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Benjamin Ryan

@benryanwriter

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…

https://twitter.com/hannahsbee/status/1997214624194740592

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.

https://twitter.com/hannahsbee/status/1997214624194740592

I reported on the UK puberty blocker trial:

open.substack.com/pub/benryan/p/…

Read 4 tweets

Benjamin Ryan

@benryanwriter

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…

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…

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…

Read 10 tweets

Benjamin Ryan

@benryanwriter

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…

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…

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…

Read 16 tweets

Benjamin Ryan

@benryanwriter

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."

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…

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…

Read 10 tweets

Benjamin Ryan

@benryanwriter

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…

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

@benryanwriter

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…

"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."

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.'"

Read 7 tweets

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