Category: medicine and health

American Humanist vigorously endorses “affirmative care” with no lower age limit

September 4, 2025 • 10:30 am

The American Humanist Association (AHA) is among the most prominent humanist/atheist/skeptical organizations in America, but it’s been getting increasingly “progressive” (read “woke”). You may remember that in 2021 the AHA revoked its “Humanist of the Year” award given to Richard Dawkins 15 years earlier, saying this:

Regrettably, Richard Dawkins has over the past several years accumulated a history of making statements that use the guise of scientific discourse to demean marginalized groups, an approach antithetical to humanist values. His latest statement implies that the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while also simultaneously attacking Black identity as one that can be assumed when convenient. His subsequent attempts at clarification are inadequate and convey neither sensitivity nor sincerity.

This is an arrant mischaracterization of Dawkins’s views, which were most famously expressed in this tweet in 2021 (note the coincidence with the year of revocation):

It didn’t matter to the AHA that Dawkins tried to explain what he meant by that tweet: it was a question intended to provoke discussion:

It didn’t matter that the Rachel Dolezal “transracial” issue is certainly worth discussing, and the first tweet above surely did not mean that Richard thinks the “identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while also simultaneously attacking Black identity as one that can be assumed when convenient.”  That can be said only if you want to attack Dawkins to begin with or are flautning virtue at the expense of truth.

This shows two things relevant to this post: that the AHA has become overly woke, and, more relevant for today, the organization waving the banner of gender activism (here the issue of transgenderism) beyond reason, ignoring the facts.  Both of these conclusions can be seen in the article below by Kavita Narayan, identified by the AHA as “a humanist writer and researcher based in LA.”.

Even though the piece is long for many people’s attention spans, I suggest you read the whole thing to check whether my assertions are correct and to see where the AHA probably stands on this issue. I assume that the AHA agrees with Narayan’s views, as she repeatedly invokes what the AHA believes to justify her conclusions, and the organization allowed her to publish the long article.

Here are some of the AHA’s assertions I’ve gleaned from the article. Bold headings are mine, Narayan’s quotes are indented, and my comments are flush left:

1.) Denying “affirmative care” to anyone (including adolescents) who wants it, with that care including hormones and surgery, is unethical. 

Transmasculine and nonbinary individuals report invasive gatekeeping, as well: Jordan, 22 and nonbinary, remembers undergoing humiliating questioning before a hysterectomy consultation, a stark reflection of a system built only for cis bodies.

A humanist framework grounded in reason, equality, and bodily autonomy holds that denying care based on gender identity is not only a practical failure, but an ethical breach. “To deny someone care… is not just unethical, it’s inhuman,” says ethicist Casey Ruhl.

. . . This is where humanism can make a unique impact. Unlike traditional religions that may treat gender diversity as a moral debate, humanism begins from a different premise: that every individual has inherent worth, and that self-determination is not a privilege, but a right. “Humanism allows us to honor people without pretending to know them better than they know themselves,” says Elan, a queer humanist chaplain.

Note that they give no age limit here: any child or adolescent who claims to be of the sex different from their natal sex has a right not just to be believed, but also given affirmative care.  I would add here that unless you’re “of age” (I’ll take it to be the age of 18, the legal age at which a person can make their own healthcare decisions), I would not be so quick to say that a person “knows themselves,” particularly when it comes to “knowing” that they’re really of their non-natal sex.  “Self-determination” for medical issues is not a right for anyone under 18, and may not be warranted if someone wants to transition when they have other psychological issues when over age 18. Often gender dysphoria is part of a complex of other, unrelated psychological problems, problems that are often confused with gender dysphoria itself (see below). It can also be exacerbated by social pressure–the “affirmation” from peers, which is often very strong.

Finally, remember that doctors are not obligated legally to do anything that a patient wants, even if it’s harmless.  If someone goes to a doctor with a viral infection and demands antibiotics, doctors are perfectly within their rights to refuse, for antibiotics are not only useless against viruses, but their wanton use can increase antibiotic resistance in bacteria.  If you ask someone to cut off your arm because you think it’s superfluous (yes, there are such people), doctors can and will refuse, and will not suffer for it. And no doctor is obligated to give children or adolescents puberty blockers or hormones just because they ask for it. (A good doctor will refer such people to competent specialists.)  This doesn’t mean that if someone has an easily treatable ailment or injury, it is ETHICAL for a doctor to refuse treatment, but gender transitioning does not fall into this category. It takes a specialist in pediatric gender transitioning, objective rather than affirmative therapy, and above all what we don’t have: evidence that it’s safe to use puberty blockers. After puberty is over, of course, a gender-specialist doctor can help transitioning by giving hormones and other things, though surgery is something that requires careful thought, and perhaps many surgeons won’t agree to go snipping off breasts or genitals.

2.) There is no lower age limit to begin “affirmative treatment”, and treatment that includes puberty blockers is reversible. While the article argues that gender-affirming care is safe and efficacious “when providce with informed consent”, what does that mean? If parents assent that it’s okay to inject a child or adolescent with hormones or cut off bits of their body, does that mean that a child of any age has a right to do that, so long as they find a compliant doctor? Look at the title of this section:

The Myth of “Too Young” and the Data That Debunks It

Opponents of gender-affirming care often argue that children are too young to make life-altering decisions. But this talking point misunderstands both the process and the people it affects.

Gender-affirming care for minors doesn’t begin with surgery. It starts with listening. It involves long conversations with therapists, pediatricians, and families. Puberty blockers, often the first clinical step, are fully reversible and give young people time to explore their identity without the permanent effects of endogenous puberty.

Narayan’s “myth of too young” is invidious.  First, it’s not uncommon for children to be referred to doctors for affvirmative therapy or even hormones after just one or a few visits, lacking those “long conversations.”

Second, talk therapy that supports and verifies the conclusion of a young person that they are transgender should be, but is not invariably, objective. What if the therapist fails to affirm the child’s assertion, concluding that the child is too young or is caught in a morass of psychological confusion? Is that unethical?

And is “too young” really a myth?  Children as young as 11 (e.g., Jazz Jennings) have taken puberty blockers, and, at 17, Jennings had the difficult and complex “bottom surgery”. Other papers report girls as young as 13 getting double mastectomies.  In 2022, the organization WPATH, a villain in this narrative, recommended these things:

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health said hormones could be started at age 14, two years earlier than the group’s previous advice, and some surgeries done at age 15 or 17, a year or so earlier than previous guidance. The group acknowledged potential risks but said it is unethical and harmful to withhold early treatment.

Surgery at 15 and hormones at 14?

Note the “unethical” trope, as raised by Narayan above.  As for “harmful to withhold early treatment,” it’s important to realize that the majority of adolescents and children who are not given affirmative treatment eventually come out as gay, so that neither surgery or hormone treatment needs to be done.

