Benjamin Ryan Profile picture
Oct 31, 2024 21 tweets 20 min read Read on X
SCOOP: ‘Shocking’ and ‘Reckless’—Top Gender Clinic Assesses Kids For Gender-Transition Treatments in Just 2 Hours
🧵I report for @NewYorkSun: @BostonChildrens slashed the time slated for psychologists to assess and write a report on kids seeking gender-transition treatment from 20 hours to 2.5 hours, alarming experts.Image
🧵LINK: ‘Shocking’ and ‘Reckless’: Top Gender Clinic Assesses Children for Gender-Altering Medical Treatments in Just 2 Hours, Lawsuit Lays Bare, I report for The @NewYorkSun.
nysun.com/article/shocki…
🧵Supporters of gender-transition treatment for kids—see: Michael Hobbes—have insisted there’s no evidence kids are being rushed onto these meds.

@BostonChildrens, we now know, in 2018 started referring kids for such meds after a single 2-hour assessment appointment with a staff psychologist.

Boston Children’s is home to one of the nation’s pre-eminent gender clinics, known as GeMS. It was the first of its kind to be established in the United States, after a Boston Children’s team in 2007 imported the so-called Dutch model of prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to gender-dysphoric minors.

The clinic, whih spawned a gender-clinic revolution in the United States, has since abandoned the many guardrails that defined that protocol.

@RottenInDenmark @ifbookspod @yrfatfriend @yourwrongabout

Read the @NewYorkSun article here:
nysun.com/article/shocki…Image
Connection Between Boston Children's and Johanna Olson-Kennedy:
Details about @BostonChildrens Hospital’s gender-clinic practices have come to light in a bitter civil trial that started last week. A former BCH gender-clinic psychologist, Amy Tishelman, is suing them for gender- and age-based discrimination. She was fired in 2021, a year after she first filed suit.

Dr. Tishelman alleged in court that her supervisor at Boston Children’s, Dr. Yee-Ming Chan, was threatened by her success and had long subjected her to sexist and ageist treatment. Dr. Chan, who denies these claims, is a pillar in the field of pediatric gender medicine in his own right. He is a co-principal investigator of an ongoing and multipronged $10 million National Institutes of Health–sponsored research endeavor of the care transgender youth, including studies of the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat gender-related distress.

Republican members of Congress last week pledged to launch an investigation into the federal grant funding this study. They were inspired to do so after The @NYTimes reported that the research project’s leading investigator, Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, said that she had refrained, expressly for political reasons, from publishing the team’s study finding that puberty blockers were not tied to psychological benefits.

Read about it in the @NewYorkSun:
nysun.com/article/shocki…Image
Image
🧵Here's how the total time declined that @BostonChildrens gave for psychologists to assess gender-distressed kids and write a report on whether to refer them to endocrinology for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones:
2014: 20 hrs
⬇️
2016: 6 hrs
⬇️
2018: 2.5 hrs
Read my article about it in The @NewYorkSun:
nysun.com/article/shocki…
🧵Boston Children's staffers who testified in court over the past week that its gender clinic in 2018 reduced the hours psychologists spend directly assessing gender-distressed kids and their families from 4 hours to 2 hrs:
▶️Former psychologist Amy Tishelman, the civil trial’s plaintiff
▶️Psychologist Kerry McGregor, assoc. dir. of the gender clinic
▶️Jeremi Carswell, dir. of the clinic
All three have a long history at the clinic.

Read my article about this in The @NewYorkSun:
nysun.com/article/shocki…
🧵Leading gender-care psychologists told me for The @NewYorkSun that they were appalled by the news that the @BostonChildrens gender clinic, GeMS, only provides gender-distressed kids and their families a single 2-hour psych appointment to assess whether the kids should be referred for life-altering gender-transition treatment. They said:
nysun.com/article/shocki…

