psychosurgery

Double Mastectomies As Young as 12-Years Old

Published by Papa Giorgio

(See my “Detransition Tag” for all related posts)

  • The research did not look at ‘bottom’ surgeries among minors, which involve removing or modifying youngsters’ sex organs. These procedures are also thought to have risen in recent years. (DAILY MAIL)

The deeper you dig in the dark warrens of adolescent transgender medicine, the more convinced you become that the doctors who operate on young girls are criminal or insane or both.

I know that sounds extreme. But how can a decent person read the bare statistics in a recent article in one of the world’s leading paediatrics journals without feeling rage?

A brief report from four doctors at Vanderbilt University, “Gender-Affirming Chest Reconstruction Among Transgender and Gender-Diverse Adolescents in the US From 2016 to 2019” appeared in JAMA PEDIATRICS earlier this week. It is “the largest investigation to date of gender-affirming chest reconstruction in a pediatric population” to date.

The researchers found that the incidence of “gender-affirming chest reconstruction” surgery for children under 18 – better known as double mastectomies or “top jobs” — increased by 389 percent between 2016 and 2019. (These “chest reconstructions” included some boys who presumably wanted breast implants – but these were only 1.4 percent.)

An estimated 1,130 “top jobs” were performed during those four years on girls as young as 12. What kind of doctor amputates the healthy breasts of a 12-year-old girl?

According to the data, based on the Nationwide Ambulatory Surgery Sample, the Vanderbilt doctors calculated that 5.5 percent of the children were under 14, 21.5 percent under 15, and 56 percent under 16.

It gets worse.

Through the distorted lens of the billion-dollar sex-reassignment surgery industry, “top jobs” might make sense as the last step in the gender-affirmation template. After a gender-dysphoric girl has experimented with living in a male body for months or years, she wants her chest to look masculine. She proceeds through the following steps:

  • I know I’m a boy in a girl’s body.
  • I need social affirmation.
  • I need puberty blockers.
  • I need cross-sex hormones.
  • I need a double mastectomy.

But according to the figures compiled by the Vanderbilt doctors, only 19.9 percent of these girls had hormone therapy before surgery. That means that the overwhelming majority of these young girls – 80.1 percent – had their breasts amputated without attempting to masculinise their bodies.

[….]

Amputation without hormone therapy makes no sense even in the Alice in Wonderland universe of transgender medicine. It is sheer mutilation. It is worse than prescribing liposuction for a 12-year-old suffering from anorexia nervosa. Or amputating limbs or severing spinal cords for people suffering from Body Integrity Identity Disorder. Where are the studies which show that “top jobs” alone will solve girls’ gender dysphoria?

Furthermore, more than a third of the girls had been diagnosed with anxiety or depression. (The study fails to mention autism, which is often implicated in gender dysphoria.) What kind of surgeon amputates the breasts of a mentally-ill teenager?

[….]

The data in this study are already nearly three years old. How many more girls will be maimed for life by sociopathic surgeons before Americans wake up to this grotesque violation of human rights?

(MERCATOR NET)

Detransitioned teen, Layla Jane, sues Kaiser Permanente after getting double mastectomy at age 13:

DAILY MAIL has this on Layla Jane (hat-tip GATEWAY PUNDIT):

According to legal papers, Layla experienced moodiness, anxiety, gender confusion and anger issues as a child. At age 11 learned about radical transgender ideology and went online to learn more about the new trend.

She self-diagnosed that she was a boy and believed transitioning would solve her mental health problems.

According to the suit, doctors at the Permanente Medical Group and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals rushed her on to cross-sex hormones and a double mastectomy without properly assessing her mental health problems.

Her evaluations lasted only 30 minutes and 75 minutes, records show.

Legal papers identify the carers as Susanne Watson, a psychiatrist in Oakland, San Francisco-based plastic surgeon Winnie Tong, and Lisa Taylor, a pediatric endocrinologist in Oakland.

They are accused of ‘intentional, malicious, and oppressive concealment of important information and false representations’ that saw Layla pushed into the procedures.

It’s claimed they presented Layla Jane and her parents with a terrifying choice: ‘Would you rather have a live son, or a dead daughter?’ — language that echoes complaints from other detransitioners across the US.

‘These are decisions I will have to live with for the rest of my life,’ Layla said in a statement.

‘I’m ready to join the growing group of detransitioners so that no other child has to go through the torment I went through at the hands of doctors I should have been able to trust.’