As I’ll mention in a minute, those treatments might damage people’s health, despite Narayan’s assertion, and we don’t know their long-term effects, except that post-puberty hormone treatment, as well as bottom surgery, can leave people without the ability to have a sex life that includes orgasms. Simply affirming a child’s self-diagnosis and giving them whatever hormones they want is bad practice without careful vetting, and certainly there are ages that are “too young” for that. (I’ve suggested a lower limit of 18, but even 21 may be okay.)

At any rate, there are a variety of studies showing the proportion of children with gender dysphoria who do not receive affirmative care and wind up deciding they’re gay. This varies from 39% to 80% among boys. Data from girls are sparser, but several studies of small samples say that untreated gender-dysphoric girls usually become lesbian or cisgender women.  Given this, and the possible dangers of hormone treatment and demonstrated dangers of surgery, saying that no child is too young to be treated, and that they have a right to be treated the way they want, is, to me, both unethical and harmful.  To foster the idea that there is no such thing as “too young” is pushing children to make decisions that they’re not ready to make—decisions that will change their lives and bodies forever.

As for the harm of puberty blockers when they are stopped, there is insufficient evidence about the long-term effects of puberty blockers on several traits, and some evidence that there are irreversible effects on bone density and height. As the Cass Report states:

There were no high-quality studies identified that used an appropriate study design to assess the outcomes of puberty suppression in adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria or incongruence. There is insufficient and/or inconsistent evidence about the effects of puberty suppression on gender dysphoria, mental and psychosocial health, cognitive development, cardio-metabolic risk, and fertility. There is consistent moderate-quality evidence, albeit from mainly pre-post studies, that bone density and height may be compromised during treatment.

There is a lack of high-quality research assessing the outcomes of hormones for masculinisation or feminisation in adolescents with gender dysphoria or incongruence and few studies that undertake long-term follow-up. There is little evidence regarding gender dysphoria, body satisfaction, psychosocial and cognitive outcomes, and fertility. There is moderate-quality evidence from mainly pre-post studies that hormone treatment may in the short-term improve some aspects of psychological health. There is inconsistent evidence about the effect of hormones on height/growth, bone health and cardiometabolic effects.

There is certainly not enough evidence to say that the effects of puberty blockers on the body are safe and fully reversible, although some of the phenotypic effects may be. The lack of firm evidence that blockers are irreversible and safe is one reason the puberty blockers (not approved, by the way by the FDA for blocking puberty, and always prescribed “off label”) are considered “experimental treatment” in the UK under 18, and are severely restricted in quite a few other countries like Sweden. Almost nowhere are they permitted to be given willy-nilly to children or adolescents at their request, as Narayan seems to feel.

3). Withholding affirmative care increases depression and suicidality. Affirmation is, as the article says, “life-saving”. Note that the AHA is very canny here, repeatedly using the word “suicidality” rather than “suicide”, although the general claim among gender activists is that withholding affirmative care increases suicide itself. But the American Psychological Association defines “suicidality” as “the risk of suicide, usually indicated by suicidal ideation or intent, especially as evident in the presence of a well-elaborated suicidal plan.”

The AHA says this:

Affirmation isn’t just emotional. It directly correlates with better mental health outcomes. A 2022 study in JAMA Network Open found that transgender youth who received gender-affirming care had significantly lower rates of depression and suicidality than those who did not. These effects persist into adulthood, with gender-affirming hormones and surgeries linked to improved quality of life and reduced psychological distress.

The link given doesn’t go to an article I can find, but I do know of one good study that seems to me the gold standard of the relation between gender dysphoria and suicide itself. And it shows that, when you disentangle the effects of psychiatric problems not related to gender dysphoria from the data, there is no difference in the suicide rates of adolescents without gender dysphoria compared to those either presenting for treatment for gender dysphoria or going on to gender reassignment via surgery and hormones. That is, dysphoria and its affirmative treatment doesn’t increase suicidality or suicide itself. You can find this 2024 study below, published last year in the BMJ [British Medical Journal] Mental Health; click on screenshot to read. If you’re blocked, click here to see the full text or here to get the pdf:

The study is the best because it had a large sample, lasted over 23 years into adulthood, and, moreover, was conducted in Finland, where every individual is numbered and their doctor and psychiatric visits tallied. The sample was of 2,083 adolescents who sought gender-identity assessments and/ir desired gender reassignment (GR). For each of these target individuals, EIGHT control individuals were assigned, matched by age and sex.  The results were that, without multivariate analysis, there was a slight but nonsignificantly higher rate of suicide among the 2,083 “GR” (gender-referred) children, some of which went on to full transition. But that difference completely disappeared when the authors controlled for other psychiatric issues. As the paper says (my bolding):

Most importantly, when psychiatric treatment needs, sex, birth year and differences in follow-up times were accounted for, the suicide mortality of both those who proceeded and did not proceed to GR did not statistically significantly differ from that of controls. This does not support the claims that GR is necessary in order to prevent suicide. GR has also not been shown to reduce even suicidal ideation, and suicidal ideation is not equal to actual suicide risk. To the best of our knowledge, the impact of GR on suicide mortality among gender-referred adolescents has not been reported in earlier studies. In an earlier study by Dhejne et al, even when psychiatric morbidity was controlled for, participants diagnosed as transsexual in adulthood who had undergone both hormonal and surgical GR displayed increased suicide mortality compared with matched population controls. Nonetheless, these authors focused on patients treated before 2002. More recent cohorts, particularly adolescents, may differ from those in earlier decades, and stress related to gender identity itself may be lower presently because of decreasing prejudice.

In other words, gender-dysphoric youth who sought help but did not proceed to gender reassignment did not differ in suicidality from those who went on to gender reassignment. Further, when psychiatric difficulties were taken into account (number of visits to psychiatrists), neither of these differed in either suicidality or suicidal rates from controls. The finding that there was a difference in earlier studies may have been due to the conflating effects of psychiatric difficulties, since those seeking help for gender dysphoria, or proceeding to gender reassignment, apparently have more such difficulties (unconnected to dysphoria) than those who don’t, and psychiatric difficulties greatly increase the rate of suicide.

What all this means is that neither “suicidality” nor suicide itself differs in rate among control children lacking gender dysphoria, whether or not they go on to gender reassignment treatment.  The argument for affirmative care that says, “you can have either a dead daughter or a live son” is not borne out, at least by this study. Have a look at it; I was impressed by the quality of the work, which would not be possible in countries where every individual is tracked for both medical and psychiatric care.

