{"id":70193,"date":"2021-07-27T17:13:21","date_gmt":"2021-07-27T22:13:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=70193"},"modified":"2021-07-27T17:13:21","modified_gmt":"2021-07-27T22:13:21","slug":"70193","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=70193","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Med Schools Are Now Denying Biological Sex<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Today we bring you another installment of Katie Herzog\u2019s ongoing series about the spread of woke ideology in the field of medicine. Her\u00a0first story<\/a>\u00a0focused on the ideological purge at the top medical schools and teaching hospitals in the country. \u201cWokeness,\u201d as one doctor put it, \u201cfeels like an existential threat.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Katie\u2019s latest reporting illustrates some of the most urgent elements of that threat. It focuses on how biological sex is being denied by professors fearful of being smeared by their students as transphobic…..<\/em><\/p>\n

During a recent endocrinology course at a top medical school in the University of California system, a professor stopped mid-lecture to apologize for something he\u2019d said at the beginning of class.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t want you to think that I am in any way trying to imply anything, and if you can summon some generosity to forgive me, I would really appreciate it,\u201d the physician says in a recording provided by a student in the class (whom I\u2019ll call Lauren). \u201cAgain, I\u2019m very sorry for that. It was certainly not my intention to offend anyone. The worst thing that I can do as a human being is be offensive.\u201d<\/p>\n

His offense: using the term \u201cpregnant women.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI said \u2018when a woman is pregnant,\u2019 which implies that only women can get pregnant and I most sincerely apologize to all of you.\u201d<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t the first time Lauren had heard an instructor apologize for using language that, to most Americans, would seem utterly\u00a0inoffensive<\/em>. Words like \u201cmale\u201d and \u201cfemale.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why would medical school professors apologize for referring to a patient\u2019s biological sex? Because, Lauren explains, in the context of her medical school \u201cacknowledging biological sex can be considered transphobic.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

When sex\u00a0is\u00a0<\/em>acknowledged by her instructors, it\u2019s sometimes portrayed as a social construct, not a biological reality, she says. In a lecture on transgender health, an instructor declared: \u201cBiological sex, sexual orientation, and gender are all constructs. These are all constructs that we have created.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, some of the country\u2019s top medical students are being taught that humans are not, like other mammals, a species comprising two sexes. The notion of sex, they are learning, is just a man-made creation.<\/p>\n

The idea that sex is a social construct may be interesting debate fodder in an anthropology class. But in medicine, the material reality of sex really matters, in part because the refusal to acknowledge sex can have devastating effects on patient outcomes.<\/p>\n

In 2019, the\u00a0New England Journal of Medicine<\/a><\/em>\u00a0reported the case of a 32-year-old transgender man who went to an ER complaining of abdominal pain. While the patient disclosed he was transgender, his medical records did not. He was simply a man. The triage nurse determined that the patient, who was obese, was in pain because he\u2019d stopped taking a medication meant to relieve hypertension. This was no emergency, she decided. She was wrong: The patient was, in fact, pregnant and in labor. By the time hospital staff realized that, it was too late. The baby was dead. And the patient, despite his own shock at being pregnant, was shattered.<\/p>\n

Professors Running Scared of Students<\/strong><\/p>\n

To Dana Beyer, a trans activist in Maryland who is also a retired surgeon, such stories illustrate how vital it is that sex, not just gender identity \u2014 how someone perceives their gender \u2014 is taken into consideration in medicine. \u201cThe practice of medicine is based in scientific reality, which includes sex, but not gender,\u201d Beyer says. \u201cThe more honest a patient is with their physician, the better the odds for a positive outcome.\u201d<\/p>\n

The denial of sex doesn\u2019t help anyone, perhaps least of all transgender patients who require special treatment. But, Lauren says, instructors who discuss sex risk complaints from their students \u2014 which is why, she thinks, many don\u2019t. \u201cI think there\u2019s a small percentage of instructors who are true believers. But most of them are probably just scared of their students,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

