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Benjamin Ryan

@benryanwriter

Aug 1

A Pattern of Lavish Spending at a Leading L.G.B.T.Q. Nonprofit
@GLAAD paid for its chief executive, to fly first-class, rent a Cape Cod house and remodel her home office. It may have violated I.R.S. rules.

nytimes.com/2024/08/01/bus…

A light rain fell at the Zurich airport one Sunday morning in January 2023 as Sarah Kate Ellis made her way from a seat in Delta’s most exclusive cabin to a waiting Mercedes. It was there to chauffeur her to the Swiss Alps, where she and her colleagues would stay at the Tivoli Lodge, a seven-bedroom chalet that cost nearly half a million dollars to rent for the week.

Ms. @sarahkateellis, who was en route to the World Economic Forum in Davos, doesn’t run a Wall Street bank or a high-flying tech start-up. She is the chief executive of the nonprofit organization GLAAD, one of the country’s leading L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy groups.

The group, which has an annual budget of roughly $30 million, paid for Ms. Ellis’s trip, as well as a day of skiing, according to internal documents reviewed by The New York Times and interviews with current and former employees and others with knowledge of GLAAD’s operations.

The trip was part of a pattern of lavish spending at GLAAD, much of it by Ms. Ellis, that may have violated the organization’s own policies as well as Internal Revenue Service rules.
nytimes.com/2024/08/01/bus…

Read 19 tweets

Benjamin Ryan

@benryanwriter

Jul 25

Dr. Marci Bowers, president of @WPATH, reiterates a position WPATH made in the spring, saying that gender-transition treatment is right for the "vast majority" of children with gender dysphoria, according to @MackenzieMays's @LATimes article about @ChoooCole.

There are an estimated 300,000 adolescents who identify as transgender. So that would mean putting some 200,000 or more of them on the medical pathway, with tens of thousands more put on puberty blockers and hormones each year.

How California teen Chloe Cole emerged as a leader of the ‘detransition’ movement — and a right-wing icon
.latimes.com/california/sto…

Paywall free link:
How California teen Chloe Cole emerged as a leader of the ‘detransition’ movement — and a right-wing icon
archive.is/20240725114436…

Read 9 tweets

Benjamin Ryan

@benryanwriter

Jul 21

Kennedy asserts that the Cass Review “has already been discredited by 3 peer-reviewed publications.”
She cites:
1) Cal Horton’s criticism of Cass’s interim report, which Horton published before the Cass Review came out
2) McNamara et al’s non-peer-reviewed white paper, which was not published in a journal, rather was placed on the Yale Law School’s website
3) Noone et al, which is a preprint and not a published journal article.
@natachakennedy
Noone:
McNamara:
Horton: osf.io/preprints/osf/…
law.yale.edu/sites/default/…
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

After falsely claiming that the Cass Review has been discredited by three peer-reviewed publications, transfeminist sociologist Dr. @NatachaKennedy says it is "hilarious" that the "transphobes can't make up their minds as to whether Cass was peer-reviewed or not." (It wasn't.)

Read 9 tweets

Benjamin Ryan

@benryanwriter

Jul 20

When I was reporting about monkeypox, people put me under intense, explicit pressure not to report the facts about the outbreak’s epidemiology, namely that sex between men was overwhelmingly and consistently how it transmitted. I was told that if I told people this I would cause antigay stigma. This always struck me as patently ridiculous and also egregiously counterproductive. Gay men needed the facts about the virus so they could protect themselves. And misleading everyone else to think they were more than very, very, very remotely at risk only caused needless anxiety and undermines the credibility of public-health voices. Children were literally more likely to get struck by lightening than to contract the virus. Gay men’s mpox acquisition rate, I estimated, was some 45,000 times greater than children’s.

Then there were the gay guys who lost their damn minds when I said gay guys should engage in sexual-behavior modification to lower their risk of mpox, a horrific infection causing many of their brethren harrowing physical pain. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/…

Incidentally, the guy with the "Where Is Your Rage?" sign in the photo that WaPo used for my oped, who recently got his PhD in European intellectual history from Princeton, was incensed to be associated with my arguments that gay men should engage in sexual behavior change to mitigate their monkeypox risk, which he found repugnant. He was especially enraged that I had criticized the CDC for refusing to even mention the word "men" in their monkeypox safer sex material, despite the fact, I noted, that sex between men was the overwhelming mode of transmission. (Why so cagey, CDC?) So the academic guy kept DMing me after my WaPo piece came out to call me a TERF. (Still new to being dragged on Twitter, I was telling my therapist about all this, and the poor man finally had to say, with utter bewilderment bordering on exasperation, "What is a TERF??)

Earlier this year, I read a screed that the academic guy published on HuffPost on Aug. 6, 2022, about what a mess the public-health response to mpox was. () And there he was, arguing that we never should've associated monkeypox with gay sex. (He engaged in a lot of finger pointing elsewhere, at the government and such. Some of that was surely deserved, mind you. But the point of what I wrote in WaPo was that gay men also needed to just protect themselves in the meantime by engaging in the same kind of sexual risk mitigation they had in the 80s with AIDS. We are adults, after all. Right?) This despite the fact that by the time he published the piece, there was pretty good data being published showing that this was indeed overwhelmingly transmitting via sex between men. (See: ) This fact never changed from week to week; and it never did for the remainder of the outbreak (which continues at a very slow burn to this day).