▶️“It’s shocking,” Laura Edwards-Leeper, a former Boston Children’s psychologist who helped found the hospital’s gender clinic in 2007. “When Amy [Tishelman] first shared that with me, I was just in disbelief.” She said she fears the system she set up has been woefully degraded.
▶️Erica Anderson @eanderh, who is transgender and a former head of @WPATH’s US branch, said that the assessment-related testimony from multiple Boston Children's employees in Dr. Tishelman’s trial – who gave no indication that the drastically shortened assessment time is anything but a long-standing clinic policy – suggested a “fall from grace” for the prestigious hospital. The institution, she said, has “capitulated to the medicalization of children in a way that is reckless.”
“When people like Amy Tishelman are forced to draw a line in the sand and say, ‘no,’ and institutions come down hard on someone like her, we’re in deep trouble in America,” Dr. Anderson said.
▶️ Former GeMS psychologist Amy Tishelman denounced as “reckless” the clinic’s policy it adopted in 2018 of allotting just 2 hours of assessment-appointment time and a half hour for report writing. “I didn’t feel like that was doable at all,” she testified in her civil trial.
▶️"It is way too short an amount of time!" another leading psychologist who wished to remain anonymous told me, expressing shock over GeMS’s policy.
▶️Anna Hutchison worked for the British pediatric gender clinic, GIDS, from 2013-2017. “What can you realistically achieve in that time?” Dr. Hutchinson said of the 2-hour appointment. “There are risks in changing what we do clinically based only on resources.” Referring to the increasing demand at GIDS for services from increasingly troubled children, she said, “Because numbers are going up, complexity is going up, and the amount of time per patient her family goes down…We essentially became an assessment and medication service.”Image
Image
Image
Image
🧵A @BostonChildrens attorney suggested in court last week that its gender clinic, GeMS, could not keep up with demand, saying that the clinic “had a really long waiting list.” Francie Mandel, a GeMS social worker, testified that the reduction in 2018 in appointment hours allotted for assessments of gender-dysphoric kids was driven not by clinical factors but by billing-related concerns.
Read my article about this in The @NewYorkSun:
nysun.com/article/shocki…
🧵How do @BostonChildrens leaders rationalize only requiring gender-distressed kids and their parents attend a single 2-hour appointment with a psychologist before the clinic decides whether to recomment the kid see an endocrinologist for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones?
nysun.com/article/shocki…

Psychologist Kerry McGregor, who is now the associate director of the Boston Children's gender clinic, GeMS, testified in court this week:

On reducing the appointment from 4 hours to 2 hours in 2018: “I thought it was appropriate. But some people wished they’d had that time.”

Further asked by a Boston Children’s attorney about why the assessment time was reduced, Dr. McGregor said: “I think that four hours was too much time. If you ever try and get an adolescent to pay attention to you for four hours straight, it’s a little bit difficult. And also we were able to get all the information in much less time. So, in order to see our growing patient population, it made sense to make that time more efficient.”

Dr. McGregor, who said she spent about 15 to 45 minutes writing her assessment reports, with the aid of a template she created, continued: “And we also could always ask for more time if we needed to. So I’ve met for a second session with patients. It’s pretty rare, but I do it if I need it.”

Asked if two hours was typically sufficient to perform what the attorney called “a hormone-readiness assessment,” Dr. McGregor replied that it was. And asked for greater specifics about occasions when she said this was not sufficient time, she said, “Very rarely, but usually if someone has extreme social anxiety, they don’t want to talk, it takes a while to warm them up, maybe they’re on the autism spectrum, things like that, it might make sense to have a second session.”Image
Image
🧵Evidently concerned, at least in part, by the potential for threats of violence, attorneys for @BostonChildren’s have sought to keep shielded from public view allegations about the practices of its gender clinic, called GeMS, that were included in exhibits former psychologist Amy Tishelman submitted for her lawsuit.

In an Oct. 2023 filing successfully requesting that the judge overseeing the case seal portions of those exhibits the attorneys wrote: “Public disclosure of these allegations will add fuel to an already highly charged public debate over the care of gender diverse youth and could cause serious, irreversible harm to the Hospital and the practitioners who Plaintiff now, for the first time, accuses of providing substandard care to this already at-risk population.”

The attorneys further asserted: “GeMS practitioners provide individualized, safe, and affirmative care.”

