The complex and articulated system we call transactivism (read business: thanks to Jennifer Bilek for her meticulous investigative work) has been working on the Creation of an ever-widening audience of drug and surgery users for the transitionfor surgery alone, the turnover in 2022 was 623 million dollars (given by Global Market Insight, an agency that directs investors to the best opportunities), expected in exponential increase in the next 10 years throughout the West, including Italy.
The best way to procure new customers for life is to expand the market is to work on school children and social media, starting with TikTok.
As for schools, the Daily Mail talks about trans-hysteria and explains what happens in any school in the South East of England, where every year one in ten children identify as trans or non-binary. The 14-year-old girl interviewed by the newspaper says: "The other day I went to the secretary's office to get a new copy of the timetable. The teacher I spoke to used 'they/them' pronouns dicing another member of staff: they have lost their timetable, can they get a new one? Yet the teacher knows me very well and it is clear that I am a girl. I was furious that he didn't just say 'she'. But it doesn't just happen with some weird teachers. I am regularly asked if I am in transition (...) When my mother complained about them calling me 'they' the teacher apologised but explained that she did it out of caution. She said that teachers are walking on eggs for fear of being labelled as transphobic'.
"It seems that the trans issue is all there is to talk about. The library has a section dedicated to LGBTQQIA+ books and there is a Pride display at the school entrance, with rainbow flags and words and terms such as 'non-binary', 'polysexual', 'demiboy', 'demigirl' and 'pansexual' '. These words also recur during lessons. I am now in Year 10 and the other day a girl in my English class asked if the Greek god Zeus was a man or a woman and the teacher replied that Zeus could have 'identified himself as non-binary'. More recently, another teacher said that Lady Macbeth was 'neither man nor woman'.
I think most parents have no idea what their children are being taught.
But I would be too afraid to say these things at school. If I did I would lose my friends because I am completely intolerant of everything they think is transphobic. That is why I am speaking here without giving my real name. Get special treatment if you say you are trans or non-binaryAs soon as a girl says she is a boy, her name is changed in the school register and students are told to use the new name.
Out of 200 students in my year, at least 20 say they are trans, almost all of them are girls who claim to be boys or non-binary. Even if there is a boy who claims to be a girl, it is largely girls who claim to be boys. Girls and boys in my year do not say that they are lesbian or gay, because those words are thought to be an insult.
I was recently watching a news item with friends on the changes to the Gender Recognition Act in Scotland and every time a guest on the programme would say 'this is a threat to gender-based rights' my friends would laugh and taunt him. It made me feel as if girls had no rights and were not respected in my school. All my friends believe in 'gender identity'. Girls and boys are referred to by teachers and students as 'female assigned at birth' or 'male assigned at birth', abbreviated to AFAB and AMAB. There are also a lot of girls who bandage their breasts, but we don't know who takes puberty blockers because nobody talks about it.
There were also violent comments on social media towards 'transphobes', with school students threatening to strangle them. That is why I am writing this text anonymously, even though I believe I should have the courage to say these things without fear of being attacked. I want adults to know what is happening in schools today'.
The English girl understandably preferred to remain anonymous, Jamie Reed decided to put his face to it.
In the very recent article published by The Free Press, Reed -who calls herself queer and is married to a trans man- former manager at the Washington University Transgender Centre at St. Louis Children's Hospital, decided to break the silence about what he saw and experienced. His account is impressive.
"During the four years I worked at the clinic as a case-manager - I was responsible for the reception and supervision of patients - about a thousand young people in need came through our doors. Most of them received hormone prescriptions that can have life-long consequences, including infertility.
I left the clinic in November 2022 because I could no longer participate in what was happening there. When I left I was sure that the way the American medical system is treating these patients was the opposite of the promise we make to 'do no harm'. Instead we are permanently damaging patients vulnerable in our care (...) Almost everyone in my life has advised me to keep my head down. But in good conscience I cannot do that. Because what is happening to dozens of children is far more important than my peace of mind.