The AHA, then, is, to my mind, grossly distorting what we know about suicidality, affirmative care, and the risks of gender dysphoria. It is not known to be safe to give adolescents puberty blockers; there should be a lower age limit; and you are not preventing suicides by giving “affirmative care.”  In this sense I consider the article misleading and irresponsible.

So many skeptical/humanist/atheist organizations lose their skepticism when it comes to gender issues!  The only one I trust, because it’s published articles on gender like this and this, is the Center for Inquiry, which appears to be the only one that is strongly based on evidence.

But read for yourself, and, if you have time, do a scan of the literature, including the Cass Review.

Tomorrow I’ll publish a letter to the AHA from a disaffected member who took strong issue with the article above, and will say a few words about their response, which I won’t publish as I didn’t ask permission. Thanks to that reader for calling this article to my attention.

Let me finish by saying I have nothing against adolescents or children who feel that they are trapped in the wrong body, nor should there be discrimination (except in sports or things like jails) affecting transgender adults.  I’m glad to call anybody whatever pronoun they want, and abhor those who really do dislike or denigrate trans individuals.  All I ask for is rationality when it comes to treating young people, and that that treatment should always, like all medical treatment, be based on evidence.

The political erosion of American med schools

July 29, 2025 • 10:15 am

Sally Satel (a psychiatrist) and Thomas Huddle (an academic clinician) have an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education that you can read by clicking on the title below. If you’ve followed how med schools are changing their curricula to emphasize social justice (including rewriting the Hippocratic Oath that they must recite), this may not come to a surprise to you.

If you don’t have a free Chronicle subscription (you get a certain number of articles per month, you can find the same article on Glenn Loury’s Substack for free.

Some quotes:

Over the past decade, we’ve grown ever more concerned about dubious strains of social-justice advocacy infiltrating medicine. Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, doctors’ pursuit of social reform coalesced, almost overnight, into a mission.

Within a week of Floyd’s death, for example, the Association of American Medical Colleges, which is a co-sponsor of a major accrediting body, announced that the nation’s 155 medical schools “must employ antiracist and unconscious bias training and engage in interracial dialogues.” A year later (and again in 2024), the American Medical Association released a Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity that encouraged physicians to dismantle “white patriarchy and other systems of oppression.” Over two dozen medical schools issued their own similar plans.

. . . . Today, doctors perform political advocacy in myriad ways. State medical boards have added a requirement for training in “antiracism” in order to be eligible for a medical license, according to the Federation of State Medical Boards. The University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) created a document titled “Anti-Racism and Race Literacy: A Primer and Toolkit for Medical Educators.”

Certain debates have become off-limits. Consider, for instance, a 2020 incident involving Norman C. Wang, a cardiologist with the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. After Wang published a peer-reviewed critique of affirmative action in a respected medical journal, his colleagues denounced him on social media for his “racist thinking” and condemned his paper as scientifically invalid and “racist.” The journal retracted his article and the school removed him as director of the electrophysiology program. (Wang sued for retaliation and discrimination, but was unsuccessful.)

Researchers are promoting unscientific modes of thinking about group-based disparities in health access and status. The University of Minnesota’s Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity decrees “structural racism as a fundamental cause of health inequities,” despite the fact that this is at best an arguable thesis, not a fact. (The center was shut down last month.) The Kaiser Family Foundation states that health differentials “stem from broader social and economic inequities.”

In what borders on compelled speech, the State University of New York’s Upstate Medical University issued a 164-page report from a diversity task force insisting that “Health care professionals must explicitly acknowledge that race and racism are at the root of [Black-white] health disparities.” Other variables influencing the course of chronic disease, prominently the patient’s health literacy and self-care, receive scant attention.

But those disparities are far more complicated than that. This brings to mind the claim, promulgated in 2020, that black babies delivered by white physicians had over twice the mortality rate than when delivered by black physicians (see this PNAS paper). It got a lot of publicity, and cries of “racism” were loud and pervasive. But later analysis showed that racism was not a factor, but a difference among races in birth weight. As The Economist reported:

Now a new study seems to have debunked the finding, to much less fanfare. A paper by George Borjas and Robert VerBruggen, published last month in PNAS, looked at the same data set from 1.8m births in Florida between 1992 and 2015 and concluded that it was not the doctor’s skin colour that best explained the mortality gap between races, but rather the baby’s birth weight. Although the authors of the original 2020 study had controlled for various factors, they had not included very low birth weight (ie, babies born weighing less than 1,500 grams, who account for about half of infant mortality). Once this was also taken into consideration, there was no measurable difference in outcomes.

The new study is striking for three reasons. First, and most important, it suggests that the primary focus to save young (black) lives should be on preventing premature deliveries and underweight babies. Second, it raises questions about why this issue of controlling for birth weight was not picked up during the peer-review process. And third, the failure of its findings to attract much notice, at least so far, suggests that scholars, medical institutions and members of the media are applying double standards to such studies. Both studies show correlation rather than causation, meaning the implications of the findings should be treated with caution. Yet, whereas the first study was quickly accepted as “fact”, the new evidence has been largely ignored.

The reason why white doctors at first looked like such a “lethal” combination with black babies, say the authors of the recent paper, was that a disproportionately high share of underweight black babies were treated by white doctors, while a disproportionately high share of healthy-weight black babies were treated by black doctors. Being born severely underweight is one of the greatest predictors of infant death. Just over 1% of babies in America are born weighing less than 1,500 grams, but among black babies the rate is nearly 3%.

You can find the Borjas and VerBruggen paper here.  Their finding, as The Economist wrote, got far less publicity than the original finding, clearly because the real reason didn’t play into the social-justice Zeitgeist.

But back to Satel and Huddle’s article. Note that the following caveat appears later in the essay, accepting the possibility that past racism is involved in health disparities but questioning whether current structural racism is causing present disparities:

. . . . .We do not deny that much of the health disadvantage suffered by minority groups is the cumulative product of legal, political, and social institutions that historically discriminated against them. But past discrimination is not necessarily a factor sustaining those problems now. We must address the discrete causes that operate today.

Back to their text, giving a few more examples of social-justice medicine:

In what borders on compelled speech, the State University of New York’s Upstate Medical University issued a 164-page report from a diversity task force insisting that “Health care professionals must explicitly acknowledge that race and racism are at the root of [Black-white] health disparities.” Other variables influencing the course of chronic disease, prominently the patient’s health literacy and self-care, receive scant attention.

Some medical professionals have even endorsed racial reparations in health care decision-making.At one point,the CDC vaccine advisory committee proposed prioritizing the anticipated Covid vaccine by race rather than age, solely because older cohorts disproportionately comprised whites. This plan would have delayed vaccination of the elderly—the highest risk group—and, according to the CDC’s own projections, resulted in more overall deaths. Other sponsors of health equity lobbied for a rationing scheme that prioritized the assignment of ventilators to Black patients, negating customary triage procedures.