Read my article about this in The @NewYorkSun:
nysun.com/article/shocki…Image
🧵Boston Children’s sustained waves of bomb threats in 2022 after the influential conservative social-media account @LibsOfTikTok issued attacks on the Boston gender clinic and others like it. The account, run by @ChayaRaichik10, circulated videos that @BostonChildrens had published, and ultimately deleted, advertising its gender-transition services.

In one such video, still available on the internet archive, a Boston Children’s OB/GYN cheerfully touts the “gender-affirming” removal of the uterus and ovaries. web.archive.org/web/2024031420… The hospital later firmly denied performing such surgeries on minors. However, it had once indicated on its website that gender-distressed patients as young as 17 could receive a vaginoplastyand those as young as 15 could undergo double mastectomies.

nysun.com/article/shocki…Image
🧵That it has taken so many years for the news about Boston Children’s slashing the assessment times at its pediatric gender clinic to be laid bare lends weight, critics suggested to me at The @NewYorkSun, to the persistent allegations that pediatric gender care, a deeply controversial medical specialty, is critically lacking in transparency.

The associated political stakes are substantial. During the presidential campaign’s home stretch, Donald Trump has relentlessly hammered Kamala Harris for her past support of taxpayer funded  gender-transition treatments for prisoners, including detainees who are undocumented migrants. His campaign has funneled tens of millions of dollars into attack ads on this issue.

Read my article:
nysun.com/article/shocki…Image
🧵The @BostonChildrens employment trial has also shone a harsh light on a substantial blind spot in pediatric gender medicine: the crucial question of how those who medically transition as minors fare as adults.

nysun.com/article/shocki…

By stripping former Boston Children’s psychologist Amy Tishelman of her right to see patients in the gender clinic in 2019, she and her attorney alleged in court, the hospital compromised her vital research into the care of transgender children. And by firing her outright two years later, she said, the hospital terminated, among other research, her effort to establish a comprehensive database of all the patients the gender clinic had ever seen and to follow up with those who had reached adulthood.

“We were the first clinic to see transgender kids in the United States, and we don’t know whatever happened to them and how they’re doing,” Dr. Tishelman testified about the hundreds of former patients who have aged out of the clinic’s care.

“It’s damning that an institution like that, which has all those esteemed affiliations with major universities, would put the kibosh on an area of research that’s so desperately needed and would have informed their administrative decisions had they allowed it,” Erica Anderson @eanderh, a psychologist and former head of the U.S. division of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or @WPATH, told me at The @NewYorkSun.

Boston Children’s is most prominently affiliated with @Harvard Medical School @HarvardMed.Image
🧵The nonprofit Do No Harm recently conservatively estimated that @BostonChildrens provided gender-transition treatment, surgery, or both to at least 300 children from 2019 to 2023. @DoNoHarm otherwise found that 14,000 U.S. minors received such interventions during this period. (benryan.substack.com/p/at-least-140…) And @LeorSapir at the @ManhattanInst estimated, also conservatively, that 5,300 to 6,300 minors—as young as 12 years old—received gender-transition mastectomies between 2017 and 2023.

According to the Boston Children’s gender clinic’s website, the clinic has cared for more than 1,000 families. The site states: “We believe in a gender-affirmative model of care, which supports transgender and gender diverse youth in the gender in which they identify. This is a standard of care grounded in scientific evidence, demonstrating its benefits to the health and well-being of transgender and gender diverse youth.”

nysun.com/article/shocki…Image
🧵Gary Click, a Republican state representative from Ohio, marshaled that state’s ban on gender-transition treatment for minors into law. In an email to me at The @NewYorkSun, he responded to news from Amy Tishelman’s trial, specifically that @BostonChildren’s assesses gender-dysphoric minors in just two hours of appointment time, by criticizing the pediatric gender-transition treatment advocates with whom he has clashed.

“While I consistently advocated for mental-health over medical interventions, I was frequently and falsely accused of denying psychological care,” Mr. @ClickForOhio said of such advocates. “I’ve since discovered they are usually guilty of what they accuse us of doing. Now it appears that they are in a rush to medicate children before they have a chance to heal emotionally and choose a normal life.”

