Do we live by consensus? If everyone is in agreement then it must be right, right? The following phrase, spoken by the beaten and beleaguered Rodney King, “Can’t we just all get along?,” still echoes today. A victim of apparent police brutality in which the officers involved were acquitted, King said what many of us believe could be the answer to our prayers. But more than 30 years after that incident, we’re still fighting.
But there are a few areas of humanity in which we tend to think fighting is considered inappropriate. One of them would be medicine. Oh, sure, healthcare professionals have disagreements but they typically settle their differences through science, evidence, and the observed outcome. However, there are two relatively recent areas where that has not been the case – COVID-19 and transgender-affirmation, especially where children are concerned.
Hopefully most of us are aware of the COVID-19 outbreak and the following vaccination debate. Yes, people died during the pandemic, but what, exactly, they died from opened the door to questions and distrust. When doctors questioned the potential dangers of what was being done in the name of immunity, they were labeled as peddlers of misinformation, disinformation, and they were discredited. That is not how healthcare used to settle its differences.
To become a physician requires a rigorous education just to get to the point where one can question what is legitimate medicine or therapy. Doctors like Peter McCullough, Robert Malone, Simone Gold, and Jay Bhattacharya, are just a few brilliant minds of medicine who spoke out against the highly-questionable responses and recommendations of the profoundly political Dr. Anthony Fauci – and they paid the price for it.
And now we have a new healthcare phenomenon that is sweeping the pandemic-sensitive world – transgender affirmation. It was an almost predictable leap from the fading COVID conflagration into the transgender inferno. Not only did gender dysphoria mystify science and medicine, it staggered the imagination.
The gay and lesbian issue has been around probably as long as mankind. It has been a long hard road for all who wore those labels. But the gay and lesbian lifestyle was making social progress until boys and girls decided they wanted to be girls and boys, instead. It did not take politics, medicine, and education long to hitch their collective wagon to that one. But doctors like psychiatrist Riittakerttu Kaltiala began to rethink what she once accepted as sound medicine.
In her article “Gender-Affirming Care Is Dangerous …,” published in The Free Press, Kaltiala said gender dysphoria, especially in adult males, had been around for decades. Medical treatment for it began in the 1950s, including estrogen therapy and surgery. But it wasn’t until 2011, when a group of Dutch clinicians published a paper on how to deal with the issue in minors through the use of puberty blockers and opposite-sex hormone therapy that Kaltiala’s thinking began to change. “I had some serious questions about all this,” the doctor wrote. “We were being told to intervene in healthy, functioning bodies simply on the basis of a young person’s shifting feelings about gender.”
Kaltiala said identity achievement is one of the final stages of adolescent development, not the stage where it begins. After challenging the “Dutch protocol,” as it was called, Kaltiala’s psychiatric department was able to help half of the patients seeking transition to recover from the dysphoria. As time went along, that number increased.
However, in 2011, the youth patient influx “skyrocketed” in Western countries, including a 90-percent increase among girls. But whereas the boys generally came from stable homes and did well in school, the girls’ lives differed markedly; in fact, many were on the autism spectrum. What startled Kaltiala was finding that an LGBT organization was telling parents of the benefits of gender transition, and healthcare practitioners were going along with it.
“Medicine, unfortunately, is not immune to dangerous groupthink that results in patient harm,” Kaltiala wrote.
Kaltiala said the United States served as the pioneer for “gender-affirming care” and clinicians were told to stop acting as “gatekeepers.” In 2015, Kaltiala discovered what she called “social contagion-linked gender dysphoria.” She found that social networks were exchanging information on just how to talk to one’s doctor, and pediatric gender clinics simply went along with it. Those who did speak out were vilified and their careers threatened.
Kaltiala said what is happening to these dysphoric children reminded her of a period during the 1980-90s, when troubled women were led to believe false memories of nonexistent sex-abuse, often suggested by their therapists. These “memories” began to tear apart innocent families until an investigation by therapists, journalists, and lawyers exposed what was actually happening. In a speech at Hillsdale College given by Christopher F. Rufo, the investigative journalist quoted a doctor at a major children’s hospital concerning what puberty blockers do to a child’s mind, body, and soul:
“This medication is called a ‘gonadotropin releasing hormone agonist’ and it comes in the form of monthly injections or an implant. And because it simulates the activity of this hormone, it shuts down the activity of the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus …controls all the other hormonal structures in your body – your sexual development, your emotions, your fight-or-flight response, everything. …” In response to what the doctor described as the divine spark in an individual, he said “To shut down that system is to shut down what makes us human.”