These “reparations” are unethical because they would cause deaths than would occur otherwise. Nevertheless, people proposed them knowing this. 

But wait! There’s more!

Perhaps the most dramatic recent display of ideological intrusion into the medical sphere took place last June at the UCSF Medical Center, where keffiyeh-draped doctors gathered on the grounds to demand that their institution call for a ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas. Their chants of “intifada, intifada, long live intifada!” echoed into patients’ rooms.

These doctors were not putting patients first—if anything, they were offending and intimidating patients. They were putting their notion of social justice first.

You can see a video along these lines from UCSF here, though I’m not sure it’s the demonstration referred to in the article.

The authors then propose three guidelines that “should advocate for policies that 1) directly help patients and 2) are rooted in professional expertise, while 3) ensuring that their advocacy does not interfere with their relationships with their colleagues, students, and patients”:

1.) First, the reform they promote must have a high likelihood of directly improving patient health. “Dismantling white patriarchy and other systems of oppression” is not an actionable goal. Our primary job is to diagnose and treat, and to do no harm in the process. We have no expertise in redistributing power and wealth. Even seasoned policy analysts cannot readily tease out strong causal links between health and economic and social factors that lie upstream.

. . . . 2.) Second, physicians’ actions or their advice to policymakers should be rooted in expertise that is unique to their profession. Opining and advocating on behalf of general social issues exploits their moral authority, turns medicine into a vehicle for politics, and risks the trust of the public. Medical professionals will, of course, have their own views of the public good. They are free to take to the barricades as citizens—but not while wearing their white coats.

3.) Third, doctors must not lose sight of the impact of advocacy on patients and students. While advocating for one’s own patients is a basic obligation of being a doctor, advocating on behalf of societal change can work against those patients, drawing time and attention away from their care.

One action the authors suggest is that young physicians who are truly dedicated to helping the oppressed, poor, and those deprived of medical care, should work in rural areas that suffer from a shortage of doctors:

A new report in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that newly licensed clinicians from top-ranked medical institutions were half as likely to initially practice in socioeconomically deprived areas as graduates from other medical institutions. Specialists were also less likely to practice in deprived areas compared with primary-care clinicians.

Well, that sounds good, but do you really think that the entitled social-justice doctors are willing to leave the cities and work in rural areas with a shortage of medical care?

The Atlantic takes on “affirmative care”

July 2, 2025 • 11:02 am

One sign that there has been a sea change in America’s gung-ho enthusiasm for “affirmative care” of minors with gender dysphoria is the mainstream media’s recent critiques (or just objective analyses) of the problems with such care. These critiques have exposed the lies promulgated about such care, largely by the “progressive” Left. The new article in The Atlantic by staff writer Helen Lewis is one such journalistic corrective (read it by clicking on the screenshot below or by reading it archived here). And you should read it.

One of the factors prompting the article appears to have been the Supreme Court case The United States v. Skrmetti, which upheld a Tennessee law banning the use of hormones or puberty blockers for “gender affirming care” in cases of gender dysphoria in minors. Such care was allowed, however, if modification of sexual traits was necessary to allow an individual with a disorder of sex determination to “conform to their sex assigned at birth” (Wikipedia’s words, not mine).  The case was decided along ideological lines by a 6-3 vote, but in general I agreed with the decision, having felt that medical treatment for transition should be permitted only if a person with gender dysphoria was old enough to have mental maturity to decide. (I waffle between 16 and 18 on this one, but it’s 18 in Tennessee).

Author Lewis, in fact, was willing to allow medical transitioning to begin in younger children with dysphoria, but changed her mind after seeing WPATH, progressives, doctors, and government officials repeatedly lie about the condition and how to fix it. To quote her (all the article’s quotes are indented):

I have always argued against straightforward bans on medical transition for adolescents. In practice, the way these have been enacted in red states has been uncaring and punitive. Parents are threatened with child-abuse investigations for pursuing treatments that medical professionals have assured them are safe. Children with severe mental-health troubles suddenly lose therapeutic support. Clinics nationwide, including Olson-Kennedy’s, are now abruptly closing because of the political atmosphere. Writing about the subject in 2023, I argued that the only way out of the culture war was for the American medical associations to commission reviews and carefully consider the evidence.

However, the revelations from Skrmetti and the Alabama case have made me more sympathetic to commentators such as Leor Sapir, of the conservative Manhattan Institute, who supports the bans because American medicine cannot be trusted to police itself. “Are these bans the perfect solution? Probably not,” he told me in 2023. “But at the end of the day, if it’s between banning gender-affirming care and leaving it unregulated, I think we can minimize the amount of harm by banning it.” Once you know that WPATH wanted to publish a review only if it came to the group’s preferred conclusion, Sapir’s case becomes more compelling.

Here are three of the issues that Lewis raises:

1.) Lying or misleading people about gender dysphoria and its treatment.

ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio was guilty of promulgating the lie that failure to effect gender transition in dysphoric children would lead to their suicide. He in fact made this statement when he argued Skrmetti before the Supreme Court, and had to admit under questioning that there was acxtuallyno evidence for this assertion:

“We often ask parents, ‘Would you rather have a dead son than a live daughter?’” Johanna Olson-Kennedy of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles once explained to ABC News. Variations on the phrase crop up in innumerable media articles and public statements by influencers, activists, and LGBTQ groups. The same idea—that the choice is transition or death—appeared in the arguments made by Elizabeth Prelogar, the Biden administration’s solicitor general, before the Supreme Court last year. Tennessee’s law prohibiting the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat minors with gender dysphoria would, she said, “increase the risk of suicide.”

. . . But there is a huge problem with this emotive formulation: It isn’t true. When Justice Samuel Alito challenged the ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio on such claims during oral arguments, Strangio made a startling admission. He conceded that there is no evidence to support the idea that medical transition reduces adolescent suicide rates.

At first, Strangio dodged the question, saying that research shows that blockers and hormones reduce “depression, anxiety, and suicidality”—that is, suicidal thoughts. (Even that is debatable, according to reviews of the research literature.) But when Alito referenced a systematic review conducted for the Cass report in England, Strangio conceded the point. “There is no evidence in some—in the studies that this treatment reduces completed suicide,” he said. “And the reason for that is completed suicide, thankfully and admittedly, is rare, and we’re talking about a very small population of individuals with studies that don’t necessarily have completed suicides within them.”

Here was the trans-rights movement’s greatest legal brain, speaking in front of the nation’s highest court. And what he was saying was that the strongest argument for a hotly debated treatment was, in fact, not supported by the evidence.

Strangio is one of the biggest proponents of affirmative care, and even took to Twitter advocating censoring Abigail Shrier’s book on gender dysphoria, Irreversible Damage. (Strangio is a trans-identified female.) Imagine an ACLU lawyer advocating censorship!