And for good reason. Her medical school hosts an online forum in which students correct their instructors for using terms like \u201cmale\u201d and \u201cfemale\u201d or \u201cbreastfeed\u201d instead of \u201cchestfeed.\u201d Students can lodge their complaints in real time during lectures. After one class, Lauren says, she heard that a professor was so upset by students calling her out for using \u201cmale\u201d and \u201cfemale\u201d that she started crying.<\/p>\n

Then there are the petitions. At the beginning of the year, students circulated a number of petitions designed to, as Lauren puts it, \u201cname and shame\u201d instructors for \u201cwrongspeak.\u201d<\/p>\n

One was delivered after a lecture on chromosomal disorders in which the professor used the pronouns \u201cshe\u201d and \u201cher\u201d as well as the terms \u201cfather\u201d and \u201cson,\u201d all of which, according to the students, are \u201ccisnormative.\u201d After the petition was delivered, the instructor emailed the class, noting that while she had consulted with a member of the school\u2019s LGBTQ Committee prior to the lecture, she was sorry for using such \u201cbinary\u201d language. Another petition was delivered after an instructor referred to \u201ca man changing into a woman,\u201d which, according to the students, incorrectly assumed that the trans woman wasn\u2019t always a woman. But, as Lauren points out, \u201cif trans women were born women, why would they need to transition?\u201d<\/p>\n

This phenomenon \u2014 of students policing teachers; of students being treated as the authorities over and above their teachers \u2014 has had consequences.<\/p>\n

\u201cSince the petitions were sent out, instructors have been far more proactive about \u2018correcting\u2019 their slides in advance or sending out emails to the school listserv if any upcoming material has \u2018outdated\u2019 terminology,\u201d Lauren tells me. \u201cAt first, compliance is demanded from outside, and eventually the instructors become trained to police their own language proactively.\u201d<\/p>\n

In one point in the semester, a faculty member sent out a preemptive email warning students about forthcoming lectures containing language that doesn\u2019t align with the school\u2019s \u201capproach to gender inclusivity and gender\/sex antioppression.\u201d That language included the term \u201cpremenopausal women.\u201d In the future, the professor promised, this would be updated to \u201cpremenopausal people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lauren also says young doctors are being taught to declare their pronouns upon meeting patients and ask for patients\u2019 pronouns in return. This was echoed by a recent graduate of Mount Sinai Medical School in New York. \u201cEverything was about pronouns,\u201d the student said. The student objected to this, thinking most patients would be confused or offended by a doctor asking them what their pronouns were, but she never said so \u2014 at least not publicly. \u201cIt was impossible to push back without worrying about getting expelled,\u201d she told me.<\/p>\n

This hypersensitivity is undermining medical training. And many of these students are likely not even aware that their education is being informed by ideology.<\/p>\n

\u201cTake abdominal aortic aneurysms,\u201d Lauren says. \u201cThese are four times as likely to occur in males than females, but this very significant difference wasn\u2019t emphasized. I had to look it up, and I don\u2019t have the time to look up the sex predominance for the hundreds of diseases I\u2019m expected to know. I\u2019m not even sure what I\u2019m not being taught, and unless my classmates are as skeptical as I am, they probably aren\u2019t aware either.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other conditions that present differently and at different rates in males and females include hernias, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, and asthma, among many others. Males and females also have different normal ranges for kidney function, which impacts drug dosage. They have different symptoms during heart attacks: males complain of chest pain, while women experience fatigue, dizziness, and indigestion. In other words: biological sex is a hugely important factor in knowing what ails patients and how to properly treat them.<\/p>\n

Carole Hooven is the author of\u00a0T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us<\/a><\/em>\u00a0and a professor at Harvard who focuses on behavioral endocrinology. I discussed Lauren\u2019s story with her and Hooven found it deeply troubling. \u201cToday\u2019s students will go on to hold professional positions that give them a great deal of power over others\u2019 bodies and minds. These young people are our future doctors, educators, researchers, statisticians, psychologists. To ignore or downplay the reality of sex and sex-based differences is to perversely handicap our understanding and our ability to increase human health and thriving.\u201d<\/p>\n

