British Medical Journal: You Know, This Whole Business of "Gender Ideology" Is Not Settled Science.

The phrase "gender ideology" should have been everyone's first tip-off, if I'm being honest.

At the National Review, our British cousins continue to be #based Chads and show us Americans what kind of soyboy beta cvcks we are:

[T]he British Medical Journal reports that the entire field [of gender ideology] remains controversial from medical and scientific perspectives. And just in the nick of time. Identifying as transgender is a social contagion that is consuming an increasing number of American youth:

More adolescents with no history of gender dysphoria -- predominantly birth registered females -- are presenting at gender clinics. A recent analysis of insurance claims by Komodo Health found that nearly 18 000 US minors began taking puberty blockers or hormones from 2017 to 2021, the number rising each year. Surveys aiming to measure prevalence have found that about 2% of high school aged teens identify as "transgender." These young people are also more likely than their cisgender peers to have concurrent mental health and neurodiverse conditions including depression, anxiety, attention deficit disorders, and autism.

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The story clearly indicates that this radical approach is not "settled science." Many European countries are backing off from early medicalized care, as is New Zealand.

Independent research is showing that the "guidelines" for treating these children, for example, published by the Endocrine Society, are poorly supported by evidence:

The Endocrine Society commissioned two systematic reviews for its clinical practice guideline, Endocrine Treatment of Gender-Dysphoric/Gender-Incongruent Persons: one on the effects of sex steroids on lipids and cardiovascular outcomes, the other on their effects on bone health.3233 To indicate the quality of evidence underpinning its various guidelines, the Endocrine Society employed the GRADE system (grading of recommendations assessment, development, and evaluation) and judged the quality of evidence for all recommendations on adolescents as "low" or "very low."

Another article quoted states that the "evidence base" for recommendations is "truly lagging behind [clinical practice]."

In other words, what these "doctors" is doing is far, far, far ahead of what evidence suggests they should be doing.

There's a term for what they're doing: child surgical experimentation.

And, the story notes that some of these kids are put on the transition train without adequate psychological exploration and in an unduly rushed manner:

[Pediatrician Sarah] Palmer says, "I've seen a quick evolution, from kids with a very rare case of gender dysphoria who were treated with a long course of counselling and exploration before hormones were started," to treatment progressing "very quickly -- even at the first visit to gender clinic -- and there's no psychologist involved anymore."

Laura Edwards-Leeper, a clinical psychologist who worked with the endocrinologist Norman Spack in Boston and coauthored the WPATH guidelines for adolescents, has observed a similar trend. "More providers do not value the mental health component," she says, so in some clinics families come in and their child is "pretty much fast tracked to medical intervention." In a study of teens at Seattle Children's Hospital's gender clinic, two thirds were taking hormones within 12 months of the initial visit.

The BMJ article notes that there are further problems with informed consent: patients are not being informed properly of their real risks. I would also assert that they are obviously being sold a bill of goods on the phantasmal benefits. Some of those those lies are being sold by the chop-shops themselves. Many of the lies are pre-sold by social media groomers and recruiters for the New Children's Crusade. The groomers at the "therapy" clinics know kids are coming in with heads filled with lies -- and do nothing to disabuse them of these fantasies.

The writer notes that the British Medical Journal is a very mainstream publication and little disposed to making controversy. So if this fish is turning, it probably means the whole school is turning too.

The covid virus was developed in a Chinese lab, but the transgender mind virus is entirely an American one. For further evidence of that, a Finnish psychiatrist -- and a female one -- shows American men that we're all pansy softdicks for not standing up to this Suicide Cult and saying "ENOUGH."

A psychiatrist who has presided over youth gender transition treatments for more than a decade says "four out of five" gender-questioning children eventually accept their bodies if no medical interventions are carried out.

Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala -- described as "Finland's leading expert on pediatric gender medicine and chief psychiatrist at its largest gender clinic" -- made the claim in an interview with the liberal newspaper Helsingin Sanomat earlier this week, according to Tablet. The doctor said data from 12 separate studies supported her claim.

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During the interview, Kaltiala also cautioned parents of gender-questioning children against using their offspring's preferred pronouns or a new chosen name.

The medical expert insisted such acts weren't a harmless "formality" and still counted as an intervention that could influence the child.

"It's a message saying that 'this is the right path for you,'" the doctor said.

This is huge:

Meanwhile, Kaltiala also dismissed the idea that gender dysphoric children would be driven to suicide if doctors denied medical intervention.

"It is not justified to tell the parents of young people identifying as transgender that a young person is at risk of suicide without medical treatments and that the danger can be alleviated with gender reassignment," she said.

The expert added that the "transition or suicide" dichotomy was "purposeful disinformation, and spreading it is irresponsible."

She states the obvious, but has credentials to back up her claims about the obvious: Young people are troubled and stressed about their place in the world, and are being fed lies that if they just "change their gender," then their problems will just vanish.

According to Helsingin Sanomat, "many young people grab the idea available in the media and social media that their problems are caused by gender identity and will be solved if others start to see them as members of the other sex."

I like this:

Kaltiala refuted that idea, declaring: "A balance of mind does not come from making others do and see what you want."

Oh, you don't say? Emotional problems and mental illness cannot be solved by giving the troubled person the power to dominate others and inflict xir deformed will on them?