The “Dutch Protocol” (see below) was often cited by American organizations like the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) or by physicians to justify affirmative care of minors. But the Dutch Protocol (affirmative care with medical intervention in children of younger ages) is basically without convincing clinical evidence:

Perhaps the greatest piece of misinformation believed by liberals, however, is that the American standards of care in this area are strongly evidence-based. In fact, at this point, the fairest thing to say about the evidence surrounding medical transition for adolescents—the so-called Dutch protocol, as opposed to talk therapy and other support—is that it is weak and inconclusive. (A further complication is that American child gender medicine has deviated significantly from this original protocol, in terms of length of assessments and the number and demographics of minors being treated.) Yes, as activists are keen to point out, most major American medical associations support the Dutch protocol. But consensus is not the same as evidence. And that consensus is politically influenced.

There’s an article at the site of Our Duty that discusses the shortcomings of the Dutch protocol, and is accompanied by a video of Dr. Patrick Hunter  testifying before the Florida Board of Medicine; it’s a summary of the flaws of that protocol, which was applied to children much younger than 18. Here’s the video, which is short (9 minutes):

2.) Demoniziong those who question “affirmative care”.

There’s Strangio, of course, who tweeted this (and later removed it):

And this:

Marci Bowers, the former head of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the most prominent organization for gender-medicine providers, has likened skepticism of child gender medicine to Holocaust denial. “There are not two sides to this issue,” she once said, according to a recent episode of The Protocol, a New York Times podcast.

Boasting about your unwillingness to listen to your opponents probably plays well in some crowds. But it left Strangio badly exposed in front of the Supreme Court, where it became clear that the conservative justices had read the most convincing critiques of hormones and blockers—and had some questions as a result.

. . .Trans-rights activists like to accuse skeptics of youth gender medicine—and publications that dare to report their views—of fomenting a “moral panic.” But the movement has spent the past decade telling gender-nonconforming children that anyone who tries to restrict access to puberty blockers and hormones is, effectively, trying to kill them. This was false, as Strangio’s answer tacitly conceded. It was also irresponsible.

Questioning affirmative care has been something that marks you as “transphobic” (I myself have been called that), but when all the facts are in, I suspect that this demonization of people who want to know the scientific and medical truth will be seen as oppressive and, given its medical results, even barbaric. As Lewis notes, the British Cass Review that resulted in closing all but one gender clinic in the UK has been falsely demonized as being discredited. It has not been discredited.

3.) Withholdiong research that doesn’t support “affirmative care”.

This is the other side of the Dutch Study coin. First you promulgate bad research that supports your side, then you are slow to publish better studies that do not support your side. The author notes that WPATH comissioned reviews of the flawed Dutch protocols and, apparently because the protocols were weak, tried to block their publication.

And then there’s the infamous study by Dr.  Johanna Olson-Kennedy on the effect of puberty blockers on mental health (remember, blockers were touted as essential to prevent depression and suicide in children with gender dysphoria). Olson-Kennedy, a big proponent of affirmative care, didn’t find what she hoped for, and so withheld the study for several years!

The Alabama disclosures are not the only example of this reluctance to acknowledge contrary evidence. Last year, Olson-Kennedy said that she had not published her own broad study on mental-health outcomes for youth with gender dysphoria, because she worried about its results being “weaponized.” That raised suspicions that she had found only sketchy evidence to support the treatments that she has been prescribing—and publicly advocating for—over many years.

Last month, her study finally appeared as a preprint, a form of scientific publication where the evidence has not yet been peer-reviewed or finalized. Its participants “demonstrated no significant changes in reported anxious/depressed, withdrawn/depressed, somatic complaints, social problems, thought problems, attention problems, aggressive behavior, internalizing problems or externalizing problems” in the two years after starting puberty blockers. (I have requested comment from Olson-Kennedy via Children’s Hospital Los Angeles but have not yet heard back.)

And note, this is in an unreviewed preprint.

Withholding evidence that doesn’t support your favored hypothesis is scientifically unethical, somewhat akin to falsifying data. That’s because doing this means you’re simply allowing false conclusions to persist when you have evidence for their falsity. And that means that medical practice based on those false conclusions also persists, and, in this case, children were being treated on the basis of untested ideas.

There’s a lot more in this article to chew on, but the important thing is that it was published in a reputable (and left-leaning) magazine. The NYT has had similar articles about the weak evidence for “gender affirming care.”  (In my view, Pamela Paul’s 2024 critique of this care in the NYT was a big factor in her being let go by the paper. They thus lost one of their best heterodox writers.)

To paraphrase Walter Cronkite, an advocate of gender-affirming care might say, “When we’ve lost The Atlantic and the New York Times, we’ve lost America.”

I don’t oppose the use of hormones or blockers when the decision to use them is made by adolescents with sufficient mental maturity. If you’re 18 and want to change, well, go ahead and take the hormones and cut off pieces of your top or bottom. But not in minors—not until we have evidence that that this practice actually helps them—and we don’t. Lewis closes her piece this way:

Some advocates for the Dutch protocol, as it’s applied in the United States, have staked their entire career and reputation on its safety and effectiveness. They have strong incentives not to concede the weakness of the evidence. In 2023, the advocacy group GLAAD drove a truck around the offices of The New York Times to declare that the “science is settled.” Doctors such as Olson-Kennedy and activists such as Strangio are unlikely to revise their opinions.

For everyone else, however, the choice is still open. We can support civil-rights protections for transgender people without having to endorse an experimental and unproven set of medical treatments—or having to repeat emotionally manipulative and now discredited claims about suicide.

Gender-altering surgery raises the incidence of mental illness in those with gender dysphoria

March 3, 2025 • 11:00 am

Here’s a new article in the Journal of Sexual Medicine that investigated the effects of gender-changing surgery on both males and females (over 18) with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria.  The results won’t make gender extremists happy, as in both cases rates of mental distress, including anxiety, and depression, were higher than those having surgery than those not having surgery after two years of monitoring. However, this doesn’t mean that the surgery shouldn’t be done, as the authors note that other studies show that people undergoing surgical treatment are, over the longer term, generally happy with the outcome.  The main lesson of the paper is that people who do undergo such surgeries should be monitored carefully for post-surgical declines in mental health.

Click the headline below to read.

The authors note that there are earlier but much smaller studies that show no decline in mental health after surgery, but these are plagued not only by small sample size, but also by non-representative sampling reliance on self-report, and failure to diagnose other forms of mental illness beyond gender dysphoria before surgery. The present study, while remedying these problems, still has a few issues (see below).