My article:
nysun.com/article/shocki…Image
🧵Amy Tishelman testified in her civil trial against @BostonChildrens that by early 2018, GeMS (its gender clinic) administrators eliminated from the assessments a screening measure for autism. This despite the high rates of autism in gender-distressed youth. She alleged that despite what she characterized as the degradation of the assessments’ quality by that time, GeMS would include in various reports about the clinic’s work that its staffers followed @WPATH’s trans-care guidelines.

“Shortening evaluations” at GeMS “eventually became a big concern” among her research collaborators nationwide, Dr. Tishelman testified. “People would complain to me about my protocol from outside,” she said in reference to those national colleagues.

Dr. Tishelman specified that Dr. Robert Garofalo, a leading pediatrician at the gender clinic at @LurieChildren’s Hospital in Chicago, expressed a concern to her at around this time regarding GeMS excluding from the assessments a measure of family acceptance and support of transgender patients. Along with Dr. Yee-Ming Chan, Dr. Garofalo is a co-principal investigator on the newly besieged, long-running NIH-funded study of which Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy is the research lead.

“I would try to tell people that I was not in charge of the protocol,” Dr. Tishelman testified.

Read my article in The @NewYorkSun:
nysun.com/article/shocki…Image
🧵Amy Tishelman’s attorney asked @BostonChildren’s psychologist Kerry McGregor about the notorious videos that the gender clinic (called GeMS) put out advertising their services in 2022. She referred to one in which she suggested that, as she recalled in her testimony, “a lot of parents share that some of their children seem to know seemingly from the womb as if they come out kind of knowing who they are,” meaning transgender.

“There’s no scientific research that would support the assertion that kids know whether they’re transgender as soon as they come out of the womb, right?” Mr. Hannon asked Dr. McGregor.

“I don’t know how we would do that scientific research, so no,” she replied.

nysun.com/article/shocki…Image
🧵Jamie Reed @JamieWhistle famously blew the whistle on her employer in an article in @BariWeiss' @TheFP, The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, where she had been a case manager. Ms. Reed has accused the since-shuttered clinic of shirking its responsibility to provide comprehensive aid to a population of vulnerable children with very complex needs. (An internal university investigation found the clinic followed “appropriate policies and procedures according to the accepted standards of care.”)
thefp.com/p/i-thought-i-…

“I long suspected that the sloppy care Wash U. provided would be found across the country,” Ms. Reed told me at the @NewYorkSun. During her time at the St. Louis clinic, she said, “I was often unable to refer patients to high-quality psychological assessment, and our clinicians were also limited to scheduling only two sessions to complete an assessment—matching Dr. Tishelman’s account.”

nysun.com/article/shocki…Image
Nearly two dozen medical-malpractice lawsuits have been filed by detransitioners –  people who medically transitioned and then regretted it, stopping treatment and reverting to identifying as their birth sex – against health and mental health providers over the past two years. Central to many of those suits are claims that minors or young adults suffering from multiple other psychiatric conditions were prescribed gender-transition treatment for dysphoria after only a cursory assessment that failed to meet the @WPATH standard.
nysun.com/article/lawsui…

Jordan Campbell, a partner at Campbell Miller Payne, a Dallas firm that represents many of these plaintiffs, told the Sun: “Dr. Tishelman’s testimony squares with what we see and hear from every single one of our clients: a general sense to rush patients into life-altering medicalization with very little—frequently even less than two hours—assessment, if any.”

nysun.com/article/shocki…Image
Psychologist Laura Edwards-Leeper has defended the value of the psychological assessments of gender-dysphoric children seeking gender-transition treatment in the face of a burgeoning movement across the pediatric gender medicine field to question their utility.

