Benjamin Ryan Profile picture
Oct 3, 2023 13 tweets 5 min read Read on X
Nebraska has issued a new, quite intense set of regulations for kids with gender dysphoria. To access gender-transition medication, they must receive 40 hours of therapy that is "clinically neutral and not in a gender-affirming or conversion context." 🧵⬇️
web.archive.org/web/2023100123…
Image
Nebraska's new regulations for gender dysphoric youth seeking puberty blockers require that clinicians document that the child's distress is driven by the dysphoria and not by other mental or physical health conditions, and that the dysphoria is unlikely to naturally resolve. 2/ Image
The gender dysphoric child in Nebraska (defined as under 19 years old) must live in the preferred gender for six straight months before qualifying for puberty blockers. 3/ web.archive.org/web/2023100123…
Image
To access puberty blockers, Nebraska kids must be informed of risks: "long-term effects on bone density, brain development, impact on fertility, sexual side effects including, but not limited to, loss of sexual gratification, and effects upon physical growth and development." 4/ Image
To provide cross-sex hormones to children in Nebraska, providers must document that the use of puberty blockers, if prescribed, "has been successful at reducing patient distress and discomfort". 5/ web.archive.org/web/2023100123…
Image
Nebraska children seeking cross-sex hormones must be informed of risks, including: "long-term effects on cardiovascular and cerebrovascular systems, metabolic disorders, increased risk of cancer, bone density, brain development, impact on fertility, sexual side effects." 6/ Image
Nebraska children seeking cross-sex hormones must be informed of potential sexual side effects, "including, but not limited to, loss of sexual gratification, and effects upon physical growth and development." 7/ Image
Trans legislative analyst Erin Reed @ErinInTheMorn denounces the Nebraska regulations. And the fact that the regulations explicitly state that the required therapy should not be conversion therapy notwithstanding, she asserts that it will be just that. 8/ erininthemorning.com/p/nebraska-to-…
@ErinInTheMorn has previously denounced a new model of psychological counseling for gender dysphoric youth, "gender-exploratory therapy" as conversion therapy. 9/ erininthemorning.com/p/gender-explo…
Gender-exploratory therapy has been championed by Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist and a past president of the trans health care group USPATH, and Laura Edwards-Leeper, the founding psychologist of the first pediatric trans clinic in the U.S. 10/ washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/1…
I spoke with Edwards-Leeper this week and she told me: "Conflating conversion therapy and identity exploration is perhaps the largest threat to both gender distressed cisgender youth and transgender youth, alike. The rhetoric being used to conflate the two must stop immediately."
Florence Ashley, of the Faculty of Law at the Univ of Alberta, is among the trans advocates who have denounced as apparent conversion therapy various counseling modalities for gender dysphoric kids that don’t follow the affirmative model. @ButNotTheCity
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17…
Trans activist and clinical instructor at the Harvard Law Cyberlaw Clinic, Alejandra Caraballo (@Esqueer_) has denounced gender-exploratory therapy as "conversion therapy, full stop." x.com/Esqueer_/statu…
Image

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Benjamin Ryan

Benjamin Ryan Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @benryanwriter

Jul 14
Clara Jeffery, editor in chief of Mother Jones, says that it is for the best that JD Vance’s children be subjected to boos at Disneyland, so that they “know now what their father is about.” Image
Debunking podcaster Michael Hobbes also endorses the jeers at @JDVance’s family at Disneyland. Image
Clara Jeffery, editor in chief of Mother Jones, adds the following to her post endorsing the jeering of @JDVance while he is with his children at Disneyland. She argues that he actually wants the optics of being booed while having family time in public.
bsky.app/profile/claraj…Image
Read 5 tweets
Jul 13
Democrats Lost Voters on Transgender Rights. Winning Them Back Won’t Be Easy.

The party’s vanguard position got ahead of voters in 2024, and the internal debate now underway reveals an uncertainty on how to adapt, by @chashomans for @nytimes.

"Stuck in a widening gulf between the views of the party’s liberal voters and advocacy organizations on one side, and those of the broader American electorate on the other, many Democratic politicians had resolved to say as little as possible about the subject. In surveys, Ms. Erickson and other public-opinion researchers had found that this allowed Republicans, who spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads attacking Democrats on transgender rights in 2024, to define voters’ perceptions of Democratic policy positions."Image
The dilemma is reflective of the Democratic Party’s broader struggles with identity politics as it dissects its losses in 2024. Recovering its standing with voters, many in the party believe, requires coming to terms with the party’s transformation during the Obama and first Trump presidencies, when American liberals broadly embraced what had previously been vanguard positions on a range of social and cultural issues, including gender and race, immigration and policing.Image
Read 8 tweets
Jul 10
Dr. Rachel Levine, a former Biden administration health official, tells @TheAdvocateMag that "the evidence base is strong for the safety and efficacy" of prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat gender dysphoria in minors.

