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Benjamin Ryan Profile picture
@benryanwriter
Feb 23, 2023 • 41 tweets • 33 min read • Read on X
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A bombshell article by @writingblock challenges claims by activists that the science supporting the treatment of gender dysphoria in minors is "settled" and that the use of puberty blockers and hormones in transgender kids is "evidence based." 🧵⬇️
press.psprings.co.uk/bmj/february/t… Image
Many argue that giving puberty blockers and hormones to trans minors is uncontroversial & backed by high-quality science. Block's reporting disputes this. Swedish health authorities, for example, say the risks "currently outweigh the possible benefits". 2/
press.psprings.co.uk/bmj/february/t… Image
@glaad, in its recent protest before the @nytimes building, echoed a common refrain: that "the science is settled" regarding giving puberty blockers and hormones to trans-identifying minors. @writingblock's peer-reviewed reporting challenges this claim. 3/ press.psprings.co.uk/bmj/february/t… Image
Trans kids has been a minefield topic, w/ activists like @Esqueer_ & lefty pundits like @RottenInDenmark battling heterodox writers @jessesingal @bariweiss @sullydish @LeorSapir & @AbigailShrier & w/ @MattWalshBlog throwing bombs. @JoyceCarolOates has lent her support to kids. 4/ ImageImageImageImage
The prescription of hormones to trans-identifying minors is often framed as a choice of life on meds vs death by suicide. But researchers have not actually shown that hormonal treatment for gender dysphoria impacts death by suicide. 5/
press.psprings.co.uk/bmj/february/t… Image
@HRC said in a press release today that "ALL gender-affirming care is age appropriate and medically necessary." But in the UK, health experts found there's "scarce & inconclusive evidence to support clinical decision-making" for kids with dysphoria. 6/
press.psprings.co.uk/bmj/february/t… Image
Mark Helfand of Oregon Health & Science University criticized @wpath's recommendations for treating #transgender minors, including a lack of grading system to assess the quality of scientific evidence backing the guidelines. #trans 7/
press.psprings.co.uk/bmj/february/t… Image
At an October meeting of the AAP, @writingblock reports, @DrScottHadland of Harvard Med said, "Ten thousand pediatricians stand in solidarity for trans and gender diverse kids & their families to receive evidence-based, lifesaving, individualized care." 8/
press.psprings.co.uk/bmj/february/t… Image
Gordon Guyatt (@GuyattGH) of McMaster University found "serious problems" with the Endocrine Society's guidelines for treating #trans kids, such as making strong recommendations based on weak evidence--meaning they should not be called "evidence based". 9/
press.psprings.co.uk/bmj/february/t… ImageImage
In contrast to @DrScottHadland, @GuyattGH said, "When there's been a rigorous systematic review of the evidence" about treating #trans kids "and the bottom line is 'we don't know,' anybody who then claims they *do* know is not being evidence based." 10/
press.psprings.co.uk/bmj/february/t… ImageImage
While myriad medical organizations in the US back prescribing puberty blockers & hormones to trans-identifying minors, standards abroad are very different. Sweden did systematic reviews in '15 and '22, found evidence was "insufficient and inconclusive."11/
press.psprings.co.uk/bmj/february/t… ImageImage
The Endocrine Society (@TheEndoSociety) commissioned 2 systematic reviews for its clinical practice guideline for treating #trans adolescents with sex steroids and found the quality of the evidence regarding health risks was "low" or "very low". 12/ press.psprings.co.uk/bmj/february/t… Image
In sum, @writingblock's reporting suggests that @wpath and @TheEndoSociety's guidelines for treating #trans adolescents are not truly "evidence based", nor uncontroversial, nor do they balance the known and potential risks v benefits of such treatment. 13/ press.psprings.co.uk/bmj/february/t… Image
@MattWalshBlog, who doesn't so much debate the science behind care for trans minors as douse the field with gasoline & set it on fire, has made the topic so combustible in Tennessee, he teed up the politicization of #HIV prevention there, I reported:
14/ nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-ou…