@UCSF child psychiatrist @Jack_Turban, for example, strongly suggested in his recent book on trans children that such assessments were useless and should be done away with. Gender-transition treatment should be as easy for adolescents to access as Prozac, he suggested. This is despite the fact that he has also frequently touted the assessments in other settings. benryan.substack.com/p/dr-jack-turb…

In a 2020 video interview posted to YouTube, Dr. Garofalo said there is no means of determining whether a child is “really trans” and that these assessments are not meant to make such a determination. (Dr. Turban similarly asserted the latter point in a recent paper.) Dr. Garofalo said that he simply asks a child for their gender identity and proceeds accordingly.

nysun.com/article/shocki…Image
Subscribe to my newsletter: Hazard Ratio, where I cover pediatric gender medicine detail: benryan.substack.comImage

• • •

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

Feb 7
How Can Doctors Like This Provide Competent Care To Their Patients?

Some beef with Dr. Jonathan Howard, by @JesseSingal.
jessesingal.substack.com/p/how-can-doct…
Dr. Jonathan Howard, a neurologist and psychiatrist at @NYULangone Health, is furious at Michael Shermer, the founding publisher of Skepticmagazine.

Howard is an impressive figure. Like many doctors at university-affiliated medical centers, he also serves as a professor, in this case at the @NYUGrossman School of Medicine. He has, according to his biography, “authored and edited multiple textbooks” on multiple sclerosis, his area of specialty.

Why is Dr. Jonathan Howard furious at @MichaelShermer? It has to do with a recent exchange between Senator Josh Hawley and an OB-GYN named Dr. Nisha Verma. Hawley, seeking to make a point about “gender ideology” (as he might call it) during a hearing, repeatedly asked Verma if men can get pregnant and Verma could not give a straight answer. Shermer chimed in to suggest an answer Verma could have given that accounts for the fact that, as Shermer (and anyone else using the traditional, biological definition of the term) sees it, men cannot, in fact, get pregnant.

That’s why Howard is furious, and that’s why he wrote a deeply aggrieved article in Science-Based Medicine about Shermer’s bigotry. The headline? “The Anti-Trans Obsessions of ‘Skeptic’ Michael Shermer: Hallucinating Imaginary Demons to Empower Actual Villains, Once Again.” The subheadline? “I want to demonstrate to Michael Shermer that it’s possible for men like us to not talk about trans people constantly. If I can do it, so can he.” (If you’re unfamiliar with Science-Based Medicine’s strange recent trajectory, see here or here.)

Not only does Dr. Jonathan Howard of NYU Langone Medical Center disagree with Michael Shermer that men can’t get pregnant — Howard thinks that to even ask this question puts other humans in danger.

That probably sounds like a caricature on my part, or a sloppy and inaccurate gloss of Howard’s actual views. But that’s exactly what he wroteImage
Image
Jonathan Howard has gotten it into his head, meanwhile, that I am personally responsible for the MAHA movement because once I published an essay on Vinay Prasad’s Substack about trans medicine researchers deceiving the public. This is bonkers conspiracy thinking by Howard.
After @jessesingal explained in exacting detail why the study Jonathan Howard cited as evidence of pediatric gender-transition treatment’s efficacy was bunk, Howard respond with this mischaracterization of what Singal said about Howard’s inability to understand the paper. Image
Read 6 tweets
Feb 6
Dr. Blair Peters,a gender-transition surgeon at OHSU, responds with disdain to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons coming out against such surgeries for minors. He says the broader membership was never polled about this.

Which is the same thing that has happened at the American Academy of Pediatrics, for example, but going in the other direction. No matter how hard @JuliaMasonMD1 has pushed, the AAP’s 2018 policy statement on the gender-affirming care method has never been up for a vote by the broader membership.

All of the major medical organizations that have led the way in establishing pediatric gender medicine’s broader credibility, including the AAP and the Endocrine Society in particular, have supported these practices in minors based on the decisions of small committees.

The AAP’s 2018 policy statement was written by a single person, Dr. Jason Rafferty, who was a resident at the time.

All of the other medical societies’ little committees have followed these other groups’ lead, along with WPATH. This has given the illusion that all medial providers support these practices in minors.

But I’ve spoken to pediatricians who are too afraid to express their concerns at the AAP’s annual conference for fear this will destroy their careers.Image
More from Blair Peters: Image
Image
Image
In 2024, Dr. Blair Peters, aka “Queer Surgeon,” spoke with the head of the ASPS and they had this remarkable exchange about whether doctors can be trusted to self police.

