Greg Abbott Is Right On 'Trans Kids'.

Stopped clocks are right twice a day. Abbott's declaration that transitioning children is child abuse is the right thing to do for LGB people. Here's why.

If you asked me about sentences I would one day write, ‘Greg Abbott Is Right’ would not be at the top of the list. Me, agree with a Texas Republican? Never. Except now, apparently. I am guessing that soon Hell will freeze over and the Detroit Lions will manage to win a play-off game.

Putin declared war on the Ukraine, but today’s other top story is that Abbott, governor of Texas, has ordered via a letter endorsing a legal opinion issued by his Attorney General, Ken Paxton, that anyone transitioning their kids in the state of Texas be investigated for child abuse. This has caused apocalyptic bloviating across the woke Twittersphere. According to them, Greg Abbott is about to persecute thousands of a vulnerable minority, because he is evil, and ‘trans kids are vulnerable’, and of course, the traditional four-hundred tweet length threads comparing the villainy of the day to Hitler all feature in the criticism.

A typical example of this new genre in bloviating is this Guardian article (yes, I am aware the Guardian is low-hanging fruit):

Trans rights groups have expressed outrage and fear after the Texas state attorney general Ken Paxton called gender-affirming surgeries and medical care “child abuse” and state governor Greg Abbott ordered the Texas department of family and protective services (DFPS) to conduct an investigation into such practices.

Abbott said: “There is no doubt that these procedures are ‘abuse’ under Texas law, and thus must be halted. [DFPS] has a responsibility to act accordingly. I’ll do everything I can to protect against those who take advantage of and harm young Texans.”

While the attorney general’s opinion has no legal bearing, rights groups argue it will spread fear and misinformation and Abbott’s move has prompted an outpouring of condemnation – as well as celebratory statements from some social conservatives.

“No court here in Texas or anywhere in the country has ever found that gender-affirming care can be considered child abuse,” said the American Civli[sic] Liberties Union of Texas in a statement “The opinion released by Paxton cites highly partisan, outdated, and inaccurate information that ignores the consensus of every major medical association and the evidence-based and peer-reviewed standards of care.”

Of course, as is my way, I’m going to deconstruct the last quote. Because it is a lie. A big fat lie, the Fat Albert of bullshit. The ACLU is right - no court has yet found that child transition is child abuse. However, Paxton’s opinion isn’t saying anything transgender advocates and the transition practitioners themselves aren’t saying. He’s just taking it to its logical conclusions.

Paxton’s opinion, which you can read here, essentially concludes that transitioning children is child abuse because it effectively sterilizes children who have no capacity to consent to such a drastic outcome, and effectively violates the child’s Fourteenth Amendment rights to procreate. That ‘gender-affirming’ surgeries, hormone treatments, and puberty blockers sterilize children isn’t up for debate. It’s a fact. If you remove gonads, or prevent them from developing in a human, that human cannot procreate. That is basic biology. Major medical associations once also endorsed lobotomies and leeches - they are not infallible, nor is transgender medicine approaching any sort of ‘consensus’.

It’s not just me or Greg Abbott saying that ‘gender-affirming care’ sterilizes children, which as we know, is sort of like, kinda, maybe probably child abuse. Why else would the original ‘Dutch Protocol’ paper that helped start this whole mess in 2006 mention that:

“In both girls and boys, after a short activation of the gonadal axes, GnRHa [puberty blockers] will bring the patients into a hypogonadotrophic state. In girls, withdrawal of oestrogens may induce a withdrawal bleeding. Cycling is disrupted. In early pubertal boys, the hypogonadotrophic state will block the development of fertility. In older staged boys, fertility will regress. Therefore, in older boys, cryopreservation of semen should be discussed prior to the start of the treatment.”

(GnRHa is the chemical name for puberty blockers.)

Or perhaps we could ask Diane Ehrensaft, who has featured in plenty of media and written books about transitioning children?