E What is happening is frightening, morally and medically.
Immediately after my arrival at the Transgender Centre I was struck by the lack of formal protocols for treatment. The medical co-directors of the centre were essentially the only authority. In the beginning, the patient population was oriented towards what was the 'traditional' case of a child with gender dysphoria: a boy, often quite young, who wanted to present himself as - who wanted to be - a girl. More or less until 2015 a very small number of boys made up the population of paediatric gender dysphoria cases. Then throughout the western world the dramatic increase in a new population: adolescent girls, many with no history of gender discomfort, who suddenly declared they were transgender and asked for immediate testosterone treatment.
I certainly saw it at the centre. One of my tasks was to take care of the reception of new patients and their families. When I started there were probably 10 such calls per month. When I left there were 50 and about 70% of the new patients were girls. Sometimes groups of girls from the same high school arrived, but Those who raised doubts ran the risk of being called transphobic. The girls who came to us had many comorbidities: depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, obesity. Many have been diagnosed with autism. A report last year on a British paediatric transgender centre found that about one third of the reported patients suffered from autism spectrum disorders.
Privately, doctors recognised these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion. They also recognised that suicide has an element of social contagion. But when I said that even for the groups of girls who poured into our service perhaps gender problems were a manifestation of social contagion, the doctors replied that gender identity reflected something innate.
To start the transition, the girls needed a letter of support from a therapist, usually one we recommended and whom they only had to see once or twice to get the go-ahead. To make it easier for the therapists, we provided them with a facsimile of a letter in support of the transition. The next stage was a single visit to the endocrinologist for a testosterone prescription. That was all that was needed.
But the centre played down the negative consequences and emphasised the need for transition. Like said the website, "If left untreated, gender dysphoria has a range of consequences, from self-harm to suicide. But when you eliminate gender dysphoria by allowing a child to be who he or she is, we notice that these problems disappear. Studies show that these children often end up functioning psychosocially as well or better than their peers. In reality, there are no reliable studies that prove it. In fact The experiences of many of the patients at the centre show how false these claims are.
Bicalutamide is a drug used to treat metastatic prostate cancer and one of its side effects is that it feminises men's bodies taking it, including the appearance of the breasts. The centre has prescribed this cancer drug as a puberty blocker and feminising agent for boys. As with most anti-cancer drugs, bicalutamide has a long list of side effects and a patient experienced one of them: liver toxicity. He was sent to another unit of the hospital for evaluation and immediately discontinued the drug. Subsequently, his mother sent an e-mail to the Transgender Centre saying that we were lucky that his family was not the type to sue.
The way the young patients realised what tunnel they were entering is illustrated by a call we received at the centre in 2020 from a 17-year-old patient on testosterone. She said she was bleeding from her vagina. In less than an hour she had soaked an extra heavy tampon, her jeans and a towel that she had wrapped around her waist. The nurse at the centre told her to go to the emergency room immediately. We found out later that this girl had had sexual intercourse and because testosterone thins the vaginal tissues, her vaginal canal had ruptured. She had to be sedated and operated on to repair the damage. This was not the only case of vaginal tearing we heard about.
Other girls were disturbed by the effects of testosterone on their clitoris, which enlarges and grows into what looks like a microphallus or a tiny penis. I advised a patient whose enlarged clitoris extended below her vulva, and he chafed and rubbed himself painfully in his jeans to get the kind of compression undergarments worn by biological men who dress to pass for women. At the end of the call I thought to myself: 'Wow, we hurt this girl'.
There are rare conditions in which babies are born with atypical genitalia, cases that require sophisticated care and compassion. But clinics like the one I worked in are creating an entire cohort of children with atypical genitaliaand most of these teenagers had not yet had sex. They had no idea who they would become as adults. Yet all it took for them to transform permanently was one or two brief conversations with a therapist.
