#Marci Bowers

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Ari Drennen at MMFA:

A New York Times article about the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s 2022 standards of care draws on emails released by a psychologist who has compared homosexuality to pedophilia and reportedly worked on behalf of an extreme anti-LGBTQ group.

The Times piece, which claims that the Biden administration lobbied to remove explicit age limits from the guidelines, does not provide sufficient context on the psychologist's background or his reported work for Alliance Defending Freedom, a Project 2025 partner.

The article also uses outdated data to fearmonger about rising numbers of trans youth and again includes misinformation about transition care from elected officials with no fact-checking.

The Times report quotes email excerpts filed in a legal challenge to Alabama's ban on gender-affirming care from WPATH officials describing their interactions with Sarah Boateng, who then served as chief of staff to Adm. Rachel Levine, assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services. Boateng argued at the time that listing specific age guidelines for transition surgeries would fuel more aggressive legislative efforts to ban them. 

The Times states that “the excerpts were filed by James Cantor,” whom the paper describes simply as “a psychologist and longstanding critic of gender treatments for minors.”

Cantor frequently presents himself as an expert on gender-affirming medicine and has reportedly been retained as an expert by the states in favor of West Virginia’s ban on sports participation and restrictions on health care in Texas, Florida, and Alabama.  In the Alabama trial at the center of the Times’ reporting, Cantor also appears to have worked on behalf of Project 2025 partner and extreme anti-LGBTQ organization the Alliance Defending Freedom – a detail excluded from the Times’ report.

[...]

Project 2025 is a comprehensive transition plan for the next GOP presidential administration. Its nearly 900-page policy book labels “the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children” as “pornography” that “should be outlawed” and states that “the people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.” The Alliance Defending Freedom, which also works to curtail access to abortion, is one of over 100 organizations that have endorsed the document, meant to serve as a blueprint for a second Trump administration.

Cantor has a troubling resume outside of his work alongside the Alliance Defending Freedom. He was previously removed from the state of Florida’s roster of “subject matter experts” on transition care after linking homosexuality to pedophilia and stating that sexual attraction to children is “not inherently wrong.” Cantor served as member of the advisory council for Prostagia, which has campaigned against bans on sex dolls resembling children and has hosted support groups for “minor attracted people” open to adults alongside people as young as 13. [...]

The Times also claims that “the numbers for all gender-related medical interventions for adolescents have been steadily rising as more young people seek such care.” But the data used to support this assertion ends in 2021, when many states began restricting or outlawing transition care, meaning those numbers may no longer be “rising.”  The article also includes statements from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott characterizing transition surgeries as “disfiguring” and “genital mutilation,” respectively, with no fact-checking, a repeat of a pattern previously noted by Media Matters and GLAAD. Activists opposing female genital mutilation also say that the harmful practice should not be “hijacked for purposes to target and discriminate against vulnerable youth.” The Times story was updated after publication to remove the detail that Marci Bowers, president of WPATH, is herself a transgender woman. While the current version of the story states that Levine is also a transgender woman, it makes no note of the gender identity of Cantor, DeSantis, or Abbott.

Once again, the New York Times fails to properly note the anti-trans extremism of the subjects being covered on gender-affirming care issues, this time in a story discussing James Cantor in which NYT omitted his ties to anti-LGBTQ+ extremist group Alliance Defending Freedom.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Jesse Singal

Published: Apr 18, 2023

Do people with severe depression have a right to accurate information about antidepressants? I suspect most people would answer “yes”. There is a general understanding that individuals who suffer from medical conditions are in a vulnerable position, making them susceptible to misinformation. There is also increased awareness of the influence that the profit motive can have on how medical research is funded, undertaken and communicated to the public.

But for some reason, this basic principle doesn’t seem to apply to the hyper-politicised subject of gender medicine. On one side, Republican states are attempting to ban youth gender medicine — and, in some cases, to dial back access to adult gender medicine. On the other, liberals maintain that there is solid evidence for these treatments, and that only an ignorant person could suggest otherwise.

Whether or not you agree with the GOP’s stance (I do not), the latter view is simply false. The trajectory of youth gender medicine in nations with nationalised healthcare systems has been relatively straightforward: these countries keep conducting careful reviews of the evidence for puberty blockers and hormones, and they keep finding that there is very little such evidence to speak of. That was the conclusion in Sweden, Finland, the UK, and, most recently, Norway. As a recent headline in The Economist had it: “The evidence to support medicalised gender transitions in adolescents is worryingly weak.”

Yet despite this evidentiary crisis in Europe, and despite multiple scandals vividly demonstrating the downside of administering these treatments in a careless way, liberal institutions in the US have only become more enthusiastic about them. In recent years, everyone from Jon Stewart and John Oliver to reporters and pundits at the New York Times, The Washington Post and NPR have exaggerated the evidence for these interventions.

The logic seems to be that if activists, doctors and journalists repeat “The evidence is great!” enough times, regardless of whether the evidence actually is great, the controversy will go away — as though the state of Arkansas could be shamed into reversing its policy on trans youth because Jon Stewart made fun of them. Meanwhile, as I can tell you from experience, if you openly question these treatments or highlight just how little we know about them, you’re going to have a bad time.

But look a little closer, and it swiftly becomes clear that the evidence for both adult and youth gender medicine is frequently drawn from alarmingly low-quality studies. Almost invariably, when you examine the latest study to go viral, there’s much less there than meets the eye — whether because of serious overhyping and questionable statistical choices on the part of the researchers, outright missing data, flawed survey instruments, more missing data, or just generally beyond-broken methods.

Since any individual study or group of studies can suffer from these issues, serious researchers know that you can’t just take a few that point in the right direction and herald them as evidence. Rather, you need to sum up the available evidence while also accounting for its quality. This is what European countries have done, and they have all come to roughly the same conclusion: the evidence supporting these treatments isn’t there.

But even at the level of sweeping summaries, America’s conclusions are often distorted. A prime example came in a recent New York Times column by Marci Bowers, a leading gender surgeon and the president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). Bowers paints a very rosy picture of the evidence base:

“Decades of medical experience and research since has found that when patients are treated for gender dysphoria, their self-esteem grows and their stress, anxiety, substance use and suicidality decrease. In 2018, Cornell University’s Center for the Study of Inequality released a comprehensive literature review finding that gender transition, including hormones and surgery, ‘improves the well-being of transgender people’. Nathaniel Frank, the project’s director, said that ‘a consensus like this is rare in social science’. “The Cornell review also found that regret… became even less common as surgical quality and social support improved. All procedures in medicine and surgery inspire some percentage of regret. But a study published in 2021 found that fewer than 1% of those who have received gender-affirming surgery say they regret their decision to do so… A separate analysis of a survey of more than 27,000 transgender and gender-diverse adults found that the vast majority of those who detransition from medical affirming treatment said they did so because of external factors (such as family pressure, financial reasons or a loss of access to care), not because they had been misdiagnosed or their gender identities had changed.”

Here we have a leading expert (Bowers) citing a leading institution (Cornell) and relating astonishing claims (what medical procedure has a 1% regret rate?). The case appears to be closed — until you actually click the links and read Bowers’s sources. (Bowers and WPATH did not return emailed interview requests.)

Let’s start with Cornell’s data. According to a summary at its “What We Know Project“:

“We conducted a systematic literature review of all peer-reviewed articles published in English between 1991 and June 2017 that assess the effect of gender transition on transgender well-being. We identified 55 studies that consist of primary research on this topic, of which 51 (93%) found that gender transition improves the overall well-being of transgender people, while 4 (7%) report mixed or null findings. We found no studies concluding that gender transition causes overall harm.”

