This article in the “Reality’s Last Stand” Substack shows you how well oiled “affirmative therapy” is for gender transitions, at least at Kaiser Permanente, a medical organization. The take-home lesson is that there appear to be almost no points at which objective therapy operates to explore your feelings. Instead “rah rah” therapy is the rule, and the patient’s wishes override everything else. Further, it’s easy to get approved for dangerous surgery—”bottom surgery” for women is dire, ineffective except in creating a faux penis, and liable to serious complications—without full explanations of the consequences.
The story is this: Beth Bourne, a 53-year-old divorced mother from Davis California, had a daughter who came out as trans at about fourteen years old. Bourne was amazed at how few checks and balances there were with people uncritically accepting her daughter’s feelings. Bourne’s concerns about gender activism eventually led to her estrangement from her daughter, but that gave her license to go ahead with her own actions, actions designed to show how easy it was to go the full route from woman through hormones to surgery to become a trans man. Bourne didn’t take the hormones or have the surgery, but, as a test, she pretended to feel like a man to see how often people gave her empathic and objective care rather than “fully affirmative” care.
The answer was that virtually all the care was affirmative. No objective therapy was offered, hormones were proffered easily and gladly, and there were no problems getting top and bottom surgery scheduled quickly, without what Bourne saw as necessary warnings of the dangers of both hormones and cutting. Yet even during the process Bourne raised red flags about her mental condition that should have served as warnings for doctors and therapists.
Bourne kept her ruse going for 231 days before stopping the pretense.
Click to read:
Some quotes:
Throughout the whole 231-day process of my feigned gender transition, the Kaiser gender specialists were eager to serve me and give me what I wanted, which would all be covered by insurance as “medically necessary.” My emails were returned quickly, my appointments scheduled efficiently, and I never fell through the cracks. I was helped along every step of the way.
Despite gender activists and clinicians constantly claiming that obtaining hormones and surgeries is a long and complex process with plenty of safety checks in place, I was in full control at every checkpoint. I was able to self-diagnose, determine how strong a dose of testosterone I received and which surgeries I wanted to pursue, no matter how extreme and no matter how many glaring red flags I purposefully dropped. The medical workers I met repeatedly reminded me that they were not there to act as “gatekeepers.”
I was able to instantly change my medical records to reflect my new gender identity and pronouns. Despite never being diagnosed with gender dysphoria, I was able to obtain a prescription for testosterone and approval for a “gender-affirming” double mastectomy from my doctor. It took only three more months (90 days) to be approved for surgery to remove my uterus and have a fake penis constructed from the skin of my thigh or forearm. Therapy was never recommended.
But of course Bourne was a middle-aged woman, not a child or adolescent. Shouldn’t she be able to get what she wants? She addresses this objection:
Critics might dismiss my story as insignificant on the grounds that I am a 53-year-old woman with ample life experience who should be free to alter her body. However, this argument for adult bodily autonomy is a standard we apply to purely cosmetic procedures like breast implants, liposuction, and facelifts, not “medically necessary” and “lifesaving” treatments covered by health insurance. Or interventions that compromise health and introduce illness into an otherwise healthy body. And especially not for children.
My story, which I outline in much more detail below, should convince any half-rational person that gender medicine is not operating like any other field of medicine. Based on a radical concept of “gender identity,” this medical anomaly preys upon the body-image insecurities common among pubescent minors to bill health insurance companies for permanent cosmetic procedures that often leave their patients with permanently altered bodies, damaged endocrine systems, sexual dysfunction, and infertility.
She then goes into the story, beginning with her change in pronouns and “self-described” sex. She then went through the process of scheduling top surgery (breast removal), all without any therapy and with just a few questions about suicidal thoughts and the like. Only thereafter did she have two one-hour Zoom “mental health” appointments, during which she dropped several “red flags” that would contraindicate her going further with gender transition, including mentioning that she had PTSD, eating disorders, and a family history of body dysmorphia. Then they got to the “fun stuff”: the top surgery and hormones, which were more or less self-prescribed (Bourne’s bolding):
[The Zoom therapist] told me that we had to get through a few more questions related to my medical history before “we can move on to the fun stuff, which is testosterone and top surgery.”