A former dean of a leading medical school agrees: \u201cI don\u2019t know the extent to which the stories you relate are now widespread in medical education, but to the extent that they are \u2014 and I hear some of this is popping up at my own institution \u2014 they are a serious departure from the expectation that medical education and practice should be based on science and be free from imposition of ideology and ideology-based intimidation.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cHow male and female members of our species develop, how they differ genetically, anatomically, physiologically, and with respect to diseases and their treatment are foundational to clinical medicine and research. Efforts to erase or diminish these foundations should be unacceptable to responsible professional leaders.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is no doubt the rules are changing. According to the\u00a0American Psychological Association<\/a>, the terms \u201cnatal sex\u201d and \u201cbirth sex,\u201d for example, are now considered \u201cdisparaging\u201d; the preferred term is \u201cassigned sex at birth.\u201d The\u00a0National Institutes of Health<\/a>, the\u00a0CDC<\/a>, and\u00a0Harvard Medical School<\/a>\u00a0have all made efforts to divorce sex from medicine and emphasize gender identity.<\/p>\n

When Asking Questions Can Destroy Your Career<\/strong><\/p>\n

While it\u2019s unclear if this trend will remain limited to some medical schools, what is perfectly clear is that activism, specifically around issues of sex, gender, and race, is impacting scientific research and progress.<\/p>\n

One of the most notorious examples is that of a physician and former associate professor at Brown University, Lisa Littman.<\/p>\n

Around 2014, Littman began to notice a sudden uptick in female adolescents in her social network who were coming out as transgender boys. Until recently, the incidence of gender dysphoria was thought to be rare, affecting an estimated one in 10,000 people in the U.S. While the exact number of trans-identifying adolescents (or adults, for that matter) is unknown, in the last decade or so, the number of youth seeking treatment for gender dysphoria has spiked by\u00a0over 1,000 percent in the U.S<\/a>.; in the U.K., it\u2019s jumped by\u00a04,000 percent<\/a>. The largest youth gender clinic in Los Angeles reportedly\u00a0saw 1,000 patients in 2019<\/a>. That same clinic, in 2009, saw about 80.<\/p>\n

Curious about what was happening, Littman surveyed about 250 parents whose adolescent children had announced they were transgender \u2014 after never before exhibiting the symptoms of gender dysphoria. Over 80 percent of cases involved girls; many were part of friend groups in which half or more of the members had come out as trans. Littman coined the term \u201crapid-onset gender dysphoria\u201d to describe this phenomenon. She posited that it might be a sort of social contagion, not unlike cutting or anorexia, both of which were endemic among teenage girls when I was in high school in the \u201990s.<\/p>\n

In August 2018, Littman published her results in a paper called “Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria in Adolescents and Young Adults: A Study of Parental Reports\u201d in the journal PLOS One. Littman, the journal, and Brown University were pummeled with accusations of transphobia in the press and on social media. In response, the journal announced an investigation into Littman\u2019s work. Several hours later, Brown University issued a press release denouncing the professor\u2019s paper.<\/p>\n

Littman\u2019s paper was republished in March 2019 with an amended title and other minor, mostly cosmetic changes. The journal has since\u00a0confirmed<\/a>\u00a0that, while the paper was \u201ccorrected,\u201d the original version contained no false information.<\/p>\n

But\u00a0Littman\u2019s career<\/a>\u00a0was forever altered. She no longer teaches at Brown. And her contract at the Rhode Island State Health Department wasn\u2019t renewed.<\/p>\n

Littman is hardly alone. Trans activists have also targeted\u00a0Ray Blanchard<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Ken Zucker<\/a>\u00a0in Toronto,\u00a0Michael Bailey<\/a>\u00a0at Northwestern, and\u00a0Stephen Gliske<\/a>\u00a0at the University of Michigan for publishing findings they deemed transphobic. In a recent case, trans activists\u00a0shut down<\/a>\u00a0research that was to be conducted by UCLA psychiatrist Jamie Feusner, who had hoped to explore the physiological underpinnings of gender dysphoria.<\/p>\n

Nor is this limited to academia. Journalists who question the new ideological orthodoxy, like\u00a0Abigail Shrier<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Jesse Singal<\/a>\u00a0(with whom I co-host a\u00a0podcast<\/a>), have also been smeared for their work. After the American Booksellers Association included Shrier\u2019s book,\u00a0Irreversible Damage<\/em>, in a promotional mailing to bookstores, activists went ballistic, prompting the ABA\u2019s CEO to apologize for having done \u201chorrific harm\u201d that \u201ctraumatized and endangered members of the trans community\u201d and \u201ccaused violence and pain.\u201d<\/p>\n