If you are familiar with systematic literature reviews, you will find the above unusual. Researchers don’t generally ask whether a procedure works or not in such a vague a manner, then tally up the results. To usefully gauge the level of evidence, a review has to carefully define its research questions, and factor in the potential biases of the existing studies. The Cornell project does none of this.

I emailed Gordon Guyatt, one of the godfathers of the so-called evidence-based medicine movement, to ask him whether he thought the Cornell project qualified as a systematic literature review. His response was: “It meets criteria for a profoundly flawed systematic review!” When we later spoke, he explained why he didn’t trust it. “Presumably, they are trying to make a causal connection between what the patients received and their outcomes,” he said. “That is not possible unless one has a comparator.” In other words, if you’re only tracking people who received a treatment, and don’t compare their outcomes to another group not receiving the treatment, you simply can’t learn that much. Guyatt offers the example of someone taking hormones and saying afterwards that they feel better. “That does not mean that the hormones have anything to do with your feeling good.” 

This is a very basic, very well-understood problem in both medical and social-scientific research. If all you have is before-and-after measurements of how someone who received a treatment changed over time, there are all sorts of potential confounds, from the placebo effect to regression towards the mean to the possibility that receiving the treatment coincided with some other salutary intervention, such as therapy, that wasn’t accounted for.

Because the Cornell team made no effort to even evaluate the risk of bias in the individual studies it evaluated, the final product tells us very little. It’s roughly analogous to coming upon a pile of coins and trying to determine its worth simply by counting how many coins there are, rather than sorting the pile by denomination. When I raised this with Nathaniel Frank, the head of the Cornell project, he said via email that “we don’t publish traditional systematic reviews”, but rather web summaries of important research questions. So the first words of its overview might confuse readers: “We conducted a systematic literature review.” 

If Bowers had wanted to cite a carefully conducted, peer-reviewed systematic review of the gender medicine literature, she actually had one at her fingertips: her own organisation, WPATH, funded one a few years ago. The results, published in the Journal of the Endocrine Society in 2021, revealed that there is almost no high-quality evidence in this field of medicine. After they summarised every study they could find that met certain quality criteria, and applied Cochrane guidelines to evaluate their quality, the authors could find only low-strength evidence to support the idea that hormones improve quality of life, depression, and anxiety for trans people. Low means, here, that the authors “have limited confidence that the estimate of effect lies close to the true effect for this outcome. The body of evidence has major or numerous deficiencies (or both).” Meanwhile, there wasn’t enough evidence to render any verdict on the quality of the evidence supporting the idea that hormones reduce the risk of death by suicide, which is an exceptionally common claim.

Oddly, though, the authors of this systematic review conclude by writing that the benefits of these treatments “make hormone therapy an essential component of care that promotes the health and well-being of transgender people”. That claim completely clashes with their substantive findings about the quality of the evidence. So, when Bowers cited the Cornell project, she was citing a review that is of very limited evidentiary value — while also ignoring a much more professionally conducted, and much more pessimistic, though strangely concluded, review that her own organisation paid for.

But what about the study which, she claims, “found that fewer than 1% of those who have received gender-affirming surgery say they regret their decision to do so”? Here’s where things get downright weird.

The study in question, published in 2021 in the journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Global Open, has dozens of errors that its nine authors and editors have refused to correct. Indeed, it appears to have been executed and published to such an unprofessional standard that one might ask why it hasn’t been retracted entirely. 

Before we get into all that, though, it’s worth pointing out that even if it had been competently conducted, the review could not have provided us with a reliable estimate of the regret rate following gender-affirming surgery: the studies it meta-analyses are just too weak. Many of those included did not actually contact people who had undergone surgery to ask them if they regretted it; rather, the authors searched medical records for mentions of regret and/or for other evidence of surgical reversals. Yet this method is inevitably going to underestimate the number of regretters, because plenty of people regret a procedure without going through the trouble of either reversing it or informing the doctor who performed it. In one study of detransitioners — albeit one focusing on a fairly small and non-random online sample — three quarters of them said they did not inform their clinicians that they had detransitioned.

The studies included in this review also failed to follow up with a very large number of patients. The meta-analysis had a total sample size of about 5,600; the largest study, with a sample size of 2,627 — so a little under half the entire sample — had a loss-to-follow-up rate of 36%. If you’re losing track of a third of your patients, you obviously don’t really know how they’re doing and can’t make any strong claims about their regret rates. And yet, the authors don’t mention the loss-to-follow-up issue anywhere in their paper. No version of this meta-analysis, then, was likely to provide a reliable estimate of the regret rate for gender-affirming surgery.

Even so, the version that was published was particularly disastrous. Independent researcher J.L. Cederblom summed it up: “What are these numbers? These are all wrong… And these weren’t even simple one-off errors — instead different tables disagreed with each other. The metaphor that comes to mind is drunk driving.”

To take one example, the authors initially reported that the aforementioned largest paper in their meta-analysis had a sample size of 4,863. But they misread it — the true figure was actually only 2,627. They also misstated other aspects of that report, such as how regret was investigated (they said it was via questionnaire but it was via medical records search) and the age of the sample (they said it included some juveniles, but it did not).

Not all the errors were significant, but they were remarkably numerous. And because of the abundance of issues, the paper attracted the attention of other researchers. “In light of these numerous issues affecting study quality and data analysis, [the authors’] conclusion that ‘our study has shown a very low percentage of regret in TGNB population after GAS’ is, in our opinion, unsupported and potentially inaccurate,” wrote two critics, Pablo Expósito-Campos and Roberto D’Angelo, in a letter to the editor that the journal subsequently published. In her own letter, the researcher Susan Bewley highlighted what appears to be an absence of vital information about the authors’ method of putting together the meta-analysis. 

The authors and the editors decided to simply not correct any of this. They did publish an erratum, in which they republished seven tables that still contained errors, while maintaining that all those errors had no impact on the paper’s takeaway findings. But the paper itself remains published, in its original form, complete with those 2,200 ghost-patients inflating the sample size.

Bewley and Cederblom have continued to ask the journal to reveal the process that led to the paper getting published, and to address why so many of the errors remain uncorrected. In an email in January to Bewley, Aaron Weinstein, its editorial director, claimed that because critical letters to the editor had been published, and because the corrected data was reanalysed by a statistical expert, “the Publisher and the ASPS [American Society of Plastic Surgeons] feel that PRS Global Open has done due diligence on this article and this case is closed”. He also claimed, curiously, that he had no power to force the authors to address the many serious remaining questions raised by the paper’s critics, saying “there is no precedent for an editorial office to do so”. Neither Weinstein nor the paper’s corresponding author, Oscar Manrique, responded to my emailed requests for comments.

Finally, there is Bowers’s claim that “a separate analysis of a survey of more than 27,000 transgender and gender-diverse adults found that the vast majority of those who detransition from medical affirming treatment said they did so because of external factors”. This is technically true, but is also rather misleading because the survey in question — the 2015 United States Transgender Survey (which has profound sampling issues) — was of currently transgender people. It says so in the first sentence of the executive summary. Research based on this survey obviously can’t provide us with any reliable information about why people detransition, because it is not a survey of detransitioners. If you want to know how often people detransition, you need to follow large groups of trans people over time and check in to see if they still identify that way later on — and we don’t have high-quality research on that front.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that the vast majority of studies being discussed here concern adults, while the legislative discussion mostly centres on adolescents. The most recent version of WPATH’s Standards of Care is very open about the lack of evidence when it comes to the latter: “Despite the slowly growing body of evidence supporting the effectiveness of early medical intervention, the number of studies is still low, and there are few outcome studies that follow youth into adulthood. Therefore, a systematic review regarding outcomes of treatment in adolescents is not possible.” Again, WPATH is Bowers’s own organisation — surely she is familiar with its output?

