At a Pride event earlier in June, Mr Trudeau said that "trans kids in New Brunswick are being told they don't have the right to be their true self, that they need to ask permission".
"Trans kids need to feel safe, not targeted by politicians," he said.1
Policy 713
In May Premier Higgs of New Brunswick responded to concerns expressed by parents + teachers about the Department of Education’s SOGI policy, known as Policy 713. Specifically his government removed explicit mention of sports teams and washrooms/change-rooms to match gender identity and banned teachers from using students’ preferred pronouns or names without parental consent for all students under age 16. The changes took effect July 1st. In Canada the confederation means programme delivery happens based on a federal-provincial power-sharing arrangement, with education falling into provincial jurisdiction.
Therefore it’s highly inappropriate in the style of woke Donald Trump for the Prime Minister of Canada to comment on an issue that lies outside his federal purview, particularly for such a partisan potshot. Justin Trudeau forgot that Canadians are served by and do not serve politicians. Such has become the state of political leadership in Canada — pathocratic and intellectually mediocre, if not altogether cognitively stunted. Most disappointingly, self serving—Justin Trudeau has revealed himself as a corrupt, shallow, unintelligent, and exhibitionistically vulgar in the way of India Folkorama Dress-Up whilst on a state trip in India. *Cringe*.
Yeah Justin is that progressive dude who trolls female people by saying in his woke stern tone trans women are women. He has no tolerance for opposition, he lacks the capacity for nuance — anyone who hoped he had some of Pierre in him grossly overestimated Justin. He has far too much smarm for me to like or trust him. And when you can look women in the eye and say trans women are women—why should any woman respect such a man?
Naturally the GenderWangsters got upset about Premier Higgs being the grownup in the room and making difficult decision to meet the needs of children + teachers + families. The Wangs believe the world exists to meet their narcissistic needs, they love hyperbole + histrionics and this time they didn’t disappoint. But, wait — doesn’t it feel like the tide has turned? Yes, it does! Pride month came and found an entirely GenderWang-saturated Canadian society.
Divided Disembodied Disconnected
Divisive as Justin Trudeau has been for Canada, his GenderWang political cult has succeeded in uniting Muslims + Christians + Jews + Hindus + atheists + LGB people together to stop SOGI. We don’t want GenderWang. We don’t want Woko Haram. We don’t want the Gender Revolutionary Guard Corps. Wokeness harms society. It divides and destroys. It preys on differences and punishes critical independent thought. It weaponises social pain and takes the torment of ostracism to Maoist heights. It normalises the dehumanisation mindset, a contagious one, which I have worked out as the state in which the social brain —
has shut off the mirror-resonant pathways
has switched on the acceptance-social pain alarm pathway
has switched off the smart vagus pathway
has become stuck in a punishing + antagonistic social neural connection loop which triggers the reward pathways.
“The neural circuitries for sensory pain and for affective pain live next door to one another in the brain. The mind-body delineation is our delusion and it’s killing us. Limited self-belief and anxious attachment style can weaken the dACC and make individuals more sensitive to sensory + somatic pain. Social supports provide opportunities for healthy disruptive connection, they strengthen the dACC, and therefore decrease sensitivity to pain. MacDonald + Leary write that threats to one's social connections are processed at a basic level as a severe threat to one's safety. In fact, we argue that such threats are partly mediated by the same system that processes physical pain because the pain system was already in place when social animals evolved adaptations for responding to social exclusion.”2 (From The Bullying of Struggle Sessions, 7.26.2023)
In other words, a culture of extreme individuation which highlights the differences between people and between groups of people and which places those differences in some kind of hierarchy of equity will cultivate a society of individuals with weak social connection neural pathways whose reward circuitry cultural distortions poison. A culture of individuation refers to one which rewards egoism and cultivates narcissism, erode natural lines of attachment and subvert independent thinking + personal boundaries + societal conventions. In other words, wokeness makes people selfish, egotistical, shallow, emotionally brittle and unable to think outside the box. It makes people stupid + histrionic + antisocial. It creates conditions for extremism. It creates conditions for extreme misogyny and child abuse. It creates social unrest, it makes people existentially unhappy.
