Author who faced backlash from trans activists when she questioned hormone treatments for teens reveals dozens of doctors and teachers agree with her - but says they are too scared to speak out
The author of a controversial book examining the huge surge in adolescents identifying as transgender has said that she received an outpouring of private support from doctors and teachers who live in fear of backlash from trans activists if they speak publicly.
Author Abigail Shrier, whose book Irreversible Damage drew both backlash and praise last year, spoke out in a guest essay on Monday for the newsletter of former New York Times op-ed editor Bari Weiss.
In her book, named a book of the year by the Economist, Shrier investigated the surge of adolescent girls presenting with gender dysphoria and self-identifying as transgender.
She notes that in the United Kingdom, the number of such cases up are up 4,400 percent over the past decade.
The author suggested the phenomenon is due to social pressure on teen girls, comparing it to 'the Salem witch trials of the 17th Century, the nervous disorders of the 18th Century, and anorexia nervosa, repressed memory, bulimia and the self-harm contagion in the 20th Century.'
Shrier questioned the wisdom of hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery for transgender youth -- and her book was met with an onslaught of criticism from trans activists, who called it transphobic and accused her of of 'erasing' trans youth.
The author denies the allegations that she is transphobic, writing in her new essay: 'As I have stated endlessly in public interviews and in Senate testimony, I fully support medical transition for mature adults and believe that transgender individuals should live openly without fear or stigma.'
In the furor last year, Target briefly banned sales of the book, and Amazon halted a promotional campaign.
Just last week, the blog Science-Based Medicine retracted a mostly positive review of Shrier's book by a medical doctor (the review has been reprinted elsewhere).
Now Shrier reveals that she received a private outpouring of support for her book, even from unlikely quarters.
One such note came from 'a senior staffer for a popular 2020 Democratic presidential candidate,' according to Shrier.
The supporter wrote: 'It might surprise you to know that I work for a prominent progressive politician (obviously I could never express my support for your work publicly). But it should be known that not everyone on the Left has totally lost their mind.'
'Child and adult psychologists and psychiatrists write to say they have witnessed a surge in transgender identification among teen girls who seem to be acting under peer and social media influence,' wrote Shrier.
'Teachers write to say they believe that the phenomenon is plainly an example of social contagion within their classrooms. Surgeons and pediatricians and endocrinologists write to wonder aloud at what has happened to their profession,' she continued.
'Journalists at our most storied newspapers, TV networks, and literary magazines, even at NPR, write to tell me they liked my book, they agree with it, and to tut-tut the abuse directed at me,' wrote Shrier. 'They wish — wish! — they could say so publicly.'
Shrier argued that the time had come for people who agreed with the premise of her book to speak up publicly, despite their fears of being targeted by trans activists.
'The first hundred or so silent supporter emails meant the most to me. They made me feel less crazy and less alone. But the inescapable reality is that defeating this ideology will take courage,' she wrote.
'And courage is not something that can happen in private. Courage requires each one of us to speak up, publicly, for what we believe in. Even when — especially when — it carries costs.'
Shrier argued that social pressure was keeping many people silent, particularly medical doctors who have an 'obligation to do something.'
'Whether or not most people admit it, what keeps them from speaking up in the face of what they know is wrong is fear,' she wrote.
'Fear not primarily of unemployment, though that is a pressing concern, but fear of ostracism. This deep and ancient fear is behind our desperate reach for innocence and safety when we virtue signal. By contrast, we stand exposed when we speak unpopular truth,' wrote Shrier.
In a note appended to the essay, Weiss wrote that she was committed to publish 'those voices who have been shut out of so many other channels that ought to be open to them.'
'How have we gotten to the point where having conversations about important scientific and medical subjects requires such a high level of personal risk?' she wrote.
'How have we accepted a reality in which Big Tech can carry out the digital equivalent of book burnings?'
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Supreme Court Protects Property Rights Against Union Trespass
The Supreme Court on Wednesday held that a state law permitting labor union organizers to enter farmland without permission to try to organize workers was unconstitutional under the Fifth and 14th Amendments to the Constitution.