“Another critical task for the medical-mental health team is the necessary discussion of fertility implications for each of these interventions. Although advances are being made in reproductive medicine to preserve immature gametes or reproductive tissues for later reproduction, at this point in history a child who begins puberty blockers at Tanner Stage 2 and proceeds directly to cross-sex hormones will be rendered infertile. Administration of testosterone or estrogen to a post pubertal adolescent may compromise a youth’s later fertility, or might require going off the hormones for a period of time if a transgender youth who has not had gonad or genital surgeries later in life desires to have a genetically related child.”[emphasis mine]

Or, or, or, I don’t know. I’m not convinced, surely there’s another source for this information! Where else could nefarious Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton have drawn this conclusion?

Maybe he read ‘Fertility concerns of the transgender patient’. Maybe he’s one of those awful people who just reads abstracts too, because this is in the fucking abstract:

Transgender individuals who undergo gender-affirming medical or surgical therapies are at risk for infertility. Suppression of puberty with gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonist analogs (GnRHa) in the pediatric transgender patient can pause the maturation of germ cells, and thus, affect fertility potential. Testosterone therapy in transgender men can suppress ovulation and alter ovarian histology, while estrogen therapy in transgender women can lead to impaired spermatogenesis and testicular atrophy. The effect of hormone therapy on fertility is potentially reversible, but the extent is unclear. Gender-affirming surgery (GAS) that includes hysterectomy and oophorectomy in transmen or orchiectomy in transwomen results in permanent sterility. It is recommended that clinicians counsel transgender patients on fertility preservation (FP) options prior to initiation of gender-affirming therapy.”

Oh, you’re still not convinced? Still? Here’s PBS:

Another potential dilemma facing transgender children, their families and their doctors is this: Taking cross hormones can reduce fertility. And there isn’t enough research to find out of it is reversible or not. So when children make the decision to start taking hormones, they have to consider whether they ever want to have biological children.

“I think it’s really important to talk to these children and families about fertility,” Finlayson says. “I do worry that at that stage in life many of them may not be able to realize how important that would be to them someday.”

Buzz-fucking-Feed:

10. For trans kids and teens, if you go from taking puberty-suppressing medication directly to hormone replacement therapy, that can render you infertile down the line.

So stopping a child from experiencing their natural path to sexual maturity could leave them sterile?

I’m shocked, shocked I tell you. Who could have predicted that outcome? Those terrible Republicans, they uh, totally uh, worked out that sterilizing healthy children might amount to child abuse.

How could Greg Abbott’s government come to the conclusion that stopping natural sexual maturity and then removing reproductive organs of children could possibly lead to sterility? That’s transphobic I tell you. Clearly it’s transphobic when Greg Abbott and company say it, but not Buzzfeed or the Huffington Post.

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Of course, Governor Abbott is right; sterilizing your child is a constitutional violation of their rights, and child abuse. Curiously though, no article I’ve read seems to mention that this is the fundamental basis of the opinion. There’s lots of claims about ‘life-saving health care’ and ‘denying rights’ and engaging with ‘rights groups’ - but if you see that Guardian article above, there’s no actual reporting on what the Texas government actually said, or based its opinion on. You’d have to go looking for it. Which is what I did; otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this article.

This article here published by NBC’s online arm doesn’t mention a lick about what the opinion contains, only that it’s bad, and includes this delicious nugget:

The Endocrine Society, an international medical organization for the field of endocrinology, which includes the study of hormones, said in a statement Wednesday that Abbott’s directive “rejects evidence-based transgender medical care.”

“Medical evidence, not politics, should inform treatment decisions,” the group said in a statement. “The governor’s directive reflects widespread misinformation about gender-affirming care. When young children experience feelings that their gender identity does not match the sex recorded at birth, the first course of action is to support the child in exploring their gender identity and to provide mental health support, as needed.”

‘Widespread misinformation’? The absolute, uncontestable fact that child transition leads to sterilizing minors is now ‘widespread misinformation’? Golly gee, who would have thunk it.