The “fun stuff” consisted of a discussion about the physical and mood changes I could expect, and her asking me about the dose of testosterone I wanted to take and the kind of “top surgery” technique I’d prefer to achieve my “chest goals.” She told me that all or most of my consultations for surgeries and hormones would be virtual
A 15-minute Zoom call with a primary care doctor led to a visit for a body chemistry workup and then an instant prescription for testosterone in the amount Bourne wanted to take. Bourne then said she wanted to have a phalloplasty (“bottom surgery,” or construction of a faux penis) along with a hysterectomy during the same operation where they would remove her breasts. No problem: the referral for this was easily obtained after only a sixteen-minute Zoom consultation, and at that point Bourne stopped the ruse. She concludes this (bolding is mine):
In fewer than 300 days, based on a set of superficial and shifting thoughts about my gender and my “embodiment goals” triggered by the mere mention of “gender” in a form letter from my primary care physician, and driven by what could only be described as minor discomforts, Kaiser Permanente’s esteemed “multi-disciplinary team” of “gender specialists” was willing, with enthusiasm—while ignoring mental health concerns, history of sexual trauma, and rapidly escalating surgical requests—to prescribe life-altering medications and perform surgeries to remove my breasts, uterus, and vagina, close my vaginal opening, and attempt a complex surgery with high failure and complication rates to create a functionless representation of a penis that destroys the integrity of my arm or thigh in the process.
This describes the supposedly meticulous, lengthy, and safety-focused process that a Kaiser patient must undergo to embark on a journey to medically alter their body. No clinician questioned my motivations. No one showed concern that I might be addressing a mental health issue through radical and irreversible interventions that wouldn’t address my amorphous problems. There were no discussions about how these treatments would impact my long-term health, romantic relationships, family, or sex life. I charted the course. The clinicians followed my lead without question. The guiding issue was what I wanted to look like.
No other medical field operates with this level of carelessness and disregard for patient health and welfare. No other medical field addresses issues of self-perception with surgery and labels it “medically necessary.” No other medical field is this disconnected from the reality of the patients it serves.
Even though she’s an adult making a decision that should be reserved for adults, the lack of checks and balances for her transition, despite Bourne’s deliberately raising warning flags, is disturbing. You can judge whether there’s something to worry about here. I think there is.
Two other points. First, this seems somewhat unethical in that medical insurance must have been needed to pay for part of Bourne’s hormones and consultations (she covered the co-pay). Thus someone paid for most of her ruse. To me this is problematic, but in the end was worth it to get the full story of how easy it is to transition without the proper advice. To get an okay for bottom surgery after only 16 minutes of consultation, without an attendant and extensive series of warnings and lists of possible consequences, and without being given a period to think about it, seems like malpractice.
Finally, the main issue for transitioning involves not adults—who are generally happy with their outcomes—but children or adolescents who may not have the maturity to make such a dramatic, body-changing decision, or who may be going through a period of stress and depression that could resolve in other ways besides surgery. (These young people often eventually come out as gay.) There is no account similar to Bourne’s of a young person trying to see how easy it was to medically transition while faking the whole thing. What we do have are accounts by young people who have transitioned and then regretted it, or have recounted how easy it was to get affirmative therapy. That, in fact, is why the Tavistock Clinic in London was closed, why many European countries won’t allow giving hormones to young people except in clinical trials, and why several young people who transitioned are suing clinics and doctors. (It’s that in her account Bourne gives the names of many doctors who “helped” her.)
I think that in the future people will look back at this spate of gender transitioning and be shocked at how little controls were exercised during the process. Of course adults should be able to transition if they want, but, particularly with young people, the kind of therapy they should be given is in fact almost never given.
Ultimately it will take lawsuits to change this practice. For adults it’s their choice, for children I’m afraid it’s their parents being scared into allowing that choice.
Mike, I don’t agree with you saying that for adults it is their choice. Note that Bourne’s treatments would have been paid by health insurance. So the costs for the treatments, and for the treatments dealing with the negative side effects of the primary treatments, would have been borne by all the members in the insurance pool.
Besides, even adult can be mentally disturbed and mistakenly believe that they need a specific treatment.
Should doctors nonchalantly hand out powerful opioids, for example – just because the patient is an adult and asks for them?
The whole idea of patients diagnosing themselves is wrong.