A slew of systematic literature reviews have found this is not the case. Instead, they have found that the relevant evidence is weak and inconclusive. They have suggested that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health erred in making strong recommendations for these treatments. Evidence-based medicine guidelines discourage making a strong recommendation based on weak evidence.Image
Despite subpoenaed email records showing that Dr. Rachel Levine pushed WPATH to remove age limits on pediatric gender-transition treatments and surgeries for political reasons, Dr. Levine denied ever having done so in an interview with @TheAdvocate. Image
The New York Times reported last year:
nytimes.com/2024/06/25/hea…
One excerpt from an unnamed member of the WPATH guideline development group recalled a conversation with Sarah Boateng, then serving as Admiral Levine’s chief of staff: “She is confident, based on the rhetoric she is hearing in D.C., and from what we have already seen, that these specific listings of ages, under 18, will result in devastating legislation for trans care. She wonders if the specific ages can be taken out.”

Another email stated that Admiral Levine “was very concerned that having ages (mainly for surgery) will affect access to care for trans youth and maybe adults, too. Apparently the situation in the U.S.A. is terrible and she and the Biden administration worried that having ages in the document will make matters worse. She asked us to remove them.”Image
Read 7 tweets
Jun 30
Fact checking Michael Hobbes

Debunking podcaster Michael Hobbes has a new episode of his podcast If Books Could Kill, about the US v. Skrmetti Supreme Court decision upholding Tennessee's ban on pediatric gender-transition treatment.

In this🧵I will fact check Hobbes:
⬇️Image
Here is a link to the podcast: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the…
Michael Hobbes, referring to a video, published in 2022 by @MattWalshBlog, of a Vanderbilt doctor talking about the money that gender-transition surgeries bring in, including bottom surgeries: “Bottom surgeries are essentially not performed on children," Hobbes says. "So the fact that she's talking about bottom surgeries here makes it very clear that she's talking about adults.”

This depends on your definition of "essentially." Phallopasties are not recommended by @WPATH for minors, but vaginoplasties are. Dr. Marci Bowers, a gender-affirming surgeon and a former WPATH president, recommends that trans girls get a vaginoplasty the summer before they leave for college, when they are 17 or 18.

A 2023 paper on a limited dataset of US minor patients did find evidence of one vaginoplasty in 2021. This suggests that if the study authors had access to all records in the nation, they would identify more such surgeries in minors.

Consequently, Hobbes is incorrect to presume that the Vanderbilt doctor was not referring to minors in the speech that Walsh published. It is entirely possible she was.

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10…Image
Read 26 tweets
Jun 30
If, for the sake of argument, no one can prove that pediatric gender-transition treatment prevents suicide death only because such deaths are so rare, then why has this treatment been sold, first and foremost, as “lifesaving”?

Why have people who have called that claim into question been savagely attacked and sidelined?

Marci Bowers, former head of WPATH, herself told me last year that suicide death has never been a good metric of the success of this treatment.Image
Image
Debunking podcaster Michael Hobbes is himself one of the prime sources of misinformation about pediatric gender-transition treatment. He has routinely falsely claimed that there is no evidence that children get these drugs after absent or cursory assessment periods. There is copious evidence that this happens routinely at some of the top gender clinics in the nation. Despite all this evidence, Hobbes has never acknowledged his fault.

But you can see here that he is combining his longstanding claim about assessments with a claim about what he characterizes as false claims that there are large numbers of kids getting these drugs. That question should not necessarily be conflated with the assessment question.

About 1 in 1,000 youth with private health insurance went on cross sex hormones by age 17 between 2018 and 2022. That number was higher for natal girls and was probably higher for all youth by the end of that period.

One thing that has concerned some people is not necessarily the number of kids getting these drugs, but the rate of increase of that number. They have been concerned over where that figure might end up.Image
If suicide deaths are so rare even in youth with gender dysphoria, then why have leading gender clinicians routinely told parents that absent blockers and hormones, their child was extremely likely to wind up dead? That’s what the mantra “Would you rather have a dead son or a live daughter?” implies. We now know from the leading litigator in this field that that threat was a false one, at the very least in the suggestion of how likely suicide death was in the first place.Image
Image
Image
Read 4 tweets
Jun 29
The Liberal Misinformation Bubble About Youth Gender Medicine

How the left ended up disbelieving the science

By @HelenLewis for @TheAtlantic Image
Debunking podcaster Michael Hobbes, a prime source of misinformation about pediatric gender-transition treatment, slams @HelenLewis of @TheAtlantic for criticizing people such as him.
Read 5 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(