Reproductive Surgery to Fix an Emotion
the clinical barbarism of gender affirming care: how did get here?
I have to admit I feel a bit defeated today and I like I don’t know what to say. I glanced at the supposed scholarly paper that wants me to think it’s liberating for a woman to want to harm her unborn child by exposing it to high and unsafe levels of a known teratogen. Yes, apparently it’s marginalising women who identify as men to deny them testosterone during their pregnancy. Yes, apparently women who identify as men must have their toxically high levels of exogenous androgen steroid in their bodies in order to be mentally well enough to endure the pregnancy. You can read the paper here if you want. I won’t duplicate anyone’s work, you can read the analysis in [The Last Stand].
Now and Then: History Repeating Itself
I cannot believe the dumb sh1t I am writing these days, testosterone therapy during pregnancy, the danger of wrong puberty. Seemingly normal and highly educated people are dangerously removed from reality. We live in a pathocracy. How did this happen? There must be some mistake, because my society is not run by unhinged psychopaths who want to bring ruin to society at large when they are having a tantrum. That stuff happens Over There, which is somewhere that isn’t geographically here. Look, Canada and the USA are places people run to in order to get away from the unhinged psychopaths bringing destruction and ruin onto their countries. How did we end up like one of those unfortunate societies we once used to help? I have questions.
How did we become a mild version of Gilead?
How did we come to have Joseph Mengele clones running modern day medicine?
How did we circle back so far into history that our current psychiatric care now resembles the Victorian care model which promoted gynaecological surgical experimentation on asylum patients?
Do the lessons repeat themselves over and over in history until humans learn them? When will we learn this one? Ever?
I have thought about the answers to these questions a lot lately. I have thought a lot about humans and our tendency to exclusivism. We always think we are the best of any era. We look back to history with a measure of arrogance thinking we know better that they did. Only we forgot that we are them. No matter how heinous we might think historical figures and societies, remember they never saw themselves like we see them. German society of 1930s and 40s believed in their superiority and their exclusive ownership of being right and morally approved. They could not relinquish that belief and the most extreme amongst them took their lives and even killed their children too! Stop and think about the distortion that grips your mind when your thinking tells you killing all of your children will be good for them.
Some children grew up in germany having no idea who they were — their families carried a dark shame no one could speak about. The further our society gets into the medical experimentation on children and young people the more I can see that European society did know 11 million humans went to their deaths and they were not moved to resist for fear of reprisal. Growing up I remember hearing the refrain we didn’t know. Now I understand that as a trauma response, a manifestation of collective guilt, at having lived such a collective lie.
How will things turn out for us, when we finally defeat the Gender Affirming Care Cult? Maybe the future won’t even notice this —it’s funny how the awful things certain important people do can go away sometimes. When you do a Google search for Richard Maurice Bucke your search will return all sorts of hits about what a great bloke Bucke was, how he was Walt Whitman’s friend, how we was so good to his patients blah blah. Is that the truth about Bucke, though?
How can we know when history tells us the truth?
Well, we can know when it’s hiding the truth when we look for key facts and they don’t appear. You can torture a collection of words to say anything, a data set to say anything. The fact of the matter is the bloke who wrote Cosmic Consciousness and may have been onto something with respect to the nervous system conducted surgical experiments on women in his Asylum. RM Bucke performed gyne surgery on mentally ill patients in the asylum hospital which he ran, as a supposed cure for their psychopathies. Apparent, according to the late historian Wendy Mitchinson (see above for the pdf) Canada led the way in that field of medicine. My heart sunk when I discovered Bucke and read Mitchinson’s paper—we have been here before, where we are now, in the past.
Bucke was an important Canadian progressive psychiatrist in the late nineteenth century … [he] was a progressive for his day, believing in humane contact and normalization of routines in the institution, says a Psychology WikiFan page. I have trouble reconciling the good guy image of Bucke with the man who decided to carve up women’s reproductive organs up in order to resolve their psychiatric distress. I wonder if he was like the arrogant + captured docs on twitter who disingenuously smear their critics, who lie about Abigail Shrier and her book, Irreversible Damage and who lie about puberty suppression being safe and reversible.
Twitter Doctors, Puberty Blockers + Weaponising Suicide
When you are an influential child psychiatrist and you express outrage at a law that mandates consulting parents about socially transitioning their child, when you imply that protecting the bond between the parent and child will lead to increased suicidal behaviour and parental abuse, then I question your grasp of the human attachment system and your capacity to make sound clinical decisions. When you shamelessly emotionally manipulate a foreign politician about a decision she is making for her country regarding health care and safeguards for kids, then I question your sincerity. Why does a suicidologist weaponise suicide so recklessly as in these tweets?
