# American Board of Pediatrics

[transmascrage]

Video by ErinInTheMorning on TikTok

[Transcript (there's captions on screen but in case you can't turn on audio):

Erin: "File this one away for the transgender history books, whenever they write about our history; today Lindsey Spero, a trans man, stood in front of the Florida Board of Medicine, which was about to vote to medically ban all gender affirming care for trans youth.

He stood there to deliver his testimony, he delivered a little bit of it, but then he took the remainder of his testimony time to stand there and inject his hormone therapy in front of all of them in stunned silence, and then he turned around and raised his fist. Watch this."

Lindsey: "My name is Lindsey Spero, I'm 25 years old, I'm a resident of St. Petersburg, Florida. I'm also transgender.

I am someone who was subjected to treatments that have been questionable, that were mentioned by people like that woman who came up and spoke, I can tell you for a fact that her child is going to grow up hating her.

I'm sure you've heard many stories that sound like mine already, over the last few months my trans siblings and family members have stood before you, put their hearts on full display and vulnerable pleaded with you to listen to our stories and perspectives.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has condemned your actions and our federal government has spoken out against the actions you seek to take regarding the necessary health care for trans youth.

I could stand here and tell you about the times I attempted to end my life because I didn't have access to gender affirming care but I know, I know you don't care. I see you sneering at us while we come here and talk to you.

Instead I'm going to take the rest of my time to demonstrate the sacred and weekly ritual of my shot in front of you, in this body.

My medication is life saving, I will use HRT for the rest of my life, your denial of my need for this medication, doesn't make my existence as a trans person any less real.

I will be giving myself my subcutaneous shot in my stomach. If you have a needle phobia, please look away."

Lindsey injects his T-shot in silence, helped by another person who passes him a needle and the testosterone in its vial.

After finishing, he raises his fist and turns around to the audience.

Lindsey: "Tomorrow and forever."

The crowd cheers and a few people get up to clap.

Erin: "That, that is what I'm talking about! Good job Lindsey! This is the kind of resistance that matters!"

End transcript.]

(As a sidenote, it seems that Lindsey identifies as nonbinary, not necessarily (or exclusively, anyways) as a trans man. Some articles identify him as transmasc but all of his socials state nonbinary.)

[trans-axolotl]

ID: Intersex activist Max Beck standing in front of the American Academy of Pediatrics with a sign that says Silence=Death.

On October 26th, 1996, the first ever protest for intersex liberation in America took place when activists from Hermaphrodites With Attitude took to the streets to protest the American Academy of Pediatrics. Later memorialized as intersex awareness day, this important action was a milestone for the American intersex movement. Max Beck, one of the intersex activists from HWA, documented the entire protest and later published their recollection in the Intersex Awakening Issue of the Chrysalis Journal. The full piece is pasted under the cut.  

"But we’re here today to say we’re back, we’re no longer lost, and we’d like to offer some feedback. We’re here to say that the treatment paradigm for “managing” intersexuals is in desperate, urgent need of re-examination. We’re back to say that early surgical intervention leads to more than “just” physical scars and sexual dysfunction. We’re back to say that the lack of education and counseling for intersexuals, our families and the community at large does not lead to a blissful, healthy, well-adjusted ignorance. Rather, it too often leads to a life-threatening shroud of silence, secrecy, and self-hatred. 

I’m here representing over one hundred fifty intersexals throughout North America. One hundred fifty intersexuals are saying: Please! Listen! You doctors, you pediatric endocrinologists and urologists treating intersexuals, you nurses interacting with intersexuals and their families, listen to us! We understand intersexuality, not because we have studied the medical literature — although many of us have — not because we have performed surgeries, but because we have been grappling with intersexuality every day of our lives. We’re here to say that those who would have us believe that intersexuality is rare, cloud the issue by breaking us and separating us into narrow etiological categories which have little meaning in terms of our actual, lived experience. 

We’re here so that other intersexuals can find us — for many of us, finding others like ourselves has been a lifealtering, even life-saving, experience. We’re here to reach parents before their intersex child is born. We’re here to elicit the help of other sympathetic professionals. We can take a stand as openly intersex adults without being crushed by shame! And we did!" 

Hermaphrodites With Attitude Take to the Streets: By Max Beck, 1997

In late October of 1996, Hermaphrodites with Attitude took to the streets, in the first public demonstration by intersexuals in modern history. On a glorious fall day, the like of which you can only find in New England, under a crackling, cloudless sky, twenty-odd protesters joined forces to picket the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Pediatricians in Boston. Deeply aware of the historical and personal significance of the action, and — correctly — surmising that a notebook diary would not be practical on such a whirlwind, windy week-end, I took a small hand-held tape recorder with me. What follows are excerpts from the resulting transcript.

October 24, 1996 2:45 PM, Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport

The trip has only just begun and I am already exhausted. Hot. Starving. Fifteen minutes until take-off. Every businessman boarding the plane looks like a pediatric endocrinologist, Boston-bound. Silly thought, testimony to what? My anxiety? My fear? My giddy anticipation? If these bespectacled, suit-and-tie sporting men were pediatricians, would they be flying coach on Continental, with a layover in Newark? I’m headed for Boston, for the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Pediatricians (AAP). Tens of thousands of pediatricians. I’m not a pediatrician, though, nor am I a nurse; in fact, I barely managed to complete my B.A. I’m a manager of a technical laboratory. We don’t work with children, and the AAP certainly didn't invite me, so why am I going?

With the plane taxiing toward take-off, this is a lousy time to reassess. I’m going. I’m going because I am intersexed. I’m going because the doctors and nurses who treated me as an infant and a child and an adolescent, and those who continue to treat intersexed infants and children today, consider me “lost to follow-up.” I was lost— that’s part of the problem. Now, I’m back.

9:02 PM: Boston’s North End

I’m comfortably ensconced in Alice’s warehouse condo in Boston’s North End, a renovated warehouse with a view of the city skyline, ceilings easily twenty feet high, exposed beams and brick, gorgeous tile floor. As I speak, my hostess is preparing an absolutely phenomenal meal. The aroma of roasted peppers permeates the entire space. Tomorrow, the work begins; my project this evening is to unwind and enjoy this wonderful meal. Easier said than done. I’m feeling excited, enervated, I feel very alive, something I don’t feel very often, I feel very present and aware. It could be my exhaustion, it could be the Chardonnay. But I think, rather, that the excitement is anticipation about what we are about to do. Being here, finally being prepared to raise a voice, to be heard, to be seen, a vocal, out, proud hermaphrodite who is standing up to say, “Let’s rethink this, this isn’t working, we’ve been hurt, stop what you’re doing, listen to us!” I’m really looking forward to meeting Morgan at the airport in the morning; it’s always amazing to make eye contact with someone else who has been there.

October 25, 7:38 AM Boston Commons

En route to my encounter with the AAP, walking the approximately two miles from my hostess’ domicile to the Marriott Hotel at Copley Square, I pause in the Boston Commons to enjoy a park bench, to sip my Starbuck’s decaf, and to watch a group of senior citizens performing Japanese swordsmanship on top of the hill beneath a monument to some forgotten general. The city is cool this morning, but clear, and it promises to be a beautiful weekend. That’s good: we won’t be rained out. I’ve got a stack of about ninety ISNA brochures in the bag at my side, crammed in the inside pocket of my leather jacket. If I want these pamphlets to get inside, I’ve got to get to the site of the Nurses’ Panel at the Marriott before they close the doors. Then it’s back out to the airport, to pick up Morgan. My feet are already killing me.

October 26, 9:15 AM: North End

Morgan and I are sitting at our hostess’ breakfast table, pulling our thoughts together. In a few minutes, we’ll have to leave to pick up Riki at the airport. The logistics of pulling together an action are mind-boggling. There’s no describing the thrill, though, of all that work, all those phone calls, all those miles. Riding a clattering subway on a Saturday morning, seated beside another living, breathing, laughing, swearing intersexual, hugging near-strangers at unfamiliar airports, then riding back, together, defiant, determined, organized, to the heart of so much of our pain, so much of our anger, so much of our need. We gathered in front of the huge Hynes Auditorium, pamphlets and leaflets in hand, and met the AAP attendees as they left the convention center for lunch. The next hour-and-a-half was a blur, as we positioned ourselves in strategic locations before the Hynes, held signs and “Hermaphrodites with Attitude” banner aloft, distributed our literature, engaged AAP members and passers-by in conversation and debate, spoke to microphones, to cameras. In all that time, I recorded only one fragment of a breathless sentence. 

Saturday, 12:20 PM Outside the Hynes

We’ve got all the exits covered, and it’s an incredible, incredibly empowering experience. I remember the words I spoke to the TV camera, if only because I had scribbled a rough outline on the airplane, pirating mightily from Cheryl’s press release. And because the moment was so salient, so real. Me, Max, bespectacled, with blisters on my feet and chapped lips, speaking out to untold numbers of invisible viewers (and a few bewildered pediatricians behind me.)

"When an intersex child is born, parents and caregivers are faced with what seems to be a terrible dilemma: here is an infant who does not fit what our society deems normal. Immediate medical intervention seems indicated, in order to spare the parents and the child the inevitable stigmatization associated with being different. Yet the infant is not facing a medical emergency; intersexuality is rarely if ever life-threatening. Rather, the psychosocial crisis of the parents and caregivers is medicalized. 

Intersexuality is assumed to be a birth defect which can be corrected, outgrown and forgotten. The experiences of members of the intersex support groups indicate that intersexuality cannot be fixed; an intersex infant grows up to be an intersex adult. This hasn’t been explored, because intersex patients are almost invariably “lost to follow-up.” The abstract of a talk that will be given at this very conference by a doctor who treats intersex infants concedes that “the psychological issues surrounding genital reconstruction are inadequately understood.”

Part of the problem is that we were lost to follow-up, and there were reasons for that. But we’re here today to say we’re back, we’re no longer lost, and we’d like to offer some feedback. We’re here to say that the treatment paradigm for “managing” intersexuals is in desperate, urgent need of re-examination. We’re back to say that early surgical intervention leads to more than “just” physical scars and sexual dysfunction. We’re back to say that the lack of education and counseling for intersexuals, our families and the community at large does not lead to a blissful, healthy, well-adjusted ignorance. Rather, it too often leads to a life-threatening shroud of silence, secrecy, and self-hatred. I’m here representing over one hundred fifty intersexals throughout North America.