@writingblock reviews the history of gender medicine in @bmj_latest. Note that her article was peer reviewed.
15/
 press.psprings.co.uk/bmj/february/t… ImageImage
@writingblock's assessment of the evidence backing standards of care for treating gender dysphoria in #trans minors comes a week after activists (eg: @glaad) and writers have pressured @nytimes to refrain from the type of reporting she has done. 16/ glaad.org/new-york-times…
Other articles finding a lack of high-quality science backing the treatment of trans minors have been published by @nytimes & Reuters, by @emilybazelon @mega2e @chadterhune @RobinRespaut @michelleconlin. 17/
nytimes.com/2022/06/15/mag…
nytimes.com/2022/11/14/hea…
reuters.com/investigates/s…
Myriad writers have criticized @nytimes reporting on #transgender issues, such as @_WrittenByHanna and @jackmirkinson in @thenation: 18/ thenation.com/article/societ…
thenation.com/article/societ…
Scores of @nytimes writers have pushed back against the charge by the paper's guild that its reporting on trans issues caused a hostile work environment, including @GiniaNYT @mattfleg @tripgabriel @apoorva_nyc @powellnyt @jimrutenberg @charlie_savage. 19/
@PressSec of @POTUS weighs in on the onslaught of bills introduced to statehouses this year that target #LGBTQ people:
20/
@ryanlcooper and @RottenInDenmark’s take on @assignedmedia:
@writingblock’s thread:
@jack_turban, MD, who treats trans kids, says there’s a lot of misinformation going around:
21/
@Esqueer_ responds to this thread: Image
The emailed responses to this thread are starting to come in. This is new: now I'm a Nazi and have autism to boot. Image
More charming exchanges with the readers of this tweet thread. Have a good one, @zunetopia. Image
Kindly do not come to this thread disrespectfully. I will not tolerate malicious statements toward anyone and the misgendering of transgender people.
Also, for anyone coming to this thread who thinks they know who I am, what I think or believe or what I'm about, do take note that I do not share my personal opinions about many issues on Twitter. I invite you to read my reporting on LGBTQ issues: benryan.net/lgbtq.html
@HRC will fly an airplane banner down the Hudson River protesting @nytimes coverage of #transgender issues today: Image
@Esqueer_ claims @writingblock can’t count, but the figure she cited in her BMJ article is the total number of minors receiving hormones and puberty blockers during that period, whereas the chart refers only to puberty blockers. Image
On the political front: cbsnews.com/news/texas-bil…
I get a lot of venomous emails, but I’d say this one regarding my tweet thread about the strength of the science behind the treatment of gender dysphoria in minors is one of the most heinous. Sadly for this person’s hopes, I was cured of cancer and have a 5% recurrence chance. Image
Also: it sucks for that person, but no one dies of testicular cancer anymore.
@meetzow wants me to die because I am engaging in science reporting and have illuminated the weakness of the science backing the treatment of gender dysphoria in minors.
Image
Also, gay people on Twitter get hit with a lot of tweets like this in the Musk era: @UIgliori Image
People tweet this to suggest that reduced stigma is the sole reason for the apparent tripling in trans identification between older adults & youths. But I think we can agree that gender identity is far more complex and driven by more complex factors than left vs right-handedness. Image
@CISCHASER hopes I die of the cancer I had: Image
If only this @ryanlcooper @TheProspect podcast had brought on academic experts to discuss youth gender care science. Instead, @RottenInDenmark provides a misleading overview that, for example, fails to note Finland & Sweden disagree with the US on this. 1/
prospect.org/podcasts/02-20…
@RyanCooper claims that what @jessesingal says about youth gender care science "makes no sense scientifically." Except Singal knows the science better than just about anyone, as he assiduously demonstrates. And his coverage is way more nuanced than Hobbes claims. 2/
My favorite is @ryanlcooper saying the best thing for science journos to do is: "You go into the studies to talk to the scientists, you don't talk to individual people, who may and probably do have an ax to grind," as he interviews two individual non-scientists about science. 3/
Hobbes himself is extraordinarily ideological, meanwhile. 4/