You're saying that might only cause further psychological derangement for the patient, and misery for everyone else?

That Tablet article that the NY Post is excerpting is interesting and is worth the full read.

This doctor initially supported transgender therapy -- under certain strict conditions and defined criteria. But... following the Social Contagion of the viral spread of the transgender mind virus, more and more girls who plainly did fit the criteria for trangender therapy were being referred to her for treatment.

And this caused her to say: Stop. Wait. Hold on. Let's evaluate what is going on here before we continue down this treacherous, unexpected, and entirely unprecedented path.

Which is exactly what is not happening in America, and in fact, if you even suggest that something like that should happen in America, you're called a trans-hating homophobe who is also a racist and wants to Literally Genocide trans kids.

Finland was among the first countries to adopt the "Dutch protocol" for pediatric gender medicine, which prescribes--in certain restricted cases--the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat adolescent gender dysphoria. By 2015, however, Finnish gender specialists, including Kaltiala, were noticing that most of their patients did not match the profile of those treated in the Netherlands and did not meet the Dutch protocol's relatively strict eligibility requirements for drug treatments. Due to the extremely high rate at which children with gender issues come to terms with their bodies (or "desist") by adulthood, the Dutch protocol requires patients to have gender dysphoria that begins before puberty and intensifies in adolescence. It also requires them to have no serious co-occurring mental health problems, to undergo at least six months of psychotherapy, and to have the support of their family for hormonal treatments.

Within a few years of their country adopting the Dutch protocol in 2011, however, Finnish researchers noticed a sharp rise in the number of patients referred for services. Most of these patients were teenage girls with no history of dysphoria in childhood, and some 75% had a history of severe psychopathology prior to the emergence of their gender-related distress. During this same time period, the U.K.'s largest pediatric gender clinic, at the Tavistock Centre, witnessed a 3,360% surge in patient referrals between 2009 and 2018. Most of the new patients were females--whose representation in the clinic rose 4,400% during this time frame--with a history of serious psychological problems and no gender dysphoria prior to adolescence. Similar trends were being observed in other countries with pediatric gender clinics, including the United States. In 2018, the American physician-researcher Lisa Littman published a study suggesting that teenage girls with high rates of mental health problems were suddenly declaring a transgender identity, often in friend groups and after prolonged exposure to social media.

A year later, Kaltiala and her Finnish colleagues observed in a peer-reviewed article that "[r]esearch on adolescent onset gender dysphoria is scarce, and optimal treatment options have not been established ... The reasons for the sudden increase in treatment-seeking due to adolescent onset gender dysphoria/transgender identification are not known." This lack of research, and lingering doubts about the Dutch protocol itself (the only attempt to replicate it in the U.K. failed), led health authorities in Finland, Sweden, and the U.K. to conduct systematic reviews of evidence for the benefits and risks of hormonal interventions.

Schizophrenics often "teach each other their delusions" in asylums. We now have the internet, where shut-in, isolated, mentally-ill people congregate and interact. And we now see explosions of people -- especially adolescent/teenaged girls -- all imitating each other's tics, Tourettes, multiple personality disorders/DIDs.

We also see a swell of people claiming to have "tulpas" living inside of them, which is a concept they heard of from Twin Peaks: The Return, and is some kind of either schizophrenia, DID, or just internet attention-seeking.

And over and over and over again, the Technocratic Non-Elite admits that all of these mental illnesses -- the tics, the Tourettes, the DID, the tulpas -- are all obviously just cases of depressed, lonely, mentally-ill people, largely girls with limited social contact and larger imaginations, imitating other people's attention-getting tricks that they see on the internet to give their lives a bit of drama and flair and to connect to a community of fellow dreamers and outcasts.

None of them think that these mental afflictions are all real. They all say that they're mostly learned and affected. Though, of course, there is some underlying mental illness or at least emotional disturbance which would lead you to imitate someone's mental illness in the first place, of course.

But when it comes to the absolute Hottest New Mental Illness of the Internet Age, Gender Dysphoria, the Technocratic Non-Elite, and, more importantly, the nerdy make-up wearing midwits who make up the AV Club of the Technocratic Non-Elite -- the media, I mean -- all insist: Ah, but this one is totally, 100% real, and you're a homophobic transphobe who wants to Literally Erase the Existence of Trans Kids if you suggest that maybe a lot of this alleged "gender dysphoria" is really just sad and lonely girls with a hodgepodge of anxiety and depression who would be better served by therapy than by off-brand chemical castration agents and experimental surgeries.

Shut up, Bigot! We, the AV Club of the Technocratic Non-Elite are the people who really "Believe In The Science" and to prove it we have avoided every single chance we've had to study science since the 11th grade and have provably gotten every single science question of any import wrong over the past three years, from the origins of covid to the efficacy of vaccines to the potency of natural immunity to the usefulness of masking to the impact of masking on child development.

But we, the AV Club of the Technocratic Non-Elite, are pretty sure we've got The Science! of Gender Dysphoria figured out.

Not Settled Science. &bodytext=The phrase "gender ideology" should have been everyone's first tip-off, if I'm being honest. At the National Review, our British cousins continue to be #based Chads and show us Americans what kind of soyboy beta cvcks we are: [T]he British...&topic=world_news"> posted by Ace at 03:10 PM

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