One hundred fifty intersexuals are saying: Please! Listen! You doctors, you pediatric endocrinologists and urologists treating intersexuals, you nurses interacting with intersexuals and their families, listen to us! We understand intersexuality, not because we have studied the medical literature — although many of us have — not because we have performed surgeries, but because we have been grappling with intersexuality every day of our lives. We’re here to say that those who would have us believe that intersexuality is rare, cloud the issue by breaking us and separating us into narrow etiological categories which have little meaning in terms of our actual, lived experience. We’re here so that other intersexuals can find us — for many of us, finding others like ourselves has been a lifealtering, even life-saving, experience. We’re here to reach parents before their intersex child is born. We’re here to elicit the help of other sympathetic professionals. We can take a stand as openly intersex adults without being crushed by shame! And we did!

7:20 PM: Boston’s North End

Goddess, this is so sweet, so liberating! I was so reluctant a week ago, having my Jesus-in-Gethsemane experience, reluctant to accept — not an onus or responsibility but — to accept who I am. And here’s where the hard work really begins. I’m exhausted when I think of the road before us. But then, it’s nothing like the road behind us. 

Max Beck, 1997.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

We have a serious problem

Michael Laidlaw, MD: I'm a board-certified endocrinologist, practicing in private practice for the last 16 years. I've been studying and publishing in this area for the last 5 years, including peer reviewed journals such as Journal of of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, and others. I also have a patient who is a detransitioner.

I think it's important to note that studies are shown that desistance, or growing out of this condition, of children by adulthood is very high. It's some 50-98%.

I want to be sure before I give someone a very powerful hormone like Insulin that they in fact have diabetes.

What about cancer? Before we give any powerful agents such as chemotherapeutics or surgeries, we certainly want to have physical evidence of this problem, such as biopsies or imaging.

Now, the gender affirmative therapy treatment proposed by WPATH gives very powerful hormones and surgeries on what basis? Where can we find the gender identity to be certain that these children will not desist by adulthood? Can we use imaging of the brain or blood tests, genetic testing, are there other biomarkers to ensure that we are correct? There is no such thing.

Julia Mason, MD: The Endocrine Society put out guidelines in 2017, and they were very careful in the guidelines. One, to point out that the evidence was of low and very low quality. And they also said in the guidelines that they have no idea how you identify which kids are trans and require this treatment.

And then the American Academy of Pediatrics the next year just leapt into that void and said, oh, oh, we'll tell you how you know which kids. You ask them.

Prior to 2018 I had maybe one trans patient. But then there was another one. And another one. And another one.

It wasn't until later that I started asking questions like, wait, every single kid I send to the gender clinic gets put on puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones. Just, it was happening immediately.

Patrick Hunter, MD: This affirmative model of care has spread wildly in the last 8 years. Now we have objective, unbiased systematic reviews. These systematic reviews tell us the evidence for youth transition is poor quality, and with very low certainty for benefit.

In JAMA Pediatrics, there was a study reported from Northwestern University in Chicago. Patients ranged in age from 13 to 24 years. The authors concluded that mastectomy was beneficial and should not be delayed in youth. What lead them to that conclusion? The finding that 3 months after surgery, the 36 patients were happy with their flat chests. They lost 9% of their surgical cases to follow-up. Nine percent. In 3 months.

It is absurd, meaningless to draw any conclusions after 3 months.

This paper is indicative of the quality of research we have in this field, published in our most prestigious journals.

We have a serious problem.

[coochiequeens]

The doctors were happy for the business and are now facing lawsuits.

By Seamus Othot August 13, 2024

The American Society of Plastic Surgeons has become the first major American medical association to express opposition to the controversial view that surgical interventions are appropriate for minors diagnosed with gender dysphoria.

The news emerged in a new report from Manhattan Institute fellow and pediatric gender medicine expert Leor Sapir.

Sapir revealed that ASPS, which represents the vast majority plastic surgeons in the U.S., has broken with the U.S. official medical consensus of support for transgender medicine for minors.

“The American Society of Plastic Surgeons, an organization representing 92% of all board-certified plastic surgeons in the U.S., becomes the first major medical association to break from the consensus over “gender-affirming care” for minors,” said Sapir on X.

Sapir reached out to the ASPS for comment last month, soliciting their opinion on the leaked internal documents from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which sets the guidelines for transgender care for minors in the U.S., showing that the organization consistently violated medical ethics and based its medical recommendations on a forged consensus.

Sapir found that the ASPS does not accept the guidelines from either WPATH or any other organization on transgender medicine for minors and recognized that there is no clear evidence that transgender surgeries provide any long-term benefits to minors.

The rebuke to the WPATH standards is significant because, in many states, including Maine, Medicaid reimbursement practices have been crafted according to WPATH recommendations.

The organization also acknowledged that the evidence provided in favor of transgender medicine for minors is “low evidence” and “low quality.”

ASPS stopped short of condemning transgender procedures and medication for minors, but its refusal to accept the existing, extremely permissive rules shows that the U.S. medical establishment is less united in support of child genital mutilation than WPATH or supporters of radical gender ideology wish to claim.

Sapir believes that the ASPS is likely working to provide its own guidelines for its members, some of whom have faced lawsuits from detransitioners who received surgeries as minors that they now regret.

One plastic surgeon at Kaiser Permanente faces a lawsuit from a girl on whom he performed a double mastectomy when she was only 13.

Despite ASPS’s dissent, the U.S. remains one of the most extremely permissive countries in the world for transgender medicine, where minors are routinely able to receive double mastectomies, puberty blockers, and cross-sex hormones, and in some cases, genital mutilating surgeries.

Recently, Europe has begun to step away from transgender medicine for minors.

Even the U.K., which is controlled by the far-left Labour Party, has decided to stop almost all use of puberty blockers for minors after studies revealed that the drugs cause permanent harm to bone development.

[readersmagnet]

Dr. Theresa Y. Wee M.D., a pediatric health and wellness expert, is committed to improving Hawaii's health through her non-profit organization, "Walk with a Doc Oahu," and her active involvement in the American Academy of Pediatrics and community boards.

Gain insights into her mission to improve Hawaii's health. Visit https://www.authortheresawee.com/ and order "My Covid-19 Diary" today!

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Erin In The Morning:

On Friday, numerous conservative accounts and news sources promoted headlines that the "American College of Pediatricians" had issued a statement against transgender care. A video accompanied the announcement featuring Dr. Jill Simons, who, wearing a white lab coat, states that there must be an end to "social affirmation, puberty blockers, and cross-sex hormones" for transgender youth. Despite the official-looking attire and name, the organization's name serves to mislead observers into thinking they are the much larger American Academy of Pediatrics, which represents tens of thousands of pediatricians. In reality, the ACP is a hyper-conservative Christian group of doctors created in 2002 to oppose gay parenting. In the announcement released on Friday, Simons called for an end to social transition and gender-affirming care for transgender youth. One video, which went viral, begins with a statement that the organization has released a "declaration" authored by the American College of Pediatricians, along with "hundreds of doctors and healthcare workers," opposing transgender care. It references the highly-politicized Cass Review from the United Kingdom, whose author controversially blames pornography for being transgender, as well as the Climategate-style leak of the “WPATH Files” to support the statement.

The video, which was viewed over 51 million times on Twitter, cuts off just before the next speaker is introduced: Dr. Andre Van Mol, who represents the Christian Medical and Dental Associations. Van Mol serves on the board of the Bethel Church of Redding, which made headlines in 2019 for attempting to pray a dead child back to life. He is followed by representatives from several other Christian medical organizations that also support banning transgender care. The website promoted at the event lists signatories to the statement, including the Catholic Medical Association, Genspect, The National Catholic Bioethics Center, the Family Research Council, and the Discovery Institute, an organization that promotes intelligent design over evolution in schools.

The American College of Pediatricians has been hugely influential in the promotion of anti-trans policy in the United States, relying in part to its misleading name. Members of the organization testify in state houses and courtrooms across the United States, misleading legislators into thinking they are the much larger American Academy of Pediatrics, the professional society that represents 67,000 pediatricians in the United States. In 2023, the organization inadvertently left a Google Drive public, leading to the leak of a massive trove of files showing their extremist roots. According to these documents, the group received significant donations from the Alliance Defending Freedom, a right-wing organization that has played a large role in the passage and defense of anti-LGBTQ+ laws in the United States. It also received free video production from Family Watch International, a group of Christian fundamentalists opposing homosexuality, birth control, abortion, and sex education. The American College of Pediatricians itself has been listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center since 2012, when the group’s leader stated that “homosexuality poses a danger to children” and that the group was “essentially a Judeo-Christian values organization.”

[...] Despite the widespread misinformation, every major medical organization in the United States supports gender-affirming care. In February, the American Psychological Association, the largest psychological association in the world, released a policy resolution stating that gender-affirming care is medically necessary and saves lives. The American Academy of Pediatrics currently recommends that transgender youth have access to gender-affirming care tailored to their unique needs. The Advocates for Trans Equality maintains a list of over 30 of the largest U.S.-based medical organizations that support transgender care, including the Endocrine Society, the Pediatric Endocrine Society, the American Public Health Association, and the American Medical Association.

Anti-trans extremists such as X owner Elon Musk and numerous right-wing and anti-trans pundits and websites are touting a video from American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) Dr. Jill Simons issuing a statement opposing gender-affirming care for trans children.

In contrast to radical right-wing whacko group ACPeds, mainstream medical organizations support gender-affirming care as a medically necessary.

ACPeds is a radical right-wing medical group that is opposed to abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, and transgender rights, and has trafficked in COVID denialism and anti-vaxxer extremism.

[zinniajones]

Gender Analysis present our remarks at the Seminole County Public Schools board meeting addressing the censorship of LGBTQ+ students in the Lyman High School yearbook.

This is the two-page spread at issue. Several speakers from Moms for Liberty, Turning Point Action, and other extremists called the school staff pedophiles, called trans children demons, said their parents are groomers, and accused the board of advancing the agenda of Satan. Those were their objections to the following two pages, which are now censored and removed:

Our remarks are reproduced below. Also refer to www.floridaban.com for the referenced materials.

