Docs cheered for standing up for 'trans' children

Several medical associations are urging the U.S. surgeon general, Dr. Jerome Adams, to issue a warning over transgender surgeries for children.

The letter to Dr. Adams was penned by the American College of Pediatricians.

ACP executive director Dr. Michelle Cretella tells OneNewsNow that sex-change hormones and life-altering surgeries are not backed by scientific research. Instead, children are subjected to sterility, blood clots, strokes, malignancy, elevated rates of suicide, and more.

"There is no science,” she insists, “to establish that this is safe or effective in children."

Medical groups in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Sweden have also issued warnings, she says, and that takes courage to do so because it means standing up to far-left, trans-affirming activists.

"These physicians who are standing up and going against the tide,” she says, “are risking their very careers and social standing."

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Transgender group Mermaids says children as young as 12 who question their gender should be offered puberty-blocking medication

Children as young as 12 who question their gender identity should be offered puberty blockers, according to a transgender group.

Teachers were told in a training session led by a trainer for the group Mermaids the hormones give the children 'immense relief' and are 'completely reversible'.

The meeting was held at Newman University in Birmingham last December with around 20 teachers and pastoral staff.

A recording obtained by the Sunday Times was made by an audience member in which the trainer says: 'Puberty blocker medication doesn't make any changes, so [is] completely reversible.

'What it does is put a pause button on the pituitary gland and freezes puberty where it is. Not growth, just puberty. Take the blockers away and biological puberty will recommence.'

The training session is believed to be a blueprint for Mermaid's training in schools nationwide.

The advice have been criticised by an Oxford academic who said it could push children towards early medical intervention.

Michael Biggs, associate professor of sociology at St Cross College, also pointed to evidence which shows most children who are prescribed blockers at a young age progress to surgery.

He said he has unpublished evidence that children experience psychological problems a year on from taking blockers.

Professor Biggs has previously been accused of transphobia by the Oxford Student newspaper after allegedly posting offensive tweets on a pseudonymous account.

One tweet from the account said: 'Transphobia is a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.'

Michael Conroy, who took the recording of the training session, has worked in pastoral support in schools for 15 years.

He said he fears Mermaids is encouraging children to believe they are born in the wrong body.

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Mermaids said the blockers are reversible and can give children relief if they are experiencing gender dysphoria

Information on Mermaid's website states: 'The blockers do not change your child’s body, but they do pause puberty to give them time to explore their gender further without the adolescent physical changes that can bring great distress.

'If a young person decides that they are happy in their birth gender then they can stop the treatment.'

They also point out that the earlier the intervention, the less surgery will be required later on, allowing trans people to appear more as their chosen gender.

Mermaids said in a statement: 'The information in our sessions is based on a wealth of international scientific study and 25 years of experience in this field.

'Since this training session in 2018, we have been funded by the Department for Education in a schools training programme overseen by the Government Equalities Office.'

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British census to let you CHOOSE your sex: Experts warn that new trans-friendly guidelines could wreck crucial plans for Britain's future

People filling in the national census are to be told officially that they can say their sex is different from the one on their birth certificate.

The new guidance runs the risk of affecting vital data regarding the population the Government needs to plan for the future.

The advice for England and Wales is set to come in from the next census, to be held in 2021.

Transgender people will be told that when asked in the survey if they are ‘male’ or ‘female’ they can choose whichever option they feel best describes their sex.

The advice will apply to both adults and children, with parents being able to choose to record a sex for their child that differs from the one on their birth certificate.

It will also be applicable to individuals who are ‘non-binary’, meaning they do not identify as either men or women, and people who have both male and female sex characteristics – known commonly as ‘intersex’.

The move by the Office for National Statistics is a departure from the last census where no such written guidelines were provided and typically people would opt for the sex they were born.

It reflects a growing trend among public bodies such as the NHS, prisons and schools to allow individuals to erase their biological sex from official records and register as the gender they feel they are – even if they have not undergone any physical changes.

The guidance is set to accompany census questions when for the first time they are sent out electronically rather than in the post to 26 million households in March 2021.

An ‘information paper’ published by the ONS this month revealed that the compulsory question which is likely to be posed is ‘What is your sex?’. The response options – as has been the case in previous censuses – will be ‘male’ or ‘female’.

But in its advice on answering this question, an accompanying statement says: ‘If you are one or more of non-binary, transgender, have variations of sex characteristics, sometimes also known as intersex, the answer you give can be different from what is on your birth certificate. If you’re not sure how to answer, use the sex registered on your official documents, such as passport or driving licence, or whichever describes your sex.’