The ruling was 6 to 3.
In Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, the court considered a California regulation that allowed union agents to “take access” to farmland for up to three hours a day, 120 days per year in order to try to unionize workers.
Ordinarily, that sort of uninvited entry would be considered a trespass, but California’s regulation purported to make it lawful.
The question the court considered was whether that regulation was a “taking” within the meaning of the Fifth and 14th Amendments. Those provisions say that no state may take private property for public use without compensation.
The clearest example of a “taking” happens when the government uses its eminent domain power to acquire title to land against the owner’s wishes. But other takings occur when the government denies an owner the full rights that come with land ownership, such as the right to exclude other people.
The latter is what happened here. California’s government denied farmers the right to exclude people from their land. The right to exclude, wrote Chief Justice John Roberts for the majority, “is one of the most treasured rights of property ownership” and “is universally held to be a fundamental element of the property right.”
Citing case law stretching back 100 years, Roberts observed that California’s regulation “appropriates a right to physically invade the growers’ property—to literally ‘take access’ and therefore violates the Constitution.”
California argued that it had not taken the farmers’ land because the regulation allowed activists only temporary access. In dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer also took the position that anything less than 365-day-per-year access was not a taking.
Roberts called that argument “insupportable as a matter of precedent and common sense.”
For one thing, Roberts said, the court has long held that even temporary or intermittent invasions are still takings. And for another thing, he said, drawing an artificial line between temporary and permanent takings would create absurd results. For example, a taking would be unconstitutional if it extends for 365 days per year, but constitutional if it lasts 364.
In dissent, Breyer—joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan—argued that California’s regulation did not deny owners the right to exclude, because it merely “regulates” that right. In their view, a law is only a taking if it “goes too far,” and to determine that, courts should “balance several factors,” keeping in mind that some “invasions” are needed for the government to run our complex modern world.
There’s something Orwellian about that, and Roberts deftly exposed it, saying that fundamental property rights, like the right to exclude, “cannot be balanced away.” Moreover, the fact that we live in a complex modern society “only reinforce[s] the importance of safeguarding the basic property rights that preserve individual liberty, as the Founders explained.”
Among others, Roberts was referring to John Adams, who said, “Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist.”
Roberts was right to remind us of that lesson and to declare, once again, that protecting property rights “empowers persons to shape and plan their own destiny in the world, where governments are always eager to do so for them.”
It’s impossible to miss the message there to the increasingly loud socialist movement in the United States. The Constitution does not permit that vision. Private property is essential to liberty, and it’s not going anywhere.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/06/23/supreme-court-protects-property-rights-against-union-trespass
*************************************Washington Post is condemned for video urging Americans to set up 'white accountability groups' and force themselves into 'a period of deep shame' over their skin color
The Washington Post has been branded 'neoracist' and accused of promoting a 'pseudoreligious movement' after the airing of a controversial video declaring people should feel 'shame for being white' and urging readers to form 'white accountability groups'.
The latest episode of the series, hosted by Nicole Ellis and called the New Normal, was released on Friday and discussed how white people can combat white supremacy.
'An antiracist culture does not exist among white people,' trauma specialist and author Resmaa Menakem says when introducing the concept. 'White people need to start getting together specifically around race.'
The video series was launched last spring, originally to discuss the coronavirus pandemic but shifted to conversations about race after the death of George Floyd.
He adds that the groups should meet and discuss for up to five years, until, 'you end up with a community that is aligned with each other.'
Rebecca Toporek, who is a professor in the Department of Counseling at San Francisco State University agreed with the concept, saying that such groups, 'are really helpful in terms of having a place to process, having a group of people whose responsibility it is to call me on things, or to challenge me.'
Ellis then speaks to trauma therapist Ilyse Kennedy, who said she had been taking part in such a group, and said that it was important that members experience a, 'period of deep shame for being white and for acknowledging the harm that our ancestors have caused,' adding, 'we can't ask people of color to hold our hand.'
Toporek said such measures might be necessary to separate oneself from white supremacy.
