Thinking Citizen Blog — “Transgender Science” and the American Academy of Pediatrics
Thinking Citizen Blog — Thursday is Health, Health Care, and Global Health Policy Day
Today’s Topic: “Transgender Science” and the American Academy of Pediatrics
What does science say about transgender children? Does it speak with one voice or many? Who is to say? Today, some excerpts from an article by pediatrician Julia Mason and Leor Sapir, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. The bottom line: “As other countries turn away from hormones and surgery, the American Academy of Pediatrics won’t even allow debate.” Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
IS SOCIAL CONTAGION A FACTOR IN AMERICA’S SURGE IN TRANSGENDER IDENTIFICATION?
1.“A spate of headlines this month declared that America’s surge in transgender identification wasn’t being caused by social contagion. These articles were prompted by a new study by Jack Turban and colleagues in Pediatrics, the flagship journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.”
2. “The study claimed that social influence isn’t that reason that as many as 9% of America’s youth now call themselves transgender. Thus, Dr. Turban argues, efforts in conservative states to regulate puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery must be resisted.”
3. “Yet Dr. Turban’s study is deeply flawed and likely couldn’t have survived a reasonable peer-review process. The swift response from the scientific community made both points clear — with even those who support hormones and surgery for gender-dysphoric youth noting that Dr. Turban’s shoddy science undermined their cause.”
NB: “Nevertheless, the media have promoted his work as a refutation of the claim that the wildfire spread of transgender identity is an example of social contagion — a phenomenon in which members of a group (mostly young and female) mutually influence one another’s emotions and behavior.”
THE GLOBAL CONTEXT — The UK, Sweden, France, Belgium, Australia
1. The AAP (American Academy of Pediatrics) has ignored the evidence that has led Sweden, Finland, and most recently the UK to place severe restrictions on medical transition for minors.”
2. “The largest pediatric gender clinic in the world, the UK’s Gender Identity Development Service, was ordered to shut down in July after an independent review expressed concerns about clinicians rushing minors to medical transition.”
3. “Medical societies in France, Belgium, and Australia have also sounded the alarm. The US is an outlier on pediatric gender medicine.”
IS DEBATE BEING STIFLED? THESE ARE SERIOUS ACCUSATIONS. ARE THEY WARRANTED?
1. “The AAP has stifled debate on how best to treat youth in distress over their bodies, shut down efforts by critics to present better scientific approaches at conferences, used technicalities to suppress resolutions to bring it into line with better-informed European countries, and put its thumb on the scale at Pediatrics in favor of a shoddy but politically correct research agenda.”
2. “Its preference for fashionable political positions over evidence-based medicine is a disservice o members, physicians, parents, and children.”
3. ‘The AAP has been giving Dr. Turban a platform for years, despite the mistakes that plague his research. Pediatrics published his highly flawed 2020 study alleging that puberty blockers reduce suicide in teens. The journal even chose the article as “Best of 2020” despite receiving rebuttals that pointed out the rate of attempted suicide was twice as high among the puberty-blocked group and Dr. Turban hadn’t controlled for the possibility that better mental-health outcomes might be the result of factors other than hormonal intervention.”
FOOTNOTES — TWO GRAPHICS
1. Do you know of a more up-to-date chart? by country?
2. Can you explain this?
Opinion | The American Academy of Pediatrics’ Dubious Transgender Science
Psychiatry.org — What is Gender Dysphoria?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7415463/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_dysphoria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_dysphoria_in_children
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_gender_nonconformity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_youth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MitqjSYtwrQ
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/10/science/transgender-teenagers-national-survey.html
LAST FOUR YEARS OF POSTS ORGANIZED THEMATICALLY
PDF with headlines — Google Drive
ATTACHMENTS BELOW:
#1 A graphic guide to justice (9 metaphors on one page).
#2 “39 Songs, Prayers, and Poems: the Keys to the Hearts of Seven Billion People” — Adams House Senior Common Room Presentation, 11/17/20
YOUR TURN
Please share the most interesting thing you learned in the last week related to health, health care or health care policy — the ethics, economics, politics, history…. Or the coolest, most important thing you learned in your life related to health are or health care policy that the rest of us may have missed. Or just some random health-related fact that blew you away.
This is your chance to make some one’s day. Or to cement in your mind something really important you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than you otherwise would about something that matters.