Last night, legal and medical experts warned that failing to accurately record the numbers of females and males in the population could lead the Government to misallocate funds for vital services.

NHS paediatrician Dr Julie Maxwell said: ‘Almost every kind of illness behaves differently in men and women. If the national statistics are skewed in this way so you don’t know how many biological men or women there are, and if you add on to that the fact people are already changing their sex on medical records, you lose any meaningful knowledge of how often health problems are happening in men and women.

‘And my biggest fear for children is they are not going to get appropriate health services allocated for their needs because of messing around with statistics.’

Professor Rosa Freedman, an expert on LGBT human rights law, added: ‘To understand how ludicrous this is – if people could just pick a race or disability, we would all be up in arms.

‘The purpose of the census is to understand what the population is and plan for those demographics. The census is not there to validate someone’s gender identity. The census is there to allow the Government to plan for the next ten years in terms of its funding for programmes and where it should focus its resources. Conflating gender with sex as the ONS are doing with this guidance does not allow for population planning.’

The next census is also set to ask adults over 16 an additional ‘voluntary’ question on whether their gender is the same as the sex they were registered at birth for the first time. If the answer to this question is ‘no’ they are given the option to enter a term they use to describe their gender. The ONS said it was advised by a number of transgender lobby groups in devising this question on gender such as Mermaids, which supports young people, but also consulted potential objectors such as feminists.

It insisted that while there has never been written guidance for transgender people on how to answer the question on sex, there had been no change in their advice. A spokesman said if a trans person called one of their advisers on how to answer this section in the last 2011 census, they would have been verbally told to select the sex they believed was correct for them.

Mermaids also advised ITV in the making of a series on transgender children called Butterfly – a drama last year in which Anna Friel played a mother who supports her 11-year-old son to begin living as a girl called Maxine.

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Where has our resilience gone?

How Australians live has changed over time. Much of it is for the better. We are richer, more worldly, better travelled, more inclusive: the advancement of women, for starters, has transformed the way we live and work. But we seem to be lacking one important quality that was there in spades a generation ago: resilience. Last century, small communities across Australia were not only resilient, they were also mightily creative and cooperative.

I grew up in just such a community. Terang, 200km west of Melbourne, had just 2400 people in the 1960s. No one locked their cars in Terang. When we went to the beach for a week in January, we didn’t lock the house. You might think this was an extraordinarily trusting thing to do, but there was nothing of value in the house to steal.

On some weekends, my father and three of his mates would borrow a flat-tray truck from work and collect and cut firewood for their families. They pooled funds to buy a chainsaw to make the job easier. There was such joie de vivre about the excursion: packing lunches in a sugar bag; preparing flasks of tea; the unfailing cheeriness of the men; the celebratory beer at the end of the day as they laughed and joked – and smoked – around the kitchen table.

It seemed that the whole community was endlessly engaged in organising working bees, contributing to cake stalls, attending Mother’s Club meetings. Everyone had a place and a purpose. A neighbour did the flowers for Sunday mass. People met in church halls to play euchre. On Saturday nights, the “young ones” would attend dances in country halls.

In 1963, we were one of the first families in our clutch of Housing Commission houses to get a television set. A neighbour’s teenage daughter would come to our house to watch Bonanza on a Monday night. When the TV went “on the blink”, another neighbour who had trained in electronics back in England would arrive with a visor and soldering iron to fix it. Today we would call this “building stronger communities” but back then it was just something everyone did. You shared, you co-operated, you pooled expertise.

There was football, netball, swimming, cycling, cricket, tennis and golf as well as music, including a pipe band, a brass band, Caledonian and Irish dancing, an amateur theatrical society. I am surprised any work was done, such was the social and sporting vitality of the town. And I don’t recall anyone complaining about the lack of facilities. The mindset seemed to be to at least try to help yourself first through cooperative effort. It was like living in an Australian kibbutz.

The town had its stratification, of course. The Catholics and Protestants; the doctors, pharmacists, lawyers and business owners who lived on the hill, and those of us who lived on the flat. The district had its landed gentry, too. But there didn’t seem to be any enmity; everyone got on. The local co-op had a staff picnic, there was an agricultural show, Anzac Day parades and an Australia Day parade of floats down the main street.

A few generations later we seem to be struggling to build the self-reliance, the resilience we had in that post-war era. Our town was remote; we had to make do, to get along, to make our own fun, to find and share pooled knowledge. There’s a lot about this era, such as smoking, that is best left in the past but there are other things, like an esprit de corps, a community camaraderie, that remains truly inspiring. I wonder what older Australians of the 2060s will recall as being truly inspiring about our way of life today.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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