'Part of the structure of racism... is to keep us from recognizing that racism is part of our daily lives.' she said. 'So it's a longer term process of looking at your understanding of yourself in the world, both historically but also contextually. Also the family you live in, the community you live in, and what role whiteness plays in that.'
Jesse Singal questioned the concepts promoted on the episode and likened them to a cult, tweeting, 'This is a very strange pseudoreligious movement that is likely to do more harm than good.'
'I'm fighting against race supremacy; the Washington Post wants to install it everywhere,' tweeted Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow for the Manhattan Institute.
Rufo, one of the most famous opponents of critical race theory in the US, added: 'The game is that they want to create an essentialized racial category ("whiteness"), load it with negative connotations, then impose it on individuals through guilt, shame, and school indoctrination. This approach is reductive, manipulative, and malicious. Don't fall for it.'
User @AGHamilton29 called the episode a: 'A 5 minute video propagating ignorant neoracist nonsense. It's really astonishing the extent to which this stuff is becoming mainstream and normalized, especially by the press.'
Another user replied that: 'It's like a bizarre new religion. They have their own language, their idea of original sins (whiteness), and seeking redemption through "doing the work" to understand race issues. It's a disconnect from the reality 99% of Americans live in.'
Discussions of race and 'anti-racism' efforts to actively tackle discrimination have hogged the headlines in recent months, and sparked fierce discussions between supporters and opponents.
Those who support critical race theory and anti-racism teachings say they are necessary to highlight the depth of racism faced by black Americans in almost every aspect of their life.
Opponents say the theories are too unequivocal, offer few solutions, and serve only to divide people further.
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Does ‘Housing First’ Help Homeless? Here’s What Happened in Los Angeles
In 2016, influential political leaders, activists, and media outlets in Los Angeles said they had a simple solution to homelessness: Build more housing. Echoing an argument heard across the country, they claimed that rising rents have thrown people onto the streets and that by directly providing free “permanent supportive housing,” cities can reduce the number of people on the streets and save costs on emergency services.
In response, 77% of Los Angeles voters approved a $1.2 billion bond for the construction of 10,000 units for the city’s homeless. That commitment made Los Angeles the most significant testing ground for the “Housing First” approach that has become the dominant policy idea on homelessness for West Coast cities.
Even before the passage of the bond, the concept’s creator, Sam Tsemberis, was lavished with praise by the national media. In 2015, The Washington Post wrote that Tsemberis had “all but solved chronic homelessness” and that his research “commands the support of most scholars.”
In the years since, Housing First has taken even greater hold in California and the across the West. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti recently declared that “we need to have an entitlement to housing.” California Gov. Gavin Newsom went a step further, arguing that “doctors should be able to write prescriptions for housing the same way they do for insulin or antibiotics.”
Five years in, the project has been plagued by construction delays, massive cost overruns, and accusations of corruption. The Los Angeles city controller issued a scathing report, “The High Cost of Homeless Housing,” which shows that some studio and one-bedroom apartments were costing taxpayers more than $700,000 each, with 40% of total costs devoted to consultants, lawyers, fees, and permitting.
The project is a boon for real estate developers and a constellation of nonprofits and service providers, but a boondoggle for taxpayers. The physical apartment units are bare-bones—small square footage, cheap flooring, vinyl surfaces—but have construction costs similar to luxury condos in the fashionable parts of Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, unsheltered homelessness has increased 41%, vastly outpacing the construction of new supportive housing units. Los Angeles magazine, which initially supported the measure, now wonders whether it has become “a historic public housing debacle.”
Before completing a single housing unit, the city reduced its projected construction from 10,000 units to 5,873 units over 10 years, with the potential for further reductions in the future.
But the long-term problem runs much deeper: Even if one accepts that permanent supportive housing is the solution, there are currently more than 66,000 homeless people in Los Angeles County. Under the best-case scenario, Proposition HHH will solve less than 10% of the problem over the course of a decade.
Despite Housing First’s uncertainties, other West Coast cities desperate to solve homelessness, including Seattle and San Francisco, have been captured by its seductive messaging and promise of respite.
