Monday, May 12, 2025

"Leaving Wokeness and Weakness Behind"


"In accordance with policy now reinstated, service members who have a current diagnosis or history of or exhibit symptoms consistent with gender dysphoria may elect to separate voluntarily. [If they chose not to do so by the deadline, they would be removed] involuntarily, if necessary."
"This is the president's agenda. This is what the American people voted for."
"TRANS is out at the DOD."
"No more pronouns, no more climate-change obsessions, no more emergency vaccine mandates, no more dudes in dresses." 
"We are leaving WOKENESS AND WEAKNESS behind. No more pronouns. We are done with that sh*t."
U.S. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth
 
"There’s no guarantee to access to your pension or severance or an honorable discharge, [for trans service members who do not take the current buyout offer and could lose out on benefits that took years of service to build]."
"This is not voluntary. This is a decision that folks are coming to under duress."
"These are 1,000 transgender troops that would be serving if the conditions were not created to force them into making a decision for their own well-being, or the well-being of their family long-term."
Rae Timberlake, spokesperson for Sparta Pride
https://a57.foxnews.com/static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2025/01/720/405/hegseth-fist-pump.jpg?ve=1&tl=1

Transgender troops have between 30 and 60 days to self-separate from the military after a court order allowed the ban on their service to move forward, according to a Thursday memo from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)

The Defence Secretary's directive is expected to bring the careers of thousands of American military service members to an abrupt conclusion. Some 1,000 troops have self-identified as having been given a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, according to the Pentagon, in response to Hegseth's memo directed to senior military leaders. The number is debatable, considered to be quite a bit higher by advocates for transgender service members.
 
From the guidelines issued on Thursday it was not immediately evident how the Pentagon will proceed in an effort to remove any transgender troops who have failed to disclose such a personal diagnosis. A month has been given to transgender personnel serving on active duty to voluntarily leave the service. Reservists have been given 60 days for their voluntary withdrawal. All of them may be eligible for separation pay, but once the deadlines pass the Pentagon will transition to involuntarily separate those who remain.
 
The announcement came two days following a divided ruling in Shilling v. Trump by the U.S. Supreme Court, allowing President Donald Trump to move on with an executive order to bar transgender men and women from the military while a lower court entertains litigation over the underlying policy. In hearings for a separate legal challenge, the Justice Department argued that the policy was not discriminatory since it did not apply to all transgender service members, but those only who suffer or have suffered from gender dysphoria.
 
"The haste with which the military is moving reflects a callous disregard for the brave troops who have put their lives on the line for this country. It is a disgrace", stated Jennifer Levi, the lead attorney in Talbott v. Trump with its 32 trans plaintiffs. Over 4,000 transgender men and women diagnosed with gender dysphoria were first permitted to serve openly beginning in 2016. The Trump executive order grants exceptions for those service members directly supporting "warfighting capabilities".
 
Those who succeed in obtaining a waiver must prove they never attempted to physically transition from one gender to the other. Certain restrictions prohibiting them from changing rooms, bathrooms and showers designated for people of the opposite sex will apply to them. They will also be required to meet fitness standards associated with their sex at birth. 
 
Pentagon officials defended the ban, stating: "The medical, surgical, and mental health constraints on individuals who have a current diagnosis or history of, or exhibit symptoms consistent with, gender dysphoria are incompatible with the high mental and physical standards necessary for military service." Psychotherapy, gender-affirming hormone therapy, gender-affirming surgery and other treatment for service members totalled $52 million between 2015 and 2024, according to a defense official speaking on condition of anonymity. 
"Additionally, the Military Departments will immediately begin processing for separation Service members who previously self-identified for voluntary separation prior to March 26, 2025."
"Service by individuals with a current diagnosis or history of, or exhibiting symptoms consistent with, gender dysphoria is not in the best interest of the Military Services and is not clearly consistent with the interests of national security."
U.S. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth
https://a57.foxnews.com/static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2025/03/720/405/gettyimages-2204667382.jpg?ve=1&tl=1

A transgender woman speaks as military veterans and their supporters protested against President Donald Trump's policies in March. (Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

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posted by Pieface @ Monday, May 12, 2025

Monday, December 06, 2021

Transitioning? Not So Fast!

Transitioning? Not So Fast!

photo of transgender

"For years and years, people have been homophobic, transphobic."
"We're now trying to correct that, but by doing that we're putting others at risk. And those others we're putting at risk are children."
Mary, Toronto,  (last name withheld)

"No one makes these decisions lightly. They are made very slowly, very cautiously, after long discussions with these youth and their parents."
"It would be incredibly worrisome [to create additional delays in treatment]. It would harm so many kids. I would hate to think what would happen to them."
Dr.Margaret Lawson, medical director, gender-diversity clinic, Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario

"In trans health care, patients diagnose themselves and prescribe their own treatment."
"Medical professionals are encouraged to accept a person's belief without question under the assumption that it will never change."
Michalle Zacchigna (first to be treated under the new transition model, and living with regrets)
Maciek Jasik
 
"Alarms are being sounded all over the world [against the trend to proceed in undue haste to effect transgender changes in young people]. And Canada seems completely deaf to it", stated Aaron Kimberley a transgender man living in British Columbia. He is also a registered nurse and is experiencing qualms over the current approach in Canada among medical professionals and parents to proceed with alacrity and insufficient caution to usher children into the process of gender transition; gender dysphoria is declared, minors are treated with hormones, and surgery follows soon afterward.