The advantages of this study over earlier ones is that the samples of Lewis et al. are HUGE, based on the TriNetX database of over 113 million patients from 64 American healthcare organizations. Further, the patients were selected only because they had a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and no record of any other form of mental illness (of course, it could have been hidden). Patients were divided into four groups (actually six, but I’m omitting two since they lacked controls): natal males with gender dyphoria who had or didn’t have surgery, and natal females with and without surgery. Here are the four groups, and I’ve added the sample size to show how much data they have:

  • Cohort A: Patients documented as male (which may indicate natal sex or affirmed gender identity), aged ≥18 years, with a prior diagnosis of gender dysphoria, who had undergone gender-affirming surgery.

  • Cohort B: Male patients with the same diagnosis but without surgery. [Cohorts A and B had 2774 patients.]

  • Cohort C: Patients documented as female, aged ≥18 years, with a prior diagnosis of gender dysphoria, who had undergone gender-affirming surgery.

  • Cohort D: Female patients with the same diagnosis but without surgery. [Cohorts C and D each had 3358 patients.]

A and B are the experimental and control groups for men, as are C and D for women.  Further, within each comparison patients were matched for sex, race, and age to provide further controls.  And here are the kinds of surgeries they had:

To be included, all patients had to be 18 years or older with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, as identified by the ICD-10 code F64. This criterion was chosen based on literature highlighting elevated mental health concerns for transgender and nonbinary patients with gender dysphoria [15, 16]. Gender-affirming surgery cohorts consisted of patients with a documented diagnosis of gender dysphoria who had undergone specific gender-affirming surgical procedures. For transmen, this primarily included mastectomy (chest masculinization surgery, CPT codes 19 303 and 19 304), while for transwomen, this encompassed a range of feminizing procedures such as tracheal shave (CPT code 31899), breast augmentation (CPT code 19325), and vaginoplasty (CPT codes 57 335 and 55 970). These surgeries were identified using clinician-verified CPT codes within the TriNetX database, allowing for precise classification.

Note that there were a lot more “bottom” surgeries for trans-identifying men (as the authors call them, “transwomen”) than for trans-identifying women (“transmen”). Men prefer to change their genitals more often than women, even though, if you know how vaginoplasties are done, you have to be hellbent on getting one. (I don’t know as much about the results of getting a confected penis.)

I’ll be brief with the results: in both comparisons, those patients who had surgery had a significantly higher postsurgical risk of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and substance abuse. But surgery had no effect on body dysmorphia: the obsession with flaws in one’s appearance.  Here are the tables and statistical comparisons of cohorts A vs. B and C vs. D, and the effect of surgery is substantial (results on women are similar though differences are smaller).  Some of the differences are substantial: anxiety in men, for example, was nearly five times higher in those who had surgery than those who did not.

As you see, there are significant differences for everything save body dysmorphia, for which there are no differences at all. The authors conclude that yes, at least over the two-year measurement period (again, mental states were monitored by professionals, and were not due to self report). Given that surgery does seem to improve well being over the long term, as the authors note twice, they conclude that the results provide more caution about taking care of patients who have transitional surgery:

The findings of this study underscore a pressing need for enhanced mental health guidelines tailored to the needs of transgender individuals following gender-affirming surgery. Our analysis reveals a significantly elevated risk of mental health disorders—including depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and substance use disorder—post-surgery among individuals with a prior diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Importantly, however, our results indicate no increased risk of body dysmorphic disorder following surgery, suggesting that these individuals generally experience satisfaction with their body image and surgical outcomes. Notably, the heightened risk of mental health issues post-surgery was particularly pronounced among individuals undergoing feminizing transition compared to masculinizing transition, emphasizing the necessity for gender-sensitive approaches even after gender-affirming procedures.

Possible problems. There are two main limitations of the study noted by the authors. First, individuals electing surgery may have higher levels of distress to begin with than those who didn’t, so the elevated rate of mental disorders in the surgery group could be artifactual in that way. Second, patients who have had surgery may be wealthier or otherwise have more access to healthcare than those who didn’t, and so higher rates of mental distress could result simply from a difference in detectability.

Now I don’t know the literature on long-term effects of surgery on well-being, so I’ll accept the authors’ statement that they are positive, even though patients with greater well being could, I suppose, still suffer more depression and anxiety. But those who are looking to say that there should be no surgery for those with gender dysphoria will not find support for that in this paper. What they will find is the conclusion that gender-altering surgery comes with mental health risks, and those must be taken into account. It’s always better, when dealing with such stuff. to have more rather than less information so one can inform those contemplating surgery.

New book argues that Alzheimer’s research is flawed, fraudulent, and incompetent

February 13, 2025 • 11:00 am

I have a friend with Alzheimer’s so I was especially depressed to read Jesse Singal’s discussion of a new book, Doctored, claiming that research on both Alzheimer’s disease and drugs that purport to ameliorate is all badly flawed, even fraudulent. You can read Singal’s discussion below (free access by clicking on the headline), and access the book on Amazon by clicking on the cover below.

An excerpt from Singal:

In his book, Piller, an investigative reporter at Science magazine, presents copious evidence of severe fraud, negligence, and buck-passing in Alzheimer’s research. From fabricated images published in major research journals (many of them still unretracted) to data manipulation conducted by pharmaceutical companies to the complete negligence of federal watchdogs, Piller’s reporting demonstrates indisputably that the field of Alzheimer’s research is in sorry shape.

Things are so bad, in fact, that the dominant theory that has guided researchers’ efforts this century — that Alzheimer’s symptoms are caused by the buildup of proteins called “amyloid plaques” in the brain — is now in serious question. That might explain why, as Piller notes, a recent meta-analysis of the available research found no evidence that any of the available Alzheimer’s drugs cause noticeable improvements in the cognition or daily functioning of patients. We’re two decades and many billions of dollars into the modern era of Alzheimer’s research, and we have precious little to show for it — a particularly dire state of affairs given that this dread condition is only going to hit us harder as America’s population continues to age. Piller’s book, which was released February 4, tells the story of a wild and heartbreaking goose-chase.

While Doctored is gripping in its own right, it also serves as a warning about the collapse of trust in expert authority. Thanks to the capacious new markets for crankery carved out by social and “alternative” media — not to mention a worldwide populist revolt against “the establishment” in general — there’s more grifting and science-denial than ever before, and the worst purveyors of pseudoscientific sludge rake in millions precisely by positioning themselves in opposition to mainstream science.

The lesson for scientists is to clean up their act and to stop misleading people about their work. I mean, I never had any doubt whatever that Alzheimer’s was caused by plaques in the brain.  Now that is not at all certain; the plaques could be a byproduct or a correlate and not a cause. If there’s that much uncertainty about it, why haven’t I heard about it.  Of course, journalists are responsible for this, too, but good scientific journalism is a species going extinct.