Despite the backbreaking errors of that nine-authored paper, the severe limitations of the Cornell review, and the near-utter-irrelevance of the United States Transgender Survey, all three are chronically trotted out as evidence that we know transgender medicine is profoundly helpful, or that detransition or regret are rare — or both. It’s frustrating enough that these lacklustre arguments are constantly made on social media, where all too many people get their scientific information. But what’s worse is that many journalists have perpetuated this sad state of affairs. A cursory Google search will reveal that these three works have been treated as solid evidence by the Associated Press, Slate, Slate again, The Daily Beast, Scientific American and other outlets. The NYT, meanwhile, further publicised Cornell’s half-baked systematic review by giving Nathaniel Frank a whole column to tout its misleading findings back in 2018.

Why does such low-quality work slip through? The answer is straightforward: because it appears, if you don’t read it too closely, or if you are unfamiliar with the basic concepts of evidence-based medicine, to support the liberal view that these treatments are wonderful and shouldn’t be questioned, let alone banned. That’s enough for most people, who are less concerned with whether what they are sharing is accurate than whether it can help with ongoing, high-stakes political fights. 

But you’re not being a good ally to trans people if you disseminate shoddy evidence about medicine they might seek. Whatever happens in the red states seeking to ban these treatments, transgender people need to make difficult healthcare choices, many of which can be ruinously expensive. And yet, if you call for the same standards to be applied to gender medicine that are applied to antidepressants, you’ll likely be told you don’t care about trans people.

As Gordon Guyatt, who has done an enormous amount to increase the evidentiary standards of the medical establishment, told me: “You’re doing harm to transgender people if you don’t question the evidence. I believe that people making any health decisions should know about what the best evidence is, and what the quality of evidence is. So by pretending things are not the way they are — I don’t see how you’re not harming people.”

[zinniajones]

Florida House of Representatives Office of the Speaker 

Paul Renner  Speaker 

MEMORANDUM 

To: The Honorable Randy Fine, Chair, Health & Human Services Committee From: Paul Renner, Speaker Date: April 23, 2023  RE: Authorization to Commence Investigation 

Dear Chair Fine, 

According to correspondence from the Florida Chapter of the American Academy Of Pediatrics (FCAAP) to the Florida Board of Medicine, “gender-affirming care is the widely accepted standard of care for treating transgender adolescents with gender dysphoria.” Many medical organizations are said to endorse “gender-affirming care,” although FCAAP’s statement indicates that the standards of care are actually developed by just two organizations — the Endocrine Society and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). 

Last year, Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) adopted a rule excluding from Medicaid coverage certain treatments for gender dysphoria. That rule is the subject of ongoing litigation in federal court, where the plaintiffs rely extensively on WPATH’s and the Endocrine Society’s standards of care and guidelines and describe them as “widely accepted best practices.” AHCA sought to probe that assertion by serving subpoenas on those entities and others that endorse “gender-affirming care” for minors in order to determine whether this purported medical consensus was truly the result of an intellectually rigorous and open process — as any medical consensus should be. Those entities — including WPATH, the Endocrine Society, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Psychiatric Association — responded by fighting vigorously to avoid any meaningful inquiry or disclosure. And they did so notwithstanding their knowledge (and likely, their intent) that their own standards and endorsements are being cited in litigation as a basis to effectively veto state law.

Similarly, in an ongoing legal challenge to Alabama’s Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act, which prohibits the use of puberty blockers, hormone treatments, and surgical interventions as “gender-affirming care” for minors, the plaintiffs have likewise relied extensively on WPATH’s guidelines. But when the State of Alabama sought discovery regarding WPATH’s development of those guidelines, WPATH’s response once again was to seek judicial protection from any disclosure. When the federal court ordered WPATH last month to respond to Alabama's subpoena, WPATH’s reaction was to seek extraordinary appellate review rather than comply. 

Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper, the first psychologist at what has been described as the first major gender clinic in the U.S. (at Boston Children’s Hospital), has publicly expressed concern about the “irresponsible” treatment being administered to minors with gender dysphoria. Referring to her fellow practitioners, she stated that “everyone is very scared to speak up because we’re afraid of not being seen as being ‘affirming.’” And Dr. Marci Bowers, a transgender gynecologic surgeon who has performed more than 2,000 “sex-change” operations and who served as president of WPATH, has commented regarding the state of open discourse and debate: “There are definitely people who are trying to keep out anyone who doesn't absolutely buy the party line that everything should be affirming and that there's no room for dissent.”

Although these leading practitioners (and others) have sounded alarm bells regarding contemporary treatment of minors with gender dysphoria, organizations including FCAAP apparently maintain that there is medical consensus that “gender-affirming care” is the appropriate treatment. The foregoing (and other) indicia of widespread self-censorship in the medical profession suggest that the purported consensus may be little more than a mirage. 

WPATH's own published standards of care at least acknowledge what we all know through common experience to be true: that the human brain continues to develop well into early adulthood, that “adolescence is often associated with increased risk-taking behaviors,” and that adolescence is commonly characterized by “a heightened focus on peer relationships, which can be both positive and detrimental.” Dr. Erica Anderson — a transgender psychologist, a former president of WPATH’s United States chapter (USPATH), and a member of the American Psychological Association (APA) task force that writes the APA guidelines for transgender care — has publicly acknowledged that “teenagers influence each other” and that “to flatly say there couldn't be any social influence in formation of gender identity flies in the face of reality.” Concluding that “it's gone too far,” Dr. Anderson asked rhetorically, “What happens when the perfect storm — of social isolation, exponentially increased consumption of social media, the popularity of alternative identities — affects the actual development of individual kids?” It appears that those responsible for developing and endorsing the purported consensus of gender-affirming care for minors may not have engaged with that question in any serious way. And it appears that they wish to avoid any inquiry into their possible failures to do so. 

As our courts and the Supreme Court have long recognized, “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” Yet it appears that the medical organizations who create and endorse guidelines on a contentious issue fraught with scientific uncertainty have gone to great lengths to avoid scrutiny and to keep the public (and their duly elected representatives) in the dark regarding the process by which these "consensus" guidelines were developed.

Therefore, I now authorize and direct the Health and Human Services Committee to investigate whether the adoption and endorsement of “gender-affirming care�� as the standard of care for minors have been the result of rigorous medical and scientific analysis and consideration, or whether the integrity of the medical profession has been compromised by a radical gender ideology that stands to cause permanent physical and mental harm to children and adolescents. As part of this investigation, the Committee may look into any relevant matter within the scope of the House's constitutional investigative powers. The Committee may also issue any necessary subpoenas for documents and testimony, including from Florida-based organizations that recommend, endorse, or otherwise promote the standard of care described herein. 

Respectfully, 

Paul M. Renner, Speaker of the House 

cc: Kathleen Passidomo, Senate President  Ron DeSantis, Governor

[makingqueerhistory]

can I just say. I grew up in Trinidad. I miss the trans women :( it's changed. I wish they'd remember.