The ASPS president, Dr. Steven Williams, brought up Tuskegee. open.substack.com/pub/benryan/p/…Image
Image
Read 6 tweets
Feb 4
People are shocked that all it took for the AMA to change its policy on pediatric gender transition surgeries was for another medical group, the ASPS, to do it. But this phenomenon is how the unanimity among the medical groups fell into place in the first place. It was only ever based on a few small committees within a couple of medical organizations, putting aside WPATH, which is a quasi-activist-medical organization.

It got started in the 2010s as WPATH and the Endocrine Society, which have a lot of overlap between them and referred to one another's guidelines in their citations, put out guidelines. And then in 2018 a single medical resident wrote the American Academy of Pediatrics' policy statement on the gender-affirming care method. Along the way, other major medical associations took these other groups' lead, including the APA and AMA. And then all the other ones fell in line.

These groups did not conduct major independent analyses of the evidence. Even the AAP never conducted a systematic literature review to support its policy statement. And in August 2023, the AAP said it was going to conduct one. But there is no sign that the organization has even started on that. Because if they ever did, there is only one conclusion that it could have: that the evidence backing providing gender-transition interventions to minors is weak and inconclusive.

All this is to say is that the mantra "all major medical association support gender affirming care for kids" was always a hallow claim. What it really meant is that: "A few small committees at a few organizations decided to support this, in part because of one another, and all the other small committees at all the other organizations followed their lead."
If you want to go down the rabbit hole of how citation laundering laid the groundwork for the supposed medical consensus on gender-transition treatment for minors, I highly recommend @buttonslives's reporting: buttonslives.news/p/new-systemat…Image
@buttonslives Hollow, not hallow*
Read 5 tweets
Feb 2
A Legal First That Could Change Gender Medicine

At 16, Fox Varian got a mastectomy while undergoing a gender transition. She sued her psychologist and plastic surgeon for leaving her ‘disfigured for life.’ Benjamin Ryan reports from the courtroom.

Read the @TheFP article: thefp.com/p/a-legal-firs…

Follow and support my Substack, where I cover pediatric gender medicine: benryan.substack.com. I was the only reporter to attend the entire three-week trial and will be providing more in-depth reporting and commentary on the case.

The opening of my Free Press article:

Fox Varian had a turbulent childhood. Her parents split when she was seven, triggering a three-year custody battle that ultimately saw her estranged from her father. She suffered from a constellation of mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, and social phobia. She was diagnosed with autism and bounced around various schools. Her first period sent her into a meltdown, and she battled disordered eating and body-image issues. By mid-adolescence, she was completely lost.

At 15, she began questioning her gender during sessions with her psychologist. She changed her birth name, Isabella, to Gabriel, which she saw as androgynous. Over the next two months, she cut her hair short, began binding her breasts, switched her name again, to Rowan, and started telling people she was transgender.

In December 2019, 11 months after she started this public social transition, Varian underwent surgery to remove her breasts. She was 16 years old.

Varian, who adopted the name Fox at 18 and is now 22, is one of thousands of minors who underwent gender-transition surgery over the past decade. And she is just one of the young people who have come to regret permanently addressing what was only a temporary identity shift.

Three years after her mastectomy, Varian stopped identifying as transgender and began a process known as detransitioning. In May 2023, she filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against the two principal Westchester County, New York, care providers who oversaw her gender transition: her long-time psychologist, Kenneth Einhorn, and Dr. Simon Chin, who performed the mastectomy.

On Friday, a jury in White Plains, New York, awarded Varian $2 million in damages. Varian’s case is the first malpractice suit from a detransitioner to go before a jury, and I was the only reporter to attend the entire three-week trial. Represented by personal-injury attorney Adam Deutsch, Varian said she had been injured by the defendants due to their deviation from standard practices and a lack of informed consent. While there are no guarantees in medical malpractice lawsuits, legal experts believe Varian’s victory could inspire a wave of similar cases that would significantly disrupt pediatric gender medicine.Image
Claire Deacon, mother to Fox Varian, the detransitioner who won a $2M jury award after suing her care providers over the mastectomy she got at 16, testified that Varian's psychologist, Kenneth Einhorn, browbeat her into consenting with threats of her child's suicide.