I believe that Singal has already been demonized on BlueHairSky, though he hasn’t been banned. The reason: the place is full of immigrants from Twitter who are “progressive” liberals and couldn’t stand the free speech on X. Singal described his apostasy: 

The background here is that a subset of users on Bluesky disagree with my reporting on youth gender medicine—a subject I’ve been investigating for almost a decade, and have written about frequently, including in The Atlantic and TheEconomist. (I’m currently working on a book about it, commissioned by an imprint of Penguin Random House.) I’m not going to go deep here, but I’d argue that my reporting is in line with what is now the mainstream liberal position: See this Washington Post editorial highlighting “scientists’ failure to study these treatments slowly and systematically as they developed them.”

But perhaps because I wrote about this controversy earlier than most journalists, and have done so in major outlets, I’ve become a symbol of bigotry and hatred to a group of activists and online trolls as well as advocacy orgs like GLAAD that push misinformation about the purported safety and efficacy of these treatments, and attempt to punish journalists like Abigail Shrier for covering the controversy at all.

Bluesky appears to have attracted a particularly high number of these trolls, and even before I arrived on the platform, some of them were making sure I wouldn’t feel welcome there. Nora Reed, an online influencer and cultural critic, wrote in November that “I think we need a plan for if Jesse Singal shows up here in advance.”

Back to his own Substack, though; Singal won’t win many friends by arguing that both scientists and liberals have exacerbated the problem, the former by acting precipitously or even duplicitously (the attempt to dismiss a lab-leak theory for the covid virus by scientific officials in the Biden ambit is a good example), while the left-wing public by always saying “trust the science” without realizing that a. scientists are human, with all the good and bad behavior that implies and b. science like investigating covid moves quickly, and what is true today could be false tomorrow.

But I shouldn’t exculpate the Right as well. After all, that’s the side of the political spectrum that still pushes creationism as well as quacks like RFK Jr. And Trump and his cronies are busy slashing scientific research almost willy-nilly. Singal, though, concentrates on the Left, perhaps because that’s where he resides:

At a time of such uncertainty and such dangerous overcorrection, it can feel awkward or difficult to point out, as Piller does in Doctored, just how broken some of our cherished mainstream scientific institutions are. Isn’t that playing right into Trump’s hands?

I don’t think so. The strategy adopted by many mainstream liberals in response to the populist surge — effectively, plugging our ears and chanting “trust the science” over and over — might be comforting, in that it offers a Manichaean worldview in which improving the world is a relatively straightforward matter of convincing people of their own ignorance so that they will board the science train with the rest of us.

But this effort has clearly failed. Some populist distrust of mainstream science is unwarranted and harmful, such as most strains of vaccine skepticism, but in plenty of instances, they are more or less correct not to automatically trust mainstream scientists, even if they arrive at that conclusion for reasons some of us might find uncouth. (Update: I added ‘automatically’ post-publication because I think it’s an important modifier here.)

In other words, while it’s easy to accuse those red-staters out there of exhibiting an alarming lack of faith in science, especially now that their wrecking-ball avatar is in power, it’s harder — and arguably just as important — to ask whether perhaps we have too much faith in it. The scientific establishment hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory in recent decades, given the replication crises that have roiled multiple fields, the data-fraud scandals popping up everywhere from cancer research to business-school psychology, and the frequently overconfident proclamations experts made about thorny Covid-era issues like mask mandates and school closures. And yet liberals tend to continue to reflexively trust many institutions that haven’t earned it, to the point where some of us have turned this sentiment into a mantra: “Science is real,” you will see on signs planted in front of many liberal homes.

I will read this book, as I’m particularly interested in how “fraud” was involved in Alzheimer’s research. Here’s one bit from Singal:

Piller’s book provides numerous damning examples of the difference between science as we idealize it and science as it is practiced by real-life human beings. For example, much of the data fraud in Alzheimer’s research, alleged and proven, involves doctored images. This fraud was uncovered not by journal editors or peer-reviewers — the individuals supposedly responsible for such quality-control — but by unpaid sleuths “who use pseudonyms to post comments” online, as he writes, in the hopes of someone who matters noticing and acting. (One notable exception is Elizabeth Bik, a Dutch microbiologist and legendary image sleuth who has taken on Alzheimer’s fraud.)

Who would have thought that we’d be catching so much fraudulent work by analysis of published images. One might conclude that reviewers of manuscripts aren’t doing their work, but I suspect that a lot of the fraud involves the same images repeated in different papers, and no reviewer has time to compare images in a submitted manuscript to other images by the same authors, but in different journals.

Doctored was released February 4 of this year.

To avoid making this post too long, I’ve put the book-publisher’s (Simon and Schuster’s) description below the fold. Click “read more” to see it:

Continue reading “New book argues that Alzheimer’s research is flawed, fraudulent, and incompetent” →

Washington Post calls for research on puberty blockers and other affirmative treatment; notes lack of improvement in some studies

December 16, 2024 • 11:45 am

This WaPo article below (click headline to read, or find the piece archived here), discusses the new case about gender transitioning being adjudicated by the Supreme Court. It’s judging the constitutionality of a Tennessee law that, according to the paper, “bans the use of puberty blockers and hormones for gender-transition treatments in minors on the grounds that it unlawfully discriminates based on sex.” (23 other states have similar laws). I’m not sure how a ban on blockers can discriminate on the basis of sex if the hormones are banned in both males and females, but I’ll leave that up to the lawyers.

What’s important here is that the dispute about the blockers is now being discussed openly, in an Editorial Board op-ed in the Washington Post, while previously such discussion was taboo. Even questioning the use of such “affirmative treatments” was seen as “transphobic,” though there wasn’t good clinical evidence that they had good outcomes. They could even have been harmful, and in light of a lack of efficacy, they’re now banned in the UK and regarded as experimental treatments in much of Europe.

What we need, as the paper says, are “gold standard” studies: large controlled studies (double blind ones would be impractical given that the drugs have easily discernible effects) over a fairly long period of time.

Read below, and I’ll give some quotes (indented):

This unresolved dispute is why Tennessee has a colorable claim before the court; it would be ludicrous to suggest that patients have a civil right to be harmed by ineffective medical interventions — and, likewise, unconscionable for Tennessee to deny a treatment that improves patient lives, even if the state did so with majestic impartiality. The issue is subject to legal dispute in part because the medical questions have not been properly resolved.

Multiple European health authorities have reviewed the available evidence and concluded that it was “very low certainty,” “lacking” and “limited by methodological weaknesses.” Last week, Britain banned the use of puberty blockers indefinitely due to safety concerns.

“Children’s healthcare must always be evidence-led,” British Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting said in a press release. “The independent expert Commission on Human Medicines found that the current prescribing and care pathway for gender dysphoria and incongruence presents an unacceptable safety risk for children and young people.”