He also fell for the false belief that the virus was going spread substantially among kids. This despite the fact that it was already quite clear by Aug 6, 2022, when he published the piece that the virus largely required quite an intense among of physical intimacy--namely, sexual intercourse--to transmit. This virus was not going to tear through kindergartens like mad. And indeed it never did. There was not one instance of the virus transmitting between children in a day care or school anywhere outside of the nations in Africa where the virus is endemic. Not one. Ever.

Then the academic guy indignantly wrote that despite the fact that many of his friends were in agonizing pain from mpox, the media kept telling everyone that the disease was mild until finally, The Guardian covered all the true horrors on July 23, 2022. Um, ahem, but I was the one who broke the story about how awful mpox was, on July 6: .huffpost.com/entry/monkeypo…
nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-ou…
nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-he…

Read 4 tweets

Benjamin Ryan

@benryanwriter

Jul 19

BREAKING: The NHS's Dept. of Health and Social Welfare review refutes claims by @JolyonMaugham of @GoodLawProject of suicide surge in gender-distressed minors referred for treatment at GIDS
This review, by By Professor Louis Appleby, University of Manchester Department of Health and Social Care adviser on suicide prevention, reaches the same conclusions as my reporting for the @NewYorkSun. He writes in summary:
▶️"The data do not support the claim that there has been a large rise in suicide in young gender dysphoria patients at the Tavistock.
▶️"The way that this issue has been discussed on social media has been insensitive, distressing and dangerous, and goes against guidance on safe reporting of suicide.
▶️"The claims that have been placed in the public domain do not meet basic standards for statistical evidence.
▶️"There is a need to move away from the perception that puberty-blocking drugs are the main marker of non-judgemental acceptance in this area of health care.
"We need to ensure high quality data in which everyone has confidence, as the basis of improved safety for this at risk group of young people."

Activist-blogger @ErinInTheMorn Erin Reed repeated the false claims of Mr. Maugham on @MajorityFM with @EmmaVigeland this week.

Here is the NHS review:
gov.uk/government/pub…

Claim of Suicide Surge in Youths on U.K. Wait List for Gender Care Undermined by ‘Cass Review’, I reported for the @NewYorkSun. My reporting has now been backed by a review by the NHS.
nysun.com/article/claim-…

https://x.com/benryanwriter/status/1814020703034974707

Activist-blogger Erin Reed @ErinInTheMorn went on @MajorityFM with @EmmaVigeland this week and made false claims about suicides in gender-distressed British youth that have now been refuted by an NHS review. Will she and Vigeland issue a correction?

https://x.com/benryanwriter/status/1814020703034974707

Read 17 tweets

Benjamin Ryan

@benryanwriter

Jul 19

Pennsylvania Psychological Association forbids any mention on its professional listserv of Britain's Cass Review about pediatric gender medicine, points to @WPATH guidelines instead
This despite the fact that the Cass Review deemed that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health's guidelines on pediatric gender-transition treatment weren't scientifically rigorous.

In a recent email to over 1,000 members of the Pennsylvania branch of the American Psychological Association @APA, the PPA’s leadership denounced Britain’s Cass Review, which found that pediatric gender-transition treatment is based on "remarkably weak evidence," as "failing to meet the professional standard" of the PPA's adherence to "evidence-based practices." Accordingly, the PPA forbade any further mention of the Cass Review on the listserv.

The Pennsylvania Psychological Association, despite being adamant that it was being transparent with its members about the reason for forbidding discussion of the Cass Review, did not specify in its email why it believed that the review did not meet the group's evidence-based standards. Instead, in explaining its new policy, the PPA said that members of the LGBTQIA+ community on the listserv and their allies felt "targeted, harmed, and hurt" by the sharing of the Cass Review.

As an alternative, the PPA recommended that members reference WPATH's Standards of Care 8 and the APA's policy statement on gender-affirming care. This came after the Cass Review found that the WPATH's guidelines “lack developmental rigor” and that the document “overstates the strength of the evidence.”

The University of York systematic literature reviews (there were two parts) that concerned global guidelines on pediatric gender-transition treatment found that WPATH's guidelines were flawed due to engaging in what Cass subsequently characterized as "circularity" in their citations with other guidelines. This practice is more pejoratively known as "citation washing," in which the scientific buck essentially stops nowhere—there is no original study that solidly backs a particular claim.

The University of York team deemed that the APA's 2015 policy statement on gender-affirming care for children (which has since been updated) had poor rigor of development.

This move by the PPA to forbid discussion of the Cass Review directly follows the unsealing of internal WPATH communications in an Alabama court case regarding the development of the Standards of Care 8 that showed that some of WPATH’s own members knew that their guidelines were based on weak evidence. One WPATH leader stated in an email to colleagues that “we are painfully aware of the gaps in the literature and the kinds of research that are needed to support our recommendations.”

Additionally, the unsealed communications revealed that WPATH suppressed systematic literature reviews it commissioned from evidence-based medicine experts at Johns Hopkins University about the treatment of gender dysphoria when the findings did not support WPATH's goals. WPATH also capitulated to outside pressure to remove age restrictions on pediatric gender-transition treatment and surgeries from the Biden administration, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Trevor Project.

The email to PPA members was signed by Allyson L. Galloway, president, Meghan Prato, communications board chair, and Michelle Wonders, EMCC chair.

Pennsylvania Psychological Association forbids any mention on its professional listserv of Britain's Cass Review about pediatric gender medicine, points to WPATH guidelines instead
benryan.substack.com/p/pennsylvania…

Here is what Cass had to say about the WPATH guidelines:

Read 6 tweets

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