Trans doctor who helps teens transition says it’s now ‘gone too far’
A transgender psychologist who has helped hundreds of teens transition has warned that it has “gone too far” — and fears many are making life-changing decisions because it’s “trendy” and pushed on social media.
Erica Anderson, 71 — who is transgender herself — told the Los Angeles Times that she is horrified that even 13-year-old kids are now getting hormone treatment without even meeting with psychologists.
“I think it’s gone too far,” said Anderson, who until recently led the US professional society at the forefront of transgender care.
“For a while, we were all happy that society was becoming more accepting and more families than ever were embracing children that were gender variant.
“Now it’s got to the point where there are kids presenting at clinics whose parents say, ‘This just doesn’t make sense,‘” she said.
Anderson is so concerned, in fact, she said she is considering ending her own pioneering work helping teens transition.
“I have these private thoughts: ‘This has gone too far. It’s going to get worse. I don’t want any part of it,’ ” she said.
“I worry that people will accuse me of setting the train in motion, as part of those who advocated the affirmative approach to gender in youth, even though that’s not a reasonable account of what happened.”
She believes that the dramatic rise in teens seeking treatment is likely driven by peer pressure as much as wider acceptance of trans issues.
“A fair number of kids are getting into it because it’s trendy,” she previously told the Washington Post. “I think in our haste to be supportive, we’re missing that element.”
In her latest interview, she told the LA Times, “To flatly say there couldn’t be any social influence in formation of gender identity flies in the face of reality. Teenagers influence each other.”
That appears to have been exacerbated by the pandemic, with children becoming more isolated and also leaning more on networks on social media.
“What happens when the perfect storm — of social isolation, exponentially increased consumption of social media, the popularity of alternative identities — affects the actual development of individual kids?” Anderson asked the LA paper.
“We’re sailing in uncharted seas,” she warned.
Anderson readily shared her birth name, Eric, and her story of how an endocrinologist refused to prescribe hormones and left her feeling deeply ashamed when she first sought them at age 45.
She finally got them at 58, and had genital surgery at 61, thrilled to finally “become a woman.”
But while thrilled that the world is now more accepting, she fears it has swung to an extreme, noting a 13-year-old patient whose pediatrician put him on testosterone, even though he had not met with a psychologist.
“Why is this kid on testosterone so precipitously?” Anderson asked.
Anderson, a member of the American Psychological Association committee that is writing guidelines for transgender health care, believes some children seek treatment in the hope that it helps with wider psychological problems, leaving them depressed when it doesn’t.
She insisted that those allowing medical treatment for kids without rigorous psychological evaluation risk committing malpractice.
https://nypost.com/2022/04/15/transitions-have-gone-too-far-trans-psychologist/
*************************************************If he transforms Twitter, Musk will be demonized as severely as Trump. He should do it anyway
The Left loves free speech, but only if their speech is freer than that of people outside of their tribe. As big tech’s social media platforms have saturated American culture over the past 10-15 years, Silicon Valley technocrats have gained a previously unimaginable power- the ability to direct, accelerate, or even halt discussion of significant topics within the realm of public discourse. Which topics get manipulated is determined by the utility- or liability- of the information presented in those topics. Never in human history have the thoughts of so many been guided by the wishes of so few.
The censorship of “other” (individuals and groups with thoughts that diverge from the Left) was subtle at first. It was a small, restrictive policy change here, or a seemingly insignificant update to the terms of service there, every several months or a year. It had to happen slowly at first. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube did not want to risk scaring away their userbase before the social media addiction took hold. The psychological grip of social media is so potent, and so well documented, that a founding Facebook executive will not allow his children to use the platform.
The significance of the addictive nature of social media is that it made most of country- even most the modernized world- habitual users. Habitual use by the masses is how big tech social media platforms have become the de facto town square of the 21st century. This online cultural shift of the 2010s is the prequel to how free speech is monopolized and titrated by the Left today in 2022. Silicon Valley companies have Americans so hooked to their platforms that individuals can be censored and still seek to remain active. It's difficult to blame them. The alternative would be getting shut off from the world.
Leftist tech overlords will fight tooth and nail to retain their God-like powers to control human thought and cultural narratives. The Left wants their version of free speech to be standardized, or no one’s at all.
The Left’s hunger for thought control is precisely why they have hated President Donald Trump for the past six years and why Elon Musk is quickly becoming their new mortal enemy. Trump refuses to bow the knee to the woke mob and Washington swamp creatures. Musk explicitly rejects the idea that any group should have greater access to free speech than another. Given these conditions, the corporate media and big tech are and have been operating from a kill-or-be-killed perspective. While Trump had the power of the government and still has tremendous public influence, Musk has so much wealth that he could personally buy out Twitter, dismantle the company, and rebuild it as he pleases.