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More from @benryanwriter

Benjamin Ryan Profile picture
Dec 7
Children taking DIY cross-sex hormones before going to gender clinics

Hundreds of young trans people are buying puberty blockers, oestrogen and testosterone without prescription from websites and even recreational drug dealers.



 archive.ph/2025.12.07-002…Image
Hannah Barnes also reported on this yesterday. If kids are getting hormones from abroad, this could jeopardize the effort to study puberty blockers in the UK.
I reported on the UK puberty blocker trial:

open.substack.com/pub/benryan/p/…Image
Read 4 tweets
Benjamin Ryan Profile picture
Dec 4
‘We’re All Just Winging It’: What the Gender Doctors Say in Private

In footage obtained exclusively by @TheFP, gender doctors acknowledge they perform life-altering procedures on vulnerable youth with no supportive evidence—and they are proud of it, By @LeorSapir.
thefp.com/p/were-all-jus…Image
At their conferences, closed to outsiders and the press, the gender clinicians allowed themselves to speak freely. They spoke about the boys who said they wanted to be girls and the girls who felt they were meant to be boys, and the medical and surgical interventions that would make them appear as the opposite sex. The clinicians also discussed new procedures for a new type of patient—some of them adolescents—who wanted to be made to look as if they had no sex at all.

In one of the videos, obtained exclusively by The Free Press, from the 2021 conference of the U.S. Professional Association for Transgender Health, Amy Penkin, a social worker with the Transgender Health Program at the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) spoke about one such case. Penkin told the audience about Sky, who she described as an 18-year-old recent high school graduate who was living on his own for the first time.

Penkin explained that Sky expressed a desire to look like “a Barbie down there.” Sky, Penkin said, reported “being asexual, never having had sex, and having no desire to have sex in the future.” Indeed, Sky did “not want to feel any pleasurable sensation and hope[d] removal of all erogenous tissue [would] be possible,” according to Penkin. thefp.com/p/were-all-jus…Image
Not so long ago, a patient like Sky would have been given a psychological evaluation and offered mental health counseling. But in the evolving world of gender medicine, clinicians now want to help young people like Sky achieve their gender goals.

Penkin explained to fellow professionals that requests for procedures that are “nonbinary” are “growing in number.” But the field is still wedded to binary assumptions. This means that procedures such as “nullification” (surgically leaving patients with no external genitals) or “penile preserving vaginoplasty” (surgically crafting a pseudo-vagina underneath the penis) are not as accessible as they should be.

Penkin said that when confronted with a patient like Sky, existing “research” and “standards of care” are “not enough to meet the needs of our patients, and we need to take it to the next level to really think about how we evolve and match the needs of our patients as their needs are being expressed to us.”

thefp.com/p/were-all-jus…Image
Read 10 tweets
Benjamin Ryan Profile picture
Dec 1
BREAKING: Ryan Lizza has just dropped Part 4 of his saga on Olivia Nuzzi and RFK Jr.

🧵👇👇Part 4: Means of Control

The Mar-a-Lago tape, the Bobby phone call, Olivia's side of the story, and the neighbor who cracked the case.

"Bobby [Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] and Olivia planned to consummate their relationship on August 23, 2024, in Phoenix, Arizona, after he endorsed Trump at a rally in nearby Glendale. The timing was perfect. Bobby would no longer be a presidential candidate himself, so the media glare would dim, and, more importantly, Olivia later told me, he would no longer have the Secret Service protection that complicated an encounter. (And presumably Cheryl wouldn’t be around, either.) Olivia had a present for Bobby she was going to bring: a 1943 edition of Brenda Starr, Girl Reporter, a book based on the old comic strip about Starr’s wild adventures while on assignment for a newspaper.

