I have followed pediatrician and researcher Dr. Leonard Sax for years now, and always find him informative, well resourced and helpful, often recommending him to others. I'll do that again, as I reproduce below a major section from his email newsletter received a few days ago
The New York Times - surprise!
The New York Times has just published a major article profoundly critical of the transgender movement and of transgenderism. Pamela Paul, the journalist, builds the article around the story of young people who transitioned from female to male or from male to female as teenagers, only to realize a few years down the road that they had made a terrible mistake: “the process of transition didn’t make me feel better. It magnified what I found was wrong with myself.” But the hormones and the surgery did irreversible damage.
Ms. Paul casts a devastating light on how American doctors now push children and teens into transition, even when the children and teens themselves have reservations. She also interviews leaders in the transgender movement who are uneasy with what's happening now.
Ms. Paul debunks the notion that the failure to quickly transition a child to the other gender increases the risk of suicide. "Do you want a live son or a dead daughter?" - she correctly recognizes as emotional blackmail, with no support in the published research. (Her lengthy article includes more than 80 links to outside sources, including many scholarly peer-reviewed papers.)
Ms. Paul also interviews gay and lesbian individuals who illustrate how the transgender movement now promotes homophobia. One of the interviewees, Kasey Emerick, is a lesbian woman who was ashamed of her sexual orientation as a teenager. She met with a counselor who encouraged her to transition to the male role. At the counselor's recommendation, she began taking testosterone. Although her depression only worsened, she was encouraged to undergo bilateral mastectomy, which she did undergo at age 17. She has since detransitioned and resumed the female role, but her voice is permanently altered. People ask her when she is going to stop taking testosterone. She stopped more than one year ago.
Ms. Paul includes many links to European research showing that the United States is now an outlier. Many European countries now limit or prohibit male-to-female or female-to-male medications or surgery for children under 18. Only in the United States are such medications and surgery for children still endorsed and encouraged by all our leading professional groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association.
None of this would be unusual if it were published in The Wall Street Journal or First Things or The New Atlantis. What's remarkable is that this piece was published in The New York Times. The article has already received more than 2,100 comments and the Times has shut down further comments. Scrolling through the 100 most popular comments, I found that every comment was supportive of the article, with most expressing a sentiment of "at last! somebody sees that the emperor has no clothes."
Back in 2019, I wrote an essay criticizing the American Academy of Pediatrics for their new guidelines in which they asserted that a 5-year-old boy knows better than the boy's parents what is best for the boy. If a 5-year-old boy says that he is a girl, then the parents' duty is to transition the boy to the female role immediately, regardless. "Watchful waiting" is bigotry. If the parents hesitate, then the pediatrician should make a referral to Child Protective Services to remove the child from the parents' custody. I noted that the AAP guidelines are psychotic, utterly detached from reality, and contradict the available evidence, which I link to.
Links to posts mentioned
- Politicizing Pediatrics: How the AAP’s Transgender Guidelines Undermine Trust in Medical Authority by Leonard Sax, March 2019 - CLICK HERE
- As Kids, They Thought They Were Trans. They No Longer Do. - NY Times, Pamela Paul, Feb 2, 2024 CLICK HERE
- LeonardSax.com - CLICK HERE for Dr Sax's personal website and to sign up for his email newsletter.
My Own Posts on Gender Transition
- What's A Pastor To Do? Pastoral Care for Those Considering Gender Transition - CLICK HERE
- More Than A Question of Pronouns: Considering a Recent Lawsuit Against Rockford School District - CLICK HERE
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