I had a similar\u00a0experience<\/a>\u00a0in 2017 after writing about\u00a0de-transitioners<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 people who transition to a different gender and then transition back \u2014 for the Seattle alt-weekly\u00a0The Stranger<\/em>. After the piece came out, people put up flyers and stickers around Seattle calling me transphobic; someone burned stacks of the newspaper and sent me a video of it. I lost many friends, and later ended up moving out of the city in part because of the turmoil.<\/p>\n

But far more concerning than the treatment of journalists chronicling this story is the treatment of patients themselves.<\/p>\n

Patients Are Suffering<\/strong><\/p>\n

Julia Mason is a pediatrician in the Portland suburbs who, unlike most doctors I spoke to, allowed me to use her name. Mason explained that she works at a small private practice and her boss is a libertarian. In other words: she won\u2019t get fired for being honest.<\/p>\n

Mason has been practicing for over 25 years, but it wasn\u2019t until 2015 that she saw her first transgender patient: a 15-year-old trans boy who Mason referred to a gender clinic, where the patient was prescribed testosterone.<\/p>\n

Since that first patient, she says there have been about 10 more requests for referrals to gender clinics. As this number increased, Mason started wondering about the advice her patients are getting at these clinics.<\/p>\n

\u201cA 12-year-old female came to see me, and the dad told me that they went to a therapist, and in the first five minutes, the therapist was like, \u2018Yep. He\u2019s trans,\u2019\u201d she told me. \u201cAnd then they went to a pediatric endocrinologist who recommended puberty blockers on the first visit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mason generally avoids prescribing puberty blockers, which inhibit the development of secondary sex characteristics like breasts or facial hair. The reason, she says, is that because there have been no controlled studies on the use of puberty blockers for gender dysphoric youth, the long term effects are still unknown. (In the U.K., a recent review of existing studies found that the quality of the evidence that puberty blockers are effective in relieving gender dysphoria and improving mental health is \u201cvery low<\/a>.\u201d)<\/p>\n

In girls, Mason says, blockers inhibit breast development, but \u201cyou end up shorter, and the last thing a female who wants to look male needs is to be shorter.\u201d Other side effects may include a loss of bone density, headache, fatigue, joint pain, hot flashes, mood swings and something called \u201cbrain fog.\u201d In boys, blockers inhibit penis growth, which can make it harder for them to achieve orgasm and for surgeons to later construct those penises into \u201cneo-vaginas,\u201d a procedure known as vaginoplasty.<\/p>\n

Trans activists often claim the effects of puberty blockers are fully reversible, but this remains unproven, and\u00a0studies<\/a>\u00a0show that the overwhelming majority of teens who start on puberty blockers later take cross-sex hormones (testosterone for females and estrogen for males) to complete their transition. The combination of puberty blockers followed by hormones can cause sterility and other health problems, including sexual dysfunction, and the hormones must be taken for life \u2014 or until detransition. Little is known about their long-term effects. While the line that blockers are \u201cfully reversible\u201d is oft-repeated by activists and the media, last year, England\u2019s National Health Service\u00a0back-tracked<\/a>\u00a0this unsubstantiated claim on its website.<\/p>\n

Mason is one of several doctors who voiced concerns about the fast-tracking of adolescents seeking to transition \u2014 and the new normal in the medical establishment, which seems to encourage that fast-tracking.<\/p>\n

In 2018, the American Academy of Pediatrics\u00a0recommended<\/a>\u00a0that pediatricians \u201caffirm\u201d their patients\u2019 chosen gender without taking into account mental health, family history, trauma, or fears of puberty. The AAP recommendations say nothing about the many consequences, physical and psychological, of transitioning. So perhaps it is not surprising that surgeons are performing double mastectomies, or \u201ctop surgery,\u201d on patients\u00a0as young as 13<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One leading clinician, Diane Ehrensaft, has said that children as young as three have the cognitive ability to come out as transgender. And the University of California San Francisco Child and Adolescent Gender Center Clinic, where Ehrensaft is the mental health director, has helped kids of that age transition socially.<\/p>\n