In the above video Chloe Cole is mentioned:

Chloe Cole—joined by Harmeet Dhillon who is representing her—talks about suing the doctors who originally transitioned her: “It’s a medical malpractice case. I want to hold the adults who put me in harm’s way accountable.”

Daughters Are Coming Back From College, Men

Published by Papa Giorgio

Dennis Prager discusses a topic that is really a new piece of Leftist propaganda (within the past 5-years), that is, rapid onset gender dysphoria. Over the years of studying cults, brainwashing, separating children from family, etc., I see much of this in the inundation of these ideas in concentrated forms and peer pressure at the university.

The articles referenced by reading from the College Fix are these:

This is a travesty! The Left and Leftist parents and doctors start to block hormones in pre-teen children, when about 90% of young people who have “gender dysphoria” settle on being either gay or straight, and not trans. It is child abuse, number one. And number two, it is no different than the “psychosurgery” that was popular in the 40’s-60’s – that of lobotomies. It is sick. It was wrong then just as it is wrong now. Doctors and psychologists were wrong then JUST as they are wrong now. Which brings me to number three… it is not scientific.

WSJ: “When Your Daughter Defies Biology“

By Abigail Shrier — Jan. 6, 2019

A reader contacted me under a pseudonym a few months ago. She turned out to be a prominent Southern lawyer with a problem she hoped I’d write about. Her college-age daughter had always been a “girly girl” and intellectually precocious, but had struggled with anxiety and depression. She liked boys and had boyfriends in high school, but also faced social challenges and often found herself on the outs with cliques.

The young woman went off to college—which began, as it often does these days, with an invitation to state her name, sexual orientation and “pronouns.” When her anxiety flared during her first semester, she and several of her friends decided their angst had a fashionable cause: “gender dysphoria.” Within a year, the lawyer’s daughter had begun a course of testosterone. Her real drug—the one that hooked her—was the promise of a new identity. A shaved head, boys’ clothes and a new name formed the baptismal waters of a female-to-male rebirth.

This is the phenomenon Brown University public-health researcher Lisa Littman has identified as “rapid onset gender dysphoria.” ROGD differs from traditional gender dysphoria, a psychological affliction that begins in early childhood and is characterized by a severe and persistent feeling that one was born the wrong sex. ROGD is a social contagion that comes on suddenly in adolescence, afflicting teens who’d never exhibited any confusion about their sex.

Like other social contagions, such as cutting and bulimia, ROGD overwhelmingly afflicts girls. But unlike other conditions, this one—though not necessarily its sufferers—gets full support from the medical community. The standard for dealing with teens who assert they are transgender is “affirmative care”—immediately granting the patient’s stated identity. There are, to be sure, a few dissenters. “This idea that what we’re supposed to do as therapists is to ‘affirm’? That’s not my job,” said psychotherapist Lisa Marchiano. “If I work with someone who’s really suicidal because his wife left him, I don’t call his wife up and say, ‘Hey, you’ve got to come back.’ . . . We don’t treat suicide by giving people exactly what they want.”

But giving in to patients’ demands is exactly what most medical professionals do when faced with ROGD. Like fashionable and tragic misdiagnoses of the past, this one comes with irreversible physical trauma. “Top surgery,” a euphemism for double mastectomies. Infertility. Permanent rounding of facial features or squaring of the jawline. Bodily and facial hair that never goes away.

Planned Parenthood furnishes testosterone to young women on an “informed consent” basis, without requiring any psychological evaluation. Student health plans at 86 colleges—including those of nearly every Ivy League school—cover not only cross-sex hormones but surgery as well.

ROGD-afflicted adolescents typically suffer anxiety and depression at a difficult stage of life, when confusion is at least as pervasive as fun, and there is everywhere the sense that they ought to be having the times of their lives. I spoke with 18 parents, 14 of them mothers—all articulate, intellectual, educated and feminist. They burst with pride in daughters who, until the ROGD spell hit, were highly accomplished, usually bound for top universities. Except for two mothers whose daughters have desisted, all insisted on anonymity. They are terrified their daughters will discover the depth of their dissent and cut them off. They are determined to use whatever influence they have left to halt their daughters’ next voluntary disfigurement.

Nearly every force in society is aligned against these parents: Churches scramble to rewrite their liturgies for greater “inclusiveness.” Therapists and psychiatrists undermine parental authority with immediate affirmation of teens’ self-diagnoses. Campus counselors happily refer students to clinics that dispense hormones on the first visit. Laws against “conversion therapy,” which purports to cure homosexuality, are on the books in 14 states and the District of Columbia. These statutes also prohibit “efforts to change a patient’s . . . gender identity,” in the words of the New Jersey law—effectively threatening counselors who might otherwise dissuade teens from proceeding with hormone treatment or surgery.