I report for @TheFP:
thefp.com/p/a-legal-firs…

Subscribe to my Substack for further in-depth reporting about the case. I was the only reporter to attend the entire three-week trial. benryan.substack.comImage
Dr. Loren Schechter, the head of gender-affirming surgery at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago and the president-elect of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), testified that gender-transition surgery is not form of suicide prevention. thefp.com/p/a-legal-firs…Image
Read 12 tweets
Jan 31
NYU neurologist/psychiatrist Jonathan Howard has been making a stink over @MichaelShermer's recent statements about transgender issues on @BrianLehrer's show.

Here, Howard cites a @Harvard study that falsely claimed youth "rarely" get gender-transition surgeries. In fact, about 1,000 minors got a mastectomy for this purpose annually in recent years, before state bans set in.

I wrote about that Harvard study when it came out. I demonstrated how its authors had quite evidently sought to mislead the public about this issue: benryan.substack.com/p/how-harvard-…

So, in fact, it is not Shermer who is "making things up" about this point in particular, it was Harvard researchers that at least effectively did so.

As for expressing concerns about minors getting these surgeries, I would like Howard to look into the eyes of the mother who testified in the detransitioner civil trial that I just finished attending yesterday (the plaintiff won a $2M judgment against her care providers; my article on the suit will run in a major outlet next week) and tell her that the loss of her daughter's breasts when she was 16 amounts to a false concern.Image
Image
How Harvard Teed Up the False Claim That the 'Vast Majority of Minors Getting Gender-Affirming Surgeries Are C-s Kids'

An opaquely written Harvard study and linked press release prompted false reporting that gynecomastia surgeries for boys are vastly more common than gender-affirming surgeries for transbenryan.substack.com/p/how-harvard-…Image
The other day, Howard wrote some screed where he referred to me as a "malignant actor" nefariously pursuing this line of inquiry for money. (Someone suggested that as a cancer survivor, maybe I am intrinsically malignant...) To that I say that Howard might get his facts straight about any of this stuff before he passes judgement on my reporting.
Read 5 tweets
Jan 31
BREAKING: 1st Detransitioner to Take a Medical-Malpractice Lawsuit to Trial Wins $2 Million Judgement

Fox Varian sued her Westchester, NY, area psychologist and plastic surgeon for the gender-transition mastectomy she got at 16.

I was the only reporter to attend the entire 3-week, historic trial. Subscribe to my Substack to receive an alert about the feature article I have coming out next week in a major publication out about the trial: benryan.substack.com. I cover pediatric gender medicine as a specialty on my Substack.

Sorry to just give just a teaser for now about the case! But I wanted to get the word out about the verdict promptly, the slower pace of feature-article publishing notwithstanding.

The entire case file was put under seal when the trial started (although I obtained all those documents before they was sealed), and all the transcripts from the trial are also under seal. The riveting trial was sparsely attended and there was only one other reporter at the trial; and he only attended for part of it and, as I observed, took few notes. So my own hundreds of pages of notes from the trial will likely remain the only way for the public to learn about the all finer details of what transpired, possibly ever (or until an appeal, should that happen).

In addition to my article coming out in the media outlet soon, I intend to write a lot about what I observed and learned on my Substack over the coming weeks. Stay tuned…Image
I have identified 28 detransitioner lawsuits filed to date. Varian v. Einhorn was the first to go to trial and the first to win a judgment, making history. If anyone knows of any additional cases that are not on my spreadsheet below or sees any errors, please DM me.Image
Quite a few of the detransitioner lawsuits have run up against strict statutes of limitation, such as the case against leading pediatric gender doctor Johanna Olson-Kennedy. Attorneys intend to appeal this dismissal, as I wrote in November:
benryan.substack.com/p/detransition…Image
Read 4 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!

:(