Finnish psychiatrist who pioneered 'gender-affirming care' but now shuns it slams US policy of pumping kids with hormones, says child DIED after surgery - and believes around a third may end up detransitioning
A woman who led European efforts to give puberty blockers to trans children has bared all about U-turning on gender-affirming care, as it is known, and debunks treatments she now calls 'dangerous.'
Dr Riittakerttu Kaltiala, chief psychiatrist at the Tampere University Hospital Department of Adolescent Psychiatry in Finland, has revealed why she changed her mind about helping minors medically transition.
Writing in The Free Press, Dr Kaltiala says the Western medical establishment has been cowed by trans activists into a 'dangerous groupthink' of pushing risky sex-altering drugs on children.
'Gender transition has gotten out of hand,' says Dr Kaltiala.
'When medical professionals start saying they have one answer that applies everywhere, or that they have a cure for all of life's pains, that should be a warning to us all that something has gone very wrong.'
Dr Kaltiala's article is just the latest in a slew of insider revelations to question America's model of affirming trans kids, and offering them puberty blockers, hormones, and even surgery as treatments.
Providing such care has become a hot-button issue in culture wars between conservatives and progressives, and a major tension within the pediatric community.
Advocates of gender-affirming care say trans-identifying kids should be helped with puberty blockers and other treatments.
They say it's a human a right and maybe the only thing that could save them from suicide.
Critics say kids are too young to opt for irreversible sex change treatments, and often just need mental health counselling instead.
They are borne out by a growing number of 'detransitioners' who come to regret their often painful procedures and seek medical help to reverse them.
Several have launched malpractice lawsuits against their former doctors.
In her article, Dr Kaltiala explains how she was tasked in 2011 by Finland's health ministry with opening the country's first gender clinic.
It was launched to help the small number of minors who felt discomfort with their sex, a condition known as gender dysphoria.
The move came after the release of research from the Netherlands about the benefits of helping gender dysphoric minors, by using hormones to stop them going through puberty, which was known as the 'Dutch protocol'
She quickly became alarmed when the clinic opened and patients 'came in droves,' she says.
But the patients were not like those covered in the Dutch protocol — a small number of boys who had felt for many years they were really girls, said Dr Kaltiala.
Instead, they were overwhelmingly girls aged 15-17 who had only recently come out as male, she said.
Worse still, they also 'presented with severe psychiatric conditions' like autism, she says.
Still, doctors followed the Dutch protocol and provided puberty blockers — but they often did not help the troubled teens, says Dr Kaltiala.
'The young people we were treating were not thriving. Instead, their lives were deteriorating,' she wrote.
'They were withdrawing from all social activities. They were not making friends. They were not going to school.'
The patients were also 'networking and exchanging information about how to talk to us' and qualify for sex-altering treatment, she said.
That's how she realized she was dealing with a 'social contagion,' not a medical problem.
The Dutch protocol had 'serious problems,' wrote the 58-year-old.
Researchers had failed to study detransitioners or those who had problems with their treatment.
'One of the patients had died due to complications from genital transition surgery,' she wrote.
About a third of trans kids who undergo treatments come to change their minds, she said.
Conversations with clinicians in other parts of Europe revealed this was a continent-wide trend.
She tried to publish papers and sound the alarm. But the medical community had been hijacked by activists and succumbed to a 'dangerous groupthink,' she says.
'Anyone, including physicians, researchers, academics, and writers, who raised concerns about the growing power of gender activists, and about the effects of medically transitioning young people, were subjected to organized campaigns of vilification and threats to their careers,' she wrote.
But the research is finally catching up and experts now understand that fast-tracking trans kids onto puberty blockers makes for terrible policy, she says.
'For the overwhelming majority of gender dysphoric children — around 80 percent — their dysphoria resolves itself if they are left to go through natural puberty,' she wrote.
'Often these children come to realize they are gay.'
Dr Kaltiala says her native Finland, the UK, Sweden, and other European countries restrict puberty blockers nowadays.
But trans ideologues have a stranglehold on US medical societies, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, she says.
She tried to raise her concerns at an annual conference, but her proposals were rejected by the academy, she says.
'This is highly disturbing,' she wrote. 'Science does not progress through silencing. Doctors who refuse to consider evidence presented by critics are putting patient safety at risk.'
The AAP did not immediately answer DailyMail.com's request for comment.