For those just looking in, this is a reference to a book I just read called Going to Trinidad, which is nonfiction with the summary:

"For more than four decades, between 1969 and 2010, the remote former mining town of Trinidad, Colorado was the unlikely crossroads for approximately six thousand medical pilgrims who came looking for relief from the pain of gender dysphoria. The surgical skill and nonjudgmental compassion of surgeons Stanley Biber and his transgender protege Marci Bowers not only made the phrase “Going to Trinidad” a euphemism for gender confirmation surgery in the worldwide transgender community, but also turned the small outpost near the New Mexico border into what The New York Times once called “the sex-change capital of the world.”"

The book explores the realities of this, as well as some of the patients who had varying experiences with earlier iterations of gender confirmation surgery and the medical system around that. One of the things it talks about is the erasure of this history, and I can definitely understand how that would feel for someone who actually lived through the transition. One of the reasons queer history is so vital to share is because of things like this, if the town had its way, it might have disappeared from the collective memory.

[oracle-cassandra]

What are Radblr's thoughts about this? I'm on my way to take a test when this article popped up on my screen, and I wanted to post this before I leave, especially given that this is published by Scientific America. However, Im personally skeptically that "social contagion" doesn't play a factor at all; I wouldn't doubt it plays into this even a little bit. I'm sure everyone knows about articles posted in favor of this fad from, like, two years ago from even big names like Mermaids, who have either been proved wrong or backtracked.

I have pasted the article below. There are links in the original article.

----------------

Health Care

Evidence Undermines ‘Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria’ Claims

Fears of “social contagion,” used to support anti-transgender legislation, are not supported by science

By Timmy Broderick on August 24, 2023

A recent study claiming to describe more than 1,600 possible cases of a “socially contagious syndrome” was retracted in June for failing to obtain ethics approval from an institutional review board. The survey examined “rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” a proposed condition that attributes adolescent gender distress to exposure to transgender people through friends or social media. The existence of such a syndrome has been the subject of intense debate for the past several years and has fueled arguments against transgender rights reforms, despite being widely criticized by medical experts.

The American Psychological Association and 61 other health care providers’ organizations signed a letter in 2021 denouncing the validity of rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) as a clinical diagnosis. And a steadily growing body of scientific evidence demonstrates that it does not reflect transgender adolescents’ experiences and that “social contagion” is not causing more young people to seek gender-affirming care. Still, the concept continues to be used to justify anti-trans legislation across the U.S.

“To even say it’s a hypothesis at this point, based on the paucity of research on this, I think is a real stretch,” says Eli Coleman, former president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Coleman helped create the organization’s most recent standards of care for trans people, which endorse and explain the evidence for forms of gender-affirming care.

Many transgender people experience gender dysphoria, meaning that the gender that was assigned to them at birth and their gender identity don’t align, causing distress. ROGD was proposed as a gender dysphoria subtype in a 2018 paper by physician and researcher Lisa Littman, then at Brown University.* Littman’s survey asked parents of transgender adolescents—recruited predominantly from anti-transgender websites and forums—to describe their child’s “sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria” and to state if it coincided with increased social media usage or the child’s friends coming out as transgender.

Littman later issued a correction that updated the methodology, including a brief description of the websites and forums, and noted that ROGD is not a formal diagnosis. But the concept had already been taken upin books and podcasts—and by politicians—to promulgate the idea that peer pressure and social media are making kids transgender or that being transgender is a form of mental illness. As legislation targeting trans people has reached an all-time high in the U.S., ROGD’s alleged social contagion has been invoked by lawmakers in states such as Missouri, Utah and Arkansas to justify banning or restricting gender-affirming care for young people.

“This is just a fear-based concept that is not supported by studies,” says Marci Bowers, president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. The term ROGD is being used to “scare people or to scare legislators into voting for some of these restrictive policies that take away options for young people. It’s cruel, cruel legislation.”

Like the 2018 study that coined the term rapid-onset gender dysphoria, the recently retracted paper, which was published this March in Archives of Sexual Behavior, surveyed parents of transgender children about their children’s experiences. The study was co-authored by Michael Bailey, a psychologist at Northwestern University, and Suzanna Diaz, a pseudonym used by a mother of a child with gender dysphoria. Diaz is not affiliated with an institution and had already collected the survey data before collaborating with Bailey on the paper. The study was retracted because Diaz and Bailey did not get consent from the survey’s respondents to have their responses published, although Bailey disputes this. (Bailey declined to answer questions about the retraction from Scientific American.)

The participants in both the 2018 and the retracted 2023 studies were recruited from online communities that were explicitly critical about many aspects of gender-affirming care for transgender kids. Littman’s research was inspired in part by parents’ posts on these skeptical websites.

In response to criticisms that recruiting parents from anti-transgender websites may have biased the results, Littman says, “I reject the premise that parents who believe transition will harm their children are more likely to discredit their kids’ experiences than parents who believe that transition will help their children.”

Most experts cite the survey of parents rather than transgender children themselves as another major flaw in the methodology of both studies.

Diane Ehrensaft, director of mental health at the University of California, San Francisco, Child and Adolescent Gender Center, concurs. “To talk about what children are thinking, feeling and doing, particularly as they get old enough to have their own minds and narratives, you need to interview them,” she says.

Parents can often be the last to know about their child’s gender identity, Ehrensaft says. Coming out can be terrifying for many transgender kids. Family members often respond with violence or distrust or may even kick the child out of the house. Almost 40 percent of transgender youth experience homelessness or housing instability, according to a 2022 report from the Trevor Project, a nonprofit that provides crisis support for young LGBTQ+ people. Many kids who wait to discuss their gender identity with their parents before appearing to “suddenly” come out are simply keeping themselves safe, Ehrensaft says.

“It is not rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” she says. “It’s rapid-onset parental discovery.”

Many experts have also questioned what length of time qualifies as a “sudden” experience of gender dysphoria. Both the 2018 and 2023 studies left the definition up for parental interpretation. Complicating this, there isn’t one pathway or time line for being transgender, says Tey Meadow, a Columbia University sociologist who studies sexuality and gender. “For some people, it can evolve slowly. For others, it can evolve quickly,” she says.

For most transgender youth seeking gender-affirming care, considerable time elapses between when they realize they may be transgender and when they receive such care. A recent analysis of 10 Canadian medical centers in the Journal of Pediatrics found that 98.3 percent of young people seeking gender-affirming care had realized more than a year prior that they may have been transgender. “If ROGD were a real thing, we would expect to see two discernible streams of patients coming in [to receive care],” says Greta Bauer, a co-author of the study and director of the Eli Coleman Institute for Sexual and Gender Health at the University of Minnesota Medical School. There would be a distinct group of adolescents with more recent knowledge about their gender identity going to clinics and another group that had had such knowledge for years. “But we didn’t see that,” she says.

Thomas Steensma, a psychologist at Amsterdam University Medical Centers who provides gender-affirming therapy, says he has not seen evidence of the “social contagion” component of ROGD, and he cautions against even using these terms. “Rapid means out of control, and contagion signals a warning, and that warning induces fear,” he says. “There’s no evidence that certain developmental pathways are more problematic or less beneficial or helpful than others” for a child’s gender identity.

Steensma reports that he sees two “peaks” of referrals in his clinic: young adolescents and 15-year-olds. In a 2020 study Steensma and his colleagues looked at adolescent referrals from 2000 to 2016 and found no measurable difference in the psychological functioning or the intensity of the gender dysphoria between more recent referrals and those who came to the clinic starting in 2000. If adolescents are presenting with a different form of gender dysphoria, Steensma has not seen it.