HEATHER: Hi, I'm Heather McNamara. I'm a parent of two Seminole County children. One's a graduate, very proud of him. I want to talk about the past for a second, because none of this is new, it's old trash. I really hope the kids here know that -- this is not new.

I grew up as many of us here did in the 80’s and 90’s, and back then, adults did not talk about LGBT stuff with kids. They were so worried about our freaking innocence, okay, and when Ellen DeGeneres came out on network television there was a huge outcry. The homophobic Defense of Marriage Act was passed, I don't even want to talk about that. Parents and children cheered. Adults said ‘God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve’, and ‘you're not gay, everyone gets curious’. Trans people weren't even discussed except on Jerry Springer, which was horrible.

I didn't know many queer kids growing up. At my high school, there was only one openly gay kid and his life was a living hell. We had a gym teacher that we were all pretty sure was a lesbian, but nobody was allowed to talk about that, especially not her. I think she was afraid for her job. Is that what we want to do again?

It was a dark time, so most of us hid ourselves. And you know what, I was exactly what some of you want your kids to be. I was afraid even to think about what I might be. I left high school believing I could live as a straight person – I think most of the rest of us did.

20 years passed, and I was able to reconnect with a lot of kids I went to high school with on social media. Scores of us have come out, because it didn't work. Because whatever you complainants may think, whatever your parental disapproval, just isn't powerful enough. Threats of hell and demons are not scary enough, and an old stupid book, a thousand times translated, and even a government isn't convincing enough to change who somebody is. Don't be your kid's first bullies. Thank you.

BOARD: Order. Order, please. Next speaker.

ZINNIA: Hi, I'm Zinnia Jones, she/her – sorry for the bad handwriting. Heather McNamara is my wife, she's crying right now because of this. I'm a proud mother of a child at SCPS and a graduate. And I'm a transgender woman. I'm 34 years old, I've been doing this for a decade. You call that a phase? I am the ‘gender ideology’ – here I stand. We are many.

We are many!

Board members, restore the censored pages of your LGBT students to their yearbook. Make this right. Calling us groomers is a historical blood libel that leads to pogroms of minorities. To kids and parents everywhere, I'll show you exactly how to stop this. Extremist groups are lying to you here about trans people being too mentally incompetent to know our own genders, and they were lying about us when they said that being trans is a contagion we're spreading to other people. That's genocidal rhetoric.

Who is responsible? The Christian nationalist legal group Alliance Defending Freedom just ordered those talking points as a legal argument from a hate group in Gainesville called the ‘American College of Pediatricians’. They are a fake group, they are not the American Academy of Pediatrics. They are not mainstream, they are about a hundred people – about 12 core members.

The Alliance Defending Freedom ordered those talking points. The talking points came first, the evidence was an afterthought, just like Big Tobacco hiring experts to manufacture doubt that smoking causes cancer. Go read the Southern Poverty Law Center today. Go read FloridaBan.com today, to see their actual documents we uploaded where they planned and workshopped these anti-trans talking points themselves.

This ends now!

I want these queer and trans kids busting open these conspiracies against their lives in the pages of that yearbook. That's journalism. You're only coping with the fallout of this because of a governor who's faced allegations of committing acts of torture against detainees at Guantanamo who were later freed. That is not political, that's the Geneva Convention. Torture is a war crime. [mic is cut] Committing torture would make someone a war criminal. Is he even following the law?

[lboogie1906]

Dr. Alexa Irene Canady (November 7, 1950) is a retired medical doctor who specialized in neurosurgery. She earned both her BS and MD from the University of Michigan. After completing her residency at the University of Minnesota, she became the first African American to become a neurosurgeon. This came after the first American woman was board-certified in Neurosurgery in 1960. She specialized in pediatric neurosurgery and was the chief of neurosurgery at the Children’s Hospital in Michigan (1987-2001). She conducted research and was a professor of neurosurgery at Wayne State University. After her retirement, she moved to FL and maintained a part-time practice at Pensacola’s Sacred Heart Hospital until her full retirement in January 2012. In 1989, she was inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame, and in 1993 she received the American Medical Women’s Association President’s Award. She was known amongst her peers as a patient-focused surgeon who cared deeply about each of her patients.

She faced prejudice in school, in one instance, a family member who was training in psychology tested her at a young age for intelligence, when she scored highly on the exam, her family was surprised because her performance in school was only average. They discovered that her teacher had been switching her test scores with a white student to cover up her intelligence. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence #deltasigmatheta

[jules-has-notes]

The Chicken Song — VoicePlay live performances

For this post, I want to let you do a bit of compare-and-contrast. Below are two performances of the same piece, two years apart. As with a lot of VoicePlay's more theatrical skit-songs, every iteration is a little different, and delightful in its own way. Especially in comedic numbers like this, "Elvira", and "Road Trip", where the guys are trying to make each other laugh almost as much as they're trying to entertain their audience.

Details:

title: The Chicken Song

original song / performers: American novelty song also known as "The Rooster" ; first two verses included in the New Christy Minstrels' "Bits and Pieces" medley (1962)

arranged by: VoicePlay

.

version 1

This video was recorded during VoicePlay's concert at The O'Shaughnessy theater at St. Catherine University during the 2014 Arts Midwest conference in Minnesota.

performance date: 19 September 2014

My favorite bits:

Layne playfully admonishing the videographer while clucking

Eli's tokyo-drift skibble at the end of each chase

"Anybody wanna milk me?" ::delighted pointing at the audience response:: "Oh, okay!"

"Big guy." ::patpat::

::half-heartedly points at his raised hand:: "’T’s’muh branch."

Eli's smug grin at Geoff's reaction to him taking over, "And an awful lot of it."

Layne, Geoff, and Eli's startled smiles at one audience member's distinctive laughter

Tony repeatedly trying to refuse his assigned role, only to get annoyed when the others don't immediately back him up. "C'mon!" 😠

"I don't think we have that."

Trivia:

Tony's improvised dialog, "Hey, my name is Maggie. Welcome to Matt's," is a reference to Matt's Bar in Minneapolis, where the guys had been very excited to go for a lunch of "juicy lucy" burgers before the show.

Since they were in Home Free's neck of the woods for the conference, the guys had a chance to catch up with Rob Lundquist and Tim Foust.

Tim live-tweeted the show in his typical wry fashion, including some arboreal appreciation for his fellow bass singer.

.

version 2

This performance was part of a benefit concert for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric Aids Foundation hosted by the Alpha Epsilon Phi fraternity at Stanford University. Tony got stuck in Florida because of Hurricane Matthew, so their old friend Paul from Vox Audio agreed to pinch hit. Which made it even more chaotic than usual.

performance date: 7 October 2016

My favorite bits:

Layne shaking his tail feathers

Eli and Layne's little finger wiggle high-five

Earl and Layne cracking each other up with livestock jokes, then everyone giggling even more when Geoff calls them out on it

Eli laughing so hard he has to take a knee

::elbow bump::

Geoff asking the audience, "D'you guys know what Chiclets are?" only for Earl to immediately pull one out of his pocket

Paul accidentally skipping the second refusal gag and grumbling about not getting paid enough

::wolf whistle:: "Shaddup."

Eli doing his darnedest not to laugh at Paul's waitress antics, to the point of angling himself away from the rest of the group

Paul's incredible scream

Trivia:

The "California cow" / "happy cow" / "best cheese" banter was referencing a series of ads from the California Milk Advisory Board that aired in the early 2000s.

The Chiclets gum question was asked at least in part because that brand had recently been discontinued.

Young lads Layne, Earl, Geoff, and James May recorded a live audio version (without the waitress verse) for 4:2:Five's album "Time Machine" way back in 2004.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 25, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 26, 2024

These days, reality is undermining the political power of the mythological image of the American cowboy. In the years after World War II, that image helped to sell the idea that a government that regulated business, provided a basic safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights for Black and Brown Americans and for women was cruising perilously close to communism. The cowboy image suggested that a true American was an individualist man who worked hard to provide for and to protect his homebound wife and children, with a gun if necessary, and wanted only for the government to leave him and his business alone.

The cowboy image dominated television in the years after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board decision, first with shows like Bonanza, Gunsmoke, and Rawhide showing cowboys imposing order on their surroundings and then, by 1974, with Little House on the Prairie showing a world in which “Pa” Ingalls—played by the same actor who had played Little Joe from Bonanza—was a doting father who provided paternal care and wholesome guidance to his wife and daughters. 

But that image was never based in reality. Constructed during Reconstruction after the Civil War to stand against government protection of Black rights, it was always a political narrative. In reality, the federal government provided more aid to the American West than to any other region. 

Success in the American West depended as much on access to capital as it did in the American East, and western entrepreneurs struggled constantly against rich men monopolizing resources and political power, just as in the East. The wages, dangers, and upward mobility of cowboys, miners, and other western wage workers paralleled those of urban workers in the same period. Western women provided the kinship ties that facilitated trade in the region, and they—including the Ingalls girls, on whose income Pa’s family depended—worked outside the home for wages. 

UCLA law professor Adam Winkler explained that “[g]uns were widespread on the frontier, but so was gun regulation.… Wild West lawmen took gun control seriously and frequently arrested people who violated their town’s gun control laws.” Political scientist Pierre Atlas noted that famous frontier town Dodge City, Kansas, prohibited guns altogether. 

Modern-day Americans could embrace the cowboy myth so long as our laws addressed conditions in the real world. But as extremist lawmakers and judges have removed those guardrails by legislating around ideology rather than reality—incidentally, the very scenario true political conservatism was designed to avoid—they have ushered in conditions that are badly hurting Americans. This moment in our history feels chaotic in part because the gulf between reality and image can no longer be hidden with divisive rhetoric, and ordinary Americans are reasserting their right to laws that protect equality, community, and opportunity. 

A study published yesterday in the pediatrics journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA Pediatrics) shows that the idea of returning women to roles as wives and mothers by banning abortion has, in Texas, driven infant death rates 12.9% higher. The rest of the country saw an increase of 1.8%. Infant deaths from congenital anomalies increased almost 23% in Texas while they decreased for the rest of the nation, showing that the abortion ban is forcing women to carry to term fetuses that could not survive. 