Being subjected to powerful doses of testosterone or oestrogen necessary to try to induce your body to mimic the opposite sex also has consequences for the rest of your body. I doubt that any parent who has ever agreed to give their child testosterone (a lifelong treatment) knows that they will probably is putting their son on medication for blood pressure, cholesterol and possibly also for sleep apnoea and diabetes.
But some parents understood what they had agreed to do to their children, and expressed it forcefully:
In addition to the girls, another new group was referred to us: the young people in the hospital psychiatric unit or emergency room, St. Louis Children's Hospital. The mental health of these children was very worrying: there were diagnoses such as schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress, bipolar disorder and others. Often they were already on various drugs. This was tragic but not surprising given the deep trauma some had suffered. Yet it did not matter how much suffering or pain a child had endured, or how little care and love they had received: our doctors saw gender transition as the solution, even with all the expenses and difficulties involved. There were weeks when it seemed that almost our entire workload was made up of nothing but disturbed young people.
Another disturbing aspect of the centre was its lack of respect for parents' rights and how doctors considered themselves to be more informed decision makers about the fate of these children. In Missouri only one parent's consent is required for the treatment of their child. But when there was a dispute between the parents, the centre always sided with the affirmative parent.
In 2019 a new group of people appeared on my radar: desisters and detransitioners. Desisters choose not to transition. Detransitioners are transgender people who decide to return to their birth gender. The one colleague with whom I was able to share my concerns agreed with me that we should keep track of desistance and detransition. We thought that doctors would want to collect and understand this data to understand what they had missed. We were wrong. One doctor asked aloud why he would spend time with someone who was no longer his patient.
In all my years at Washington University School of Medicine I had received very positive performance reviews. But in 2021 things changed. I scored below average on 'Judgment' and 'Working relationships/Cooperative spirit'.. Although I was described as "responsible, conscientious, hard-working and productive", the evaluation also noted: "Sometimes Jamie responds badly to management's instructions with a defensive attitude and hostility'.
Things came to a head during a half-day retreat in the summer of 2022. In front of the team, the doctors said that my colleague and I had to stop questioning 'medicine and science' as well as their authority. Then an administrator told us that we had to "boarding or disembarking". It became clear that the purpose of the retreat was to deliver these messages to us. I resigned and left the Transgender Centre in November 2022.
But then I came across the comments of Dr. Rachel Levine, transgender woman who is a senior official at the federal Department of Health and Human Services. The article said: 'Levine, the US Assistant Secretary of Health, states that clinics are proceeding with caution and that no American children are receiving drugs or hormones for gender dysphoria that they should not be taking'.
I felt dizzy and nauseated. It wasn't true. And I knew this from profound experience.
So I started writing everything I could about my experience at the Transgender Centre. A fortnight ago, I brought my concerns and documents to the attention of the attorney general of Missouri. He is a Republican. I am a progressive. But the safety of children should not be the subject of our culture wars.
Given the secrecy and the lack of strict standards that characterise youth gender transition across the country, I believe that to ensure the safety of American children is A moratorium on hormonal and surgical treatment of young people with gender dysphoria is necessary.
In the last 15 years, according to Reuters , The United States has gone from having no paediatric gender clinics to more than 100. It should be undertaken an in-depth analysis to find out what has been done to their patients and why, and what the long-term effect will be. There is a clear path for us to follow. Just last year England closed the Tavistock Centre, the only youth gender clinic in the country, after that an investigation revealed poor practices and inadequate treatment of patients. Also Sweden and Finland investigated the paediatric transition and significantly curbed the practice, finding that there is insufficient evidence of help and there is a danger of serious damage.
Some critics describe the kind of treatment offered in places like the Transgender Centre where I worked as a kind of national experimentation. But even this is wrong. Experiments should be carefully designed. Hypotheses should be ethically tested. The doctors I worked with at the Transgender Centre often said about the treatment of our patients: "We are building the plane while we are flying it. No one should be a passenger in that kind of plane'.
Marina Terragni