Oh, here’s something else that most people are unaware:
Both patients and doctors, on average, overestimate the effectiveness of treatments and underestimate their negative side effects:
Tammy C Hoffmann and Chris Del Mar: Patients’ Expectations of the Benefits and Harms of Treatments, Screening, and Tests. JAMA Internal Medicine, March 2015, 175(2)
Tammy C Hoffmann and Chris Del Mar: Clinicians’ Expectations of the Benefits and Harms of Treatments, Screening, and Tests. JAMA Internal Medicine, March 2017, 177(3)
Austin Frakt & Aaron Carroll: If Patients Only Knew How Often Treatments Could Harm Them. New York Times, March 3, 2015
Someone considering transitioning definitely needs access to reliable, fact-based information, both pro and con. Physicians and counselors helping someone go through the process need to be just as thorough in their background assessments as the aforementioned information that’s provided to the patient.
There is risk in every type of surgery, even one as small as suturing a skin-deep cut. Informed consent has its emphasis on the word “informed.”
Parents are scared that if they don’t allow it, the child will resort to suicide: “What do you prefer, a dead son or a live daughter?”
Just today a friend told me of her friend’s son, who had transitioned to female. Comitted suicide yesterday, age 24.
Maybe the kid needed counselling, not transitioning.
Crusty as I seem sometimes, that breaks my heart. I am just gutted for your friend of friend and for her son.
Transitioning doesn’t necessarily mean the bullying and bigotry will end. In some cases, it may get even worse. But transitioning isn’t about ending bigotry, it’s about having ones body be consistent with one’s internal identity.
First, you have no idea why this young man committed suicide, much less that bigotry had anything to do with it. Second, gender-affirming care is sold as a life-saving preventive against suicide. You should at least acknowledge that it didn’t work in this case. You are moving the goalposts here.
Leslie MacMillan, I didn’t say anything about this young man. I was commenting on the phenomenon of suicide among victims of bullying and bigotry (bigotry is essentially a form of bullying). Someone considering transitioning will inevitably have additional layers of difficulty in finding social and profesional acceptance (this article notwithstanding).
Bigotry occurs when people are disturbed by their own lack of empathy.
Second, “gender-affirming care is sold [, in some cases,] as a life-saving preventive against suicide.”
Neither you nor I know why the young man committed suicide. There isn’t enough information provided to acknowledge it (transitioning) didn’t work in this case.
The insurers had to pay, but I imagine they’d be grateful to her for exposing a scandal that, in the long run, may reduce the number of baseless procedures they end up having to pay for.
We can’t know for sure, but I suspect that if she had received competent medical care, she would have been quickly told she was not now a candidate for sex transition procedures, and most of the expense could have ben avoided. So I place the onus of wasted effort on the doctors, not her. Don’t blame her any more than you would the authors of the hoax journal articles – they wasted peoples’ efforts too.
Kaiser follows WPATH standards of care in developing their criteria for offering “gender-affirming care.” This is just one example:
https://healthy.kaiserpermanente.org/content/dam/kporg/final/documents/health-plan-documents/coverage-information/clinical-review-gender-affirming-procedures-nw.pdf
What Beth describes is entirely consistent with those criteria. All of the criteria in the example above include a carve-out for judgement calls by a physician. For example,
“a. 12 months of hormone therapy [before top or bottom surgery] to allow maturation of some tissues, unless contraindicated.”
Beth didn’t have 12 months of testosterone but if her physician decided this was contraindicated (e.g., “life-saving”) then she could have accelerated her surgery. She “started” testosterone in February, and had her last surgical consult in May. Her article and the correspondence from Kaiser doesn’t say when they wanted to schedule her surgery.
All of this is exactly what Kaiser and other insurers and hospitals think of as competent medical care.
I’ve heard from people who work in this field and have read the latest standards of care (SOC) from WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, that the standards are written in such a way that it would be difficult to use them against a doctor in a medical malpractice suit. In other words, almost anything goes, treatment-wise.
Normally, the idea of there being treatment standards means that there are certain dos and don’ts. But the list of don’ts in WPATH’s most recent SOC may be very short.
What most people don’t know is:
A number of countries (e.g., Sweden, Finland, Norway, England) do not follow WPATH’s SOC.