When the Texas ban went into effect, Governor Greg Abbott said there was no need to make an exception for rape, because Texas was going to “eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas.” Instead, in a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers estimated that in the 16 months after the Texas ban, 26,313 rape-related pregnancies occurred in the state. 

Earlier this month, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to oppose in vitro fertilization (IVF), and today, Representative Matt Rosendale (R-MT) announced he would file an amendment to the 2025 defense appropriations bill stripping it of funding for IVF, saying “the practice of IVF is morally wrong.” 

Trump advisors behind Project 2025 want to enforce the 1873 Comstock Law to ban medical abortion and contraception nationally. Yesterday the Biden-Harris campaign released a tape in which Jeff Durbin, a Trump ally who is pastor of the Apologia Church in Tempe, Arizona, and the founder and head of End Abortion Now, says that abortion is murder and those who practice it deserve execution: “You forfeit your right to live.” 

But for Americans, particularly American women, reality trumps the Republicans’ fantasy, and they are demanding that their right to reproductive health care be protected. Liz Crampton of Politico noted that yesterday, on the second anniversary of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that protected abortion rights, Republicans were silent. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) didn’t post about it on social media, those vying to be Trump’s vice-presidential pick kept quiet, and Trump himself didn’t boast about it (although his former vice president Mike Pence did say in a National Review op-ed that the Dobbs decision had made the U.S. “a more compassionate nation”).

Republicans in Louisiana, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Texas determined to reestablish patriarchy have now taken on the cause of eliminating no-fault divorce. Eric Berger of The Guardian explains that right-wing opponents of no-fault divorce note that women, especially educated, self-supporting women, file for divorce more often than men and that no-fault divorce means men can’t fight it. They claim divorce hurts families and, by extension, society.  

Berger points out that it was then–California governor Ronald Reagan, who had been divorced, who signed the nation’s first no-fault divorce law in 1969. Other states followed, with New York last in 2010. Berger also notes that in states that approved no-fault divorce, domestic violence rates dropped about 30%, the number of women killed by an intimate partner fell by 10%, and women’s deaths by suicide dropped by 8–16%. It’s hard to imagine American voters are going to embrace an end to no-fault divorce.

Constructing a society around the myth of free individual gun possession has also met reality. Today, for the first time in U.S. history, Surgeon General Doctor Vivek Murthy issued a Surgeon General's Advisory calling firearm violence a public health crisis. Guns have now outpaced car accidents and drug overdoses to become the number one cause of death for American children and adolescents. That violence ripples outward to those injured, to witnesses, and to traumatized communities. Fifty-four percent of American adults say they or a family member have experienced a gun incident. 

“All of us, regardless of our background or beliefs, want to live in a world that is safe for us and our children,” Dr. Murthy said.

The national mood about gun violence appears to be changing. A trustee for a U.S. bankruptcy court has said they will liquidate the assets of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s Free Speech Systems, the media platform for his InfoWars website, in order to begin to pay some of the $1.5 billion he owes to family members of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. The shooting took the lives of 26 people, 20 of them children between the ages of six and seven, but Jones told his audience that the event was a hoax designed to push gun safety laws. The victims’ families successfully sued Jones for defamation.   

Another part of the individualist myth that has met reality is that cutting taxes and slashing business regulation would boost the economy. Yesterday the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget compared the $8.4 trillion debt approved by Trump to the $4.3 trillion approved by Biden. It estimated Trump’s tax cuts for the rich and corporations cost $4.8 trillion, which as Allison Gill of Mueller, She Wrote pointed out, is more than the $4.3 trillion cost of Biden’s “Infrastructure bill, Inflation Reduction Act, American Rescue Plan, CHIPs [and Science Act], PACT [expanding health benefits to veterans exposed to toxic substances and burn pits], student debt forgiveness, and funding the IRS COMBINED.” Under Trump, Congress also passed $3.6 trillion in COVID relief. 

On the other side of the ledger, Trump’s tariffs relieved only about $443 billion, while Biden’s Fiscal Responsibility Act, Inflation Reduction Act, and deficit-reducing executive actions relieved close to $2 trillion in debt. 

The Biden administration has returned to the idea of leveling the nation’s economic playing field and has invested in manufacturing and clean energy. A new study released yesterday by Climate Power, which has been tracking clean energy jobs in the private sector, says that U.S. companies have added “more than 312,900 new clean energy jobs for electricians, mechanics, construction workers, technicians, support staff, and many others” since Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022. 

On June 11, David Lynch reported in the Washington Post that U.S. economic growth has been so strong this year that it is helping to stabilize the global economy, while Hans Nichols of Axios reported today that 16 Nobel prize–winning economists have warned that Trump’s economic plans will spike inflation and hurt the global economy. "While each of us has different views on the particulars of various economic policies,” the economists wrote, “we all agree that Joe Biden's economic agenda is vastly superior to Donald Trump.”

Restoring reality to the center of our political debates would protect the rights stolen from us by ideologues in government. Curiously, it would also do a better job than the cowboy myth of reflecting real people and communities in the historic American West. 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[theforesteldritch]

I was thinking about like. Medical stuff I’ve been through relating to being intersex. And I thought oh it’s not been that bad but looking back so far a lot of it has actually been pretty traumatic and messed up and I just didn’t have the capacity to deal with it at the time. Like how even though it was consensual and the doctor wasn’t bad and was quick and relatively respectful the genital exam I had was horrible, lying there in a hospital gown while a doctor looks at your genitals quickly sucks at the best of times but I’d just gotten the official diagnosis and she told me at the end that my vagina was shorter than usual and asked if I wanted to try dialating. That was horrible to experience. And then the thing that fucks me the most up is while I was having a biopsy done of my gonads apparently the doctor did a genital exam again and I didn’t find out until after, I never said yes to that and my mom asked about it and the doctor said she’d just forgot to tell me and I tried to brush it off at the time because of all the shit I was going through with accepting myself as intersex but again looking back that was a horrible violation of privacy but honestly even if I knew how I don’t think I’d want to do anything about that specific instance because it’s not worth what I’d have to go through to try to figure it out. And then the time the X-ray tech when I was having a bone mineral density scan done repeatedly asked me if I was on hormone blockers when I told her what I was in for even after I told her no I’m just like that. And how I had to fight to even keep my gonads at all and do a biopsy instead because my doctor was recommending a gonadectomy hard and I’m so fucking glad I found the intersex subreddit when I did because they helped me realize that that wasn’t the only option. And how my mom wanted me to get them out too at first (she’s always respected that it’s my descision and is more on board with my plan now but I still. It sucked). And while I was going through all that I was just trying to get through and figure my shit out and didn’t want to deal with the mental side of things and now it’s just all crashing down on me. Holy shit that was fucked up. And the care I’ve gotten could be considered fucking exemplary care compared to what other intersex people face. It’s just. A lot to deal with Just. Never forget that when intersex activists in 1996 protested how the American academy of pediatrics was treating us they were ignored and ridiculed. And today despite all advances in the fight for our rights there’s still so much change that must happen.

[orangesarenttheonlyfruit]

Jocelyn Elders

Today I want to talk about Jocelyn Elders, who, like Mary Putnam Jacobi, held many firsts throughout her career, and became the first African-American surgeon general. She grew up in poverty and first visited the doctor at age 16, where she first knew she wanted to become one. After a 3 year stint in the army, receiving a B.S. degree in Biology and working as a nurse’s aide, she went on to study Medicine, finish her residency, and specialise in, and become the first board certified, Pediatric Endocrinologist in her state. 

During her time running the Arkansas health department, she doubled child vaccinations, improved prenatal healthcare, and expanded on support for elderly in care. She worked with public schools to promote sex education, proper hygeine and preventing substance use.  

From what I have read about Jocelyn Elders, I believe she is a dedicated, passionate and well educated individual who’s career in medicine stretched far beyond treating her patients, but improving and striving for excellence in healthcare for all.  

Thank you so much for reading, see you tomorrow!!

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

My name is Dr Jill Simons. I'm a board-certified pediatrician and the executive director for the American College of Pediatricians. Today I'm here alongside my colleagues representing the Coalition of co-signers of the Doctors Protecting Children Declaration. Our coalition consists of physicians together with nurses, behavioral health clinicians, other health professionals, scientists, researchers and public health and policy professionals. And we have serious concerns about the physical and mental health effects of the current protocols promoted for the care of children and adolescents in the United States who express discomfort with their biological sex.

This declaration was authored by the American College of Pediatricians, but really it was developed from the expertise of hundreds of doctors researchers and other healthcare workers and leaders wh, for years have been sounding the alarm on the harmful protocols that continue to be promoted by the medical organizations in the United States. Despite recent revelations from the leaked WPATH Files and the recent release of the final report from the Cass Review, these medical organizations have not changed course.

So, we are calling on these medical organizations of the United States, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, the Pediatric Endocrine Society, the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry to follow the science and their European colleagues and immediately stop the promotion of social affirmation, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries for children and adolescents who experience distress over their biological sex.

In our declaration, we affirm that sex is a dimorphic, innate trait defined in relation to an organism's biological role in reproduction: male and female this genetic signature is present in every nucleated somatic cell in the body and is not altered by drugs or surgical interventions. Consideration of these innate differences is critical to the practice of good medicine and to the development of sound policy for children and adults alike. Medical decision-making should be based upon an individual's biological sex. It should respect biological reality and the dignity of the person by compassionately addressing the whole person.

We are here defying the claims made by these medical organizations in the US that those of us who are concerned are a minority and that their protocols are consensus. They are not consensus, and we are speaking in a loud unified voice: enough.

[ Full press conference: https://youtu.be/C2tU90XPFlg ]

--

Doctors Protecting Children Declaration

As physicians, together with nurses, psychotherapists and behavioral health clinicians, other health professionals, scientists, researchers, and public health and policy professionals, we have serious concerns about the physical and mental health effects of the current protocols promoted for the care of children and adolescents in the United States who express discomfort with their biological sex.