The researchers did observe a change in their referral population in recent years, however. More kids assigned female at birth have been transitioning in recent years than those assigned male at birth. Many studies have captured this difference—including the 2018 survey proposing ROGD—but experts are unsure of its cause. Littman suggests that female-assigned kids are more susceptible to the “social contagion” of gender dysphoria because they feel social pressure more acutely than male-assigned kids. But Ehrensaft says nothing in the clinical literature corroborates this assertion. Instead she attributes this discrepancy to shifting cultural factors that influence how children express themselves and explore their identity. In our culture, Ehrensaft says, “there’s a lot more gender stress for the boy in the tutu than the girl in the football uniform.”

Other forms of gender incongruence, such as identifying as nonbinary or gender nonconforming, further challenge the idea that children should be forced to abide by traditional gender categories. And the best way to understand what kids are experiencing is to ask them questions and listen to their answers, Ehrensaft says.

“In some ways, [kids] are far more advanced than I am, as somebody in my 70s, about how they live and understand gender,” Ehrensaft adds. “So if we want to really understand gender, turn to the experts—and that would be the youth themselves.”

*Editor’s Note (8/24/23): This sentence was edited after posting to correct Lisa Littman’s occupation and her affiliation at the time of her 2018 paper.

[bumblee-stumblee]

I feel fucking sick.

If you've got the stomach for it, read the thread.

Marci Bowers (Born Mark Bowers) is a transgender woman (mtf) telling parents that a tanner stage 2 child that's been puberty blocked should practice masturbation to reach orgasm

Girls -7.5 to 13

Boys 9-14

I fuckin hate this why are they all going along with this???

[partly-hueman]

All about Jazz

I'll admit I have seen exactly ONE episode of I am Jazz and there is one thing that stuck out like a sore thumb. Jaron's mom, (Jaron is his real name) is a psychopath. I don't mean that in a crude name calling way. I'm describing her.

In 2003, when Jaron, "Jazz" was just 3 years old his mom noticed that he kept opening his onsie. She took this to mean he was trying to change it into a dress. She became convinced that her son was actually her daughter and by the age of 5 his mom socially transitioned him into a girl.

It's like if you stumble upon some liberal lunatic who tells you that her cat is a vegan. We all know who made that choice.

Jazz's mom consulted the UK trans lobby group Mermaids. Who has since been exposed as frauds and just downright evil bastards. At a conference in 1998 a Mermaids speaker admitted only a third of children exhibiting gender dysphoria "will grow up to be transgendered adults". Over a half would be gay, she said. And that was 25 years ago, before trans became the latest and greatest cause of the left. http://gender.org.uk/conf/1998/merm

Then she she then took Jazz to see Marilyn Volker, a therapist who had been a sex surrogate. She had sex with her clients, and even married one of them. Top notch care eh? So what was the outcome? Puberty blockers of course. This would help Jazz and his "traumatic gender dysphoria" as his mother calls it.

Once puberty blockers became available Mermaids became Britain's foremost campaigners for their use. But if only a third of kids with dysphoria will become trans adults, two thirds of the kids who get medicalised are not receiving any so-called "benefit" from blockers. Even those who may become "trans" are being harmed. The cognitive impact of blockers appears to be major and irreversible. Young animals on blockers become more anxious and withdrawn. The Tavistock found they made gender dysphoria worse in many kids.

Marci Bowers, Jazz's surgeon and star of "What Is A Woman", has admitted that no child who goes on blockers at the "recommended time" will ever be able to sexually function properly or orgasm. Did you catch that? Thousands of kids are being deprived of their birthright to become a sexual adult.

Why are so-called "trans kids" put through all this pain? I have a theory that the parents and doctors harbor a nefarious subconscious disgust for effeminate boys and butch girls.

Isn't it ironic that gay rights -which began as a movement championing sexual freedom- has been taken over by a cult that now sterilizes mainly gay teenagers, robbing them of sexual freedom?

Jazz has become what we have warned people about for over a decade. At just 21 years old, Jazz has become a tragic figure. Obese, depressed and often suffering from anxiety attacks, he has struggled to form anything remotely like an intimate relationship.

We were sold "Jazz Jennings" by The Church of Transgenderism and it's cult members. "Jazz" is a true success story and is propped up and highlighted as a rousing success of early gender reassignment for children. In truth, he’s been left sexless, sterilized and physically mutilated. Jazz is not an example to follow. His tragic life is an indictment of the trans movement.

[crossdreamers]

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health Attacks the Republican Anti-transgender Policies

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health has released a letter from WPATH President, Dr. Marci Bowers, addressing the attacks on gender affirming care throughout the United States. Read it. This is important!

Here’s the letter:

//Dear Colleagues,

In the United States, 2023 has been a difficult year thus far for trans rights, to say the least. Although anti-trans sentiment has simmered for years, the exponential rise in TGD [Transgender and gender diverse] identification among adolescents has triggered unprecedented attacks against all things trans. 

American anti-trans legislation

More than 400 anti-transgender bills, particularly in conservative states, see anti-trans messaging as a winning political posture for some. Eleven (11) states alone have already banned or restricted gender affirming care for gender diverse adolescents. 

Last week, Missouri became the first state to attempt gender enforcement on adult populations when attorney general, Andrew Bailey, issued an 'emergency declaration' that added draconian new hurdles for adult trans care to its adolescent ban. 

It is already probable that gender affirming care will be a wedge issue in the 2024 US election cycle.

Cherry-picking arguments

Globally, many of the arguments used here in the US to ban transgender care have been cherry-picked or use narrowly excerpted language for restrictions that have been implemented in gender services policies in Sweden and the UK---'lack of evidence', 'experimental' and 'focus on mental health'. They also ignore European countries where access to trans care has recently expanded (Spain, Portugal, and France). 

And unlike Swedish and British restrictions---which do not end treatment but rather, make research participation compulsory in order to answer remaining questions---conservative US policy makers have no interest in research on TGD medical therapy; they only care about shutting it down. 

Rather than safeguard young people by outlawing automatic weapons and high capacity munitions, conservatives feel that banning trans care and removing LGBTQ-themed books will better protect society.

Anguish and despair

Caught in the middle are TGD individuals, providers, and families, who are now in anguish here in US-affected states. WPATH membership continues to receive stories of growing despair, clinics closing, families moving or seeking healthcare out of state [see link]. Suicidality and desperation are again, needlessly in play.

Telemedicine and the emergence of sanctuary US states (California, Minnesota, and Colorado) that have chosen to defend access to trans care, provide some hope. But real progress on the road back will be difficult until the flow of anti-trans legislation slows and then stops. If there is one reductionist word that WPATH does not deserve, it is advocacy--all scientific organizations participate in some form of advocacy.

Scientific and biological arguments

Photo of Dr., Eli Coleman, American sexologist. He is the director of the Program in Human Sexuality at the University of Minnesota, and a professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health. (Photo from RO)

That said, the scientific and biological arguments can all be won and should continue to be argued. In a recent interview, Dr. Eli Coleman responded 

"WPATH followed a rigorous, multi-year process and was based on the best available scientific evidence and weighing all risks and benefits to arrive at the recommendations in our Standards of Care 8 guidelines. Our multi-step methodology is clearly set forth in the guidelines themselves. 

“When you compare the process we followed, the SOC8 has by far the more robust methodology than any other trans health related guidelines. We had 119 experts from around the world involved, developed PICO questions which formed the basis of systematic reviews, used a consensus-based approach (Delphi) involving all committee members to arrive at our conclusions and then graded the strength of our recommendations. 

“We had an extensive period of public comment on a draft of the SOC8 and this input was checked against the available evidence resulting in the final version of the SOC8. The rationale for our recommendations is clearly explicated in the SOC8 referencing the extant research. WPATH stands behind our process and conclusions."

