Oregon Health And Sciences University: Shaky Science Around Gender Dysphoric Minors
News Commentary
The Federalist is a conservative news site generally unsupportive of LGBT issues.. However, an article from September accurately covers some of the shaky information being presented as hard facts in transgender medicine for children and teens. The article is called “How Oregon Built A Transgender Medical-Industrial Complex On Junk Science.” It is about the staunchly pro-pediatric medical transition culture in Oregon, where a 15 year old can undergo surgery without parental consent.
A quote from the article:
As a group of suburban Portland psychiatric nurses sat for training in late 2016, they had no idea they were witnessing a paradigm shift in public health policy. They simply wanted to know what to do about a sudden upsurge in young psychiatric patients who believed themselves to be in the wrong body. They had turned to a colleague from Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) for help.
The reply was astonishing: The children’s claims should be taken at face value, and the children should be referred to OHSU, or like institutions, for a “Dutch Protocol” of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. Further, the nurses should expect such referrals to comprise 3 percent of the children in their care.
The author discusses an astronomical 3% estimate of trans children they expect at their hospital:
OHSU professionals have been asserting that 3% of children in their care will be transgender. The article takes them to take on this estimate:
Yet in a hospital training, administered by people with advanced degrees to other people with advanced degrees, no one questioned the assertion that 3 percent of local kids were in the wrong body and that the hospital on the hill could give them the right one.
‘A Quality Improvement Project’
The cultural trajectory — from “first do no harm” to “no holds barred” — that Oregon is traversing under a regulatory framework shaped by gender service providers, is reflected in the disparate responses the two institutions gave when asked about the invalid 3 percent citation.
This article highlights the reality that there are a lot of unsubstantiated assertions around the treatment of transgender youth. GHQ reviews many of them in Topic 4. It also highlights the fact that so many health professionals and people in media seem to have zero interest in asking why so many young people, particularly females, are identifying as trans, given the serious medical side effects that result from medical transition.
This should be of concern as there have been reports of transition regret and botched surgeries at OHSO and taxpayers are funding these surgeries by medicaid:
The first recommendations in the letter are to implement advanced transgender-specific surgical training for the surgeons and a formal grievance procedure for the patients. Ashe told me in an email he felt rushed and pushed into having surgery by all his medical providers — therapist, general practitioner and surgeon. He wrote:
“The doctor [Dr. Daniel Dugi III] basically used a bunch of trans people to experiment on and gain experience without being properly trained. I was denied by him for an orchiectomy [removal of the testicles] and coerced into having SRS [Sex Reassignment surgery] by him and my GP [general practitioner] who was stressing that I needed to be castrated ASAP. I had previously told my therapists who wrote my letters [of approval] I never wanted surgery. I feel like I was very much pushed into transition as an answer to my mental health problems that were ignored by my ‘gender’ therapist.”
Also:
As the stories in the letter to the university clearly show, the number of surgical complications in this small group far exceeds the program’s publicly stated total of three. These six stories and three more in the letter demonstrate why the group recommends that the OHSU THP begin collecting, evaluating, and independently reviewing patient results.
Another article was published on Medium highlighting questionable claims and statistics involved in transgender “science.” The article by vocal critic of trans activism, Julian Vigo, was removed by Medium and then reinstated. They likely removed it because activists sought to censor it despite the validity of its content. This is a common problem with current trans activism. This article is more critical of the concept biological sex is irrelevant, a common attitude in gender activism. We review the serious conflicts this ideology is causing within and outside of the LGBT population.
Quotes about a new agenda-driven UK survey study and confirmation bias and lack of scientific validity:
From the ground up, this project’s experts and advisory board have a clear agenda to install pro-transgender conclusions given the ethos of the research team, their political and theoretical motivations, and what seems to be a troubling push by many in academia around the English-speaking world to elide any discussions of material reality to the extent of removing sex as a legal characteristic.
And:
The imbalance in these studies bulldozes the survey-taker and passive reader into having to collude with the ethos that gender is “good.” These research projects never put into question the possibility that gender is uniquely a stereotype and harmful to males and females alike. The planned impact of Cooper’s project is formulated around the researcher’s assumption that the research findings will be “ideally placed to influence future legal and policy debate.” What this means, when you sift through the bios of the principal investigators and many on the advisory board who hold seats on other granting institutions, editorial committees, and institutional seats of great power, is this: that an enormous amount of money has been thrown at academics who are using public funds for political activism within a dishonestly formulated project.
References:
Heyer, W. (2019, December 18). 9 Transgender Patients Complain Of Mutilation, Botched Sex-Change Surgeries In Oregon. The Federalist. Retrieved from https://thefederalist.com/2018/12/06/9-transgender-patients-complain-mutilation-botched-sex-change-surgeries-oregon/
How to Stage a Study: The Transgender Lobby in British Academia. (2019, July 30). Retrieved from http://archive.md/vV8zf#selection-209.0-209.63
Kirkpatrick, K. (2019, September 16). How Oregon Built A Transgender Medical-Industrial Complex On Junk Science. The Federalist. Retrieved from https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/16/how-oregon-built-a-transgender-medical-industrial-complex-on-junk-science/#.XYBfLUNkRYI.twitter
In Transgender Regret Tags trans safety unknown, raising youth trans