We affirm:

1. Sex is a dimorphic, innate trait defined in relation to an organism’s biological role in reproduction. In humans, primary sex determination occurs at fertilization and is directed by a complement of sex determining genes on the X and Y chromosomes.  This genetic signature is present in every nucleated somatic cell in the body and is not altered by drugs or surgical interventions

2. Consideration of these innate differences is critical to the practice of good medicine and to the development of sound public policy for children and adults alike.

3. Gender ideology, the view that sex (male and female) is inadequate and that humans need to be further categorized based on an individual’s thoughts and feelings described as “gender identity” or “gender expression”, does not accommodate the reality of these innate sex differences. This leads to the inaccurate view that children can be born in the wrong body. Gender ideology seeks to affirm thoughts, feelings and beliefs, with puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries that harm healthy bodies, rather than affirm biological reality.

4. Medical decision making should not be based upon an individual’s thoughts and feelings, as in “gender identity” or “gender expression”, but rather should be based upon an individual’s biological sex. Medical decision making should respect biological reality and the dignity of the person by compassionately addressing the whole person.

We recognize:

1. Most children and adolescents whose thoughts and feelings do not align with their biological sex will resolve those mental incongruencies after experiencing the normal developmental process of puberty.

Desistance is the norm without affirmation as documented by Zucker in his article “The Myth of Peristence”. (1) Zucker, KJ. The myth of persistence: Response to “A critical commentary on follow-up studies and ‘desistance’ theories about transgender and gender nonconforming children” by Temple Newhook et al. International Journal of Transgenderism. 2018: 19(2), 231–245. Published online May 29, 2018.http://doi.org/10.1080/15532739.2018.1468293 [1]

In the “largest sample to date of boys clinic-referred for gender dysphoria,” there was a desistance rate of 87.8%. (2) Singh D, Bradley SJ and Zucker KJ. A Follow-Up Study of Boys With Gender Identity Disorder. Front Psychiatry. 2021;12:632784. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2021.632784

The pro-affirmation Endocrine Society Guidelines (2017) admit: “…the GD/gender incongruence of a minority of prepubertal children appears to persist in adolescence.” (3) Hembree, W., Cohen-Kettenis PT, Gooren L, et al. Endocrine treatment of gender-dysphoric/gender-incongruent persons: An Endocrine Society clinical practice guideline J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2017; 102:1–35.

A longitudinal study from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands followed 2772 adolescents (recruited from a psychiatric clinic) from age 11 years through 22 – 26 years. “In early adolescence 11% of participants reported gender non- contentedness. The prevalence decreased with age and was 4% at the last follow-up (around age 26).” Even in this psychiatric patient study group for which interventions were not addressed, but “gender affirmation” is most likely, gender non-contentedness (essentially gender noncongruence) decreased substantially from early adolescence to young adulthood.(4) Rawee P, Rosmalen JGM, Kalverdiijk L and Burke SM. Development of gender non-contentedness during adolescence and early adulthood. Archives of Sexual Behavior. 2024; https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-024-02817-5

2. Responsible informed consent is not possible in light of extremely limited long-term follow-up studies of interventions, and the immature, often impulsive, nature of the adolescent brain. The adolescent brain’s prefrontal cortex is immature and is limited in its ability to strategize, problem solve and make emotionally laden decisions that have life-long consequences.[2]

3. Sex-trait modification or “Gender affirming” clinics in the United States base their treatments upon the “Standards of Care” developed by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). However, the foundation of WPATH guidelines is demonstrably flawed and pediatric patients can be harmed when subjected to those protocols.

The two Dutch studies that form the foundation for treatment guidelines as documented in the WPATH “Standards of Care” guidelines version 7 (SOC 7) had serious flaws.[3]

These studies did show that the appearance of secondary sex characteristics in adolescents and young adults could be changed by hormonal and surgical interventions, but they failed to demonstrate meaningful long-term improvement in psychological well-being.

Scientific concerns with these studies also include a lack of a control group, small sample sizes, significant numbers of patients lost to follow up, and the elimination of patients who experienced significant mental illness from entering the studies.

It is concerning that the Dutch studies did not address complications and adverse outcome in the adolescent cohort that underwent transition. These complications included new onset diabetes, obesity and one death.[4]

4. There is now sufficient research to further demonstrate the failure of the WPATH, American Academy of Pediatrics and Endocrine Society protocols.

The Cass Review was released on April 10, 2024, as an “independent review of gender identity services for children and young people”. The following points are from Cass’s final report:[5]

Commissioned by the National Health Service (NHS) England, and chaired by Dr. Hilary Cass, the 388-page report utilized systematic reviews, qualitative and quantitative research, as well as focus groups, roundtables and interviews with international clinicians and policy makers.

As part of the evaluation, they reviewed the research on social transition, puberty blockers, and cross-sex hormones.

Social transition

“The systematic review showed no clear evidence that social transition in childhood has any positive or negative mental health outcomes, and relatively weak evidence for any effect in adolescence.

However, those who had socially transitioned at an earlier age and/or prior to being seen in clinic were more likely to proceed to a medical pathway.”

Puberty blockers

“The systematic review undertaken by the University of York found multiple studies demonstrating that puberty blockers exert their intended effect in suppressing puberty, and also that bone density is compromised during puberty suppression. However, no changes in gender dysphoria or body satisfaction were demonstrated [emphasis added].”

“There was insufficient/inconsistent evidence about the effects of puberty suppression on psychological or psychosocial wellbeing, cognitive development, cardio-metabolic risk or fertility.”

“Moreover, given that the vast majority of young people started on puberty blockers proceed from puberty blockers to masculinizing/ feminizing hormones, there is no evidence that puberty blockers buy time to think, and some concern that they may change the trajectory of psychosexual and gender identity development.”

Cross-sex hormones

“The University of York carried out a systematic review of outcomes of masculinising/feminising hormones.” They concluded, “There is a lack of high-quality research assessing the outcomes of hormone interventions in adolescents with gender dysphoria/incongruence, and few studies that undertake long-term follow-up. No conclusions can be drawn about the effect on gender dysphoria, body satisfaction, psychosocial health, cognitive development, or fertility.”

“Uncertainty remains about the outcomes for height/growth, cardio-metabolic and bone health.”

The Cass Review further stated, “Assessing whether a hormone pathway is indicated is challenging. A formal diagnosis of gender dysphoria is frequently cited as a prerequisite for accessing hormone treatment. However, it is not reliably predictive of whether that young person will have longstanding gender incongruence in the future, or whether medical intervention will be the best option for them.”

A 2024 German systematic review on the evidence for use of puberty blockers (PB) and cross-sex hormones (CSH) in minors with gender dysphoria (GD) also found “The available evidence on the use of PB and CSH in minors with GD is very limited and based on only a few studies with small numbers, and these studies have problematic methodology and quality. There also is a lack of adequate and meaningful long-term studies. Current evidence doesn’t suggest that GD symptoms and mental health significantly improve when PB or CSH are used in minors with GD.”[6]  

5. There are serious long-term risks associated with the use of social transition, puberty blockers, masculinizing or feminizing hormones, and surgeries, not the least of which is potential sterility.

Youth who are socially affirmed are more likely to progress to using puberty blockers and cross-sex (masculinizing or feminizing) hormones.

“Social transition is associated with the persistence of gender dysphoria as a child progresses into adolescence.”[7]

“Gender social transition of prepubertal children will increase dramatically the rate of gender dysphoria persistence when compared to follow-up studies of children with gender dysphoria who did not receive this type of psychosocial intervention and, oddly enough, might be characterized as iatrogenic.”[8]

Puberty blockers permanently disrupt physical, cognitive, emotional and social development.

Side effects listed in the Lupron package insert include emotional lability, worsening psychological illness, low bone density, impaired memory, and the rare side-effect of pseudotumor cerebri (brain swelling).[9]

A coalition of physicians and medical organizations from around the world submitted a petition to the Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration requesting urgent action be taken to eliminate the off-label use of GnRH (growth hormone) agonists in children.[10]

Testosterone use in females and estrogen use in males are associated with dangerous health risks across the lifespan including, but not limited to, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, heart attacks, blood clots, stroke, diabetes, and cancer.[xi],[12]

Genital surgeries affect future fertility and reproduction.

6. A report from Environmental Progress released on March 4, 2024, entitled “The WPATH Files” revealed “widespread medical malpractice on children and vulnerable adults at global transgender healthcare authority.”[13]

“The WPATH Files reveal that the organization does not meet the standards of evidence-based medicine, and members frequently discuss improvising treatments as they go along.”

“Members are fully aware that children and adolescents cannot comprehend the lifelong consequences of ‘gender-affirming care’ and, in some cases due to poor health literacy, neither can their parents.”

In addition, developmentally challenged and mentally ill individuals were being encouraged to “transition”, and treatments were often improvised.

7. Evidence-based medical research now demonstrates there is little to no benefit from any or all suggested “gender affirming” interventions for adolescents experiencing Gender Dysphoria. Social “affirmation”, puberty blockers, masculinizing or feminizing hormones, and surgeries, individually or in combination, do not appear to improve long-term mental health of the adolescents, including suicide risk.[14]

8. Psychotherapy for underlying mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, and autism, as well as prior emotional trauma or abuse should be the first line of treatment for these vulnerable children experiencing discomfort with their biological sex.

9. England, Scotland, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland have all recognized the scientific research demonstrating that the social, hormonal and surgical interventions are not only unhelpful but are harmful. So, these European countries have paused protocols and are instead focusing on evaluating and treating the underlying and preceding mental health concerns.

10. Other medical organizations are adhering to the evidence-based medicine documented in the Cass Review Final Report.

The constitution of the National Health Service in England will be updated to state, “We are defining sex as biological sex.”[15]

The European Society of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry issued a document titled “ESCAP statement on the care for children and adolescents with gender dysphoria: an urgent need for safeguarding clinical, scientific, and ethical standards.”

In this paper, they stated, “The standards of evidence-based medicine must ensure the best and safest possible care for each individual in this highly vulnerable group of children and adolescents. As such, ESCAP calls for healthcare providers not to promote experimental and unnecessarily invasive treatments with unproven psycho-social effects and, therefore, to adhere to the “primum-nil-nocere” (first, do no harm) principle”.[16]

11. Health care professionals around the world are also acknowledging the urgent need to protect children from harmful “gender-affirming” interventions.