A government move is underway in the House of Commons, supported by all political parties, to make it illegal to subject children or adults to any form of conversion therapy. A practise that has been said to be discredited, with its goal of focusing on changing someone's sexual orientation or gender identity. The bill has passed in the House and is prepared to move to the Senate for assent before it becomes law. The bill is a reflection of the current zeitgeist, the sacred belief that children expressing discomfort in their birth gender assignment must be encouraged to transition to a more 'comfortable-fitting' gender.

Mary's daughter insisted she had to alter her sexual identity, suddenly announcing at age 16 that she was a transgender boy. The young girl had long suffered depression and uncertainty along with a deep sense of anxiety. A doctor wrote a prescription for testosterone following a few 15-minute appointments and within months the teen had a double mastectomy, to become a trans male. Her mother recalls that as her daughter was  being wheeled into the operating room for the mastectomy she expressed self-doubts about her decision.

She is now 21 and in the process of "detransitioning", a reversion to her original female identity. Her mother, Mary, has become a partner in a movement asking that the health care system now geared to affirmation of a young person's transgender feelings with drugs and surgery slow down, and seriously consider assessments of other psychological issues before declaring the young to be fully capable of making such a life-altering decision.

Outside of Canada which has embraced full transitioning for young people with scarcely enough medical and psychological examinations of their expressed feelings and emotions over the issue -- which has seen a tidal wave of children demanding they be assisted in their determination to leave the gender they were assigned at birth based on their physical characteristics, when they claim their minds and emotions are lodged in the other gender -- a reversal of social attitude is taking place.

Countries as diverse as Finland and Australia have taken steps to back up from the affirmative approach. At the same time, some leading figures in the transgender medical world have themselves begun to urge caution. A provincial bill in Ontario's legislature is set to speed up access to medical transition and to reduce the need for medical practitioners to make referrals for treatment. At both the provincial and federal level, the way is being paved for children to confuse their identities and face an uncertain future.

While there may well be a good number of legitimate instances of a psychological need to transition, the entire process has taken on a popular social-activist stance, with young children wanting to be part of the new trend. Parents and detransitioners indicate their support for improving access to medical transitions for those who really require it to be done, and feel transphobic bigotry has no place in society. While not opposing gender neutral bathrooms or public funding for transition treatment, they argue the pendulum has swung uncontrollably, and not to society's or the most vulnerables' advantage.

In some instances, gender treatment  occurs outside hospitals. The questioning newly arisen of the status quo has arrived in parallel with a boom in demand driven by patient demographics; both looking suspiciously like red flags that something is badly amiss. People presenting with gender dysphoria were predominately young boys or middle-aged men, traditionally. Now, gender-identity clinics are coming face-to-face with mostly teenagers born girls. 

Pediatric patients numbers at ten hospital clinics across Canada leaped from close to none in 2004 to over 1,000 by 2016. Some 80 percent represented natal girls, most under age 16, when first arriving at the clinics. In the U.S., a major college health study found the percentage of students identifying as transgender or gender non-conforming rose from .05 percent between 2008 and 2014 to three to four percent more recently. 
 
An American study of parents skeptical about gender treatment in 2018 hypothesized that there was a new "rapid-onset gender dysphoria" phenomenon among young girls sometimes convinced by online influencers and through social contagion. According to gender-medical professionals the explosion is a reflection of a growing acceptance of transgenderism following years of stigma and isolation, and the true number of youth in need may in fact be much higher.

The complaint from critics is that health care practitioners are too ready to place children on "puberty-blockers"; drugs to "pause" the development of puberty, and then cross-sex hormones, followed frequently by reassignment surgery. The emphasis, they feel, should lie in an exploration of the complex mental health issues of young people presenting as trans. "We feel the health-care system has been completely taken over by a political agenda at the expense of the actual evidence", said a representative of the group Gender Dysphoria Alliance.

Dr.Marci Bowers, a trans woman, a widely respected gender-reassignment surgeon herself, preparing to become president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), is among top figures in the field who have expressed concerns. Concerns which led to change in recent months in some countries. Where Finland last year encouraged psychotherapy before transition treatment, and the Australia-New Zealand psychiatry regulator claimed it to be essential. In Sweden, clinics stopped prescribing puberty blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones to patients under 18 this year.

Dr.Bowers, the gender reassignment surgeon, suggested that children are sometimes placed on puberty blockers too soon, with complications arising in reassignment surgery which can deprive them potentially of sexual satisfaction for their lifetimes. Transgender women Erica Anderson and Laura Edwards-Leeper, senior officers with WPATH as psychologists, spoke of sloppy and dangerous assessment of young people presenting as transgender, the results of overly hasty prescribing of medical interventions.

W5 The Transition

 

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posted by Pieface @ Monday, December 06, 2021

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