Moreover, many healthcare practitioners in US transgender youth medicine do not follow WPATH guidelines either. WPATH’s most recent version of its standards of care says that gender-dysphoric adolescents should undergo rigorous mental health evaluations before starting hormonal drugs. But Pamela Paul, in her recent New York Times piece (Feb 2, 2024, Jerry posted about it on WEIT), cites Laura Edwards-Leeper, “the founding psychologist of the first pediatric gender clinic in the United States,” as follows (bolding added):
The truth is that WPATH is
1. an organization with an impressive sounding name that
2. is influential in the transgender healthcare field, and
3. whose treatment guidelines are controversial.
4. Nobody made WPATH responsible for creating such treatment guidelines.
Regarding point 3), two pieces of evidence:
Quote 1 (bolding added):
“WPATH has not proven itself to be an open, reliable producer of guidance. They have not got rigorous processes,” said Dr. Susan Bewley, a professor emeritus in obstetrics and women’s health at King’s College London who has chaired numerous evidence-based medical guidelines for the UK’s National Institute for Health and Social Care Excellence.
A systematic review and quality assessment of an array of existing global clinical practice guidelines for trans people, published in 2021 and co authored by Dr. Bewley, found that outside of HIV-related topics, such guidelines are “linked to a weak evidence base.”
Quote 2:
WPATH is a largely US-based organisation, comprising medical hospitals, universities and trans advocacy organisations. The mix of clinicians, researchers and trans advocates means that it is “a hybrid professional and activist organization, where activists have become voting members and have served as president. In fact, it can be argued that WPATH is activist-led rather than evidence-led.”
I hope you won’t mind if I shamelessly appropriate the phrase “rah rah therapy.”
Physicians are trained to empathize with their patients and commit themselves to doing the best they can for them. They’re generally good people hoping to do good. So what the hell has happened with “Gender Medicine” and its abandonment of normal safeguarding measures?
I think the root of the problem lies in the way the ideology “switches” patients. Beth goes to see a gender specialist. She is the patient. She informs them that she’s very, very sure she’s a man — and wants to be called “Bob.”
The framework changes. Beth — with her complex history, bizarre motivations, red flags, and other reasons to slow down and look more closely — is no longer the patient. Bob is the patient. From now on, all the medical and therapeutic experts want to do the best they can for Bob. And Bob’s existence AS Bob pretty much depends on their readiness to affirm.
It’s like medical practice meets Horton Hears a Who. The true self deep within each person who identifies as transgender is crying out to be heard. These empathetic experts can listen and believe. “A person’s a person no matter how small.”
Within this sensitive environment , the Beth-part of Bob is basically a hindrance, an illusion which distorts the fact that Bob, though seeming invisible, is really there. You can’t fail Beth because she’s not the real patient. Everyone wants to bond with Bob.
good explanation – although the money certainly helps too
Great closing paragraph. And referencing Horton Hears a Who seems very apt.
I have Kaiser – calling fake on “the Kaiser … specialists were eager to serve me and give me what I wanted, … My emails were returned quickly, my appointments scheduled efficiently, and I never fell through the cracks. I was helped along every step of the way.”
I think her point was that this level of readiness and consideration was out of character.
That is correct, Sastra. This is Beth in Davis. I have never received this kind of treatment from Kaiser in my 25 plus years as a member (and both my kids are also members). Super fast email responses, phone calls to make sure I had seen the correspondence, appointments days after I requested them, and all the medical providers cheerful and eager to help me. This is NOT like my experience for non “gender affirming care” at Kaiser.
j a higginbotham, why don’t you enlighten us about your reasons for thinking that Bourne is a liar. Okay, so you have insurance with Kaiser too. Have you ever tried to access transgender care medical services through Kaiser? And, if yes, with what results?
It wouldn’t just be the specialists who are at fault here. There is our whole for-profit medical system that practically has quotas for doing unnecessary procedures in order to charge insurance companies. Gotta keep the lights on, and the administrators have a new pool system at home to pay for.