In a letter to the British newspaper, The Guardian, sixteen psychologists, some of whom worked at the Tavistock Center for Gender Identity Development Service, acknowledged the role clinical psychologists played in placing children on an “irreversible medical pathway that in most cases was inappropriate.”[17]

In the United States, a group of psychiatrists, physicians and other health care workers wrote an open Letter to the American Psychiatric Association (APA), calling on the APA to explain why it glaringly ignored many scientific developments in gender-related care and to consider its responsibility to promote and protect patients’ safety, mental and physical health.[18]

12. Despite all the above evidence that gender affirming treatments are not only unhelpful, but are harmful, and despite the knowledge that the adolescent brain is immature, professional medical organizations in the United States continue to promote these interventions. Further, they state that legislation to protect children from harmful interventions is dangerous since it interferes with necessary medical care for children and adolescents.

The American Psychological Association states it is the largest association of psychologists worldwide. The organization released a policy statement in February 2024 stating, “The APA opposes state bans on gender-affirming care, which are contrary to the principles of evidence-based healthcare, human rights, and social justice.”[19]

The Endocrine Society responded to the Cass Review by reaffirming their stance. “We stand firm in our support of gender-affirming care…. NHS England’s recent report, the Cass Review, does not contain any new research that would contradict the recommendations made in our Clinical Practice Guideline on gender-affirming care.”[20]

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Board of Directors in August 2023, voted to reaffirm their 2018 policy statement on gender-affirming care. They did decide to authorize a systematic review but only because they were concerned “about restrictions to access to health care with bans on gender-affirming care in more than 20 states.”[21]

Of note, Dr. Hilary Cass called out the AAP for “holding on to a position that is now demonstrated to be out of date by multiple systematic reviews.”[22]

In Conclusion

Therefore, given the recent research and the revelations of the harmful approach advocated by WPATH and its followers in the United States, we, the undersigned, call upon the medical professional organizations of the United States, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the  Endocrine Society, the Pediatric Endocrine Society, American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry to follow the science and their European professional colleagues and immediately stop the promotion of social affirmation, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries for children and adolescents who experience distress over their biological sex.  Instead, these organizations should recommend comprehensive evaluations and therapies aimed at identifying and addressing underlying psychological co-morbidities and neurodiversity that often predispose to and accompany gender dysphoria. We also encourage the physicians who are members of these professional organizations to contact their leadership and urge them to adhere to the evidence-based research now available.

[coochiequeens]

Its chief executive officer instructed those members who have leadership roles within the organization — but who are employed by medical practices or universities — only to use personal email accounts for AAP (American Academy of Pediatrics) -related correspondence. This could protect such emails from freedom-of-information requests and employers’ document-retention policies." 

Well that sounds like they have nothing to hide

By BENJAMIN RYAN Thursday, December 21, 202322:44:51 pm

The American Academy of Pediatrics, under fire for its policies on gender-transition treatment for minors, is taking steps that might limit its legal exposure — or at least minimize public scrutiny — in the face of a lawsuit by a woman who at 14 underwent a medical gender transition that she later regretted. 

This month, the highly influential medical association, which has about 68,000 pediatrician members, shelved a pending book on the care and treatment of children who identify as transgender. Its chief executive officer instructed those members who have leadership roles within the organization — but who are employed by medical practices or universities — only to use personal email accounts for AAP-related correspondence. This could protect such emails from freedom-of-information requests and employers’ document-retention policies.  

An AAP representative told the Sun that neither move was related to the litigation it faces and that the board’s decision to enact the new email policy predated the filing of the lawsuit in question.

“The AAP has been under scrutiny for a couple of years now because of its gender policies,” said a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Leor Sapir. He speculated that the organization’s new email policy could have been motivated by such ongoing external pressures, which also predated the lawsuit. 

Dr. Jason Rafferty, a leading specialist in pediatric gender transitions, is named in the detransitioners’ lawsuit. He also contributed commentary to a forthcoming book that’s been pulled by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Brown University

Mr. Sapir argues that the AAP and the American medical establishment more broadly have failed to establish “in a thoughtful and scientific way” its guidelines for pediatric gender-transition treatments. Consequently, he said, he supports controversial state laws that ban the prescription of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children to treat gender dysphoria — a psychiatric diagnosis that involves significant distress over a conflict between an individual’s gender identity and their biological sex. 

A number of states with Republican-controlled legislatures have passed these laws since 2021 as part of a concerted pushback against medical care practices, first imported to the United States from the Netherlands in 2007, for children who identify as the opposite gender. The Republican-dominated Ohio legislature last week passed a bill that would make the state the 22nd to ban such medical treatment. The governor of Ohio, Mike Dewine, a Republican, has yet to decide if he will sign the contentious bill. If he does not sign or veto it by December 29, it will become law.

The AAP has maintained full-throated support for the availability – and legality – of medical gender-transition treatments for children. Its influential journal Pediatrics on Wednesday published an essay by a pediatrician at Seattle Children’s Hospital, Dr. Emily Georges, and two colleagues arguing that banning such medicine is “a form of child maltreatment.” 

“These legislative efforts operate under the guise of protecting children,” Dr. Georges and her coauthors wrote. “In reality, they punish caregivers and physicians when they choose to support children.”

The AAP Faces a Lawsuit

In October, a Dallas law firm filed a lawsuit against the AAP on behalf of a biological woman, Isabelle Ayala, who beginning at age 14 was treated for gender dysphoria with testosterone by a group of Rhode Island health care providers; they are also named as defendants. On this team was a child psychiatrist and pediatrician trained by and affiliated with Brown University, Dr. Jason Rafferty, who is the sole author of the broadly influential policy statement on pediatric gender-transition treatment that the AAP published in October 2018, a few months after Ms. Ayala left his care. 

“In hindsight, that makes me feel like a guinea pig,” Ms. Ayala, 20, said in a YouTube video posted last week by the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative nonprofit. 

Jordan Campbell, Ron Miller, Josh Payne, and Daniel Sepulveda of newly founded law firm Campbell Miller Payne, PLLC. They say they established their firm to represent ‘individuals who were misled and abused – many as children – into psychological and physical harm through a false promise of “gender-affirming care.”’ Campbell Miller Payne, PLLC.

A retired pediatrician, AAP member and volunteer professor of pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, Dr. Christopher Bolling, defended the AAP’s integrity from what he said was a “talking point from transgender care ban advocates” that Dr. Rafferty “somehow wrote the whole thing and forced everyone else to just sign it.” Dr. Bolling was not himself involved with developing the policy statement in question, but said, “Writing those statements are some of the most collaborative labor-intensive, careful processes I’ve ever been involved with.” 

Ms. Ayala ultimately “detransitioned,” reverting from considering herself a trans male to identifying as her birth sex. The law firm representing her, Campbell Miller Payne, was recently established by four white-shoe attorneys solely to represent such regretful so-called detransitioners. The firm is behind five of the nine known medical-malpractice detransitioner lawsuits.  

Time Magazine reported Thursday that the threat of such litigation is already driving up malpractice insurance premiums for providers of pediatric gender-transition treatment, shutting out some smaller gender clinics.

The lawsuit takes on the powerful American Academy of Pediatrics, which has enormous influence over pediatric care in the U.S. Campbell Miller Payne, PLLC

Ms. Ayala’s suit accuses Dr. Rafferty and his colleagues of malpractice for prioritizing treating her gender dysphoria over her myriad other psychiatric diagnoses and for allegedly causing her lasting physical harm. 

“I don’t even like to think about my fertility,” Ms. Ayala said in a voice over in the YouTube video as she looked at a baby crib, addressing concerns about the long-term impacts of testosterone treatment. “It is my greatest fear to go to the gynecologist and have them tell me I can’t have children over some decisions that were made when I was fourteen.”

The suit further alleges that Dr. Rafferty and others engaged in a conspiracy with the AAP to develop methods for treating gender dysphoric children while Ms. Ayala was the physicians’ patient that are not evidence based and are grounded in what a scathing peer-reviewed critique published in 2019 argued was a misrepresentation of the relevant scientific literature.

In their new Pediatrics essay, Dr. Georges and her coauthors countered such a premise. Referring  to what supporters of such treatment call gender-affirming care, they wrote: “Although some individuals make it seem that GAC is a new, experimental area of medicine, GAC is evidence-based.”  

They continued: “The benefits of GAC, most notably on mental health, self-esteem, and development, outweigh the risks in the majority of circumstances. GAC is, for many, lifesaving.” 

Isabelle Ayala appears with her attorney in a new YouTube video in which she discusses her gender transition treatment. Independent Women’s Forum

This a reference to suicide prevention. Advocates of medical gender transitions for children argue that gender dysphoric youth are at high risk for death by suicide if they are not able to medically transition if they so choose.

The AAP Pulls a Book on the Gender-Affirming Care Model

During the fall, the AAP began taking pre-orders for a 320-page book on pediatric gender-transition care and treatment that was set to be published on January 30. Dr. Rafferty was listed first among the authors of the book’s commentaries. 

On December 6, the day after the Sun published an article about Ms. Ayala’s suit and another malpractice suit filed against Dr. Rafferty and his colleagues by a detransitioned adult patient, the AAP emailed those who had pre-ordered the book, alerting them: “Due to an upcoming policy review on this topic, the publication of this book has been placed on hold.” 

A representative for the organization confirmed to the Sun that the email referenced the AAP leadership’s announcement in August that it would commission an independent systematic literature review — the gold standard for assessing scientific evidence — of the research regarding pediatric gender-transition treatment. The AAP said at the time that it was prompted to take this step out of “concerns about restrictions to access to health care with bans on gender-affirming care.”

An AAP member and a pediatrician at Carmel, Indiana, Dr. Sarah Palmer, criticized the academy’s expressed motivation, which she said centered the pending review “in the political realm instead of in the clinical and scientific realm where doctors should apply their expertise.” 

