It was a good week for biology, the medical profession and children with gender dysphoria last week. The narrative that children can change their sex with the aid of social transitioning, puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, chest binders and tucking is exploding before our eyes. Around the world, medical professionals are finally waking up to a radical activist experiment on our most vulnerable children, Unfortunately New Zealand is still to come to the party – courtesy of an atrocious mainstream media who refuse to debate this issue as they protect the radical ideology and its adherents. But we’ll tell you. The house of cards has started to fall.
The child transgender narrative is crumbling
It was a good week for biology, the medical profession and children with gender dysphoria last week. The narrative that children can change their sex with the aid of social transitioning, puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, chest binders and tucking is exploding before our eyes. Around the world, medical professionals are finally waking up to a radical activist experiment on our most vulnerable children, Unfortunately New Zealand is still to come to the party – courtesy of an atrocious mainstream media who refuse to discuss this issue as they protect the radical ideology and its adherents. But we’ll tell you. The house of cards has started to fall.
The first major event was the release of leaked internal files from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) which prove that the practice of transgender medicine is neither scientific nor medical. Thousands of doctors worldwide rely on WPATH including our own Ministry of Health Te Whatu Ora – and its pushed by the radical association of NZ doctors called PATHA (Professional Association for Transgender Health Aotearoa). But there’s nothing professional about it.
The leaked internal files provide clear evidence that doctors and therapists are aware that they are offering minors life-changing treatments they cannot fully understand. WPATH members know that puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries will cause infertility and other complications, including cancer and pelvic floor dysfunction. A growing number of medical and psychiatric professionals say the promotion of pseudoscientific surgical and hormonal experiments is a global medical scandal.
And it’s not only the children that are unaware of the true consequences – mainly because they’re too young and not mature enough to process it all. The WPATH members admit that parents really don’t understand what’s going on or going to happen either.
Despite these admissions that clients are unable to give “informed consent,” WPATH members repeatedly engaged in victim blaming, asserting that people who regret the irreversible procedures should have known what they signed up for.
And regarding detransitioners, this is very telling. In reply to a post about a detransition study: the President of WPATH Marci Bowers says “acknowledgment that de-transition exists even to a minor extent is considered off limits for many in our community,”
But WPATH guidelines are the authority here in New Zealand.
Guidelines for Gender Affirming Healthcare in Aotearoa New Zealand comes out of a group called PATHA which is the NZ equivalent or affiliate to WPATH
And in their Guidelines document they specifically say
WPATH is the international body responsible for producing standards of care… This guideline is not intended to replace the WPATH SOC but to present additional guidance for the provision of gender affirming healthcare in Aotearoa, New Zealand.
Puberty blockers, cross sex hormones. WPATH is basically the go-to for guidelines around treatment of gender confused children in NZ.
And here’s the Ministry of Health website as it stands with an update from January 2024
For referral acceptance to be considered patients need to: meet the eligibility criteria set out in the Standards of Care for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender and Gender Nonconforming People, published by The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) version seven.
Who is PATHA? It was formed in 2018 and is a group of transactivists – some of whom have found their way into the medical professional setting. A member of the Executive committee is a transgender woman – a NZ activist on the global board of directors for WPATH, and one of the authors of the latest revision of the WPATH Standards of Care.
The second bit of good news last week was that the NHS England confirmed “Children will no longer be prescribed puberty blockers at gender identity clinics”. The decision comes after an independent review of services for children under 18 and a sharp rise in referrals to the Gender Identity Development Service run by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. You’ll probably have heard of Tavistock and the debacle happening there.
The NHS cited “a lack of sufficient evidence relating to the safety and clinical effectiveness of [puberty blockers] for children and young people with gender incongruence/dysphoria, including about the benefits, risks and long-term outcomes.” Psychosocial interventions will become the front-line response to gender distress. The government said it welcomed the “landmark decision”, adding it will help ensure care is based on evidence and is the “best interests of the child”.
Puberty blockers were promoted as a safe, no-regrets option merely “pausing” puberty. The marketing of blockers internationally since 2010-15 has been followed by an unprecedented surge in young patients, mostly teenage females, rejecting their birth sex and seeking hormonal interventions and surgery.
These are chemical castration drugs used on sex offenders and those with prostate cancer.
Of course, the big question is whether the NHS will also ban cross-sex hormones – or wrong sex hormones as I can them – which most young people on puberty blockers then progress to.
And here’s the trend of puberty blockers being prescribed in NZ. Shocking, isn’t it.
Now you won’t have read about the developments around WPATH or around the NHS’s decision in NZ’s mainstream media. They have all covered it up – and maintained radio silence on these key issues affecting our children. Why is that? They’re protecting a radical leftist ideology.
And then at the beginning of this month it was the Dutch. The Netherlands pioneered gender-affirming treatment for children.
According to a report in the UK Telegraph
the Dutch government has been told to conduct research into the physical and mental health outcomes of children given puberty blockers, which tends to be the first step on the pathway to changing gender. Cross-sex hormone treatment and surgery often follow. The reason this is such a big deal is that the Netherlands pioneered the use of puberty blockers, using guidelines known as the Dutch Protocol, which has been copied in the UK and around the world since it was first published by a clinic in Amsterdam in 1998. The fact that the Dutch are now having doubts about a practice they effectively exported to the rest of the world has obvious implications
The three stages of the protocol—designed for patients then described as “juvenile transsexuals”—are puberty blockers to stop natural development, cross-sex hormone drugs to masculinise or feminise the body, followed by surgery from age 18.