In August, the academy renewed its support for the gender-affirming model of care, but launched a review into the evidence underpinning it.
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Woke campaigners are 'authoritarians' using hate speech laws to stifle free speech, report warns
Woke campaigners have been condemned as 'authoritarians' who deploy hate speech laws to stifle free speech.
A report from a think-tank said elements of the Left have 'successfully weaponised' concepts such as hate speech to 'silence their political opponents'.
It highlighted the 'hard inner core' of campaign groups such as Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion.
Describing the intolerant woke as the 'Culture-Control Left', or CCL, the report said their views now 'stretch beyond the traditional confines of the left and now heavily influence big business, public sector bureaucracies (including the police) and some Conservative politicians'.
The report noted how the woke movement was leading to people being forced out of jobs over their 'gender critical' views on transgender rights, and to a growing number of 'campaigns to remove or deface statues'.
The report by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) added that hate speech laws are applied by police in a 'partial and inconsistent way'.
It said that 'when someone who is not white makes what seem like racist remarks' it is regarded as a 'form of cultural resistance' rather than as a crime.
Those seeking to suppress alternative viewpoints in favour of woke views are part of a 'form of authoritarian politics', it added.
'They see censorship as a tool to transfer power between social groups,' it said.
'They threaten any open society.
'Being accused of hate speech is the contemporary equivalent of being charged with blasphemy or seditious libel.' The paper concluded: 'The damage that has been done by the CCL at the legal and institutional levels must be undone.
'This will be a considerable challenge, given the degree of penetration the CCL has achieved into the public life of Britain.
'Opponents of the CCL must make a special effort to identify and reform specific laws and practices that are incompatible with a truly liberal political order.
'In particular, advocates for free speech must now create an inventory of specific pieces of legislation that should be amended or abolished.
'The governing objective should be to have only those laws in place that criminally prosecute speech that directly and immediately threatens or incites violence, or speech that is intrinsically connected to criminal acts such as fraud, robbery and murder.'
Author Marc Glendening, of the IEA, said: 'British democracy faces an existential threat from those seeking to silence debate.
'Defenders of political pluralism now need to wage a counterattack based upon a foundational, natural rights-based defence of free speech.' The Government had previously outlined plans to bolster free speech in a new Bill of Rights, but it was dropped in June.
The legislation would have made free speech a 'trump card' over other rights, barring the creation of European-style privacy laws through the back door.
When the Bill was dropped by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's government, former justice secretary Dominic Raab - who drew up the proposals - said it was a 'disappointing' decision which would mean 'all the wrong people will celebrate'.
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Black activist ditches his progressive, defund the police beliefs after being arrested for defending himself against homeless knifeman in his Oakland garden
A black activist has renounced his beliefs about defunding the police and set out to save his crime-ridden home city, Oakland, from what he calls 'phony progressives'.
Seneca Scott, 44, used to be a self-proclaimed 'leftie'. In 2020 he ran for elected office in Oakland, calling for 'shifting budgets away from the police' and a 'complete overhaul of how we want our communities to interact with law enforcement.'
But now he is vehemently anti what he terms the 'woke left' and 'phony "progressives"' who he says are 'dismissive towards black and brown people'.
Scott told The Free Press that he changed his views when he realized 'how deep the damage was' and how 'the people we had put in place were just complete frauds'.
He decided to run for mayor last year after his own run-in with police, when he was arrested for defending himself against a knife-wielding thief in his own garden.
At around 10pm on October 30 2021, Scott discovered two men were trying to steal the water heater from his garden. He went down to confront them, taking his gun for protection, and found they had set up a tent and laid out drugs on his picnic table.
He told them to put down the water heater and one of them pulled a knife. Scott showed them his pistol and again told them to put down the water heater.
At this point one of the men fled, but the other flagged down a police car and told them Scott had pulled a gun on him. Police arrested Scott on charges of brandishing a weapon and carrying a concealed firearm.
The charges have all since been dropped.
Scott said: 'It’s unfortunate that we’re forced to self-help right now. Just that same night, an hour earlier, my neighbor was shot in his face while holding his baby. That was on the same street, like eight houses down.'
Since Oakland officials cut $18million from the police budget to pay for social services in 2021, Scott says crime has gone through the roof.
