The Cult of Ruthless Compassion
“Do you want a live son, or a dead daughter?”
Be careful about challenging the new state religion. You could lose your job. Or lose custody of your own child.
Ask Dr. Kenneth Zucker, a sexologist and psychologist who ran the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health Gender Identity Clinic in Toronto for more than 30 years. He was fired after a trans activists’ smear campaign. His crime? Suggesting that perhaps we should first try to “help children to feel comfortable in their own bodies.” After all, research shows that 80-90% of youth who experience gender dysphoria come to accept their biological sexual identity by late adolescence. But don’t tell that to a screaming Trans mob or the government bureaucrats who enforce the party line.
Ask Jeanette Cooper, a mom in Chicago who lost custody of her daughter Sophia and can’t even visit her, after refusing to “affirm” that her daughter is really a boy. “People who are imprisoned have more communication with their child than I do,” Jeannette said. “That’s wrong.” Jeannette blames a lot of people, mostly professionals, for her circumstance. One person noticeably missing from that list is Sophia, whom Jeannette believes did a fairly normal adolescent thing of struggling with her changing body. [1]
Jeanette says that she has no way to communicate with Sophia other than by mail:
I don’t have her phone number. I know where she lives, but I’m not allowed to go there. I know where she goes to school and I’m not allowed there either. But this is parenting. What I’m doing, even though I have no real contact with her, I am still her parent. I am still her mother. And I am still parenting now.
Ask Jennifer in Washington state, who wouldn’t even have known that her 10-year-old daughter was being counseled at school to “transition” had she not been younger than 13.[2]
She and her husband followed the school’s guidance until a male teacher suggested that her now 11-year-old daughter sleep in the boy’s cabin at an upcoming school trip. They pulled their daughter out of school and cut off her access to online devices for a long time. Her mood changed for the better after that.
Since “T” for Trans has been added to “LGB” (lesbian-gay-binary) people assume it’s a similar civil rights/bullying issue, but lesbians and gays aren’t asking for sterilization or chopping off body parts leading to the need for medical care for the rest of their lives. Professionals who should be educating parents and children about the costs and benefits of different approaches have instead become enforcers of the state orthodoxy that parents who question prescribing powerful drugs and radical surgery are transphobic bigots.
Parents are given a stark choice: choose between having a dead child or learn to accept a child who has “transitioned” to the opposite sex. There is no research supporting this binary choice, but as a bullying piece of rhetoric it has been effective.
A small, but growing number of doctors have been challenging the “gender-affirming care” being forced on families with children experiencing “gender dysphoria.” Dr. Paul Hruz, an endocrinology researcher and clinician at Washington University School of Medicine warns that patients suffering from gender dysphoria or related issues have a right to be protected from experimental, potentially harmful treatments lacking reliable, valid, peer-reviewed, published, long-term scientific evidence of safety and effectiveness.[3]
Hruz and other doctors argue that the medical interventions often described as “gender-affirming care” are experimental and that the organizations that present standards of care supporting them—the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and the Endocrine Society—represent more a political and advocacy effort than an objective analysis supporting these alleged treatments.
Dr. Stephen B. Levine, a psychiatrist and early proponent of transgender medical interventions, joined and briefly helped lead the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, which later became WPATH. A member from 1974 to 2001, he served as the chairman of the eight-person International Standards of Care Committee that issued the fifth version of the standards of care.
In his affidavit, Levine notes that he resigned his membership in 2002 due to “my regretful conclusion that the organization and its recommendations had become dominated by politics and ideology, rather than by scientific process, as it was years earlier.” He condemns the WPATH standards of care as “not an impartial or evidence-based document.”
Levine explicitly calls transition and affirmation “experimental therapies that have not been shown to improve mental or physical health outcomes by young adulthood,” and warns that these therapies “do not decrease, and may increase, the risk of suicide.”
Hruz also notes that attempts to block puberty followed by cross-sex hormones not only impact fertility, but also pose risks such as low bone density, “disfiguring acne, high blood pressure, weight gain, abnormal glucose tolerance, breast cancer, liver disease, thrombosis, and cardiovascular disease.”
In the absence of transgender interventions, children often grow to reject a transgender identity. For these reasons, Hruz concludes that “administering hormones to a child whose gender dysphoria is highly likely to resolve is risky, unscientific, and unethical.”
If that is so, then why are schools, medical clinics, and government agencies across the U.S. so determined to impose experimental treatments on vulnerable youth and to punish parents who dare to ask conscientious questions? That is a very dark rabbit hole…
[1] Chicago Mother Loses Custody of Her Daughter—For Insisting That Her Daughter Is a Girl, https://www.iwf.org/identity-crisis-jeannette/
[2] After Identifying as Trans, a Male Teacher Asked Her 11-Year-Old Daughter to Sleep in the Boy’s Cabin, https://www.iwf.org/identity-crisis-jennifer/
[3] Tyler O’Neil, EXCLUSIVE: Doctors Expose Just How Experimental ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ Truly Is in Florida Medicaid Case, Daily Signal, April 11, 2023.