An early Dutch study of blockers showed “promising results”, but the sample was too small to give definitive results, and wasn’t replicable:

Yet as other doctors began copying the Dutch, clinical practice outraced the research, especially as treatment protocols rapidly evolved. A British study attempting to replicate the Dutch researchers’ success with puberty blockers “identified no changes in psychological function” among those treated.

Some clinicians appear reluctant to publish findings that don’t show strong benefits. The British lackluster results were published nine years after the study began, after Britain’s High Court ruled that children younger than 16 were unlikely to be able to form informed consent to such treatments.

And here is the unconscionable censorship on the part of both the American government and the WPATH organization that I haven’t yet written about:

Internal communications from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health [WPATH] suggest that the group tried to interfere with a review commissioned from a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University

Johanna Olson-Kennedy, medical director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, told the New York Times that a government-funded study of puberty blockers she helped conduct, which started in 2015, had not found mental health improvements, and those results hadn’t been published because more time was needed to ensure the research wouldn’t be “weaponized.” Medical progress is impossible unless null or negative results are published as promptly as positive ones.

Weaponized?  WEAPONIZED? The study is done, but the results aren’t ideologically pleasing to gender activists, and so the study languishes, unpublished. That is unethical, for whether or not one uses blockers can have permanent effects on the well being and future fertility of adolescents.

And so we have one more example of science being suppressed because it didn’t give the results activists wanted. But this story isn’t over. As the Post recommends, Congress should fund larger and wlll-conducted trials of blockers with followups on adults who have gone on to estrogen or testosterone therapy. Given the increasing number of people who want to transition, such studies are imperative. But now we lack evidence, and without that the use of blockers should, I think, be stopped. Anecdotal evidence is not enough.

New MIT course to indoctrinate students in all aspects of woke ideology that colonize medicine

November 24, 2024 • 11:00 am

This new course, to be offered next spring at MIT, was first singled out on The Babbling Beaver site, which calls attention to “fake news” at the university that usually turns out, as in this case, to be real news.  The Beaver said this about the course.

Feminist theory, disability justice, critical race theory, queer theory, anti-colonial thought, and trans liberation movements provide the foundation for a new approach to medical education now being taught at MIT.

A proselytizing professor dispatched from Harvard is on a mission to spread wokeism to all corners of STEM. Unable to penetrate MIT’s School of Science or Engineering, the Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality program hosted by MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts and Socialist Scientism let him in.

Now students can learn how Marxist, psychoanalytic, and anarchist frameworks can inform debates in bioethics, public health, and environmental justice.

Why is racism so prevalent in hospitals and other health care settings? What unique challenges do trans and gender-diverse youth face in seeking medical care as a result of recent transphobic laws and policies? How are community organizers advocating for the end of medical neglect, abuse, and torture in prisons and migrant detention facilities? This largely discussion-based course will explore these questions and many others.

Special attention is paid to the structuring force of anti-Blackness in various clinical and research settings, the development and racialization of transgender medicine, and what it means to view state violence as an issue in public health and the medical humanities.

The Beaver apologizes for his inability to make this funny rather than alarming, and confesses to copy-pasting most of the above directly from the course description.

Yep, the course description can be seen by clicking on the screenshot below:

I’ve put in the course description all aspects of “progressivism” that have colonized this course:

SPRING 2025, Thursdays, 5:00-8:00PM; MEETS AT MIT

Why is racism so prevalent in hospitals and other health care settings? What unique challenges do trans and gender-diverse youth face in seeking medical care as a result of recent transphobic laws and policies? How are community organizers advocating for the end of medical neglect, abuse, and torture in prisons and migrant detention facilities? In this largely discussion-based course we explore these questions and many others. Social approaches to medicine and public health challenge and expand contemporary debates in the medical humanities by centering issues of gender, race, and sexuality.  This class provides an overview of the theoretical landscape and social movements that ground recent developments in the field. In particular, the course engages feminist theory, disability justice movements, critical race theory, queer theory, anti-colonial thought, and trans liberation movements. The seminar will also explore how debates around race, gender, and medicine are conceptualized in Latin America and Africa. This includes an overview of racism and religion in Brazilian gynecological spaces, as well as how legal theorists from Kenya and Uganda critique pertinent public health issues like vaccine nationalism and the coloniality of gender.  Special attention is paid to the structuring force of anti-Blackness in various clinical and research settings, the development and racialization of transgender medicine, and what it means to view state violence as an issue in public health and the medical humanities.

You already know from the description that the course is designed to inculcate students with “progressive” viewpoints rather than let them think for themselves.  Descriptions like “transphobic laws and policies”, “critical race theory”, “vaccine nationalism”, and so on are all issues that should be debated, not presented as realities. One would think that such a piece of propaganda would be limited to the humanities and social sciences, and indeed, it’s offered in the “Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality” program hosted by MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts and Socialist Sciences.  But have no doubts: there are courses like this in science departments and medical schools as well. While some of the social issues mentioned above do need fixing, the purpose of college is supposed to be education, not fixing social problems identified by a particular ideology.

And the professor’s description includes this (my bolding):

Roberto Sirvent, JD, PhD is a political theorist who studies race, law, and social movements. He also works at the intersection of ethics, philosophy of religion, and science and technology studies (STS). Roberto’s research considers how Marxist, psychoanalytic, and anarchist frameworks can inform debates in bioethics, public health, and environmental justice. Central to his scholarly interests are the ways that colonialism, imperialism, and US militarism fuel various health injustices and ecological crises around the globe. Roberto is especially interested in helping bioethics professionals find creative ways to engage the theoretical work of disability justice advocates, queer and trans liberation movements, Black Studies scholars, mutual aid networks, and anti-colonial revolutionary struggles.

Roberto’s current research examines the prevalence of medical neglect, abuse, and torture in prisons and migrant detention centers. He is also working on a community resource guide exploring the intersection of education policy, critical pedagogy, and students’ mental health, as well as a study that draws on theories of libidinal economy and the “psychopolitics of race” to address recent controversies in sports and bioethics. Some of Roberto’s most recent scholarship invites students of comics and graphic medicine to consider how narratives of slave revolts and prison rebellions contribute to Black liberation struggles for health justice. His work in clinical ethics explores how anti-Black racism functions in Latinx and Latin American communities and the impact it has on everyday clinical encounters between patients, doctors, and other medical professionals.

“Latinx”: a term that virtually no Latinos use or want to use.

I could write more about this course and what its offering connotes about modern America, but there are so many of these these things that I don’t want to wear out my precious neurons thinking about them. Just be aware that the kids who take this stuff are going to leave MIT spreading their brainwashed mindset through the greater society.

h/t: Anna