"There were two problems. Inconveniently for them, I was also planning to be in Arizona to cover the Trump-Kennedy event. And then, a few days before the rally and the planned hotel room encounter, after Bobby and Olivia had been talking, texting, and FaceTiming for almost a year, I finally learned about their affair. Olivia reluctantly canceled her rendezvous with Bobby, who was about to become one of the most powerful figures in the Trump universe, a fortuitous development because Olivia was wrapping up her latest New York magazine assignment, a profile of Trump."
telos.news/p/part-4-means…Image
Ryan Lizza on what Isabelle "Izzy" Brourman allegedly found by surreptitiously taping, for Olivia Nuzzi, Trump talking about the assassination attempt at Bethlehem, PA:

"According to Olivia, Izzy thought Trump said something that cast doubt on the official story behind Trump’s bloody ear, which was injured on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, when Thomas Crooks tried to kill Trump.

"I assumed the context of what Izzy thought she overheard was about whether it was one of the eight rounds fired by Crooks that nicked Trump’s ear or something else—ricocheting glass or a bullet fragment—but that’s just speculation.

"What I know from Olivia is that the quality of the audio recording was poor, that she couldn’t corroborate Izzy’s recollection, that she discussed the recording with Bobby, and that after a phone call with Bobby while he was on vacation with his wife in Baja, Olivia erased the recording."
telos.news/p/part-4-means…Image
Ryan Lizza reports that the tape that Olivia Nuzzi asked Isabelle "Izzy" Brourman make of Trump talking might have raised questions about whether a bullet or something else nicked Trump's ear at the assassination attempt at Butler, PA. Lizza writes:

"Obviously, this episode raises a lot of questions:

"*When did Bobby [Robert F. Kennedy Jr aka RFK Jr.] learn about the operation to record Trump, and was it before or after it happened?
*Did Bobby ever disclose what he knew to the Trump campaign or anyone else?
*Did Olivia pass on any intel to Bobby from the recording, which would have included hours of Trump’s private campaign meetings at Mar-a-Lago, that aided him in his endorsement negotiations with Trump?
*What information from the recording, if any, did Olivia use in her profile of Trump, which was published on September 9, 2024?
*What did Trump really say about Butler, if anything?
*Does anyone still have a copy of the recording?

"The answers to these questions, and any additional information about what really happened, will have to come from Olivia, Izzy, and Bobby."
telos.news/p/part-4-means…Image
Read 16 tweets
Benjamin Ryan Profile picture
Nov 26
BREAKING: The 3rd part of Ryan Lizza's Olivia Nuzzi saga is live

Part 3: Catch and Kill
telos.news/p/part-3-catch…
"One night in early August 2024, before I knew anything, Olivia Nuzzi became obsessed with obtaining an advance copy of an article that The New Yorker was set to publish the following day. Olivia was desperate to get a preview of a profile of Bobby Kennedy Jr. by Clare Malone, a political reporter whom Olivia viewed as a competitor.

"The piece included a killer anecdote, one of the most memorable of the presidential campaign, and which would come to define Bobby’s image for much of the public: A decade earlier, he had left the carcass of a black-bear cub in Central Park as some kind of twisted prank.

"This was precisely the sort of story that Olivia relished, a Twin Peaks-like tale that illuminated the darker parts of a candidate’s mind. Olivia had written one of the earliest profiles of Bobby, so I figured her fixation on getting The New Yorker piece was also about professional jealousy. Bobby was her subject. Now she had missed a major scoop about the candidate whom, behind the scenes and without much explanation, she insisted would be the next president.

"What I didn’t know at the time was that she was secretly working to help make Bobby the next president."Image
Ryan Lizza catalogues Olivia Nuzzi's catch-and-kill effort for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.):

"And [@OliviaNuzzi] didn’t want to get her hands on that @NewYorker profile because she envied Clare Malone’s bear scoop. In fact, I later learned, she already had it. Olivia had heard the strange story from a confidential source. But instead of writing it herself and owning what would become one of the most infamous stories of 2024, or handing it off to a colleague at @NYMag, Olivia outed the source to Bobby [Kennedy] and told him everything she had learned. Together they plotted ways to kill it, or, at the very least, get ahead of it. (Bobby eventually pre-empted Clare’s piece with a video about the bear story after a New Yorker fact-checker called him.)