Paediatrics and Gender Identity
Let’s backtrack. What is gender? I looked at the legislation and the federal government websites—to nail down a definition of the word gender feels like carrying water in a basket. I managed to locate a definition buried amongst some explanatory notes. Gender is the individual experience of being a man or a woman and it is separate from reproductive class, aka sex. GenderWangsters believe that children as young as toddlerhood have a firm sense of their gender identity, that is of being either a man or a woman. GenderWangsters believe that when this gender identity conflicts with the child’s immutable sex that the physiologic sex is wrong + the constructed feeling is right, that puberty becomes a disease and could kill the child because the child cannot stand his or her physical form it makes him or her want to die. GenderWangsters believe that the only affirming treatment path for this severe emotional + psychological dissociation + imbalance lies in pubertal suppression + body modification surgery to mimic opposite sex secondary sex characteristics. How does one argue with such insanity?
The Representative for Children and Youth for New Brunswick, Kelly Lamrock, reviewed the submissions received in the public consultation process and wrote 97 page report complete with recommendations for Policy 713. I read the report, and I studied the cases he cited and I tweeted about that. You can look at the Threadreader compilation of that tweet thread in PDF form below.
The main issue when it comes to Paediatric Gender Care revolves around parental consent versus the child’s right to privacy and autonomy versus the child’s safety and wellness and best interest. The other important issue relates to the dearth of accurate + ideologically neutral + valid-reliable scholarly information available to Family Law Justices making these important rulings involving gender and children. Since common law relies on jurisprudence as well as statute, the accuracy of information available to judges has a primary societal importance. The judiciary helps keep our democracy alive and functioning. Freedom means honesty of information available to lawmakers and the judiciary. Freedom means Child Advocates actually working to advocate for the children and not for an ideologically-driven approach to child development and pedagogy.
One thing that sticks out, having combed through the Lamrock report and the case law — parental rights do not exist as the parent activists group believe they do. In Canadian law, parental rights exist against your co-parent in a custody case. Otherwise the law considers the rights or best interest of child. Children are not property to control, they are persons under the law with rights + freedoms we can limit for their developmental integrity, wellbeing + safety. Mature Minor aka Gillick Competent means that children aged 14 and over can make decisions about their own health care without parental consent—see below for a detailed explanation. Parens Patriae means the court and the state has a duty to act in the place of the parent when considering legal matters for the child, it does not mean paying deference to a health care professional or clinical researcher.
By placing gender identity in the Human Rights Code, the federal government assigned a quasi-Charter status to it — how does this bode for sex based rights, what does this mean for the rights of female people to gather without males? How does this bode for kids who get scooped up by GenderWang zealots that want to transition every child in sight? No one wants to have this conversation in Canada, apparently that is far right stuff now. I can hardly wait for the grownups to show up and start leading.
Well it seems like some grown ups have arrived in Australia, where Belle Lane presented a paper on Paediatric Gender Affirming Care to the Australian Family Court, and where Justice Kylie Beckhouse made an important and thoughtful ruling in a family law case involving gender identity. You can find a PDF copy of each above. Legal decisions provide a lot of great information that tells readers what kinds of factors contributed to the breakdown. Overwhelmingly in the case of gender identity, attachment rupture, parental relationship breakdown, abuse or bullying coincide with the onset of the gender dysphoria or whatever psychiatric symptoms emerge in the child.