Now I will ask here about numbers. One reads from both sides words like “many”, “several”, or “often”. Many adolescents claiming gender dysphoria turn out to be gay. Many teens with gender dysphoria have depression and idealize suicide or commit suicide. Teens with gender dysphoria often also have eating disorders. What % is “many”, or “often”? Proponents of one side can say that these co-morbidities are the result of having gender dysphoria, and that leads to depression, eating disorders, and suicide. Others claim they are messed up in the first place, and claiming g.d. is an outlet to get care and attention. I’ve seen peer reviewed studies that amass data that defend one side, and others that amass data to defend the other side.
So I don’t know what to think.
Someone leaked some internal correspondence from WPATH (published with an extensive critique) and is fairly disturbing (especially the eunuch section):
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56a45d683b0be33df885def6/t/65e6d9bea9969715fba29e6f/1709627904275/U_WPATH+Report+and+Files.pdf
The suicide rate seems to remain stable at ~4% from what I recall and is very close to people without g.d. who have similar mental illnesses.
About 25% turn out to homosexual iirc.
I don’t recall seeing the depression or eating disorder rates but the argument for g.d. causing each is based on societal transphobia (I think fat phobia was also blamed for the eating disorder).
In this context it is important to know that…
“There are currently two distinct conceptual models for GD [Gender Dysphoria]—a developmental, biopsychosocial model and an innate gender identity model. These models differ in their views about the causes for (etiologies of) GD, whether underlying psychological conditions can lead to gender dysphoria, whether GD can desist, and the role of a thorough evaluation before considering medical and surgical transition.
In a developmental, biopsychosocial model (a model that considers biological, psychological, and social contributors), GD can emerge in the context of a variety of psychological, social, and cognitive situations (such as being bullied for having gender-non-conforming interests, in the aftermath of rape, or due to difficulty accepting oneself as lesbian, gay, or bisexual); can be temporary; and can be the result of underlying psychological conditions (…). Treatment approaches are specific to the type of GD and the context in which it arose. In other words, there are multiple causes for GD and multiple treatments. Medical and surgical transition are not appropriate treatments for all types of gender dysphoria (…). Because there can be multiple causes for GD, the approaches associated with a developmental model employ thorough evaluations to identify the causes of distress and a judicious use of medical and surgical transition so that each patient receives the correct treatment for their situation (…). The approaches consistent with a developmental perspective include the developmentally informed, biopsychosocial approach, and exploratory approaches (…).
In contrast, the innate gender identity model is based on gender identity theory and may be referred to as a gender-affirmative model. From an innate gender identity perspective, every person has an innate soul-like gender identity that represents their ‘true self ’, and this entity can either match or not match one’s biological sex (…). In this model, GD has one cause (a mismatch between a person’s gender identity and their physical body) and one treatment: changing the physical body to align with the innate gender identity (…). Proponents of this model support an approach where once a person expresses a gender identity that differs from their biological sex, the stated gender identity is reinforced without question or delay, and transition interventions are made available to them according to any of several protocols (…). The assumptions supporting this approach are that when transition interventions are provided to gender-dysphoric individuals, the benefts will usually exceed the risks and that delaying these interventions will usually cause harm. The clinical approaches that are related to an innate gender identity model include the gender-(identity-)affirming approach and the informed consent model of care which employ minimised or eliminated evaluations and a liberal use of medical and surgical transition (…).
From the perspective of the innate gender-identity model, the desistence evidence is rejected, and if a person has GD and psychological issues, it is believed that the psychological issues cannot be underlying conditions for the GD (…). However, the existence of people who desist after experiencing GD, people who have been harmed by transition, detransitioners who regret transitioning, and people who have had underlying psychological conditions for their GD contradict the assumptions and beliefs associated with the innate gender-identity model. While the developmental model prioritises making the correct diagnosis and providing the correct treatment to the gender-dysphoric patient, the innate gender-identity model prioritises quick access to transition. These differences in priorities contribute to the current contentious public debate surrounding the topics of GD, transition, and detransition.”
(Littman, Lisa. “Psychosocial Factors and Gender Dysphoria: Emerging Theories.” In Sex and Gender: A Contemporary Reader, edited by Alice Sullivan and Selina Todd, 156-174. Abingdon: Routledge, 2024. pp. 160-1)
I have lived in Davis for over 30 years. I’ve seen how what was described as “political correctness,” has morphed into the quasi religion known as “wokeness” today. The very idea of “truth” is now at odds with “love,” in a sense. The exploding “trans” phenomenon has made it fairly clear that a new religion is in the pangs of birth. It’s not a difficult task or process, to harvest new souls for the crusade. Abrahamic duality of good vs evil…Marx… post modern subjectivity…critical theory…applied to an ever expanding litany of oppressor vs oppressed. Weaponize words by distorting and even lying through the good/ bad binary. Words like “hate, love, truth, kindness, diversity, inclusiveness, supremacy, -ism, -ist, -phobia. Look up Future Shock.
