Madeline touched upon this earlier this month when the United Kingdom issued a total ban on puberty blockers for minors. The National Health Service took a significant step in ending the “transanity” that’s engulfed the Western World. It became a liberal war cry, but what’s happening across the pond will inevitably be exported here. There’s something about minors undergoing genital mutilation surgeries and competing in sports where they didn’t belong that doesn’t sit well with most Americans. Once again, the cultural bastions of the United States overplayed their hand. That’s the thing about echo chambers—the noise dissipates precipitously when most see through the nonsense. Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag have a new lengthy post on their Public Substack that exposed why the craze is ending. Yet, they warned, the most damaging aspects could take years to roll back.
This issue has now sunk governments like Nicola Sturgeon’s in Scotland. Her downfall was over a transgender law concerning biological males being sent to women’s prisons. You already know about the fiasco Lia Thomas has caused concerning trans women competing with biological females. The overwhelming consensus is that this practice should be banned, a rare win for common sense.
Even the UK’s Labour Party said banning trans women from female sports protects the integrity and safety of the competition. Such words would have led to an outcry and cancellation campaigns—no more. One thing that’s helped blow up the transgender craze is the mounting reports of medical abuse emanating from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the leading transgender healthcare organization, according to Shellenberger and Gutentag.
Yet, besides whistleblowers within WPATH, new reports are showing that transgender medicine isn’t grounded in science. Moreover, the treatments haven’t led to any decrease in suicidal tendencies, which has been the linchpin for pushing gender mutilation surgeries for minors. Second, for those becoming trans-men, the injections of testosterone have shown increased levels of tumors in the liver, which functions differently based on gender. It almost seems as if sex isn’t a social construct but a defined scientific one that cannot be altered (via Public):
A big part of the reason for the end of the trans craze is the accumulation of scientific studies, patient testimonies, and the testimonies of gender clinicians themselves.
The WPATH Files themselves should be seen in a broader context of revelations and confessions from the whistleblowers and employees of the gender medicine industry itself. The UK government shut down its leading gender clinic at Tavistock Hospital after its own employees blew the whistle. A St. Louis gender clinician last year similarly blew the whistle. One of the founders of gender-affirming care in Europe recently denounced the overuse of drugs and surgeries. Dr. Erica Anderson has argued for years that too few guardrails protect children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults.
Meanwhile, medical journals are publishing a growing number of scientific articles debunking the leading trans myths. A major Finland study found gender medicine to offer no benefits in terms of reducing suicide and suicidal feelings among people with gender dysphoria. And earlier this week, journalist Ben Ryan resurfaced a 2021 study that found that trans women who underwent genital surgery had twice as many suicide attempts after the surgery than before.
Defenders of gender medicine are responding to these revelations. In response to the WPATH Files, StatNews claimed we had exaggerated the link between hormones and cancer in trans-identified natal females.
But even a cursory review of the evidence shows that testosterone has already been linked to cancer. A 2020 paper in the Lancet found that a 17-year-old trans-identified natal female had developed liver tumors in connection to testosterone use. Although the research has been inconclusive (as we noted), another 2023 paper found multiple cases of liver tumors linked to testosterone use.
What’s more, we were not the ones to make the cancer link from the WPATH Files – it was suggested by WPATH-affiliated doctors themselves. And it turns out that testosterone can cause far worse damage to livers than we had realized. The liver is a sexually dimorphic organ, meaning it exhibits major differences in males and females.
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One of the main reasons the trans craze is coming to an end is because of the coalition of feminists, conservatives, liberals, and non-ideological professionals, intellectuals, and activists who fought for years against it. We should feel gratitude toward these individuals, particularly those who suffered greatly for their service. Trans activists destroyed the careers of journalists, academics, administrators, and anyone else who stood in the way of their agenda to transform medicine, sports, prisons, and much else. People lost their jobs in universities worldwide, particularly in North America and Europe. And many of those same people fought heroically.
While there are medical and political reasons why transgenderism is coming to an end, the underlying reason is that gender-affirming care has no basis in science. The idea that someone can change their biological sex is ungrounded from reality.
Shellenberger and Gutentag ask if anything should be done to accelerate the rollback. They concur that something should be done since a natural retreat doesn’t guarantee that this craze will end completely, quickly, or well. Progressives in legislatures will dig in, but they cannot overcome the public tide that’s rapidly turning against this nonsense. Keep in mind, the writers said that the UK news has yet to strike the liberal bubbles in America. When it does, expect a meltdown over some very weird stuff.
