Thread by @Bernard_Lane

"There are parents of 7-year-olds asking: When should my daughter get hormones? And when should the ovaries come out?" Munich gender dysphoria expert Dr Alexander Korte speaks about social contagion, puberty blockers that "prevent homosexuality" & law confusing sex & gender. 1/

He rejects the trans-gay analogy pushed by activists.

"Gays & lesbians want one thing above all from doctors and therapists: to be left alone. Transsexuals ... want costly & momentous medical treatment - with irreversible, lifelong consequences."
taz.de/Jugendpsychiat…

He says puberty blockers act like "a homosexuality preventer".

Data suggests that blockers are a one-way path to lifelong medicalisation when left-alone, most kids with childhood dysphoria grew out of it & many emerged as gay/bisexual.

2019 interview gdworkinggroup.org/2019/11/15/int…

Why are today's gender clinics full of teenage girls?

"For girls, the onset of sexual maturity is marked by the first menstruation .. About 1/3 girls clearly experience this as aversive. For boys, the counterpart is the first ejaculation. Almost all of them find it pleasant."

Korte draws a parallel between gender dysphoria & anorexia.

"Here, too, [with anorexia] there is almost always an underlying sexual conflict - or a rejection of femininity. But we would never come up with the abstruse idea of giving appetite suppressants."

A child & adolescent psychiatrist, he cites a patient depressed & troubled in her sexuality whose mother was sexually traumatised. At puberty, the girl mistakenly chose a "trans identity" as the solution offered by social media & peer networks.

"Trans is obviously a new kind of identification template for which there is a social reception space. And it appeals primarily to a vulnerable group of female youth ... My colleague Lisa Littman from the USA describes this new phenomenon as 'Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria'."

"In the media, role models report euphorically about their supposedly uncomplicated medical transition. It is pretended that paradise on earth is achieved with the performance of gender reassignment."

"In fact, they are dependent on hormone replacement therapy for the rest of their lives ... It is not easy [for transsexuals] to find a life partner. The ability to experience sexuality has suffered. Quite a few become chronically depressed ..."

His clinic gives cross-sex hormones but "only after at least 1 year of psychotherapeutically accompanied everyday testing & very careful examination of the indications. Sometimes I still have a bad feeling at the end [but it's better than young people going online for hormones]."

He points out that the claimed "success" of gender clinics is "based on surveys, but there is a sampling bias in the sense that negative outcomes are not published at all. Nobody is interested in that. It is also difficult for patients to admit to themselves: That was wrong".

Unlike other clinicians, he does not put faith in dated statistics showing low treatment regret. He cites Keira Bell's Tavistock case & the 2021 Littman study suggesting many detransitioners do not go back to tell their clinics it was a harmful mistake.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34665380/

Korte notes that some adult transsexuals who have been through transition now advocate for "bloodless transition" -- living in the opposite-sex role without any medical interventions.

He picks up on the fact that activists demand easier access to medicalised gender change but also want "depathologisation".

"The unfortunate depathologisation debate leads nowhere - it harms those affected [by dysphoria], which a large number of them have also realised by now."

"Only the trans activists are denied the insight that this discussion is no longer in the interest of those suffering from gender dysphoria."

Once a regular voter for Germany's Greens party, he thinks their approach to reforming the country's transsexual law is "a big mistake". He opposes the plan to allow self-determination of gender in official records. #AusVotes

"That would not help those affected. After all, the plan is for it to apply from the age of 14. That will also lead to discord in families, because some teenagers will then enforce it against the will of their parents."

Korte says passage of the self-ID law will not be "without consequences for medical treatment practice". The Greens lost his vote because of this.

[Australia's @Greens want medicalised gender change paid for by the taxpayer. Does this include kids?greens.org.au/news/media-rel…]

In Korte's opinion, "everyone should categorise themselves in the way that suits them. But they don't have to change the legal entry for that. Biological sex is different from gender. And gender, the social sex, is something else again than gender identity. It's a wild mix-up."

"Gender in the biological sense is definitely [binary]: there is a male and a female because there are only two types of germ cells, two 'gamete types'. And this dimorphism is the basis of all life, also in the plant and animal kingdoms."

"The mechanisms by which an organism produces the respective germ cells are quite susceptible to interference. That is why there are so-called intersex forms. But they are not proof that there are several sexes."

“In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot." Czeslaw Milosz