Hi Karl – I also moved to Davis in 1996. I have been a registered Democrat this entire time until this last year. I don’t think I’ve moved right so much as the left moving far, far left. It’s tough living in a town where it’s still 85% democrat and so many people have been captured by this ideology.
and thanks for altering me to this article:-)
You question, fairly, the ethics of Ms. Bourne’s ruse. I’m assuming the doctors were on the level: they sincerely believed she was a legitimate patient and didn’t seek to defraud the insurance company. So what about her? Patients don’t have ethical obligations in healthcare but they do have legal obligations to entities they sign insurance contracts with, or whose employers do on their behalf. A policyholder who fakes an illness with the result that the insurance company’s money changes hands, even if none flows to her personally, has exposed the company to a loss it wouldn’t have sustained but for her fakery. Whether the insurance company appreciates her unsolicited amateur detective work at their expense is likely a topic of internal discussion at Kaiser as we speak.
I don’t think her expose will contribute anything to the medical necessity vs cosmetic debate, even though that seems to have been her motive. Insurance pays for these services because it believes they are medically necessary without psychological gate-keeping (or is told by regulators and activists that it must.) If a person fakes the symptoms of appendicitis and has a good-faith surgical operation — this is Münchausen syndrome — that does not argue against appendectomy being medically necessary. The transgression there is not that the surgeon billed insurance for a medically unnecessary procedure but that the pseudo-patient lied to the surgeon.
I suppose the question is, In the absence of insurance where she had to pay out of pocket, would she have perpetrated this ruse at her own expense just to show how cavalier the gender doctors are? If not, then I think she has some ‘splainin’ to do to Kaiser. If she had an individual policy with me, I would definitely cancel her.
“..has exposed the company to a loss it wouldn’t have sustained but for her fakery..” Maybe because the fakery started when modern medicine told people that men can become women etc.
I’m happy to pay any amount to Kaiser if they want to charge me full price for my visits – I haven’t heard a peep from them yet. I’m guessing they realize any correspondence they send to me I will be sure to blast. I’m also happy to take them to court for medical fraud.
Her expose will almost certainly have benefit far greater than the cost of the ruse. It would be justified if only one person is dissuaded from pursuing radical and unnecessary treatment. Kaiser is an enormous and influential integrated insurance and healthcare delivery system. Also, they fund medical research and the development of best practices. They have no excuse to hide behind “we were only following standard gender medicine” when there is ample evidence that the “standard” is being crafted by ideology. The fact that it is based in the SF Bay Area is probably relevant too.
Incidentally, I am a long-time satisfied Kaiser member. I also worked for Kaiser for a couple years. I have no beef with the organization per se.
But isn’t that what people complain about when insurance companies deny payment when they substitute their own interpretation of medical necessity that denies payment for what the patient and doctor wanted to do? I don’t see how you can have it both ways: never second-guess my doctor’s opinion about the medical necessity (and therefore eligibility for payment) for something I want but always play hardball when someone else wants a treatment that I don’t think is medically necessary, even when of course I don’t have all the facts about that other patient’s circumstances.
I realize Kaiser owns both sides of the transaction here, as payer and as provider, which makes it complicated. (Of course it’s the insured workers in Kaiser’s plans who pay.) Whether gender care is medically necessary or cosmetic is a hot topic that is not really in the power of an insurance company to decide. There could be a large civil rights suit alleging gender discrimination brought by the federal government if they just up and decided unilaterally not to reimburse it. I just think that Ms. Bourne would have been better to have made up a further story, that she was uninsured and was happy to pay the whole shot out of pocket.
Anyway, I’m just speaking to Jerry’s concerns about ethics so I’ll leave this here.
