What a Tangled Web…

By: Aphra

10 October 2021

Some of us have been worrying for years about the long term, adverse effects of what has become known as the Dutch Protocol. Abigail Shrier’s article about two prominent American advocates of the protocol who are stepping back from it, is timely in New Zealand given two pieces of legislation, currently in Select Committee, may well result in an increase in its application here. (1)

The stepping back is common sense, and very welcome given the widespread, unthinking adherence to the ideology driving it is both preventing proper debate, and enabling commercial interests which have neither benign nor philanthropic motives.

Those who reflexively support the Dutch Protocol should be asking whether the massive increase in girls identifying as transgender in the anglophone world is not just a natural levelling out between male to female and female to male gender transitioning, but both a symptom of a profound underlying social malaise, and a form of social contagion. (2)

The cascade of developmental effects that are triggered by sex hormones in puberty is not just a physiological process but a hugely important psychological and social one. 

There are profound psycho-social effects, on girls especially (3), of the steady decrease in the average age of entry into puberty – a phenomenon which has to be viewed in relation to the existence of a mass of endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) in the wider environment. (4)

The chemical disruption of genetically determined, hormonally driven puberty for as much as five  years (5), followed by the induction of a counter-puberty by synthetic cross-sex hormones, is a complete unknown in respect of the potential for long-term adverse effects on these kids. 

I can only assume that the people who unthinkingly support this protocol are also suffering from a form of social contagion – like the experiment when people were told to just walk wherever and however they liked in a hall, but when a researcher began to march purposefully in a certain direction, most people fell in behind. 

Of course there are loud declaimers, ideologues, unthinking followers, and vexatious mischief makers on both sides, which makes it all the more important for people of good faith and common sense to get a grip and stop actively or passively fuelling the growing moral panic that is now raging on both sides of the issue.

The doctors cited in Shrier’s article may have been genuine in their motives – genuinely wanting to help distressed kids and not driven by profit and prestige.

They might also have been driven by both, and now – aware that the pendulum is about to swing the other way, and given they are practising in an insanely litigious society – they are covering their designer-clad butts. 

In one sense, that doesn’t matter. What matters is they have spoken out about the fact that the medical transition of children is a HUGE mistake. 

It is arguably one of the most extreme outcomes of the rigid pharmaco-surgical paradigm which dominates western medicine and which, in concert with rampant commercialism and the cult of celebrity, has become a monster.

Notes:

1. In a Christchurch clinic for young people, 65% of those with forms of gender distress are on puberty blocking drugs. Evidence from overseas shows that 90+% of kids on puberty blockers will go on to have cross-sex hormone therapy, which almost always results in prophylactic removals of sex organs and hence infertility. 
2. The burgeoning of the ever-growing variety of bespoke gender and sexual identities which have coat-tailed the gender identity movement, can best be typified as attempting to be transgressive, short-term, fashion statements.
3. The age at which girls are entering the first stage of puberty, has reduced by three months every decade for the past forty years. 
4. There is a charted increase in the rate of central (true) precocious puberty, linked in a French study, to the use of agricultural chemicals.
5. As it stands, a child cannot typically consent to surgery or cross-sex hormone treatment until the age of 16.

Image Credit: Mollivan Jon, ‘My, what a tangled web we weave.’

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