The AAP representative said that the book contains research previously published in the academy’s journals and no new guidance. It does, however, contain the new commentaries. The representative said the AAP decided to delay publication “to avoid confusion” during the ���ongoing” work on the review, the findings of which the academy plans to share publicly. However, the book went on sale for pre-order well after the literature review was announced. The representative declined to respond to detailed questions about the review’s progress, including whether the AAP would observe typical scientific protocol for a systematic literature review and publish its criteria in advance.

In reference to the AAP’s publication of Dr. Georges’ unsparing and politically charged new Pediatrics essay, Mr. Sapir said, “It’s weird that they would pull the book on the grounds that there is an ongoing systematic review, but in their own peer-reviewed journal they would publish this document.”

The AAP’s move to conduct the systematic review came after three years of efforts led by an AAP member and Gresham, Oregon-based pediatrician, Dr. Julia Mason, to compel the organization to do so. ​​She, Dr. Palmer, and Mr. Sapir all expressed concern about what they characterized as the AAP’s lack of transparency during the four months since announcing it would commission the systematic review. 

“I think the pressure of the lawsuit led to their pulling the book. Because they suddenly realized that they might be held responsible for what that book said in a court of law,” said Dr. Mason, who is a board member of the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine. Founded in 2020, the society is a collective of clinicians and researchers who share concern that, as multiple systematic reviews of the relevant evidence have found, pediatric gender-transition treatment is based on a low or very low quality of scientific evidence while it comes with considerable risks, including infertility and sexual dysfunction.

In conflict with the Pediatrics essay, such reviews have also not found evidence that withholding puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones from gender dysphoric youth is associated with a higher suicide death rate. Additionally, Dr. Mason and numerous other critics have called into question the validity of the findings of a 2022 University of Washington and Seattle Children’s study often cited by supporters of such treatment, including in the new Pedatrics article’s authors, as evidence that medical gender-transition treatment reduces suicidal thoughts and behaviors in gender-dysphoric adolescents.

The American Academy of Pediatrics headquarters outside Chicago. The AAP is the target of a lawsuit about its policies regarding transgender care for minors. AAP

Transgender activists have called the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine an anti-trans group and highlight how commonly other medical treatments are backed only by low quality evidence. The type of randomized, placebo-controlled trials that would produce the highest quality of evidence, trans advocates argue, would not be ethical for pediatric gender-transition treatment.

A sprawling Southern Poverty Law Center report published December 12, “Combatting LGBTQ+ Pseudoscience,” places the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine at the nexus of what it portrays as an interconnected conspiracy by various organizations to undermine support for pediatric gender-transition treatment and harm trans youth. The Southern Poverty Law Center has come under criticism from social conservatives in recent years for, they argue, unfairly and egregiously classifying some conservative groups as “hate groups.” The Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine, however, bills itself as an apolitical science organization. 

Maintaining Ownership of Internal Emails

Earlier this month, the AAP’s chief executive officer, Mark Del Monte, and chief medical officer, Dr. Anne R. Edwards, sent a letter to what the AAP representative reported was all of the academy’s staff and hundreds of non-staff members in leadership roles, alerting them to a new correspondence policy, effective January 1. It ordered the members only to use personal email accounts, such as Gmail, for leadership level AAP-related business. 

The AAP representative told the Sun that the decision to enact this new policy was unrelated to Ms. Ayala’s lawsuit and predates its filing, having been made at an AAP board meeting in May; minutes from the meeting indicate as much. 

Mr. Del Monte and Dr. Edwards differentiate in the letter between the public nature of the AAP’s “policy, advocacy positions, and educational resources” and the “confidential, internal discussions” pertaining to these documents’ development. 

“To protect the internal deliberations of our member experts,” the letter states, “the AAP Board of Directors has approved new prudent steps to keep internal communications under the control of the AAP and its member leaders.” 

The letter continues: “While we regret that this action is necessary, members do not ‘own’ their work email and so do not necessarily have the decision-making authority about whether or not to release it publicly.” 

The use of institutional or workplace email accounts, the letter further states, creates “multiple vulnerabilities for AAP and our members.” This includes the fact that “employer-sponsored email platforms are subject to the document retention and release policies of external institutions, including in response to subpoenas or Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests.” 

The board’s decision to enact this policy, the AAP representative said, “followed a lengthy deliberation by board members to ensure the AAP manages records in compliance with applicable federal and state laws, while meeting operational needs.” 

A medical doctor and tort law expert at the University of Baltimore School of Law, Dr. Gregory Dolin, said he anticipated that a shift from workplace to personal email accounts for such correspondence would not frustrate any attempts by Campbell Miller Payne to obtain internal AAP emails through discovery in its suit against the academy. However, Dr. Dolin said that by forbidding communicating via email accounts subject to FOIA requests, the AAP “may reduce non-litigation related, but nevertheless embarrassing disclosures” by, for example, journalists.

Protecting Children

A professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Vinay Prasad is an outspoken critic of what he has characterized as unscientifically sound Covid-19-mitigation public-health policies. On Monday, he published an essay on the Sensible Medicine Substack criticizing the AAP for asserting that for obese patients, pediatricians “should offer” adolescents and “may offer” children ages 8 to 11 weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic.

Meanwhile, the United States Preventive Services Task Force asserted in a draft guidance released December 12 that evidence was insufficient, in particular concerning the long-term impacts of such medications, to make such a recommendation. The task force called for more research. 

In an email, Dr. Prasad argued that the AAP’s policies regarding gender-transition treatment represent a pervasive lack of adherence to evidence-based standards. 

“I am deeply concerned that, across all their recommendations, the American Academy of Pediatrics does not rely on the highest quality of evidence, and worse, they do not call for better studies,” said Dr. Prasad. “Instead, they’re very happy to make strong recommendations based on their own biases in the absence of evidence. And that harms children.” 

Dr. Georges, by contrast, wrote in Pediatrics that any state law denying children gender-transition treatment “not only represents medical neglect, but it is also state-sanctioned emotional abuse.”

BENJAMIN RYAN

Benjamin Ryan is an independent health and science reporter who also contributes to The New York Times, The Guardian and NBC News and has also written for The Atlantic and the Washington Post.

[mariacallous]

A revolution in weight loss is apparently underway. It started in 2021, when the FDA approved the diabetes drug semaglutide for weight loss. The weekly injectable—sold under the brand name Wegovy—can help users lose 5 to 10 percent of their body weight, leading commentators to describe the drug as both a “medical breakthrough” and a “silver bullet” for obesity. Elon Musk says he’s taking it, Kim Kardashian is rumored to be using it, and everyone from Hollywood to the Hamptons reportedly wants a prescription. 

Soon, there will be a new weight loss medication on the block—and it’s even more potent than its peers. Last fall, the FDA fast-tracked the review process for using tirzepatide as a weight loss drug after a clinical trial showed that people with BMIs labeled “overweight” or “obese” lost a staggering 22.5 percent of their body weight on the highest dose. If all goes according to plan, that will make Mounjaro the latest in a fast-growing biomedical sector—spanning everything from bariatric surgery to deep brain stimulation for binge-eating—that aims to combat, if not cure, the problem of “excess” weight. 

For pharmaceutical companies, the race to market is financially motivated: Wegovy and Mounjaro cost more than $1,000 a month. Weight loss drugs are rarely covered by insurance, but people who can afford them have proven they’re willing to pay. And the market seems effectively limitless: Despite an ongoing “war on obesity,” more than 1.9 billion adults globally are considered overweight or obese, and the number of prospective users is growing every year. Now doctors—desperate to treat what is widely seen as an “obesity epidemic”—are coming on board. In January, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended such medications for kids as young as 12. 

The victorious narratives gilding drugs like Mounjaro are already being positioned as a direct challenge to fat activism. For decades, the movement has pushed for social and economic opportunity for people of all sizes through civil rights, fat pride and liberation, and biomedical evidence itself. Thanks to prominent voices like Audrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes, many people now know that “lifestyle changes” like calorie restriction and exercise fail to produce sustained weight loss for 97 percent of people and that many dieters end up gaining back more weight than they lost. But what happens to the strength of these arguments when a weight loss drug seems to work?

Like other purported weight loss solutions, Mounjaro promises “to fix weight stigma by making you thinner, instead of removing the stigma,” says Susanne Johnson, a fat activist and family nurse practitioner in Pennsylvania.��In so doing, these drugs and surgeries further exacerbate anti-fat discrimination. Instead of criticizing people in larger bodies for their perceived lack of willpower—that old “calories in, calories out” adage—people can now blame those in bigger bodies for something more akin to a techno-pessimist, or even anti-science, stance: “Just take the miracle cure!” 

The history of the weight loss industry is more akin to prospecting for gold or investing in crypto than transplanting organs and developing antibiotics; less a story of scientific progress than an endless cycle of wild speculation, where boom inevitably gives way to bust. Fen-Phen was a miracle until it was linked to heart valve damage. Intermittent fasting was going to fix what caloric restriction couldn’t until researchers showed the two produce exactly the same results. And then there’s the complicated case of bariatric surgery.

From their inception in the 1950s, operations like gastric bypass (which reroutes food away from the stomach, inducing malabsorption) and gastric sleeve (which involves partially amputating the stomach so it holds less food and produces fewer hunger hormones) have been sold as a potential panacea, says Lisa Du Breuil, a clinical social worker at Massachusetts General Hospital. While fewer than 1 percent of people who qualify actually undergo bariatric surgery, those who do can lose up to 70 percent of their “excess” weight (or the weight above a BMI of 24.9). 

But Du Breuil, who specializes in eating disorders and substance abuse disorders, has seen some of the worst of bariatric’s side effects. People can develop dumping syndrome—wherein sugar-rich meals leave the stomach too quickly, causing sweating, dizziness, rapid heart rate, and vomiting. Gastric bypass in particular raises the risk of postoperative alcohol abuse. Rates of suicide and self-harming behaviors also rise in the years after bariatric surgery. And even when people follow strict post-operative diets, malnutrition, tooth loss, gout, and new or resurging eating disorders are possible. “It can be really challenging to get a full picture,” Du Breuil says. She learns about new side effects all the time.

Semaglutide and tirzepatide—both part of a larger family of GLP-1 receptor agonists—were developed for diabetes management at lower doses. When pharmaceutical companies noticed their trial participants were also losing weight, they realized “if we can turn the volume up to 11, we can really enhance this side effect,” says Johnson, the nurse. “That means you’re also turning up the other side effects.” 