I appreciate your comments and yes the situation is complicated. The reality is, however, that payers ultimately decide what they are willing to cover, for they simply cannot afford to pay for every procedure that patients demand, and patients (health plan members) are unwilling to pay premiums that would cover everything they desire. Kaiser is influential enough that they could establish a reasonable and defensible standard of care if they wanted. I suspect that they are unwilling to confront the gender activists, many who reside in the Bay Area where Kaiser is headquartered.
+1
“… the pseudo-patient lied to the surgeon.”
But what was the lie?
“To me this is problematic, but in the end was worth it to get the full story of how easy”
No. Respectfully, I don’t see it that way. Would you say the same thing about somebody doing the exact same experiment with gung-ho lobotomists in the 1950s?
I see it as very similar. Except under 18s are less wordly, experienced and sure of themselves than the “depressed” patients the lobotomy knives came out for?
Another framing is FGM: a social contagion for magical reasons resulting in great damage.
D.A.
NYC
I see no ethical problems with the ruse whatsoever. If Kaiser (a combined insurance and medical services plan) cares so little about providing and funding detrimental treatment, then they do not deserve to be treated honorably. Especially when, as in this case, the deceit may reduce future suffering.
what a nice comment, thanks, Patrick. I would actually be willing to pay huge fines or serve time in jail if I knew no more kids or vulnerable adults would become harmed by Kaiser and this insane new gender industry. It’s not only the confused teens and young adults that are suffering immensely from this ideology, but the parents, siblings, grandparents, spouses – it’s truly horrific.
You are very welcome Beth. Hang in there!
I agree with both of you, and maybe I disagree a little bit with Leslie @9. Leslie notes it’s the insured workers who ultimately pay for this useless cosmetic medicalization of personality disorders. It’s a big cost even if one didn’t care about the needless suffering of the patients & their families. In 2018 it cost ~$37 per minute to run an operating room in California.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5875376/
Jerry, thanks for talking about my story here!
Yesterday I did a podcast with Susannah Luthi, she writes for the WA Free Beacon, and lives in CA. She asked some great questions about my experience with Kaiser and why I became in activist. She briefly talks about the story at the start of the show, and the interview is at the 24:30 mark.
https://kprl.com/free-talk-california-03-04-2024/
also, i like to share videos and pics of the Davis trans activists and DJUSD school gender stuff on my Facebook, set to public Beth Young Bourne. thanks!
Who the hell cares?
You, obviously, since you’re here complaining about the OP and comments.
Story starts out stating that the woman is still estranged from her daughter. Years & years later she is still looking for someone to blame. I’m guessing she was not even accepting to listen to her daughter at the time. A strong relationship would have allowed them to speak openly about pros & cons, delays or time periods. Her closed angry minds destroyed her relationship with her kid. Sad! I bet this article will help mend those feelings after all these years though. She would try calling and listening to her daughter….who is an adult now.
We have no idea what kind of mother Bourne is/ was. Let’s assume you are correct, and she drove her child away.
What does this say about her experience? Did she keep documentation to support everything she wrote about? Can she demonstrate that her report is accurate? If so, her motivations are not at issue if they did not prejudice the truth of her report. What actually happened is what matters.
We can also guess that she was motivated by love for her child and grief at the estrangement, therefore she wanted to understand the medical process better. If her report was falsified, all the loving motivation would not redeem it. I believe her because it aligns with so many other reports of this process.
The daughter may have broken off contact with the mother because she (the mother) didn’t affirm her. I know a father who, while his daughter was questioning her sex during her late teen years, provided her with some scientific material to try to help inform her judgement in hopes she would desist, as any mentally healthy parent would do. She responded with the Canadian version of a restraining order against him — he was a non-custodial parent at the time — and to this day he talks to her only through his public podcasts, hoping, inviting, her to come home someday. It’s a cult.
I have several friends among us baby-boomers (who had so few children as it is) whose children, mostly daughters, just went astray and disappeared into their own world. Cults, hippies, drugs, eating disorders, one actually became a hobo, following the dope harvest by riding freight trains in the United States, which is just about the most dangerous thing anyone can do, much less a young woman alone. The difference this time around is that this is all medically enabled.
John Prine wrote a lovely haunting song about it back in 1975: “Come Back To Us Barbara Lewis Hare Krishna Beauregard.” (Listen to the original from the Common Sense album which has his old friend Bonnie Raitt singing backup vocals.)