The Post-Partisan Emporium

  The secret life of gender clinicians They are trained to practise 'heavenly deception' BY  ELIZA MONDEGREEN This was no ordinary medical conference. Over the course of three days, I learned a great many things. That eunuchs are one of the world’s oldest gender identities and that doctors should not judge their strange desires for castration but fulfil them. That, “ideally, patients wouldn’t be actively psychotic” when they initiated testosterone, but that psychotic patients consent to take medication like stool softeners and statins all the time and “people don’t pay that much attention”. That it would be “ableist” to question an autistic girl’s insistence on a double mastectomy. That patients who claim to have multiple personalities that disagree about which irreversible steps to take toward transition can find consensus — or at least obtain a quorum — using a smartphone app. It is hard to shock me these days — but as I moved around the World Professional Association for Tra

Ultra-Processed People On bratwurst, baby-buying, and the lie of puberty blockers MARY HARRINGTON In news that should surprise no one, the  Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine  (SEGM)  reports  that the supposedly robust evidence base for puberty blockers is not just weak: it fails to replicate. The original Dutch studies on using off-label cancer drugs to halt puberty in gender-confused children claimed doing so afforded modest improvements in mental-wellbeing for some patients. But  a newer study , just published, re-analysed existing data to show that for the majority this drug made no improvements to mental health, and around a third actually deteriorated. This underlines what ought to be obvious. Dosing physically healthy kids with an off-label cancer drug with  side effects  that can include osteoporosis, seizures, cognitive impairment, and sterility is not, as supporters  claim , a safe and temporary intervention but a powerful iatrogenic harm. And it’s being pursued desp

  Who Owns Your Children? The Government Keeps Acting Like It Does Derrick Broze Governments across the world continue to take actions that reflect the belief that it is not parents who are the guardians of their children but the state itself. In September, the First Circuit  Court of Appeals  heard arguments in a high-profile case  regarding whether a school violated parents’ constitutional rights by actively encouraging their 11-year-old daughter to transition her gender while keeping it a secret from the parents. School officials followed a school board policy that encourages them to privately meet with the child and affirm her gender transition, allow her to use the boys’ bathroom, and instruct everyone at school to use her new name and pronouns. The school also asserted that the parents weren’t providing a safe environment at home. The school’s attorney argued in court that parents do not have a right to know about their child’s “gender transition” because “you can’t decide to hav