As Los Angeles grapples with the unforeseen consequences of its big bet on Housing First, the federal, state, and local governments, especially in major metropolitan areas, are preparing to commit billions of dollars to the program, whose track record remains woefully underexamined.
Ever since clinical psychologist Tsemberis pioneered the model in New York City in the 1990s, political leaders, activists, and academics have insisted that Housing First is an “evidence-based” intervention that reduces homelessness, saves taxpayer money, and improves lives.
Supporters frequently argue that the program reduced costs in a study of chronic alcoholics in Seattle, consistently demonstrates high retention rates in multiple academic surveys, and eliminated chronic homelessness in Utah.
“We’re going to stem this crisis by building supportive housing in every neighborhood throughout Los Angeles,” City Council member Herb Wesson recently claimed.
These studies, however, are not as persuasive as activists suggest. Although the study of chronic alcoholics in Seattle does show a net reduction in monthly social service costs of $2,449 per person, this figure does not include $11 million in capital and construction costs for the housing units themselves; in other words, Housing First saves money if the cost of housing is not included.
Even on its own favorable terms, the study’s purported savings aren’t as dramatic as they appear: While the Housing First participants showed a 63% reduction in service costs over six months, a wait-listed control group that was not provided housing showed a 42% reduction in service costs over the same time period, raising questions about the specific effectiveness of the intervention.
Claims that studies show one-year retention rates of roughly 80% for Housing First participants are open to question. In a meta-study of three best-in-class Housing First sites, researchers found that 43% remained in housing for the first 12 months, 41% were “intermittent stayers” who left and returned, and 16% abandoned the program or died within the first year. These findings challenge the argument that Housing First is a long-term solution to homelessness.
Finally, advocates and the media have long touted Utah as the gold standard of Housing First. “The Daily Show” called the state’s program “mind-blowing,” the Los Angeles Times reported in 2015 that Utah “is winning the war on chronic homelessness,” and dozens of media outlets announced that the state “reduced chronic homelessness by 91%.”
These miraculous results, however, were not the result of Housing First policies, but apparently clerical manipulation by state officials. According to the Deseret News and economist Kevin Corinth, “As much as 85% of Utah’s touted reductions in chronic homelessness … may have been due to changes in how the homeless were counted.”
It’s not that all of the chronically homeless were housed; they were simply transposed onto a new spreadsheet. Moreover, between 2016 and 2018, the number of unsheltered homeless in Utah nearly doubled—hardly the victory that Housing First activists had declared.
The recent debate surrounding Housing First has predominantly been focused on the physical and budgetary metrics of housing retention and cost reductions. But these surface-level concerns obscure a deeper question: What happens to the human beings in these programs? The results, according to the vast majority of studies, point to a grim conclusion: Housing First does not meaningfully improve human lives.
Although housing programs are often an effective solution for families experiencing a temporary loss of shelter, Housing First programs do not have a strong track record improving the lives of the unsheltered homeless—the people in tents, cars, and on the streets—who often suffer from more severe challenges.
According to research by the California Policy Lab, 75% of the unsheltered homeless have substance abuse conditions, 78% have mental health conditions, and 84% have physical health conditions.
In theory, Housing First would address these problems. In every program, residents are offered a wide range of services.
At the Pathways to Housing program in New York City, a flagship program founded by Tsemberis himself, residents are served by an “interdisciplinary team of professionals that includes social workers, nurses, psychiatrists, and vocational and substance abuse counselors who are available to assist consumers 7 days a week 24 hours a day.”
However, despite this massive intervention, the Pathways program shows no reduction in substance abuse or psychiatric symptoms over time—in fact, those conditions often worsened.
This basic finding is confirmed by a range of studies showing that residents of Housing First programs show no improvement regarding addiction and mental illness. They are housed but broken, wracked by the cruelest psychoses, compulsions, and torments—all under the guise of medical care.
A Housing First experiment in Ottawa, Canada, illustrates this paradoxical outcome in stark terms. Researchers divided the study into two populations: an “intervention” group that was provided Housing First and access to primary care, medically assisted treatment, social workers, and on-demand services; and a non-intervention “control” group that was not provided housing or services—it was simply left on the streets.