There is nothing obviously detrimental about a parent allowing their child to reject the prevailing societal gender norms and expectations. But arguably, it has the potential to make them more vulnerable when they are, at the same time, questioning their sense of belonging following a difficult parental separation. In Dr S’s view, the impact of this is that it had amplified rather than contained the emotional experience of the children. — Justice Beckhouse
In her paper Belle Lane states, clinicians would be well-advised that gender transition is not an appropriate response to suicidal intent or threat, as it ignores the larger mental health and social context of the young patient’s life—the entire family is often in crisis. (p. 59, para 253). She mentions the data from Sweden that indicate socially transitioning increases the likelihood of medically transitioning, and she mentions the issue the with online survey data, particularly over-reporting of suicidality and inaccurate self reports of puberty blockers. Also, cross-sectional designs do not permit for causal inferences. Children as young as ten, who do not have the capacity for informed consent, are starting a treatment course that will likely render them infertile or sterile and this raises complex bioethical issues, Lane states in para 277 on page 64. In a 2022 Family Law case a paediatrician stated, there are some unknown effects with using GnRHa during early adolescence which include the impact on emotional and cognitive development. Whilst this has not been effectively studied … (p. 65, para 283). In paragraph 289 on page 66, Lane mentions growing international concern about the brain impact of puberty suppression.
Contrary to what Lane and others say, plenty of valid and reliable evidence exists to tell us that puberty suppression harms rather than affirms children, and places at particular risk for suicide and self harm children with emotional and psychiatric disturbances. You can read my Lupron Primers below.
Lupron Primer :: Part 2
The puberty blocking drug the media calls puberty blocker is a chemical called GnRH agonist, Gonadotropin-Releasing Hormone agonist. AbbVie distributes the drug made by TAP Pharmaceuticals under the name Lupron. Based on the nature of GnRHa and the complexity of neuroendocrine physiology, only a reckless clinician would promote Lupron as a safe and reversible part of necessary care for gender discordant kids. Dualism leads us to falsely believe that the brain and body can be misaligned. Puberty Blockers are not puberty blockers at all. There is no such thing as blocking puberty — puberty is not an annoying Twitter account. Puberty is a developmental neuroendocrine process, one temporally governed and regulated. Functional restructuring and neural/synaptic pruning of the brain happens at puberty, as does metabolic and bone growth. Children need to experience puberty to have a healthy and safe and fulfilling adulthood.
Lupron has not been authorized for use in children with gender dysphoria, Lupron is not authorised for use in child sex change. It is fraud for a drug company to promote an off label use for a drug in the USA. It is a violation of the Food and Drugs Act for anyone to promote an off-label use for a drug in Canada. Yet provinces are paying for Lupron to treat gender dysphoric kids, at $400/mo/patient for a lengthy treatment course. In BC, pediatric endocrinologists receive an exemption from the special authority restrictions to prescribe Lupron to kids with GD under Plan G, a plan for psychiatric medications for patients who would otherwise be hospitalized. The BC Hospital Foundation did receive money from AbbVie.
Criteria to determine Gillick competence (Mature Minor)
able to comprehend and retain both existing and new information regarding proposed treatment;
able to provide a full explanation, in terms appropriate to the child’s level of maturity and education, of the nature of treatment;
able to describe the advantages of the treatment;
able to describe the disadvantages of the treatment;
able to weigh the advantages and disadvantages in the balance, and arrive at an informed decision about whether and when they should proceed with the treatment;
able to understand that the treatment will not necessarily address all or any of the psychological and social difficulties that the child had before the commencement of treatment;
being free to the greatest extent possible from temporary factors that could impair judgment in providing consent to the procedure.
A child afflicted by pressured thinking, anxiety, depersonalisation, dissociative delusions, depression and suicidal thinking does not meet these criteria because they do not satisfy criteria number 7 and because psychiatric disordered thought-processes prevent a child from weighing advantage and disadvantage in a balanced manner.
Nadine Yousif, BBC, Policy 713: LGBT school policy change causes political turmoil in Canada, 3.7.2023
MacDonald + Leary, 10.1037/0033-2909.131.2.202, 2005