Reddit, Tumblr, Instagram and YouTube host an endless supply of mentors, who cheerfully document their own physical transitions, omitting mention of dangerous side effects and offering tips on how to pass as a man and how to break away from unsupportive parents. For anxious teens who tend toward obsession, these videos can be mesmerizing. Though the stars are typically pictured alone in a bedroom, they project exuberance and social élan. As one female-to-male YouTube guru who goes by “Alex Bertie” puts it: “Taking testosterone is the best decision I’ve ever made. I’m so happy within myself. It did not solve all of my problems, but it’s given me the strength to make the most out of life and to battle my other demons like my social issues.”

Brie Jontry, a spokeswoman for Fourth Wave Now, an international support network for these families, is one of the two mothers who spoke on the record. She tells me ROGD teens often come from politically progressive families. Many of the mothers I spoke with say they enthusiastically supported same-sex marriage long before it was legal anywhere. Some of them describe welcoming the news when their daughters came out as lesbians. But when their daughters suddenly decided that they were actually men and started clamoring for hormones and surgery, the mothers begged them to reconsider, or at least slow down.

“If your kid went off and joined the Moonies, people would feel sorry for you, and they would understand that this is a bad thing and that your kid shouldn’t be in the Moonies,” one mother, a former leader of the pro-gay organization Pflag, said. “With this, I can’t even tell anybody. I talk to my husband, that’s it.” The couple have faithfully covered their daughter’s tuition, health-care and cellphone bills—even though she refuses to speak to them.

Under the influence of testosterone and the spell of transgression, ROGD daughters grow churlish and aggressive. Under the banner of civil rights, they assume the moral high ground. Their mothers take cover behind pseudonyms. As ROGD daughters rage against the biology they hope to defy, their mothers bear its burden, evincing its maternal instinct—the stubborn refusal to abandon their young.

Ms. Shrier is a writer living in Los Angeles.

 

The Lobotomist

Published by Papa Giorgio

The lobotomy was hailed by The New York Times as a “surgery of the soul”, a landmark medical procedure promising hope to mentally ill patients. Championed by neurologist Walter J. Freeman, this “last resort” caught on fast. A decade later, Freeman was decried as a moral monster and the lobotomy as a barbaric mistake of modern medicine. This program tells the gripping tale of medical intervention gone awry.

The Author of “Paper Genders” Shares His Story

Published by Papa Giorgio

ONE LAST EXAMPLE
This last example has all the elements: misdiagnosis, suicide attempts and early childhood experiences that twisted this poor boy’s perception of his gender identity into a knot.

The young boy was normal from all accounts until some events begin to alter and reshape his view of who he was. Sometimes when Grandma babysat him alone, she would dress him in female clothing that she made especially for him. His uncle, a troubled teenager, had a favorite sport: making fun of the little boy and yanking down his pants. The uncle turned more aggressive and fondled the boy far too many times over several years, especially while intoxicated.

The young boy started to fantasize about becoming a girl. After years of obsessing, along came Christine Jorgensen in 1955 and the first media reports of a gender change. Then the young boy started to think it was true and he, too, could change genders. The boy in his silence adopted a female name, Cristal West, but only he would know this name and the battleground that was inside him: this silent struggle lasted for years.

Trying to battle against the female trapped inside his body, the boy excelled at all that was male: football, track. cars and yes, girls. All looked normal from the outside, but inside there was pain and confusion about his gender.

As a young teen. the boy attended Eagle Rock Episcopal Church on Chickasaw Avenue. In his teens. the boy sought guidance for his struggle with the internal female from the pastor, Father Carol Barber. At their second meeting, to his shock, Father Barber moved out from behind his desk, unzipped his long black robe to reveal his naked body, and tempted the boy to have homosexual sex. The boy. appalled by the overture, quickly departed and never met with Father Barber again.

In his early twenties, the young man got married, had children and developed skills for high achievement in the business world, first as an aerospace associate design engineer, then by his forties, achieving a national operations position for a major corporation. But his internal struggle with his gender identity never went away and he used alcohol to numb the pain. Alcohol became the pathway to drugs which would bring, his impressive career to an abrupt and tragic end.

In his forties, his marriage failed. His two teenage children suffered a great betrayal when their father turned to hormone therapy in San Francisco. A skinny old doctor named Garfield who asked no questions and took no names provided the hormone injections. Over the course of time, Dr. Paul Walker approved him for surgery and Dr. Biber performed the surgical gender change.