The recent New York Times opinion piece, "What Decades of Providing Trans Care Have Taught Me", was my take on the situation and can be read here.

Make the suffering visible

The first step on the road back, in my opinion, will be to allow the public to hear the anguish and the stories of those in pain as a direct result of anti-trans legislation, difficult as this will be to watch---and to pin this pain upon those legislators and policy makers who have inflicted the agony. 

In my interview with CBS Evening News to be aired any day, I called it 'legislative cruelty'. The moment we are in reminds me of San Francisco's Harvey Milk and his plea to gay persons to come out. We need to be heard-trans persons, allies, parents, families, politicians, clergy---those who have been hurt and those who know us.

Intersectionality

The second step on the road back will be to unite disparate causes in our fight against a common foe. An attack on trans care is an attack on women. It is an attack on black people, brown people, and Asian people. It is an attack on Jewish, Muslim, Hindi, Sikh, and trut Christian communities. It is an attack on diversity and all of the ideals that diversity holds. It is an attack on us all. 

A majority of Americans favor access to adolescent trans care (see link to NPR-Marist poll) but the support is regional and it is thin. We need to better explain what adolescent TGD care looks like, why it is effective and indicated and who these patients really are. 

Anti-trans legislation needs to be fought with every voice, every thought, every inclination by all who know it. We need to make anti-trans legislation a losing political issue.

A need for sex education

Already lost in this debate is the deplorable state of health and sex education throughout the Southern US. Furthering this ignorance, books are now banned, especially and specifically those with LGBTQI themes. It is of little surprise to many that persistent rates of new HIV infection, incest, and STDs remain highest where sex education is lowest, most in states where anti-trans legislation has been proposed.

What is a woman?

And finally, 'What is a Woman?', the title to a trite and condescending 2022 American movie produced by conservative Matt Walsh, whose edits left out any answer to the question, as though the answer was obvious. 

What was cut from the piece was reality; that nature lacks a definitive answer to the question. Because there is no biological measure----not chromosomes, not hormones, not anatomy nor any of the six other biological markers of sex---a woman is what society sees based upon the gender identity the individual projects. No measure in biology gets it right every time. For every rule, there is an exception. 

Sex and gender are complicated and diverse---but let us explain the phenomena, not allow the issues to be put back in the societal closet. 

Ultimately, what terrifies conservatives most is that gender diversity is a force of nature that can no longer be contained by religious conscription or enforcement of a gender binary.

Killarney, Ireland and EPATH [The European Professional Association for Transgender Health] will again surely exceed expectations as we meet April 26-28, 2023.

Until we all dance once more.

Marci L Bowers, MD//

Dated April 21, 2023

Subsection headlines added by Transgender World.

Source: Erin Reed and WPATH.

Marci Bowers, M.D. of Burlingame, California, is acknowledged as a pioneer in the field of Gender Affirmation Surgery and is the first woman worldwide to hold a personal transgender history while performing transgender surgery. (Source: MarciBowers.com Photo: Drew Bird.)

Top photo: Tero Vesalainen

[userchai]

Okay so what about "trans kids"? Should we be letting 13 year olds get mastectomies and 16 year olds get phalloplasties? And before you say that it isn't happening, marci bowers is on video saying the youngest she has done those surgeries on, are those ages. who the fuck lets their 16 year old daughter mutilate her body? I agree. Let kids be kids :)

Okay I can’t fully reply to this one. this isn’t about trans kids getting surgery that they need. This is about minor children interacting with adult content.

((Psssst in case you haven’t noticed I’m trans so idk what you thought you were doing sending this shit to me))

I’m not trying to be rude but cmon.

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

The medical transitioning of children has become one of the most controversial and polarising issues of our time. For some, it is a medical scandal. For others, life-saving treatment.

So, when hundreds of messages were leaked from an internal forum of doctors and mental health workers from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, it was bound to spark interest. WPATH describes itself as an “interdisciplinary professional and educational organisation devoted to transgender health”. Most significantly, it produces standards of care (SOC) which, it claims, articulate “professional consensus” about how best to help people with gender dysphoria.

Despite its grand title, WPATH is neither solely a professional body – a significant proportion of its membership are activists – nor does it represent the “world” view on how to care for this group of people. There is no global agreement on best practice. The leaked messages (and the odd recording) – dubbed the WPATH files – are disturbing. In one video, doctors acknowledge that patients are sometimes too young to fully understand the consequences of puberty blockers and hormones for their fertility. “It’s always a good theory that you talk about fertility preservation with a 14-year-old, but I know I’m talking to a blank wall,” one Canadian endocrinologist says.

WPATH’s president, Dr Marci Bowers, comments on the impact of early blocking of puberty on sexual function in adulthood. “To date,” she writes, “I’m unaware of an individual claiming ability to orgasm when they were blocked at Tanner 2.” Tanner stage 2 is the beginning of puberty. It can be as young as nine in girls.

Elsewhere, there are extraordinary discussions on how to manage “trans clients” with dissociative identity disorder (what used to be called multiple personality disorder) when “not all the alters have the same gender identity”. Surgeons talk about procedures that result in bodies that don’t exist in nature: those with both sets of genitals – the “phallus-preserving vaginoplasty”; double mastectomies that don’t have nipples; “nullification” surgery, where there are no genitals at all, just smooth skin. And doctors discuss the possibility that 16-year-old patients have liver cancer as the result of taking hormones. The problem is not necessarily the discussions themselves, but that the organisation is not so open when speaking publicly.

The views of WPATH matter to the UK. For years, the organisation and its SOC have been cited as a source of “best practice” for trans healthcare by numerous medical bodies, including the British Medical Association and the General Medical Council – and still is. The Royal College of Psychiatrists refers to WPATH in its own recommendations for care.

Most relevant is that WPATH is cited as “good practice” in the current service specifications underpinning youth and adult gender clinics in England and Scotland, albeit in both cases it is WPATH’s previous SOC that is mentioned. The most recent version does away with all age limits from the beginning of puberty for hormones and surgical interventions, other than female to male genital surgery, and contains a chapter on eunuchs.

Several staff at England’s NHS adult gender clinics are not just members of WPATH (one is the former president), but authors of that current SOC. So too was Susie Green, the former boss of the young people’s charity Mermaids; a lack of medical expertise does not exclude either membership of WPATH or the power to influence policy.

England’s only NHS children’s gender clinic – the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) at London’s Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust – will close its doors at the end of March, having been earmarked for closure since July 2022. But the 2016 service specification still underpinning Gids states that “the service will be delivered in line with” WPATH 7. While Gids was generally more cautious than other WPATH practitioners, clinicians I spoke to for my book, Time to Think, also relayed how young people claiming to have multiple personalities, or who identified with another race, could be referred for puberty blockers.

Gids staff have also presented at WPATH conferences for the past decade, including the most recent, held in 2022. This doesn’t imply agreement with WPATH’s principles, but association with the group becomes harder to justify as its views become more extreme.

It is difficult to see how the Department of Health’s assertion that NHS England “moved away from WPATH guidelines more than five years ago” holds.

What is true is that there is no mention of WPATH in updated guidance that will underpin the new youth gender services opening on 1 April. What’s more, NHS England has made it clear that WPATH’s views are irrelevant to its core recommendation that puberty blockers will no longer be available as part of routine clinical practice.