He said: 'There's no rule of law. Our crime labs don’t work. We have to go out and subcontract to other places to do DNA tests or fingerprint tests. And sometimes they deny us.
He says police response time to crime is 'insane' and it can take '45, 50, minutes' for police to arrive.
Police data shows the city now has the second worst 911 response time in California, while the number of homicides has jumped by 79 per cent from 2018 to 2022.
In the year to date, violent crime is 22 per cent higher than last year, motor vehicle theft is 51 per cent higher and robbery is 36 per cent higher.
Scott said there is a huge problem with 'drug addicts and drug tourists', adding: 'Anyone who has the ability is making an exit plan. Like you're in a country going to war soon and people are looking at it like, how do we get out?'
Scott, who graduated from Cornell, has activism in his blood - his father was Martin Luther King Jr's wife, Coretta's, cousin.
He grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, but his family left the inner city to escape the crack epidemic. He moved to Oakland in 2012.
He lost his 2022 mayoral campaign, but is now focused on forming a new party, filled with nonpartisan political candidates.
He is particularly opposed to the current Oakland officials and the mayor, Sheng Thao, who has faced fierce opposition to her crime policies - including defunding the police.
Oakland NAACP leaders called for a state of emergency in August over the soaring crime rate, as they attributed it to the defund the police movement and Price.
Sharing a video of a rubbish filled encampment in Oakland on Twitter, Scott said: 'Remember @carol_fife claimed back in February she could "clean up any encampment quickly" once Sheng took the mayor's seat? What happened to that?'
He says doesn't do left-right politics any more, adding: 'The Democrats wrongly demonize everybody who’s a white man or say every single thing that’s wrong with society is white supremacy. It’s bull****.'
Instead he says: 'I’m post-partisan. I don’t go left or right. I go up and down. Either you have integrity and solutions or you don’t.'
Through his nonprofit Neighbors Together, Scott is planning to find 100 nontraditional candidates like himself and help them get elected to positions on city councils and boards across America.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12693221/Oakland-Seneca-Scott-crime-defund-police.html
*************************************************Astonishing moment feminist author Clementine Ford leaves Project hosts stunned by claiming marriage is 'built on the oppression of women'
Clemmie is a very typical feminist in her devotion to broad generalizations. The fact of the matter is that there are as many variations of male/female relationhips as there are men and women.
And it can as easily be the man as the woman who gets the short end. Men often feel that a full-time wife and mother has got a pretty good deal but accept that out of appreciation of the woman -- particularly in view of the great attention she can give to the chidren.
Even where both partners work, mutually agreed divisions of labour are often entered in to. That's not always so and it is those situations that Clemmie presumably has in mind in her rant She does have a partner herself so should probably acknowledge that good male/female arrangements can happen
Controversial feminist figure Clementine Ford has described marriage as being 'built on the oppression of women' and compared wives to slaves in a new book.
The best-selling author appeared on The Project to outline an alternative view on marriage in her latest book I Don't, describing how she wants women to question what they've been told about it.
'My biggest issue with marriage is that I think that it's a fundamentally flawed institution that is built on the oppression of women,' she said on the program.
'...But also that it's presented to people now as something that it never has been, which is something that we need in order to have happiness and love.
'Love marriage is only about 200 years old, so the idea that somehow marriage is an essential thing that will elevate our life to something better is historically wrong and I think that we would be much better as people focusing on how to make ourselves happy.'
She went on to say that marriage was largely 'great for men', while women were left with a large burden inside of the relationship.
'One of the chief complaints a lot of women have about their husbands is that they don't really feel like their husbands see them, all they are is kind of like a glorified all-in-one appliance for them,' she said.
Ms Ford said she was 'not at all against people falling in love and forming families', but urged people to consider whether they needed to get married in order to have significant relationships.
'If you have essentially all the same legal rights in a de facto relationship as you would in a marriage, what is the marriage and the piece of government paper giving you that a relationship doesn't?' she asked.
Host Waleed Aly then pointed out to Ms Ford that the dynamics of de facto relationships are often similar to marriages, posing the question to her that marriage may not be the issue after all.
'It's a good question Waleed, well maybe the plan is to go for de facto relationships next,' she said. 'My goal is to really get women to see something bigger and better for themselves than just being someone's partner or wife.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12692785/Feminist-Clementine-Ford-Project-marriage.html
****************************************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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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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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