But not all clinicians have cheered these developments. In a paper responding to the AAP guidelines, James Cantor, a clinical psychologist in Toronto,\u00a0noted<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cevery follow-up study of [gender dysphoric] children, without exception, found the same thing: By puberty, the majority of GD children ceased to want to transition.\u201d Other studies of gender-clinic patients, stretching back to the 1970s, have found that 60 to 90 percent of patients eventually grow out of their gender dysphoria; most come out as gay or lesbian.<\/p>\n

In an email to me, Cantor said: \u201cThe deafening silence from AAP when asked about the evidence allegedly supporting their trans policy is hard to interpret as anything other than their \u2018pleading the 5th,\u2019 as you in the U.S. put it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist at the UCSF Child and Adolescent Gender Center Clinic and a trans woman herself, also voiced skepticism about the AAP\u2019s approach to would-be transitioners. Unlike Mason, Anderson says withholding puberty blockers from dysphoric children is \u201ccruel.\u201d But she is suspicious of the sharp spike in young people, and especially young women. While she doesn\u2019t like phrases like \u201crapid-onset gender dysphoria\u201d or \u201csocial contagion,\u201d she said something is definitely going on.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat makes us think that gender is the one exception to peer influence?\u201d she told me. \u201cFor 100 years, psychology has acknowledged that adolescence is a time of experimentation and exploration. It’s normal. I’m not alarmed by that. What I’m alarmed by is some medical and psychological professionals rushing kids into taking blockers or hormones.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because Anderson has been so vocal, including a recent\u00a060 Minutes<\/a><\/em>\u00a0appearance in which she discussed detransitioners, she regularly gets calls from frantic parents. She told me she\u2019d gotten off the phone with the parents of a 17-year-old who had announced that they were trans and wanted hormones. \u201cIt\u2019s alarming to these parents,\u201d Anderson said.<\/p>\n

Anderson isn\u2019t opposed to pediatric transition when patients are properly diagnosed, but she wants to see more individualized care rather than the activist-driven, one-size-fits-all approach. That, however, goes against current AAP guidelines.<\/p>\n

Will Science Prevail?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Medicine is not impervious to trends.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the 90s, when I was training, everything was about controlling pain,\u201d said a pediatrician in the Midwest who declined to be named for fear of repercussions. \u201cWe were taught that it was really hard to become addicted to narcotics. Look where that got us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Around the same time, she says, there was a rash of kids being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, something we now know is exceedingly rare in children. Before that, there was the recovered memory craze, multiple personality disorder, and\u00a0rebirthing therapy<\/a>, a bizarre treatment for attachment disorders that lead to the deaths of several children in the U.S. So how does this happen?<\/p>\n

\u201cSome idea will get picked up by major medical associations that put out reports and their members turn to those instead of the actual literature,\u201d this pediatrician said. \u201cAnd when you get too far ahead of the research, that’s when you get into trouble. That’s what\u2019s happening now.\u201d<\/p>\n

For her part, Lauren, the medical student in California, is both hopeful for the future \u2014 and not. \u201cOn the one hand, I have this idea that the truth will eventually come out and science will ultimately prevail,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

But the difference between things like rebirthing therapy or multiple personality disorder and the new gender ideology is that the latter is portrayed as a civil rights movement. \u201cIt\u00a0seems<\/em>\u00a0virtuous. It\u00a0seems<\/em>\u00a0like the right thing to do,\u201d she said. \u201cSo how can you fight against something that\u2019s being marketed as a fight for human rights?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Med Schools Are Now Denying Biological Sex. Today we bring you another installment of Katie Herzog\u2019s ongoing series about the spread of woke ideology in the field of medicine. Her\u00a0first story\u00a0focused on the ideological purge at the top medical schools and teaching hospitals in the country. \u201cWokeness,\u201d as one doctor put it, \u201cfeels like an … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,59,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crap-for-brains","category-education-schools","category-health-medicine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=70193"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70194,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70193\/revisions\/70194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=70193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=70193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=70193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}