In 1983, the man became Laura with a new birth record that specified gender as female. She had success after a few years —good looks and good jobs, recovery from drugs and alcohol—but living as a female just did not resolve the internal struggles. It was during the time Laura was studying to be a counselor at U.C. Santa Cruz in the late 1980s that she came to understand that as a transgender, she was living a self-imposed exile from her true identity.

As Laura’s intellect and thought processing ability reemerged from the alcohol- and drug-induced fog, a sober Laura could see that being a transgender was not real, but a fantasy forged out of very powerful obsessive thoughts and feelings that took over her life. As a young boy, the expression he had used to express his feelings of hurt and pain was “girl trapped in a male body.” Hiding in a transgender persona was her elaborate way to escape the deep hurt. Acting out was very important to Laura in expressing how she felt, but letting feelings define identity is never a good idea. She later commented that transgender life was like living in a temporary zip code not located near reality. She learned that the transgender feelings would be overwhelming at times, but no matter how strong the feelings are, they can never define her real identity.

Laura was determined to recover on every level, including her male birth gender. She learned in her counseling studies that recovery requires an unwavering persistence with good people supporting her. Recovery was a bit rocky and the path twisted and difficult, but now with 25 years in the rear view mirror, he is restored and has been married to a wonderful lady for 14 years. He made it back.

I know this story all too well, because that was me, the little kid from Glendale. Most of my life I thought I had been born in the wrong body but my traumatic experiences occurred after birth, not in the womb. Regrettably, I learned to dislike the boy who was fondled by an uncle, cross-dressed by a grandmother and propositioned by a homosexual clergyman. I was never a homosexual or felt the desire for men. My rejection of my birth gender was the result of abuse I suffered from several adults.

I learned after surgery that my primary issue was called dissociative identity disorder, which in turn either caused the gender disorder or displayed symptoms that looked like it. The treatment was strenuous psychotherapy to address the primary disorder, not undergoing irreversible surgery to treat a symptom. Comorbidity, the presence of more than one disorder in an individual, is common in transgenders.

So, what made me so different from other transgenders? That is simple—I wanted to recover. Like any recovery, it started with the desire to recover. Without desire, no change is even possible. I did not want to live my life in a masquerade, but in truth. I discovered there was no real medical necessity for the surgery. It was a lie.

Even the doctors who were advocating for me to change genders did not have a clue what it was all about. Psychologist Paul Walker said adaptability is the key to success in changing genders. Surgeon Stanley Biber said success is defined by the ability to physically engage in sex. Psychologist John Money at Johns Hopkins said hormones make the new gender work. Not one, however, said surgery was medical necessary, so it must not be. Dr. Paul McHugh reflects views that more closely align with my personal experience when he said, “It’s a disaster.” Sadly, a gender wreck is not one you bounce back from easily.

In my view the history of psychosurgery demonstrates a lack of accountability and oversight in the medical community that continues today. Activist lawyers and doctors join together to lobby for, and effectively get, more and more laws passed that provide even more protection for reckless, medically unnecessary surgeries. The evidence suggests a need exists for a broader base of nonsurgical therapies, such as psychological interventions, in an effort to improve care.

Now the children have caught the eye of the activist surgeons. Soon young kids will go under the knife and we’ll see television shows like “Twelve Year Old Transgenders in Tiaras.” Who should hold accountable the doctors who are playing with children’s hormones? A 2007 Dutch study says, “Fifty-two percent of the children diagnosed with GID [gender identity disorder] had one or more diagnoses other than GID…Clinicians working with children with GID should be aware of the risk for co-occurring psychiatric problems.'” Treating GID with irreversible surgery, while ignoring co-existing conditions, is a recipe for patient regret and suicide.

Transgenders want more freedom when perhaps they actually need more boundaries. The real life-threatening harm to transgenders is not a consequence of bullying; it results from the transgenders’ own high-risk sexual behaviors, illicit drug use, and alcohol abuse. Transgenders have been shown to be prone to harming themselves. Unfortunately, the activist agenda is directed toward more laws to protect transgenders instead of finding better treatments to reduce the number of suicides and regretters.

The evidence is clear—the surgery is not medically necessary and many problems occur as a result of changing genders. The personal testimonies are further confirmation that changing genders can result in very painful regret. In the next chapter we conclude with an explanation of how effective treatment got derailed by the activists and we explore some possible solutions for reducing the number of transgender regretters and deaths by suicide.

Walt Heyer, Paper Genders: Puling the Mask Off the Transgender Phenomenon (Make Waves Publishing, 2011), 87-91.