The Movement Advance Project, published a guidebook about how to have discussions about suicide in the LGBT population. They advised:
DON'T attribute a suicide death to a single factor (such as bullying or discrimination) or say that a specific anti-LGBT law or policy will "cause" suicide.
Suicide deaths are almost always the result of multiple overlapping causes, including mental health issues that might not have been recognized or treated.
Linking suicide directly to external factors like bullying, discrimination or anti-LGBT laws can normalize suicide by suggesting that it is a natural reaction to such experiences or laws. It can also increase suicide risk by leading at-risk individuals to identify with the experiences of those who have died by suicide.
By Black’s own admission, instigation of moral panic around suicide epidemics involves more coercive control to influence political decision making and policymaker than anything else, including a desire to save lives. In an interview regarding suicidal behaviour and COVID lockdown, he downplayed the suicide panic promoted by the conservative who opposed lockdown, saying:
We have virtually no reliable ways to predict future suicide rates. The moral panic around the "tsunami of suicides" that would follow COVID was incited by the lay opinion that this makes sense, a media that loves to make people afraid, and media "experts" whose main expertise is being on camera and furthering their career. —Psychology Today Interview about COVID lockdown suicides
When you are a fancy Harvard medical school graduate and you are smearing your intellectual opponents by accusing them of spreading misinformation, then you have betrayed yourself. Jack’s ridiculous + misleading claims about GnRH analogue makes sense when you learn that, in 2019, he received $15K from Arbor Pharmaceutical, maker of Triptorelin, maker of a GnRH analogue alternative to Lupron.
Here we have a medical doctor tweeting that it’s ok to prescribe a hazardous chemotherapy drug to kids to extend their childhood so they can decide if they like their immutable reproductive class. Here we have a medical doctor tweeting that natural growth could be harmful and that kids need synthetic growth to be affirmed and live. Puberty can’t be undone he says, like it’s a bad thing that kids grow out of their child bodies and into their adult sexed bodies. Lobotomising the hypothalamus and pituitary is more benign than allowing a child to grow and develop naturally, tweets Jack Turban.
How is a doctor able to practise Do No Harm when he is lying about natural child development being harmful to children?
How are we all okay with Jack Turban and we were not okay with Mark Geier? They both want to give GnRHa to autistic kids, only Jack has rebranded autistic kids as trans kids and suddenly it’s ok to wreck your child’s body when you think they may be trans which you are told is like being gay. So, we have a medical establishment that thinks gay children need hormonal and surgical mutilation to be affirmed into a rigid gender visual stereotype.
So, we basically have Wahhabists running the pediatric psychiatric medical world now? Cool. #SarcasmAlert
How did we get here again? Why do we end up back at this place where we think that we can abuse and destroy the body to self-actualise? We are still battling original sin, aren’t we?
Enter Richard Maurice Bucke, noted Canadian Psychiatrist, and his gynaecological treatment of psychiatric distress in women who were asylum patients. Bucke gave a speech in from of the American Medico-Psychological Association in May of 1898 in which he claimed pelvic disease as a causative source of mental alienation. You can read the full PDF above to get a flavour of the time and of the man Bucke. Historian Wendy Mitchinson researched Canadian medical history and wrote about Bucke and also wrote about how the medical profession treated women during the first half of the 20th century.
Doctors … tended to see men's bodies as the healthful norm: they considered women to be frail, weak, and prone to sickness. Where womens' bodies deviated from their male counter-part, they were regarded as problematic and in need of "scientific" management.