To the shock of the researchers, after 24 months, the non-intervention control group reported better results regarding substance abuse, mental health, quality of life, family relations, and mortality than the Housing First group. In other words, doing nothing resulted in superior human outcomes than providing Housing First with wraparound services.
One explanation may be that Housing First programs are deliberately not oriented toward recovery, rehabilitation, and renewal. They operate on the “harm reduction” model, which allows residents to continue using drugs such as alcohol, heroin, and methamphetamine, and does not require mental health treatment as a condition of residency.
In theory, this permissive policy would help “reduce harm” to the individual; in practice, however, it may create a community-level effect that makes it hard for any individual to find recovery.
Here is the basic chain of events: Homeless individuals with substance abuse and psychiatric disorders are placed together in a residential facility where they are allowed to continue the way of life they had on the streets. Despite the availability of services, there is no incentive to use those services and no disincentive to the problematic behavior associated with street homelessness. Consequently, widespread addiction often becomes the norm within Housing First programs.
Preferring Homelessness
This chain of events is not just a thought experiment. In Birmingham, Alabama, researchers inadvertently created this exact problem when they put participants of two different programs—one “recovery” program and one “harm reduction” program—in the same apartment complex.
Immediately after beginning the experiment, the recovery group “began abandoning the provided housing, complaining that their proximity to persons not required to remain abstinent (i.e., the other trial group) was detrimental to their recovery. They claimed that they preferred to return to homelessness rather than live near drug users.”
The researchers quickly stopped and reorganized the trial, writing that “this unexpected reaction shows one possible risk to housing persons with active addiction.”
Still, Housing First advocates insist that their policy is working. When reached for comment, Tsemberis insisted that The Washington Post headline declaring that he had “solved homelessness” is true.
“The most effective way to end homelessness for people with mental health and addiction is to provide housing and wraparound support,” Tsemberis said. He points toward rates of “housing stability” as the key metric, while conceding that Housing First does not provide “a cure for mental illness and addiction.”
This is a suggestion that policymakers have “solved homelessness” simply by bringing people indoors, no matter their addictions, mental illnesses, and human torments.
Advocates portray Housing First as a science that transcends politics. The policy was first adopted by the George W. Bush administration and has gained support from Republicans and Democrats alike. As The Washington Post observed, it is “a model so simple children could grasp it, so cost-effective fiscal hawks loved it, so socially progressive liberals praised it.”
However, the real-world evidence from cities such as Los Angeles challenges this narrative. If Housing First has demonstrated anything, it is this: It provides a stable residential environment for the homeless to live out their pathologies, subsidized by the public, and administered by the social-scientific sector. It does not, however, address addiction, mental illness, and other factors that limit human potential and lead to homelessness.
In Los Angeles, despite the insistence that Housing First is the answer, some uncertainty is creeping in. Garcetti is now on the defensive, as homelessness in Los Angeles continues to increase despite billions in spending.
After the federal government released a study questioning the premises of Housing First, Garcetti backed away from the unidimensional approach, telling reporters with irritation in his voice: “Sometimes people parody Housing First as ‘only housing.’ Nobody embraces only housing. It’s got to be housing with services together.”
In more bad news for public officials and supporters of Housing First, there is an emerging body of evidence that calls into question the “cost savings” of the program.
A recent study in Massachusetts shows that Housing First does not reduce rehospitalization and service utilization, while another study in Chicago suggests that Housing First might increase overall costs.
Furthermore, researchers have concluded that the purported cost savings in earlier Housing First studies would not apply to the 82% of the homeless population that is not chronically homeless.
In Los Angeles, this could spell disaster. In the most optimistic scenario laid out by the controller’s office, the city will build 5,873 supportive housing units at an initial cost of $1.2 billion, plus an estimated $88 million in annual service costs associated with the Housing First model.
The recipients of this housing will not meaningfully improve their lives in terms of addiction, mental illness, and spiritual well-being—and there will still be 60,000 people on the streets across Los Angeles County. In other words, even under its own theoretical assumptions, Proposition HHH is doomed to fail.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER 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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