Of course, modern media is essentially publishing the same article with the same slant twenty times - an article in NBC is interchangeable with an article in the New York Times, as mainstream center-left journalism careens ever closer to becoming a homogenous, potato-like mush eaten by ancient Irish peasants, but seriously, here is the New York Times article on the same subject, which again, doesn’t mention the content of the opinion. Or this Slate piece, which spends half of its column inches talking about abortion and not actually engaging with the fact that sterilizing children might actually, you know, be child abuse. It’s lying by omission.

Actually engaging with the substantive content of the opinion, might reveal that sometimes, stopped clocks are in fact right twice a day, and that ‘gender-affirming care’ often amounts to experimental butchery on vulnerable young people. What other condition would involve the amputation or removal of healthy body parts and be celebrated as life-affirming? Get real.

Paxton’s opinion does, however, miss a crucial point. And given that he cited the Bell case in England, I feel like it’s probably intentional.

There’s one group of young people that’s incredibly vulnerable to ‘gender-affirming care’. One particular group of young people that’s disproportionately more likely to try and engage these services, one group of young people who might even face parental pressure to transition. Hell, a whole country, like, say, Iran, might prescribe gender transition as an alternative to the death penalty for this particular group of young people. It’s very odd that Paxton would ignore them.

Of course, I’m talking about gay, lesbian, and bisexual young people.

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These claims aren’t far fetched. While the Bell case made international headlines, the Tavistock gender clinic in England was also facing an employment case, which it lost, taken by Sonia Appleby, leader of child safeguarding at the Tavistock center. She claimed she was vilified for raising safeguarding concerns around the gender clinics practices - she ended up winning $53,000 in damages. What emerged in the case was shocking, like the claims of gay psychologist Dr Matt Bristow:

A gay psychologist who worked at the NHS’s only gender transition clinic for children spoke of his fears that the clinic was running “conversion therapy for gay kids”.

Dr Matt Bristow said he feared the Tavistock and Portman NHS trust was ignoring the possibility that boys and girls who said they wanted to change sex might simply be gay.

Bristow’s claim has emerged in witness statements for Sonia Appleby, a psychotherapist responsible for safeguarding children at the gender identity clinic, who is suing the trust.

[…]

Bristow said he was one of several gay members of staff at the clinic who felt concerned that patients’ homosexuality — and the possibility that gay children were saying they wanted to change sex because they were being bullied — was ignored. He told staff at the Tavistock clinic that they were doing “conversion therapy for gay kids”.

In an exit interview when he left the trust, which forms part of Appleby’s legal case, Bristow said that he was particularly concerned about gay children who were referred to the service having been bullied. This may have motivated some to say they wanted to change sex and that he “tried hard not to let [them] get drawn into the service”.

Bristow told the clinic that gay staff felt they “had to keep sexuality on the agenda, as otherwise it was completely ignored as a topic”. He said there was a group of gay clinicians with these worries and that four had left at the time of his exit interview.

Five other clinicians at the English Tavistock clinic have blown the whistle on the same issue. They joked there could be ‘no homosexuals left’, and noted a trend of parents wanting their children ‘fixed’:

“For some families, it was easier to say, this is a medical problem, ‘here’s my child, please fix them!’ than dealing with a young, gay kid,” the third female clinician said. At the service’s “family days”, a parent was allegedly heard saying that they did not want their child to have gay friends because they “didn’t want them mixed up in that hedonistic lifestyle”. “It is converting people into heterosexuals,” one of the clinicians said. “We had so many families who would talk about not wanting their daughters to be lesbian.” Young people “repeatedly” confided their own “disgust” that they may be gay, according to the clinician.”

