What Doctors Aren’t Telling The Parents of Gender Dysphoric Children

i'm going to talk about um what happens when you do speak up and what's happened to people who've spoken up the first um the first firestorm really of of um someone of a voice being suppressed michael bailey wrote a book called the man who would be queen back in 2003. the subtitle was the science of gender bending in transsexualism um transgender used to be called transsexualism and he bailey described the work of ray blanchard who worked in the 1980s who described two distinctly different types of transsexuals one was homosexual men and that's what most people think of when we think of transgender is that these are gay men they traditionally have been just dissatisfied with societal sexual stereotypes and expectations for men and believing instead that they must really be women um and in the past they had support for that um but bailly noted that blanchard also said that there are heterosexual men called autogynophilic that was blanchard's term it was coined in 1989 and it means men who are erotically obsessed with the image of themselves as women they are not they are not women trapped in a man's body um they have sexual arousal at the idea of themselves as women and they now may be probably are the majority of transgender identified males they are really more men trapped in men's bodies and ann lawrence who is himself a trans-identified man wrote a book about that called men trapped in men's bodies where he interviewed over 300 of these of these guys so the book would have gone it probably would have been gone nowhere was nominated for a lambda literary foundation award which didn't get it only sold a few thousand copies and probably would have gone nowhere or not for the firestorm that erupted um transgender activists said that the um the book was misleading that it was false and the what they did made it into a book written in 2015 by alex drago who's a science historian called galileo's middle finger this was a book about scientific controversies and threats to a free press and free academic inquiry and in bailey's case um drager writes that a small group tried to bury a politically challenging scientific theory by killing the messenger so the the firestorm that interrupted wasn't really directed at bailly's ideas was directed at bailly drager did essentially investigative reporting she interviewed every single individual involved every person that bailly had in interviewed in his book she dug up original documents and she corroborated or debunked um every claim bail the transgender activists who um assailed bailly um accused him of abusing the rights of subjects having sex with the subject making up data they accused him he received threats and harassment via emails relentlessly pictures of his kids were posted online with sexualized captions he was accused of sodomizing his own daughter his academic colleagues were contacted and were told that bailly was an alcoholic and they should encourage him to move they accused him of practicing without a license and that he had no ethics oversight in his research um draeger ident she was who did a terrific job identified an individual who set up really an enormous website um hosted by a large state university for the purpose of taking down bailey um and she said that she figured out that what what really had been done that it wasn't his ideas that it was essentially set up in an effort to shut him up about autogynophilia um one of the hallmarks of which is denying that you have it um ultimately bailly was pressured and pressured and pressured into stepping down from his department chairmanship at northwestern university um it it gets better kenneth zucker this isn't his paper but kenneth zucker in 2015 was on head and had been head for um decades of a clinic in toronto called the child youth and family gender identity clinic or gic which was under the umbrella of the center for addiction and mental health or cam he um he was a researcher he developed the dsm-5 criteria for gender dysphoria he helped write standards of care guidelines for the world professional association for transgender health he believed in helping kids feel comfortable in their own bodies he believed that that gender is malleable at young ages and that gender dysphoria is likely to resolve with time his approach is called watchful waiting where you just kind of support the kids watch them help them through what are very very difficult years and discover um and there's this is one of the things where there is good research on discover that most of them just desist and decide not to transgender if left alone however um he was because of this watchful waiting um his clinic had actually been closed in in 2014 they um they said the waitlist the cam said the waitlist was too long um they laid off the only other full-time staff member a psychologist on the day she came back from maternity leave um and they continued activists continued to pressure um the center for to review um zucker's approach which they did and the review which zucker read included a factual error which the uh which was not changed before the review was posted online um there were interviews of only a few activists and clinicians who said that the clinic practiced conversion therapy there were photos taken of patients and printed posted without patient consent uh former patients were interviewed who said they'd been traumatized by the clinic and there was a false allegation by a former patient that zucker had mocked his body zucker was essentially fired on the spot and his clinic was closed down over 500 of zucker's colleagues signed a petition in his defense in the fall of 2018 he finally received an apology for um cam for erroneously representing his behavior in words the apology admitted that the report made false allegations and errors yes errors were made about zucker but the clinic stayed closed we move on to 2017 and james caspian at bath spa university in uk decided to do a master's degree so he proposed a research project he'd spoken with a surgeon who was getting more and more patients wanting their trends and surgeries reversed those people who would like to go back are called d transitioners and bath spa the university initially said hey that's great let's do that um we accept your proposal but then caspian discovered that a lot of people who detransitioned necessarily did not necessarily