Dwelling upon the reproductive function, doctors were not only preoccupied with woman's gynaecology, but came to regard women as prisoners of their bodies, an assumption that devalued the intellectual capabilities of the female sex. As victims of their biology, women were thought to be "closer to nature than men and less able to escape its thrall." — Colin Howell, review of Mitchinson’s book
What if doctors see gender diverse children as trapped in their own bodies the same way society sees women trapped in our own bodies? You know, as opposed to powered by our bodies? What if this is really hatred of sexuality masquerading as gender tolerance? What if this alternating revulsion of and obsession with sexuality is a function of our hatred and disgust at our basic self — the sexual being that provides biological structure and and meaning to existence? A century ago doctors knew the barbarism and inappropriateness of manipulating the reproductive system to effect a mood or thought change. In a paper on women, families and the provincial asylum in BC, Mary Ellen Kelm wrote:
In Canada, Richard Maurice Bucke pioneered the practice at his institution in London Ontario, while the American Marion Sims and the English physician Isaac Baker Brown followed similar courses in their work. The practice was denounced in both moral and medical terms as issues of consent and the effectiveness of the surgery were hotly debated. In 1901, the Ontario government prohibited the treatment in its public asylums, but Alfred Hobbs continued to surgically intervene in the reproductive lives of his female patients at the private Ontario hospital, the Homewood Retreat (Warsh 1989). So did Ernest Hall of Vancouver's Burrard Sanitarium, and he was one of Bucke's staunchest supporters. Men who committed women to the Provincial Hospital for the Insane cited reproductive causes almost half the time and some went on to advocate surgery as a possible cure. Hall's work was well-known and the popular belief that women's reproductive organs could cause insanity did not die easily. —Mary Ellen Kelm, 1994
Well that idea did not entirely die. In fact it expanded to include gay men — the reproductive organs of gay men could cause insanity. In present day we’ve expanded it once again to include the reproductive organs of children are causing them insanity. In Body Failure: Medical Views of Women, 1900 - 1950, Wendy Mitchinson wrote about the social cultural norm that designates male heterosexuality as the normative human standard, thereby rendering female sexuality as a disease state that required remedial care and also from which men must guard themselves. In this cultural model of humanity, female sexuality weakens and hampers rather than fuels and strengthens and emboldens.
Fast forward to present day where a vocal + powerful + dominant segment of the medical professional now openly espouses the professional opinion that natural sexuality weakens + hampers a human adolescent and that the synthetic sexuality offered by a pharmaceutical company in a syringe provides life-saving affirmation. Gender Identity represents an inability to accept an immutable and unchanging characteristic about oneself — sex. It represents the notion of sexuality as a harm to be mitigated and even eradicated through elective chemical and chemical disfiguration. However we are sex. Sex appears in every cell of our body. Seeking to destroy sex in a human equals seeking to destroy the Self, because sex has physiologic functions that extend far beyond procreation to brain growth, healthy, and protection.
Horrific. Criminal. Crime of the century. Though something in the nature of the beast, even if hardly less deserving of anathematizing. But you might have some interest in the article on "perverse incentives" which provides a case in point of another (shameful) bit of Canadiana:
Wikipedia (old version): "The Duplessis Orphans — Between 1945 and 1960, the federal Canadian government paid orphanages 70 cents per day, per orphan, and paid psychiatric hospitals $2.25 per day, per patient. Allegedly, up to 20,000 orphaned children were falsely certified as mentally ill so that the province of Quebec could receive the larger payment."
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Perverse_incentive&oldid=1062635881
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplessis_Orphans
Though this is hardly more than folk-biology; sorry about that:
"... an inability to accept an immutable and unchanging characteristic about oneself — sex. .... Sex appears in every cell of our body."
Relative to the former, you might take a look at the standard biological definitions "promulgated" in reputable sources like the Journal of Molecular Human Reproduction [MHR] and the Oxford Dictionary of Biology [ODB], the latter from a tweet as I don't have a subscription to that dictionary:
MHR: "Female: Biologically, the female sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces [present tense] the larger gametes in anisogamous systems.
Male: Biologically, the male sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces [present tense] the smaller gametes in anisogamous systems."
Gamete competition, gamete limitation, and the evolution of the two sexes:
https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990
ODB: "female 2. (Denoting) an individual organism who reproductive organs produce only female gametes (ova)"
https://twitter.com/pwkilleen/status/1039879009407037441
By those definitions, to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexless. Hardly "immutable" -- hundreds if not thousands of species change sex all the time.
And relative to the latter, only bodies have a sex -- i.e., the ability to produce gametes; cells only have karyotypes and don't produce gametes so don't have a sex.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karyotype
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamete
Your writings are excellent and I truly love this one.
While I might not agree with your personal way of expressing your anger sometimes, you sure as heck have a way of hitting the issue on the head with a massive sledge hammer. It is also very obvious that, different from many writers, you have a wealth of factual, scientific, and personal knowledge about the subjects you address. Sometimes I would just like to be a little fly fluttering around in your head and looking at all the parts of your brain on fire.
Keep up the great work. I hope your substack and Twitter will gain immense recognition over time because you deserve it and we need voices like you who are not afraid to speak up at any given time. Thank you, Rukhsana!