that they’re extremely distressed by the pubertal changes that they’re seeing, to continue going through puberty.”
“Knowing what we do know, these medications have enormous benefits for the population that we care for,” she added.
In other words, physicians don’t really know the full repercussions of what they are doing to these children but they are going to go ahead and do it anyway. Whatever happened to "First, do no harm?" Now for the most sickening part: YOUR taxpayer dollars have funded this experimentation on young, impressionable kids. From the 2016 UCSF article:UCSF, along with three other academic institutions with dedicated transgender youth centers, are addressing that lack of evidence with a $5.7-million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The five-year study – the first of U.S. transgender youth funded by the NIH – will evaluate the physiological and psychosocial impact of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.
“We’re really excited to pool our resources,” says Rosenthal. “This study will help to effectively and safely guide the clinical care of these youth.” Dr. Anthony Fauci puts starving sand flies on the faces of caged beagles and the NIH is funding speculative research with puberty blockers on young children. The U.S. medical establishment’s God complex truly has reached the zenith of hubris. Meanwhile, the Dallas Morning News has made clear that times have changed as its editorial policy has evolved. According to the infallible Wikipedia:Historically, the Morning News' opinion section has tilted conservative, mirroring Texas′ drift to the Republican Party since the 1950s. However, on September 7, 2016 it endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, the first time it had recommended a Democrat for president since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940. This came a day after it ran a scathing editorial declaring Republican candidate Donald Trump "not qualified to serve as president." It was the first time that the paper had refused to recommend a Republican since 1964. Then, in wake of the approaching 2018 midterm elections, the Morning News once again endorsed a Democratic candidate: Beto O'Rourke, the challenger to incumbent Senator Ted Cruz.
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