The primary complaints from users of Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro sound like the kind of thing you can fix with a bottle (or three) of Pepto Bismol: nausea, upset stomach, diarrhea, and what one patient called “power vomiting.” But these might be less like classic “side effects” of a drug than a mechanism of weight loss itself, as The Guardian recently reported. By making the feeling of eating (and, in some cases, even hydrating) actively disgusting to the user, the drug curbs their consumption—similar to the experience of bariatric patients, who can only fit a few ounces of food in their stomachs at a time. 

The list of complications doesn’t end there. For example, both GLP-1 receptor agonists may increase the risk of thyroid cancer—one of the many BMI-linked diseases that supposedly makes weight loss absolutely imperative for people in larger bodies. And there’s good reason to believe that other side effects will reveal themselves in years to come, as the number of long-term users grows. 

The biggest surprise for many prospective patients is that long-term weight loss isn’t guaranteed—a reflection, perhaps, of the faulty assumption that people are obese because they overeat. Current estimates suggest that the average bariatric surgery patient regains 30 percent of the weight they lost in the 10 years after surgery. One in four regain all of their weight in that time. And 20 percent of people don’t respond to surgery in the first place. 

The same is true for GLP-1 receptor agonists: If you stop injecting, the weight returns. 

In case it wasn’t clear by now, biomedical weight loss interventions often mimic the deadly logic of anorexia, bulimia, or other forms of disordered eating, says Erin Harrop, a clinical social worker and researcher. Harrop would know. At the height of their own eating disorder, Harrop wished they could fill their stomach with air instead of food, or cut their stomach out, or wire their jaw shut. Later, they learned these things exist—in the form of gastric balloons, gastric sleeves, and even a magnetic jaw trap. 

It’s no surprise, then, that some people who undergo bariatric surgery experience a resurgence of a preexisting eating disorder, or develop a new one. Frequent vomiting, never knowing what foods will upset your stomach, and feeling pressure to maintain a post-surgical weight—“you can create an eating disorder that way,” Du Briel says.

But semaglutide and tirzepatide promise to fulfill an even stranger fantasy: eliminating appetite itself. While a drug like Mounjaro works on numerous fronts—including preventing the body from storing fat and “browning” existing adipose tissue—it’s the feeling of being untethered from desire that seems to fascinate patients and physicians alike. People for whom the drug works often say, “I forget to eat,” says Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity medicine specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Weight Center. 

If doctors really believe that obesity is the greater of any two evils, then this approach makes sense. When it comes to bariatric surgery, for example, a review of the medical literature suggests it is, on balance, associated with a reduction in all-cause mortality—or death of any cause*—*compared to patients with high BMIs who don’t go under the knife (though such studies are profoundly limited, as they often do not control for social factors, like income or education). Many hope that semaglutide and tirzepatide will one day prove just as vitalizing.

But eating disorders kill too. In many contexts, sustained hunger is considered a travesty. And desire—for food, or anything else—is a great way to know you’re alive. “It’s wild to me that we see no appetite as a positive thing,” says Shira Rosenbluth, an eating disorder therapist who works with people of all sizes. Anna Toonk agrees: “I realized that there are worse things than being fat,” she told The Cut last fall. “The worst thing you can be is wanting to barf all the time.” 

Ultimately, the proliferation of drugs like Mounjaro means medicine is not only in the business of dictating “normal” weights (a thing it still hasn’t quite figured out), but “normal” appetites. What was once an intuitive process, in which your body tells you what it needs, became a dictate under diet culture: You tell your body what it can have. Now medicine promises a radical reset: With the right drug, your body will hunger for nothing at all.

Weight loss technology can’t be stopped entirely—nor should it be. Everyone has the right to choose what they want to do with their bodies. But informed consent is built on information, and we may not have enough. Mounjaro was fast-tracked by the FDA based on studies designed to observe weight loss over just 72 weeks, a small fraction of the time real patients will be on the drug. At the very least, patients should be informed that in the first years after a drug hits the market, they are participants in an ongoing experiment. 

As biomedicine’s war on obesity continues, people must work harder to combat anti-fat bias—not on a technicality, but as part of the expansive vision of justice fat activists began articulating more than 50 years ago. For semaglutide, tirzepatide, bariatric surgery, and their ilk are neither miracles nor cures. There have always been fat people, and there always will be, whether they’re “non-responders” to treatment, refuseniks, or languishing on the waitlist. Notably, even those who experience dramatic weight loss after surgery or on injectables may still be overweight or obese, depending where they started. 

Perhaps most importantly, the American weight loss discourse must move away from a reflexive scientism, which has enabled biomedicine to subject the entirety of human experience to its single-minded scrutiny. Weight, like almost every aspect of embodiment, is not an exclusively biological phenomenon or a clear-cut medical “problem” to solve. It is shaped by countless factors, like power distribution in society, personal psychology, and that most frightening of forces: the desire for more.

If you or a loved one is struggling with an eating disorder, the National Eating Disorders Association Helpline is available at (800) 931-2237.

[starfiresyugiohocs]

OC Profile: Iris

Full Name: Iris Ophelia McGinnis. Nicknames: Irey, Petals (by her grandfather), Cupcake (a nickname that happened for a good while from Alister) Aliases: N/a Nationality: American, Japanese citizenship, ⅓ Irish Birthplace: Domino City, Japan. Gender: Female (she/her, comfortable with they/them as well). Sexuality: Demisexual demi/biromantic. Age: 19-21 years old. Birthday: September 7th. Star Sign: Virgo. Occupation: Nursing student -> Pediatric nurse; counter clerk at Kame Game; book seller at Marcie’s Marvelous Books; Pro Duelist. Voiceclaim: Janet Varney.

Hair Color: Blonde. Hairstyle: Shoulder length, very thick and more shaggy than wavy (though it does curl at the ends), has long sideswept bangs over one eye. Eye Color: Violet. Skintone: Pale. Notable Features: Scar underneath her right eye. Typically wears dark, heavy makeup. Pierced ears, two piercings on the top of each ear, a tongue piercing and a naval piercing. Also got her nips pierced on a drunken dare by Maddox. After Season 4, she starts getting various tattoos as well, mainly on her arms, legs and one on her collarbone. Outfit Style: Thrifted goth, usually getting a lot of her clothes second hand or on sale. Lots of blacks, not a lot of room for other colors unless they're accents. Loves a good fishnet stockings and ripped jeans combo. After season 4 and she gets into Dueling in tournaments more and more, her younger brother finally got to go on a shopping spree and get her some new clothes, coming in touch with her roots as Kaiba's big sister but even more goth. Accessories: Silver rings on her fingers she'll find antiquing, choker necklaces (definitely a lot more of the spikey ones early on).

Personality: Very snarky and sarcastic. Suffers heavily from resting bitch face; also tends to not be able to hide it when she does not like somebody. Beyond that, however, she typically struggles with expressing emotions and vulnerability; to the point that not even her siblings have ever seen her even shed a tear. She tends to also bury a lot of her more negative emotions and feelings to "deal with it one day when she's dead". Is absolutely fantastic with kids and animals. Isn't afraid to be blunt when she needs to be and can be overly straightforward. When you've earned her respect and care, she will be the most loyal person in the world. Very much has a caretaker nature and wants to help heal everyone she can and look out for everyone. Tired Big Sister energy as well as depressed broke zillennial energy. Hobbies: Reading, annotating books,  gardening, thrift shopping, collecting Addams Family merch where she can afford it, researching anything and everything, cooking, playing different card and board games with her family. Habits/Mannerisms: Brushes her bangs back during serious talks, easily slips into neutral masks when upset, crossed arms when she doesn't have much to do with them, lip biting, hand holding for small shows of affection, eats cupcakes the way Anne Hathaway does by taking the bottoms off and smushing it on top of the frosting. Likes: Halloween, thick books, fanfiction, motorcycles, cats, history, mythology, small businesses, rainy days, anything mint chocolate, seeing karma work its magic. Dislikes: Rich people, corporate assholes, heights/flying, overly noisy places, animatronics, hard candies, sports, writing essays. Favorite Food: Chicken fried rice, mint chocolate fudge. Least Favorite Food: Caviar.

Deck: Cyber Angel. Signature Card: Cyber Angel Izana. Ranking: Wasn't much for Dueling early on, but after she starts getting into the tournaments, she starts to rank pretty well. As of the moment, she's sitting somewhere between the top 25-50 range I think, but is pushing to get further and further.

Parents: Meredith McGinnis-Butler, Steven Nesbitt (estranged, deceased), Roland Butler (step-father, views as her real Dad). Sibling(s): Henry Nesbitt (half-brother, deceased), River McGinnis (younger sibling), Flora Butler (younger half sister); Seto Kaiba (younger foster brother), Mokuba Kaiba (younger foster brother). Children: Orion Gayle (born right before Season 4). Extended Family: See family tree here. Pet(s): None at the moment, looking at getting a cat. Love Interest(s): Alister Gayle. Extensive Relationships: See post here (coming soon).

History:

Grew up being raised by her single mother. Steven was a very infrequent part of her life early on, and was not a good or loving presence and kept a firm distance.

He disappeared almost completely out of her life after the death of her half-brother, Henry, and after his reaction to her mother finding out that she both had MS and was pregnant again with River.

Showed back up when Iris was in middle school to bribe her mother into letting her and River attend a dinner with his boss, and she met the Kaiba brothers. He tried to arrange a marriage contract between her and Seto, and it became a heated battle.

Tried to put up with it to help keep an eye on Seto and Mokuba, though fought against it the best she could. The boys became like brothers to her and River.

Her Mom and Roland worked to protect the kids and eventually fell in love with each other.

Has quite a bit of trauma from Steven, as well as Gozaburo, during the time leading up to Seto taking over KaibaCorp, all that she took in an attempt to protect her siblings.'

Started taking college credits her last year of high school and even graduated high school a semester early. Went to college on a full scholarship to get her nursing degree.

Meets Alister a year before the story starts when he begins working for KaibaCorp in the IT department (all undercover to try and take them down from the inside) and they end u pbecoming friends and later something more.