Do no harm

Part 1 - funding the disruption of puberty

Healthcare protocols that disrupt children’s puberty and those that worsen the health of ME/CFS sufferers are two recent medical scandals that have continued for far too long. In each case, who funds the recommended treatment turns out to be crucial, not only in actively harming patients but in not providing treatment that would help them. And in each case, it is only determined opposition by concerned citizens that is challenging the distorted priorities of the funders.

Pubertyphobia

Few outside parliament noticed when in 2004 the UK government passed its Gender Recognition Act. Fewer still grasped its significance. Allowing a small number of adults to have a certificate that validated a pretence that they had changed sex, or that they had a mysterious ‘gender’ that was more important than their sex, did not seem such a big deal. But part of this validation did more than give legal recognition to a supposed ‘gender’ - it issued a replacement birth certificate, which lied that a man with a gender recognition certificate had been born female, and that a woman with one had been born male.

For anyone accepting this delusion that some adults had been ‘born in the wrong body’ it’s a small step to believing that small children have a ‘gender’ that is different from their sex - that tomboys really are boys, and effeminate boys are really girls. Parents (particularly those who found it hard to accept that their child might become gay) were persuaded that it was ‘kind’ to affirm their daughter who climbs trees as their son or their son who plays with dolls as their daughter. This was reinforced by schools that had outsourced relationships and sex education to outside groups committed to affirming the importance of ‘gender’. Within a decade of the Gender Recognition Act becoming law, there was an explosive growth in the number of children identifying as ‘trans’.

Puberty is never totally straightforward. It is particularly difficult for children who have been encouraged to believe in a fantasy that they were born in the wrong body. Puberty forces children to let go of the fantasy, and cope with biological reality. .It makes male bodies more obviously male, and female bodies more obviously female. It is also a developmental transition, a key step in the process of becoming an adult. Instead of therapeutic help to enable troubled children to accept their bodies and understand why they might fear puberty, gender clinics offer puberty disruption, and subsequent body modification, as a solution, regardless of the long term implications.

A small group called Press for Change, that was influential in getting the UK government to introduce the Gender Recognition Act, was also instrumental in bringing about this medicalised approach . It campaigned for a re-named World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) to downplay psychological help for children who dissociate from their sexed bodies, and promote instead medical interventions that disrupt puberty, as a first step on a pathway to cross-sex hormones and surgery. Gender clinics throughout the world, including GIDS (The Gender Identity Development Service, until this year the sole gender clinic in England and Wales), followed WPATH guidelines and pushed this body modification approach.

The combined efforts of whistleblowers, women’s rights campaigners, gay rights campaigners, detransitioners, journalists, and academics have exposed multiple harms of the ‘care’ offered to children by GIDS - including use of experimental drugs, unmonitored and irreversible impacts on bone density and brain development, lack of transparency, near-universal progression to cross-sex hormones, gay conversion, and absence of informed consent, particularly in relation to loss of sexual function and fertility). These failings, catalogued on the invaluable Transgender Trend website, led eventually to this month’s closure of GIDS. This coincides with the publication of leaked files from WPATH, revealing lack of concern for long-term patient outcomes, and awareness that patient consent is often not informed.

“In the files, the chief medical officer from Texas advised a concerned therapist to allow a troubled 13-year-old girl to begin testosterone therapy; a therapist discussed starting a 10-year-old girl on puberty blockers; WPATH President Bowers admitted that natal male children are being left anorgasmic for life; and one surgeon reported performing 20 vaginoplasties on minors. Minors lack the maturity and cognitive capacity to understand the risks associated with such interventions and the long-term implications for their wellbeing … The leaked panel discussion proves that WPATH members know this.”

(Mia Hughes, The WPATH Files, Environmental Progress, March 2024)

The funders

To understand how this medical scandal came about, it is essential to follow the money. Jennifer Bilek, in her 11th hour blog, has looked beneath the veneer of the ‘trans rights are human rights’ slogan, and documented who is funding this assault on young bodies, and why they are doing it.

New drug development is costly, so Big Pharma is always on the lookout for new markets into which they can sell existing products. Synthetic sex identities are a marketing director’s dream - give puberty blockers to  adolescents, then move them on to cross-sex hormones and possibly surgery, and you’ve got guaranteed revenue streams that last a lifetime.

The recent NHS England decision to cut back on prescription of puberty blockers will not be welcome to Big Pharma, but it will spur it to foster private healthcare provision in its place. Already, dodgy outfits like Gender GP are gearing up to replace the NHS as a source of puberty blockers for children. And NHS England has reassured its gender industry suppliers that it will continue to offer cross-sex hormones to 16 year olds (including those with “associated difficulties such as a psychotic episode, drug addiction or self harming” so long as these difficulties are “not escalating”), and that there will be referrals to NHS fertility services for “egg/sperm retrieval and storage.” As the NHS reduces one source of profit for the industry, it expands another two.

Big Pharma is backed up by billionaires who not only fund gender clinics, but use their philanthropy to influence NGOs to  promote synthetic sex identities. In the UK, a donation to Stonewall  from the Arcus Foundation (headed by the Stryker medical technology company heir Jon Stryker) coincided with Stonewall’s transformation from an LGB organisation to one that force teamed LGB with T, and now prioritises the T.  Advocacy by these billionaires has been effective in reframing the normalisation of body dissociation as if it were a human rights issue. Many of the NGOs that they support stimulate demand by targeting children - Just Like Us is one of many examples in the UK.

Perhaps the most influential of these billionaire promoters of medical abuse  is Martine Rothblatt. A lawyer by training, Rothblatt was instrumental in promoting law changes that would give anyone the right to access medical interventions to change their bodies. But he’s not just interested in the profit opportunities of synthetic sex identities. He sees the commodification of body parts and the normalisation of beliefs that anyone can change sex as  stepping stones on a path to a transhuman future in which humans will merge with AI, and be able to create digital selves capable of living for ever.

Such are the goals for which the sexed bodies of vulnerable children are being sacrificed.

Part 2 will explore another medical scandal that was brought about by the distorted priorities of funders  - government sponsored research that denied the reality of ME/CFS in order to reduce spending on disability benefits.