Hell Freezes Over: NYT Admits That Trans "Science" Was Heavily Politicized and Distorted by Prejudice

None of this is new to you, but it might be new to 80% of the New York Times' mentally-ill Wine Mom cult members.

American advocates for youth gender medicine have insisted for years that overwhelming evidence favors providing gender dysphoric youth with puberty blockers, hormones and, in the case of biological females, surgery to remove their breasts.

It didn't matter that the number of kids showing up at gender clinics had soared and were more likely to have complex mental health conditions than those who had come to clinics in years earlier, complicating diagnosis. Advocates and health care organizations just dug in. As a billboard truck used by the L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy group GLAAD proclaimed in 2023, "The science is settled." The Human Rights Campaign says on its website that "the safety and efficacy of gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary youth and adults is clear." Elsewhere, these and other groups, like the American Civil Liberties Union, referred to these treatments as "medically necessary," "lifesaving" and "evidence-based."

The reason these advocates were able to make such strong statements is that for years, the most important professional medical and mental health organizations in the country had been singing a similar tune: "The science" was supposedly codified in documents published by these organizations. As GLAAD puts it on its website, "Every major medical association supports health care for transgender people and youth as safe and lifesaving."

But something confounding has happened in the last few weeks: Cracks have appeared in the supposed wall of consensus.

Jesse Signal recounts the major blows to the fake "consensus" over the past few weeks: A major malpractice lawsuit against a "gender" doctor for failing to properly inform the patient about the consequences of "transitioning" resulted in a $4 million verdict, and both the American Society of Plastic Surgeons and the corrupt and always-wrong AMA both reversing past diktats and advising that all gender surgeries for children be halted.

The science doesn't seem so settled after all, and it's important to understand what happened here. The approach of left-of-center Americans and our institutions -- to assume that when a scientific organization releases a "policy statement" on a hot-button issue, that the policy statement must be accurate -- is a deeply naive understanding of science, human nature and politics, and how they intersect.

At a time when more and more Americans are turning away from expert authority in favor of YouTube quacks and their ilk -- and when our own government is pushing scientifically baseless policies on childhood vaccination and climate change -- it's vital that the organizations that represent mainstream science be open, honest and transparent about politically charged issues. If they aren't, there's simply no good reason to trust them.

...

In 2020, Republican-led states began pushing in earnest to tightly restrict or ban youth gender medicine. In response, the professional organizations -- including the A.M.A., the A.A.P. and the American Psychological Association -- wrote a flurry of letters to legislators, amicus briefs and sciencey-sounding documents opposing the bans. These documents routinely exaggerated the evidence base for the treatments in question. There was more talk of consensus: "Every major medical association in the United States recognizes the medical necessity of transition-related care for improving the physical and mental health of transgender people," explained the A.M.A. in a letter from 2021.

...

I've been covering this controversy for about a decade from a left-of-center perspective, and I've found that anyone who questions these treatments, even mildly, is invariably accused of bigotry. It would be shocking if the professional organizations chiming in on these issues -- which, like all such organizations, exist in part to increase the esteem of their members and to enhance their own influence -- were immune from such influences. And now that the political winds have shifted radically, with the Trump administration launching an all-out assault on both the practice of and research into youth gender medicine, it seems some of them are realizing they would benefit from appearing a bit more moderate.

This guy is a left-winger writing for the New York Times so of course he has to call Trump's efforts to limit a surgical procedure he himself admits is evil and without evidence for its medical efficacy is an "all-out assault" on The Gayzzz.

He "Both Sides" it and says both the AMA and AAPS have gone from bowing to political pressure from the left and trans cult to bowing to political pressure from Orange Man Bad.

I mean, sure, but as this stupid lefty admits, Trump and the Republicans are actually right. The parts of the article I omitted are about all the real studies that have shown that "transitioning" does not in fact improve mental health and that there is zero evidence for its medical necessity or efficacy.

I mean, does that even matter? No, but his Cult requires him to always temper every anti-cult sentiment with a pro-cult declaration that Orange Man, Being Orange, Is Bad.

...

Along those same lines, how did the American Medical Association go from arguing that "forgoing gender-affirming care can have tragic consequences" for "pediatric patients" in its 2021 letter to its present stance that one such treatment, surgery, should be delayed -- potentially for many years -- as a general matter of course?
If, as I suspect, political forces are the culprit, that would lead to an inescapable conclusion: You cannot automatically trust what these organizations say at a given moment. Not unless they provide a lot more information about their decision-making processes.

Should we "trust the science"? Sure, in theory -- but only when the science in question has earned our trust through transparency and rigor.

Meanwhile: Any of you bigots who say that the trans cult is propagandizing its members to murder children in the name of their made-up "rights" is just a bigot making WITHOUT EVIDENCE claims.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 02:18 PM

| Access Comments