And then Sweden, regarded as an exemplar in the field of LGBT rights, who started restricting hormone therapy for children in 2022, and now only sanctions it in rare cases.
Norway. According to a February 29 news report in the Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang (VG), the medical directors of Norway’s four regions have determined that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for gender-distressed minors are experimental treatments and should be restricted to clinical trials.
The Directorate of Health will be asked to revisit its 2020 “gender-affirming” treatment guidelines and “clearly state” the experimental nature of these hormonal and surgical treatments,
So the decisions in the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway – you possibly weren’t aware of. Our media certainly didn’t tell you about them.
Then at the end of January, the mainstream media in NZ also didn’t tell you about landmark research from Finland which found that suicide risk in a large group of adolescents was predicted by the psychiatric problems that often accompany gender distress, not by the gender distress itself.
And I’m quoting from coverage by Bernard Lane who writes on Substack under Gender Clinic News.
Dramatic claims of the risk of attempted suicide among trans-identifying youth are typically based on low-quality anonymous online self-report surveys with no follow-up checks, potential exaggeration driven by a constant “transition or suicide” narrative, and “convenience samples” unlikely to be representative.
The new Finnish study vindicates that country’s 2020 adoption of a more cautious treatment policy which first targets psychiatric, social and educational problems among gender-distressed youth before any assumption of a stable trans identity justifying “experimental” affirmation with hormones or surgery.
“It is of utmost importance to identify and appropriately treat mental disorders in adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria to prevent suicide; in addition, health policies need to ensure that accurate information is provided to professionals along these lines,” the researchers say in their BMJ Mental Health paper.
The research team includes the psychiatrist Riittakerttu Kaltiala, from Tampere University Faculty of Medicine, who helped pioneer paediatric gender medicine in Finland, but became concerned when she and her colleagues did not see the good outcomes promised by the internationally imitated “Dutch protocol” of puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones and surgery.
Clinical psychologist Erica Anderson, a gender clinician and former president of the US Professional Association for Transgender Health, told GCN she believed that other scientific reviews yet to be published would also “raise questions about the assumption that gender-affirming medicines for youth are protective and prevent suicide.”
“If more evidence is accumulated of this type, one of the most frequent justifications for gender-affirming medicines for minors—that such medicines are lifesaving—can no longer be defended.” …
Parents hesitant about these poorly evidenced medical interventions have reportedly been asked by clinicians, “Do you want a live son or a dead daughter?”
The suicide narrative also figures in the practice of schools keeping a child’s social transition secret from parents, in the shutting down of debate about the efficacy and safety of hormonal and surgical interventions, and in the promotion of ill-defined bans on “conversion therapy” and “hate speech.”
… “Although the rate of suicide [in the Finnish study] is just over four times higher among trans young people than their peers, this is explained by their more serious psychiatric problems. When these psychiatric problems are taken into account, there is no evidence that transgender people have a higher rate of suicide.”
Dr Ken Zucker, who is a Toronto-based clinical psychologist, researcher, and editor of the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. (He chaired the DSM-5 diagnostic work group which replaced the term “gender identity disorder” with the term gender dysphoria in 2013.) told Bernard Lane at Gender Clinic News –
“There is a trope that has been around now for a number of years—‘Would you rather have a trans kid or a dead kid? It has been said that this [‘trans kid or dead kid’] trope is used to engender fear and anxiety in parents who are uncertain what the best therapeutic approach should be in helping an adolescent with gender dysphoria. Although we know that adolescents and adults with gender dysphoria report suicidal ideation and suicide attempts at a rate higher than non-clinical populations, the rates are, by and large, similar to what one sees in many mental health conditions.
So there we have it. WPATH, UK, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, study from Finland
But you probably know none of these – because the mainstream media don’t report this because it goes against their narrative. In fact, Stuff news for example has a policy that they won’t even discuss the issue.
A majority of the NZ Media Council found this piece at the end of 2022 was unbalanced. See down the bottom.
But in Stuff’s defence, if you can call it a defence, Stuff’ decision not to provide balance was endorsed by the Dominion Post editor who wrote in response to the complaint that “just as media used to approach climate change deniers for stories on climate change, accepted science offers a more useful approach for readers”
The science is settled on chemicalising and castrating young people to change their sex – apparently.
In fact, researcher Jan Rivers did a spreadsheet analysing Stuff’s coverage over three years (just under 50 stories about puberty blockers during that time) and showed only stories that were almost entirely uncritically positive about gender medicine for children. None contained any detail of the emerging uncertainties overseas.
But now you know.
The narrative around puberty blockers and cross-sex hormone and chest binders and social transitioning – the whole narrative is crumbling before us.
The tipping point has been reached, it seems.
It’s only the media holding it up in New Zealand.
Don’t let them. Share this McBlog. Tell people the truth. Be the media. We need a fact based media in NZ. That’s why we’re here.