Pay close attention during the coming days and weeks. The attempted character assassination of Elon Musk may appear novel and distinct from that of Trump, but they have the same root. Eliminate the existential threat to Leftist groupthink dominance. While it’s true that character assassination is a longstanding practice in American politics, never have there been so many organizations, media outlets, and vast amounts of money aligned against one individual such as Trump, and now to a lesser extent, Musk. The Leftist character assassination tactics are arguably more vitriolic since Trump’s election than they have ever been at any other time in modern American electoral politics.
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Google's "geofence" facility knows a lot about you
In the first order of its kind, a federal district court has held that a warrant used to identify all devices in the area of a bank robbery, including the defendant’s, “plainly violates the rights enshrined in [the Fourth] Amendment.” The court questioned whether similar warrants could ever be constitutional.
The case is United States v. Chatrie, and addresses a controversial tool called a geofence warrant. The police issued the warrant to Google seeking information on every device within the area of the robbery during a one-hour period. The geographic area was about 17.5 acres (about 3 and a half times the footprint of a New York city block) and included a church, a chain restaurant, a hotel, several apartments and residences, a senior living facility, a self-storage business, and two busy streets.
Google’s initial search identified 19 devices, with a total of 210 individual location points. Google assigned anonymizing identifiers to each device and provided their locations to the police. Following a three-step process designed by Google, the police expanded the time period to two hours to get additional location information for 9 of the devices. Ultimately, police obtained detailed, identifying subscriber information for three devices. One of those belonged to the defendant.
Mr. Chatrie filed a motion to suppress the geofence evidence, and, after several hearings and extensive expert testimony, the court issued a thorough, 63-page order holding the warrant was unconstitutional. The court held that it’s not enough for the police to allege that a crime was committed and the perpetrator used a cellphone. If the police want to get information on every device in the area, they must also establish probable cause to search every person in the area, something that’s likely impossible in a busy area like this one.
The court further held that Google’s three-step process did not cure the warrant’s defects. The initial anonymization of the data didn’t help because, as the court recognized, “[e]ven ‘anonymized’ location data—from innocent people—can reveal astonishing glimpses into individuals’ private lives when the Government collects data across even a one- or two-hour period.”
The second and third steps of the process, taken ostensibly to narrow the number of devices disclosed to police, couldn’t buttress the search either. They were “undertaken with no judicial review whatsoever” and “provided law enforcement unchecked discretion to seize more intrusive and personal data with each round of requests—without ever needing to return to a neutral and detached magistrate for approval.” There were no objective guardrails in the warrant or “any semblance of objective criteria to guide how officers would narrow the lists of users.” And even though Google (rather than the police) insisted on narrowing at the second step, the court held “Fourth Amendment protections should not be left in the hands of a private actor.”
Chatrie follows everal other courts that have also held geofence warrants to be unconstitutional, but in each of those cases, the judges were reviewing the warrant before a defendant had ever been charged. The Chatrie case is different because the warrant was approved by a magistrate, and the investigation ultimately resulted in the case brought against Mr. Chatrie. With the help of experienced defense attorneys and extensive testimony from Google and expert witnesses for both the defense and prosecution, the parties were able to create a robust factual record, which the court detailed in its order. This should prove extremely helpful for other defendants challenging similar geofence warrants in the future.
The facts established in the case confirmed much of what we already suspected—that Google has a voluminous, detailed, and searchable database of location information, which it collects from “numerous tens of millions” of its users. The data comes from a database Google calls “Sensorvault,” where it stores location data for one of its services called “Location History.” Google collects Location History data from different sources, including wifi connections, GPS and Bluetooth signals, and cellular networks. And it logs a device’s location, on average, every two minutes. This makes it much more precise than cell site location information and allows Google to estimate a device’s (and by extension, the device owner’s) location to within 20 meters or less.
This precision also allows Google to infer where a user has been, what they were doing at the time, and the path they took to get there. Google can even determine a user’s elevation and establish what floor of a building that user may have been on. As the court noted, “Location History appears to be the most sweeping, granular, and comprehensive tool—to a significant degree—when it comes to collecting and storing location data.”
However, the fact witnesses also showed that, despite this claimed precision, the data may not be all that accurate. It may place a device inside the geofenced area that was, in fact hundreds of feet away and vice versa. This creates the possibility of both false positives and false negatives—people could be implicated for the robbery when they were nowhere near the bank, or the actual perpetrator might not show up at all in the data Google provides to police.
