Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has been all over the transgender issue of late, brought author Abigail Shrier onto Friday night's "Tucker Carlson Tonight" to discuss the "real problem" of doctors being essentially forced to "rubber-stamp," without pushing back, the self-diagnosis of those who claim to be transgender, regardless of age.
Shrier is the author of "Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters," a horrifying look at how influencers, therapists, and educators are artificially swelling the number of people, particularly young girls, who claim to have gender dysphoria, a once super-rare condition that mainly affected males.
Before introducing his guest, Carlson played clips from last week's episode of "60 Minutes," where CBS anchor Lesley Stahl highlighted people who have changed their minds and de-transitioned. Asked why "responsible physicians" weren't providing more push-back on the issue, Shrier explained why the problem is "much worse" than the program portrayed.
Partial transcript below:
[Shrier] The Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine is formed recently as a consortium of doctors from across the west who are very concerned and oppose affirmative care, but the problem is much worse than what that doctor on "60 Minutes" said. The reason is because doctors in America are afraid of losing their licenses. Nearly every medical accrediting organization has adopted affirmative care, which means that the doctor's job is to affirm or rubber-stamp the patient's self-diagnosis even of minors when they decide that their problem is gender. So there's a real problem, and in the 20 states in America that have conversion therapy laws, doctors are absolutely afraid that they could face civil and criminal penalties if they say 'wait a second, this may not be gender dysphoria that's the problem. Let's explore other options.'"
[Carlson] Well, that is shocking. Is there any other procedure a series of procedures to which that applies? If I walk in and say 'I want chemotherapy' and the physician says I'm sorry, I don’t detect cancer,' the physician can turn me down for that treatment, right?
[Shrier] Absolutely. This is the only area of medicine where we do this and has basically turned our doctors into life coaches. It is profoundly unscientific. It tells them not to use their medical judgment and instead just rubber-stamp the patient’s wishes.
[Carlson] Where were the rest of us when this happened? Until you just said it I didn’t know that, that medical associations can revoke the license of physicians who don't play along with what is essentially a political movement.
[Shrier] We've seen some of the really giants in the field of gender dysphoria have been deplatformed or canceled. Ken Zucker, most famously who chaired the committee to write the definition of gender dysphoria for the dsm five, that's the psychiatric manual, he was fired in Canada because activists called him a transphobe.
[Carlson] I wonder at what point do we look back on this and a lot of other things we’ve done in medicine I will say, giving heavy-duty drugs to kids who don’t need them, but do we look back on this and recognize it for the tragedy that it is? How long is it going to take, do you think?
[Shrier] I don't know, I have a feeling the lawsuits will start coming, but because they can attack me, they can try to discredit the scientists who have done good research into this and have shown affirmative care does not show the mental health benefits that the activists claim, but the one thing they haven’t been able to cover up is the detransitioners, young women regretting that they were pushed through these treatments. They're speaking up all the time, more and more of them.
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Medical doctors, people of science, being literally afraid to tell the truth or push back on patients because of political, civil, and criminal considerations - it's hard to get more chilling than that, even in a totalitarian society.
Yes, gender dysphoria is real, and people who genuinely have it should be treated with compassion. However, it should be clear to any thinking person by now that transgender activists are simply looking to grow their ranks, and they don't care who they inflict 'irreversible damage' to in the process.
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