There is a battle raging over how best to care for children and young people struggling with their gender identity, with ever increasing numbers of European countries choosing to take a more cautious, less medical, approach after finding the evidence base underpinning those treatments to be wanting. NHS England insists that new services will operate in accordance with recommendations of the independent Cass review, and that it is well placed to develop policies “in line with clinical evidence and expertise”. But it won’t be easy. There is already discussion among professionals working in gender services planning a pushback against Cass’s as yet unpublished final recommendations.

It was difficult for Gids to stand up to external pressures, allowing the care it offered to suffer. At the same time, NHS England failed in its duty to provide proper oversight. Both they and those in charge of the new services must do better if they are to avoid the mistakes of the past. Without proper, evidence-based guidance on what good practice looks like, organisations like WPATH will continue to have influence.

[coochiequeens]

By Reduxx Team November 6, 2023

Editor’s Note: Reduxx has submitted a detailed report on the subject of this article to CyberTip, a leading digital child protective authority which connects reports with local law enforcement. In accordance with our ethical standards, CyberTip was contacted PRIOR to the writing of this article.

A trans-identified male who promotes nudism has been reported to child protective authorities following a disturbing video beginning to circulate on social media showing him exposing his genitals and breasts in the presence of a small child.

The video first began to circulate on November 5. Reduxx is withholding the direct link to the video as the child’s face is not censored.

In the video, an adult post-operative transgender male is seen lounging nude in what appears to be a family residence. The man spreads his legs repeatedly, exposing his surgically-constructed vagina, while a young boy is sitting a few feet in front of him. He then stands to retrieve a trans-pride flag which he holds in front of his body.

Reduxx has identified the male in the video as Marie Willa Bobo-Smith, a nudist activist who resides in Fort Bragg, California.

Bobo-Smith, formerly known as Maurice Smith, has been a pro-nudist activist for a number of years, maintaining a strong presence in the nudist community since 2012.

Bobo-Smith prior to his transition.

Bobo-Smith has maintained a blog titled Simple Naturist for 13 years, regularly posting lengthy diatribes about his belief that public nudity should be made legal and protected by the law.

“As Americans, we live in an insane world, where you can legally carry and conceal a gun, but risk imprisonment should anyone see your genitals,” Bobo-Smith wrote in December of 2012. “We live in a world where children entertain fantasies of killing innocents in video games, but the sight of a nipple is unacceptable and psychologically damaging.”

Bobo-Smith began transitioning in 2018, beginning a hormone regimen. The next year, he launched a GoFundMe campaign requesting donations to help him afford the “gender confirmation surgery” he wanted to undergo with Dr. Marci Bowers in the Bay Area.

Bowers, a trans-identified male, is the current President of the World Professional Association of Transgender Health, and has become controversial for his role in promoting the medical transitioning of children.

An old Vimeo account belonging to Bobo-Smith pre-transition featured videos of the man doing a number of tasks while nude, including cooking, washing his dogs, and cleaning.

But in some of the videos he is in public, such as in one where he is naked while driving, and another while he is pumping gas at a service station.

In 2021, Bobo-Smith participated in a nudist rally in Fort Bragg, giving a speech at the event in which he condemned the stigma surrounding nudity and relating it to an experience he had walking topless following the hormone-induced growth of his breasts.

“Imagine: that as a transgender woman I am the living embodiment of a sexual double standard. Men can walk around top free and post photos of themselves on the internet and when a woman does it, she then becomes a slut, a whore and illegal,” he declared.

Bobo-Smith has been married since 1993, with his wife remaining with him throughout his transition. According to his social media history, he has children and grandchildren.

Over the years, Bobo-Smith has admitted to exposing his children to his genitalia, slamming critics of the practice as close-minded puritans. He insists there are no sinister motives to the practice, and advocates for nudism as a “lifestyle.”

In one post recently shared to his Instagram, Bobo-Smith uploaded a photo of a child’s doll representing a little girl with a penis. Bobo-Smith describes keeping a stuffed animals in his bedroom, along with a child’s doll intended to resemble a little girl with a penis.

“I got to have a great conversation with my grandson [name redacted] this morning. He’s six years old. He finally saw this naked doll sitting amongst our stuffed animals in mine and Marge’s bedroom,” Bobo-Smith describes. “When he saw it, he shockingly exclaimed ‘meemaw!'”

Bobo-Smith then describes a short exchange in which the child says “boys have penises,” to which he responds: “some boys have a penis and some boys have a vulva.”

On TikTok, Bobo-Smith has claimed he also has fostered children, with other “nudists” curiously asking him how he managed to get approval to become a foster parent despite his open nudism.

In the comments from a TikTok video uploaded in May, Bobo-Smith advised another nudist aspiring to be a foster parent that his nudism had been “addressed and resolved” at one point during the fostering process.

While Bobo-Smith has now deleted his TikTok account, Reduxx was able to archive multiple videos Bobo-Smith published following the initial outburst of concern prompted by the footage of him exposing himself to a child.

“People on the bird app formerly known as Twitter seem really shocked by a recent post of mine and asked ‘you mean your family and your friends have all seen you naked?’ Well, yeah. Everyone I know has seen me naked,” Bobo-Smith says. “I see nudity as normal and I do my utmost to show other people that nudity is a normal thing.”

[raggedyanndy]

... Dr. Marci Bowers, a California surgeon whose patients include trans women, said she first heard from [Rebecca] Dobkowitz in July 2021. The producer emailed her with what seemed like a friendly request for a documentary about transgender people and the “challenges they face in today’s culture"...

The movie includes footage of an interview with Bowers and with two other people, who told NBC News that they felt they were deceived: Dr. Michelle Forcier, a Brown University professor, and Naia Ōkami, a trans woman who lives in Washington state. In the movie, Forcier talks about the process children go through in learning about gender, and Ōkami talks about a different subject entirely — her affinity for wolves — as [Matt] Walsh tries to make a link between animals and trans people. ...

The tactics that Walsh’s team allegedly employed were already somewhat known within the trans community when the movie was in production. In February 2022, Eli Erlick, a trans rights advocate, published a Twitter thread alleging that Walsh’s team had reached out to her for an interview using a fake name and a front organization called the Gender Unity Project. ...

“It was complete fraud in my opinion,” Ōkami said. “He wanted to use me to make us look ridiculous, to make us look sensational.” ...

Forcier, a professor of pediatrics at Brown University, said she got an email from Walsh’s staff that she thought was a sincere inquiry about the science of puberty blockers. ... A few minutes in, Walsh compared gender dysphoria to believing in Santa Claus and compared puberty blockers to “chemical castration.” Forcier ended the interview. ...

Bowers said that she’s undeterred. Her clinic near San Francisco offers surgery not only for transgender people, but also to victims of genital mutilation and other people needing gynecological services. 

“I’m here helping people in three areas of medicine that are not covered by current services, so I’m pretty certain that I’m doing God’s work. What is Matt Walsh doing but trying to return us to some 1950s simplified version of male and female?” she said.

[msclaritea]

"Jeanette made the false claim that nearly 50% of "trans kids" will take their own lives without these harmful interventions.

After sterilizing her effeminate son, Jeanette Jennings wants more parents to follow suit, even if it means spreading lies..."

[deargodsno]

The American Psychological Association and 61 other health care providers’ organizations signed a letter in 2021 denouncing the validity of rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) as a clinical diagnosis. And a steadily growing body of scientific evidence demonstrates that it does not reflect transgender adolescents’ experiences and that “social contagion” is not causing more young people to seek gender-affirming care. Still, the concept continues to be used to justify anti-trans legislation across the U.S.