Unfortunately for Mr. Chatrie, despite the court’s determination that the warrant was plainly unconstitutional, the court nevertheless refused to suppress the evidence. The court held that the officer acted in good faith on what he thought was a valid warrant. This is a frustrating outcome that lets the police off the hook in this case. However, the court’s order makes clear that this can’t happen again in the future. The police are now on notice that geofence warrants are, by default, unconstitutional, and there are very few—if any—scenarios in which they could satisfy the Fourth Amendment.
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JAN MOIR: Sorry, but women don't want changing rooms open to all... Public spaces where women and girls are undressing should be sacrosanct
In the article below, "Monsoon" is a women's fashion shop. "Shower" is British military slang of obscene but very derogatory meaning
What a right shower they are at Monsoon.
Following a complaint by one non‑binary teenager this week — let me repeat, a single person who made one solitary protest on social media — the fashion chain, whose entire range is designed for women and children only, has declared that its changing rooms are now ‘available to all customers’.
Does this mean that any dirty old men who want to spy on young girls trying on crop tops should throw on their crusty macs and thunder down to one of Monsoon’s 180 shops pronto, grab some floaty skirts and head for the changing rooms? Who knows? But if they did, no one at Monsoon would be able to stop them.
This all started because sixth‑former Charlie Moore wanted to buy a prom dress, so went shopping at a Monsoon branch in Birmingham.
So far, so ordinary — except that Charlie (who uses the pronouns ‘they/them’ instead of ‘he/she’) was asked to leave the store’s changing rooms after being told by an assistant that ‘males are not allowed to try our clothes on’.
Charlie does not feel comfortable with the gender they were assigned at birth. Born male, they now wish to live their life as a non-binary person and is hoping for gender-affirming hormone therapy. Fair enough, that’s totally Charlie’s call.
After leaving the store, the 18-year-old complained on social media, where Charlie lists themself as ‘pansexual’ and also the chair of the West Midlands Young Liberals and trans-spokesperson for the Young Liberals.
Uh-oh.
One can only imagine the panic bomb that exploded at Monsoon HQ. God, no! Anything but the Young Liberals!
The company immediately capitulated. There was an ocean of grovel, fawn, cringe, kowtow — and how.
Not only did it declare that its changing rooms were now open to all, it offered to find a dress for Charlie ‘free of charge’. Result!
I’m glad for Charlie and hope their hurt feelings are assuaged and that they shall go to the ball. (Unlikely to do so in a Monsoon dress, though, as they have said they will never shop there again.)
However, where does that leave the majority of Monsoon customers — the birth-assigned females, the mothers, the loyal shoppers who might well feel differently about another formerly ‘safe space’ going, going, gone? What about our rights and feelings?
Because really, this isn’t about Charlie, who only wants to live their life. But what if the person in the next changing room is not this Charlie — but Charlie Nutter or Creepy Charlie, who is very much not your darling? The point is that public spaces where women and girls are undressing should be sacrosanct.
Young women should be able to shop in peace, with an expectation of privacy and safety, free from the male gaze and possibly predatory interest. Older women should be able to welcome the comfort and security of female-only zones.
By making its changing rooms available to ‘all customers’, Monsoon is at risk of alienating the majority of its core clientele. Why are their feelings, hurt or otherwise, never taken into account?
Is it just a coincidence that this all happened just days after the Equality and Human Rights Commission issued guidance that services such as gym changing rooms, bathrooms and domestic abuse refuges should be open to trans people whenever possible? And that exceptions are only acceptable if there are ‘proportionate and justified reasons’?
It’s not the law, not yet (just an interpretation of existing equality laws), but one can see the way things are going.
A tolerant and healthy society can be accommodating and flexible, but how will commerce cope? Hard to imagine companies such as Monsoon allowing the need for more diverse changing rooms to eat into an inch of their high-profit retail space. Far easier to trample over women’s rights instead, so let’s just do that, shall we?
Many will sympathise with Charlie and their difficult journey. I know I do. Charlie has already started a GoFundMe page to raise the money for their gender therapy: ‘The NHS’s gender services are terribly underfunded and inadequate, and to avoid furthering already present medical-related trauma, I’ve elected for a private route,’ they write on their page. ‘Please chip in.’
At the time of writing, Charlie has reached half of the £1,200 goal. The kindness of strangers and the support of friends is so inspiring, isn’t it?
That won’t stop the storm clouds gathering for Monsoon. But I feel it deserves the approaching culture war squalls.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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