have surgery or wanted to detransition for other reasons so he wanted to include all detransitioners he was interested in the phenomenon as a whole the university said no you can't do that because attacks on social media may not be confined to the researcher but may involve the university and it might cause offense um he ultimately yeah he ultimately went to court earlier this year but unfortunately the case was brought too late um so the court said you know we can't hear it but they did acknowledge that there was a an issue of academic freedom of expression um that uh oh you can hardly read it but lisa littman last the end of last summer published a paper originally titled rapid onset gender dysphoria and adolescence and young adults a study of parental reports within days of publication um trans activist pressured brown university uh to that the um uh that the study was misleading because it said that there was a phenomenon which she called rapidance and gender dysphoria of kids spending tremendous amounts of times with each other online and in real life but primarily online i mean these kids spend hours and hours and hours a day um reading about trent other kids being trans and about how to trans and i encourage you if you haven't done it to go on i hate to say this tumblr um and other other sites and read what kids are are saying to each other um the uh trans activist said no this isn't true it's misleading there are methodological errors and within days the university removed the press release about the paper from their website and with continued pressure the journal re-reviewed the paper which is a really extraordinary thing to do not only did they re-review it i mean they got you know just senior editors statisticians academic editors and what they found lo and behold that the results were identical but they did rename the paper parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria the littman says that things were reframed including the new title but reframed mostly to emphasize that reports from parents have limitations which was acknowledged in the original paper and that rapid onset gender dysphoria is not a clinical diagnosis which was not claimed in the original paper but rather a described phenomenon so that's lisa littman with her redone paper moving on you have to wonder then after this has been going on why the american academy of pediatrics in 2016 allowed the human rights commission to take the lead in writing their guidelines for supporting and caring for transgender children the lead author is a 25 year old woman a trans-identified female who is not a physician who essentially wrote and directed these set of guidelines there were 12 authors there were only five positions um out of 66 000 pediatrician members of the american association of pediatrics the input was really from less than 30 people and the contributors on this this original um 2016 set of guidelines included um one physician who was the director of a trans and transgender health clinic at which 100 percent of the patients the kids who came in were considered appropriate for transition 100 there was another physician who was a director of another gender clinic who says that self-identification as homosexual can be a normal first step for trans people however this it was significantly revised in october of 2018 now this was written by physicians but it was published to provide guidance for parents and clinicians through a gender affirming approach watchful waiting was deemed unsupportive and it stated that the mental health issues that kids have because there are a tremendous number of associated comorbidities comorbidities aside from autism other psychiatric disorders depression a whole host of things the revision stated that mental health issues are really from stigma and negative experiences rather than being intrinsic to the child and the uh the conflation or or the confusion between um uh sexual orientation and gender identity is kind of exploited in conversion therapy bands there are now conversion therapy bands in effect in 15 states they were passed from august of 2013 to january of 2019. until recently it just meant using psychological techniques to try and change someone's sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual although there is no reliable evidence that this is effective current conversion therapy bans are applicable to both sexual orientation and gender identity so what do you do especially when there's a director of a gender identity clinic saying well homosexual is just a step on the way to to yeah on just a step on the way to trans um there are consistent um reliable findings that um gender non-conforming kids you know boys who prefer traditionally feminine activities and girls who prefer climbing trees and playing with trucks um we'll often go on to become generally healthy gay and lesbian people as adults and well that will happen significantly more um um than them going on to be straight although that does happen so most kids who insist they are the opposite sex if left alone no longer have this belief or desire after puberty and with watchful waiting i would think that ultimately we would want kids to be comfortable with themselves and their bodies and that this is a priori a better outcome than lifelong hormones with irreversible effects irreversible surgeries sterility and struggling to believe the impossible that they are the opposite sex which can never happen um and there is not a lot of data there really are not a whole lot of studies um what studies there are this is um this is really a very good um you can find it online you can google it this gentleman is a uh is a layman who gets it the best studies show the worst outcomes um given the sometimes heated debate around transgenderism in general and transient kids in particular and the toxicities of the drugs used and drastic body alterations of the surgeries along with the irreversibility of both i mean one would expect that there'd be an explosion in research or a demand for research about what is gender dysphoria really i know there's a definition but again if you go to these online places there are kids directing other kids well you have to say this um here's what you say this is how you get the medications this is how you get them to give you the stuff and when they talk about their experiences it's not the definition of gender dysphoria at all for many