A 2021 study followed up 139 boys referred for gender dysphoria with regard to gender identity and sexual orientation. Of those 139, 82 (63.6%) had grown up to be gay or bisexual men. Only 12% had persisted with a cross-gender identity into adulthood - which obviously raises questions about affirming the insistent statements of children. A 2012 study of Tavistock referrals found the vast majority of referrals, both male and female were gay, lesbian or bisexual.

Of course, this isn’t a novel statement. Kenneth Zucker, one of the scientists on the aforementioned 2021 study was observing the same in the the early 1990s:

Two short term goals have been discussed in the literature: the reduction or elimination of social ostracism and conflict and the alleviation of underlying or associated psychopathology. Longer term goals have focused on the prevention of transsexualism and/or homosexuality. In the clinical literature, there has been little disagreement about the advisability of preventing gender dysphoria in adolescence or adulthood. Contemporary and secular-minded clinicians are, however, much more sensitive to the importance of helping people integrate a homosexual orientation into their sense of identity (3,4). Not surprisingly, however, the development of a heterosexual orientation is probably preferred by most parents of children with GID. It is important, therefore, that clinicians point out that, as of yet, there is no strong evidence either way as to the effectiveness of treatment on later sexual orientation.

[…]

“About 25 % of our adolescent sample presented with a request for sex reassignment or with severe gender identity confusion. As with some adult transsexuals, the wish for sex reassignment seems to serve as a way of “normalizing” unacceptable homosexual feelings. With supportive therapy, some of these individuals will accept themselves as homosexual and relinquish the cross-sex wish.

Nor is this therapy ‘life-saving care’. This fantastic article by Transgender Trend in the UK does a fantastic job of outlining research on the topic - including the fact that the the National Centre for Transgender Equality study on transgender suicides in 2010 found that medical and surgical transition increased rates of attempted suicide:

“Those who have medically transitioned (45%) and surgically transitioned (43%) have higher rates of attempted suicide than those who have not (34% and 39% respectively).”

It is not a novel idea to point out that transitioning young people is effectively modern-day conversion therapy. It is not disinformation to point out that it is highly experimental - which is something almost every major study done by pro ‘gender-affirming’ scientists in the past ten years concedes!

Nor is it ‘backed by decades of research’ - the original Dutch Protocol study dates to 2006, if that’s ‘decades’ I’m an old woman. Nor is it false to point out that ultimately the pathway of transition leads to the sterilization of children. It may make some people feel bad to point this out, but it’s true. If you support ‘gender-affirming care’ you are not supporting life saving treatment, you are supporting homophobic parents medically abusing their potentially gay children.

After all, when the cross-sex identity of the young pre-homosexual or the young homosexual teenager is affirmed, suddenly that young person is now ‘straight’. They can be ‘normal’. In any reasonable world, that would immediately raise red flags on behalf of the people who supposedly care about lesbians and gays. Spoiler alert: the left doesn’t care. The left would rather see young lesbians undergoing childhood mastectomy and embracing ‘lesbians with penises’ (i.e straight dudes) rather than living authentic, healthy, vibrant, and loving homosexual lives.

It’s not like destroying gay and lesbian lives with experimental therapies is novel either. I’d like to remind everyone that 40% of the 40,000 victims of lobotomies were gay, lesbian or bisexual.

Why has Paxton ignored this element in the report? Frankly my dear, he probably doesn’t give a damn about gay people. Neither does Greg Abbott, I bet. Both Abbott and Paxton are facing a crowded Republican primary in their quest for re-election - almost certainly that is what has motivated this latest swipe in the culture wars. They’ve done the right thing, for all the wrong reasons.

It is an odd time when a Republican governor in Texas is more on the side of gay young people, albeit accidentally, than the center-left that supposedly represents us. The center-left is upset that the Republicans have targeted their scientific, middle class conversion therapy, and no more. Ultimately, the homosexual loses under both - but at least Republicans will leave the homosexual alone, and not try to censor us, coerce us into relationships we don’t want, and mutilate and sterilize us as children -which is what the left is up to these days.

Truly, we live in deeply strange times.