"As she later revealed to me during hours of conversations, Olivia did this regularly throughout 2024: canvassing sources who trusted her, obtaining their opposition research on Bobby, and then feeding it directly to the candidate."
telos.news/p/part-3-catch…Image
Ryan Lizza on Olivia Nuzzi's behind the scenes advocacy on behalf of RFK Jr:

"As she later revealed to me during hours of conversations, Olivia did this regularly throughout 2024: canvassing sources who trusted her, obtaining their opposition research on Bobby, and then feeding it directly to the candidate.

"Olivia also obtained information to help Bobby acquire Secret Service protection, advised him on debate prep, including what suit to wear for a key appearance, and provided him with detailed media strategy advice, among other things.

"During much of this period, Olivia was reporting and writing a major article about Joe Biden, considered the single most devastating piece about the president in all of 2024."
telos.news/p/part-3-catch…Image
Read 10 tweets
Benjamin Ryan Profile picture
Nov 24
VACCINE NEWS: A pair of Cochrane Review papers provide the strongest evidence to date that the HPV vaccine is very safe and highly effective.

Girls who are vaccinated before age 16 have an 80 percent lower risk of cervical cancer.

HHS secretary RFK Jr has disparaged the HPV vax, calling it dangerous. This rigorous analysis of numerous studies finds considerable evidence to the contrary. The vaccine was not associated with serious adverse effects and instead was only associated with mild effects, like a sore arm after the injection.

The papers:

Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination for the prevention of cervical cancer and other HPV-related diseases: a network meta-analysis 
cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.10…

Effects of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination programmes on community rates of HPV-related disease and harms from vaccination cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.10…Image
The Cochrane review pored over a huge amount of safety data and found that serious adverse health events were rare and occurred at the same rate regardless of whether people received the vaccine or a placebo.
The Cochrane Review team also cross-referenced online claims of specific HPV vaccine-related injuries and did not find evidence to support claims that the vaccine caused those specific negative health outcomes.
Read 12 tweets
Benjamin Ryan Profile picture
Nov 22
BREAKING: Ryan Lizza has issued Part 2 of his saga with Olivia Nuzzi:

She did it again.

It was four years later. Another presidential campaign. Another book project. Another candidate whom she had profiled. Another note—a poem, according to Olivia—though this time from the candidate to her.

“Yr open mouth awaiting my harvest,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is now the Secretary of Health and Human Services, had written to my then-fiancé. “Drink from me Love.”

He continued, “I mean to squeeze your cheeks to force open your mouth. I’ll hold your nose as you look up at me to encourage you to swallow. ‘Dont spill a drop’. I am a river You are my canyon. I mean to flow through you. I mean to subdue and tame you. My Love.”

telos.news/p/part-2-she-d…Image
"Olivia [Nuzzi] insisted that she and Mark [Sanford] only had sex one time, on the night of February 24, 2020, after she arrived at his home at about 7 PM. During their encounter, he was paranoid that she was taping him, so she briefly turned her phone’s recorder on and off to show him how it worked, leaving behind a short voice memo of the two of them giggling. She left his house around 11 PM."Image
Ryan Lizza writes:

"I did not believe Olivia [Nuzzi]’s version of events. I believed she had engaged in a long affair with Mark [Sanford]. She insisted that while her 'infatuation' lasted months, it was one-sided and they only ever slept together that one night. She insisted that I search her phone and laptop to corroborate her story, but, of course, she had already erased everything that was incriminating.

"Well, almost everything. There was that voice memo. And then there was something much stranger. Olivia had written a tabloid-style news story about how 'sources in Washington, D.C. and Charleston have been buzzing recently about an unexpected romance: Mark Sanford and Olivia Nuzzi,' who was described as 'one of the most famous political reporters in America,' a 'blonde beauty' who 'gained critical acclaim as a skilled profile writer, gaining access to the powerful and the mysterious and turning it into pure journalistic gold.'"Image
Read 7 tweets

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