“To even say it’s a hypothesis at this point, based on the paucity of research on this, I think is a real stretch,” says Eli Coleman, former president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Coleman helped create the organization’s most recent standards of care for trans people, which endorse and explain the evidence for forms of gender-affirming care.

Many transgender people experience gender dysphoria, meaning that the gender that was assigned to them at birth and their gender identity don’t align, causing distress. ROGD was proposed as a gender dysphoria subtype in a 2018 paper by physician and researcher Lisa Littman, then at Brown University.* Littman’s survey asked parents of transgender adolescents—recruited predominantly from anti-transgender websites and forums—to describe their child’s “sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria” and to state if it coincided with increased social media usage or the child’s friends coming out as transgender.

Littman later issued a correction that updated the methodology, including a brief description of the websites and forums, and noted that ROGD is not a formal diagnosis. But the concept had already been taken upin books and podcasts—and by politicians—to promulgate the idea that peer pressure and social media are making kids transgender or that being transgender is a form of mental illness. As legislation targeting trans people has reached an all-time high in the U.S., ROGD’s alleged social contagion has been invoked by lawmakers in states such as Missouri, Utah and Arkansas to justify banning or restricting gender-affirming care for young people.

“This is just a fear-based concept that is not supported by studies,” says Marci Bowers, president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. The term ROGD is being used to “scare people or to scare legislators into voting for some of these restrictive policies that take away options for young people. It’s cruel, cruel legislation.”

Like the 2018 study that coined the term rapid-onset gender dysphoria, the recently retracted paper, which was published this March in Archives of Sexual Behavior, surveyed parents of transgender children about their children’s experiences. The study was co-authored by Michael Bailey, a psychologist at Northwestern University, and Suzanna Diaz, a pseudonym used by a mother of a child with gender dysphoria. Diaz is not affiliated with an institution and had already collected the survey data before collaborating with Bailey on the paper. The study was retracted because Diaz and Bailey did not get consent from the survey’s respondents to have their responses published, although Bailey disputes this. (Bailey declined to answer questions about the retraction from Scientific American.)

The participants in both the 2018 and the retracted 2023 studies were recruited from online communities that were explicitly critical about many aspects of gender-affirming care for transgender kids. Littman’s research was inspired in part by parents’ posts on these skeptical websites.

In response to criticisms that recruiting parents from anti-transgender websites may have biased the results, Littman says, “I reject the premise that parents who believe transition will harm their children are more likely to discredit their kids’ experiences than parents who believe that transition will help their children.”

Most experts cite the survey of parents rather than transgender children themselves as another major flaw in the methodology of both studies.

Diane Ehrensaft, director of mental health at the University of California, San Francisco, Child and Adolescent Gender Center, concurs. “To talk about what children are thinking, feeling and doing, particularly as they get old enough to have their own minds and narratives, you need to interview them,” she says.

[doctorbeverlycrusher]

I’m liveblogging Who’s The Boss again because I’m on Wedding Bells and apparently this one is something else.

Thoughts under here

- I’ve found that the versions on CTV seem to cut things apparently and I hate it.

- Teens now are so lucky they don’t have to tie up a landline to talk to each other. I didn’t have to do that either but it’s fun to see it depicted because I’m sure that was an actual thing.

- Angela wears so much pink and I love it for her. This pink blouse in particular I love to bits.

- Samantha being offended that Marci’s dad told her he was engaged before Sam could 💀

- Oh my god they’re going to be the matron of honour and best man oh god oh fuck oh god

- TONY SQUEALING 😂 And Angela’s genuine laughter in the background 🥹

- NOT TONY AND ANGELA PICKING THE INVITATIONS BUT GOING WITH WHAT THEY THINK NOT WHAT THE BRIDE AND GROOM THINK AND MONA CALLING THEM OUT 👀 These two will be the fucking end of me.

- “Any woman I love would have to love you as much as I do” Did you mean Angela Bower?

- “And then I’ve got to find a woman who accepts me for what I am and what I do.” DID YOU MEAN ANGELA BOWER?

- “This time I would like a man that would be supportive of my career, that loves my son, and is sensitive and considerate.” Wow, so Tony right? You realize that you’re describing Tony don’t you?

- Oh god them walking down the aisle together they’re so cute I can’t handle this 💜

- THEY KEEP GLANCING AT EACH OTHER DURING THE CEREMONY JESUS

- That was the shortest ceremony I’ve ever seen in my life.

- OH MY GOD NOT THEM IMAGINING EACH OTHER I CAN’T

- “Perfect couple don’t you think?” Yes you two are

- “It’s almost like there’s love in the air” “Oh c’mon Angela, that was Pine Sol.”

Okay I need to break this down (read: extremely overanalyze) for a second. Obviously, Tony is cracking a joke here, but I can get some deeper meaning here. Tony’s her housekeeper right? So he would use cleaning products, like say, Pine Sol. And we all know Angela’s in love with him so maybe love does smell like Pine Sol to her.

- NOT THE FERGUSONS OFFERING TO LET THEM GET MARRIED TOO 💀

- “You probably know what I like as well as I do.” “Better.” OH MY GOD HE’S RIGHT BUT I’M DYING

- TONY ANSWERING THE GUY’S QUESTION AT THE HORS D’OUVRES TABLE WITH TABLE 6 WHICH IS WHERE HE AND ANGELA ARE SITTING.

(I’m sorry for the permanent caps I am just literally trying not to scream out loud so I need to scream through text)

- I’m already getting bad vibes from Fred and Ginger…

- “He’s very sensitive about his organs.”💀💀

- Mona is being a shit disturber and I don’t know how I feel about it.

- Tony and Angela dancing together gives me all the feels 💜

- And then them going to say the same thing at the same time. This is soulmatism if I’ve ever seen it. I’m still convinced at least one person on the Ted Lasso writing staff was inspired by these two because Ted and Rebecca have some similar stuff here

- THEY WAY THEY ARE LOOKING AT EACH OTHER 😍😍😍

- Sam i love you but please don’t interrupt them dancing

- “As you well know, good husbands are hard to find.” MONA I LOVE YOU

- NOPE FUCK FRED AND GINGER. THEY NEED TO FUCK RIGHT OFF.

- Angela, I know your heart is in the right place here but this is going to make things worse and I hate it here

- “I don’t give a Fig Newton what people say” I need to use this euphemism now. I love it.

- Angela’s gonna catch the bouquet. I guarantee it.

- Okay she tossed that right at them 💀

- TONY NO 😭😭😭😭 YOU’RE GOOD ENOUGH FOR HER YOU GOTTA BELIEVE THAT 😭😭😭

- HE’S GIVING HER A FOOT RUB HELLO?!?

[etherealcharacterz]

Headley Archer

Headley Archer

Headley Archer

♛   Né le 3 avril 1998

♛   Originals

♛   Britannique

♛   Fils de Jordan et Zoe Archer, née Ceasy

♛   Frère de Abby, Shel et Liddy

⇝   Aromantique ; pansexuel

⇝   Serpentard

⇝   Sang-Mêlé

⇝   Directeur des Serpentard ; professeur d'astronomie

⇝   Astral projection

⇝   Jamie Campbell Bower

☮   Père de Marcy Archer

☮   Meilleur ami, puis jumeau cosmique, puis frère d'Abby Archer

☮   Ami d'Aspen Aspid (ils ont eu un groupe de musique ensemble durant leur adolescence), Emma Shils, Corine Gamble

☮   Pote de Charley Chatterson

☮   Aime embêter Josh Card et Anna Becker

☮   Parrain d'Anthony Archer

☮   Filleul de Lorcan Ausländer