girls it's great dissatisfaction with how they're treated as girls being treated being sexualized at very young ages by boys grabbing them and calling them really awful things um for the boys um some maybe young future gay men um some of them maybe young autogynophilic males who will grow up to be autogranophilic men since the onset is at puberty um so one would expect an explosion in research about what gender dysphoria really is about the effect efficacy of transitioning to relieve gender dysphoria does it work whether the risks of the medical and surgical interventions outweigh any benefits what are the long-term treatment effects there's a concept called burden of treatment that you know when you're deciding do i want to get treated for this that or the other where there's a very low risk that the treatment will work will i accept the burdens that this treatment lays on me and you would expect research about the adverse effects and you would also expect that patients parents and physicians would want high quality objective research to answer really important questions about what's being treated if it's effective for the underlying condition and the risks and does it work in the long term lay people get all that in studies of their um here we go the problem with most studies is that they are on trans kids is that they're cross-sectional they're just a one-shot um study which can tell you about incidents of certain phenomenon but doesn't tell you about long-term effects changes or consequences there are often controls that are lacking there are no control subjects and that if you do not have a control subject you really need control subjects that are the actual same sex as the um as the kid the trans kid and also of the sex of the sex that the kid thinks he's transing into um there are confounding factors the major confounding factor in kids as we saw is homosexuality since if most of these kids were left alone that's what would happen to them um so don't you want to know what percentage of kids would really go on to be same sex distracted is there any difference between why kids want to trans if they're boys or girls if they're um lesbians or if they're straight girls or if they're bisexual if they're boys who are autogynophilic if they're boys who are homosexual or if there are maybe a few boys who will turn out to be neither in either of those categories i would want to know about those things um maybe those kids probably those kids need to be treated differently there are also in most of the studies very very high rates of loss to follow up and very short study periods longer studies of patients who are followed up consistently show increasingly negative outcomes after a one to two year honeymoon period where people report hey everything is great starting at about five years and for five to ten years the rates of suicide start to go up dramatically and this is supposedly after being well integrated into society as the supposed new sex um the uh loss to follow-up isn't because those people are doing well in studies of um other medical and surgical conditions patients loss to follow-up after treatment are generally found to have a fairly not insignificant at least proportion of people um who are doing poorly rather than well when you do track them down so ultimately um as doctors we really do want people to feel better i mean we do that's you come in and we want you to feel better and we practice we hope we practice with an evidence-based practice based on what what you know studies are really telling us we hope it's based on high quality research and when you work with kids you want to be an advocate for kids because um i mean does is there anyone in this room who doesn't remember some really dumb decision they made when they were 11 years old i mean yeah and even more so when you're i think somebody said you know still believing in the tooth fairy so you want to really advocate for kids um and the best science for public policy and clinical decisions without cherry-picking you can't say well i like this science and i don't like the science because it does or doesn't support my preconceived belief so you want the best science um physician you saw what happened to you know a lot of um you know predominant prominent researchers who wrote books um how they were harassed you can go online and see what happens to many women in particular who speak out who get death and rape threats physicians themselves you know you fear loss of employment patient satisfaction surveys believe it or not are not so much measures of quality of care but do measure how patients are satisfied about what they feel the diagnosis they were given is and what the treatment was and i don't know if you know but those are sometimes tied to continued employment if you get too many not so good ones and too many can sometimes even be two or three sometimes employment is uh is terminated or advances in pay or terminated so there's a fear doctors don't want to get harassed doctors may not so much feel fear getting sued but hospitals do there's a case in the news right now of a hospital that's refusing to do a perform a hysterectomy on a trans-identified female who is still an adolescent i believe and the hospital looks to be possibly getting sued doctors were also overwhelmed keeping up with a new body of very flawed literature um trans patients are are it's tough to deal with them they require large amounts of usually uncompensated time um the discussions are very difficult to have there is often conflict within families because it is so difficult and and parents are sort of at a loss of what to what to do um and it is easier in many cases to acquiesce to providing medical and surgical solutions to social and psychological issues

Channel: The Heritage Foundation

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Keywords: gender dysphoria, gender, sex, children, doctors, hormones, transition, medicine, transgender, Hormonal and Surgical Interventions, medical risks, endocrinologist, therapy, surgery, walt, heyer, trans, lgbt, lgbtqia+, queer, bisexual, homosexual, Title VII, Title 8, gay, transexual, drag, supreme court, gorsuch, identity, the heritage foundation, SCOTUS, youtube, censorship, censored, google, kavanaugh, clarence thomas, alito, Chief Justice John Roberts

Id: VovGbtShGvk

Length: 19min 42sec (1182 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 04 2019