Posted on 2 December 2022
by Sasha White
Original: Sasha White’s Newsletter – The Cover up of the Biggest Medical Scandal of Our Time
How have the “experts” gotten away with medically experimenting on children in broad daylight?
“I was failed by the system. I literally lost organs.” detransitioner Chloe Cole tells the New York Post in June 2022. The bombshell piece, “Why detransitioned teens regret changing genders” by Rikki Schlott, is part of a recent avalanche of truth about what happens to young people who undergo gender transition and then regret it. Schlott interviewed seventeen-year-old Chloe and 23 year-old Helena Kerschner, both of whom were prescribed testosterone as teens. Chloe had her breasts removed at fifteen. Both young women, as well as other detransitioners, have been speaking out for some time now. Their courage in coming forward is commendable. But it is only recently that their stories are getting mainstream attention, despite the media’s obsession with covering trans issues.
If they were really interested in doing right by “trans kids,” they would welcome scrutiny to the medical process.
A stream of prominent articles have come out lately, (including in the New York Times) raising flags about childhood transition. There are cracks opening in the narrative that anything other than full blown support for “trans kids” is liberal sacrilege. The truth about this medical atrocity is now being exposed, but the question is, how was this experiment on children allowed to go unacknowledged in polite society for so long?
The answer lies in the campaign of censorship deployed by the activists and experts who have built their careers on this medical experiment. The gender industry and its enablers attack anyone who dares ask questions. Powerful organizations and activists have created a culture of silence and shame to cover up the profitable craft of reshaping young bodies to resemble the opposite sex. People are fired and blacklisted for disagreeing with gender identity ideology and the body modification it promotes. Asking questions about the massive increase in young people identifying as trans will get you labeled a bigot, a right wing reactionary who hates trans kids. Therapists and doctors who blow the whistle on the gender industry are vilified and smeared. Authors are censored, and trans activists brazenly call for their silencing and deplatforming.
The greatest tool of gender ideologues has been their appropriation of feminism and the gay rights movement.
How well does this silencing campaign work? One answer lies in the confession earlier this year by Matt Taibbi, a self described “serial gobbler of negative attention.” Taibbi admits he hesitated before publishing a piece about trans critic and former ACLU lawyer Kara Dansky because he did not want to attract the ire of trans activists. “It was the first time I was scared away from a topic,” he writes. This is telling. Taibbi is no stranger to stepping on the toes of the powerful, but this is the one issue that made him tremble and keep his mouth shut. How many people have been on the sidelines, fully aware but not talking about this issue because they were afraid of the reaction? Transgenderism is a movement with so much social power that notoriously bold journalists like Taibbi are afraid to speak out due to the severity of the inevitable backlash.
The aggresive campaign to censor their critics is the ultimate damning fact against the trans movement. If they were really interested in doing right by “trans kids,” they would welcome scrutiny to the medical process, they would diligently follow up with each child given experimental drugs and surgery, and they would be transparent about what they are doing to young people’s bodies. Instead, adults who speak up are dismissed, and kids whose sexual function has been destroyed are discarded as byproducts of the great movement toward “trans rights.”
How has the trans movement achieved such social and political power? The greatest tool of gender ideologues has been their appropriation of feminism and the gay rights movement. By claiming these human rights movements as their own, trans activists created a climate where anyone who disagrees with them can be immediately discredited as a bigot. Within liberal circles, you will find many individuals who enforce trans ideology through threats, intimidation, and cancel culture, and you will also find those who enable these abuses with their silence.
The liberal and “tolerant” adults who shout that transition for minors is a human right are enabling an atrocity.
The vicious enforcers do their best to ruin your life if you dissent, scaring everyone else into compliance. For their part, the enablers stand by while heretics are punished, cementing the chilling effect into place. In this climate, the young detransitioners who speak out are immensely brave.
The stories of Chloe and Helena are not as rare as they should be. In recent years there has been an explosion in the number of young people identifying as trans in the U.S. as well as other countries. In the UK, the number of young people seeking medical transition has grown by 4000 percent. There are reportedly over 400 gender clinics around the world that offer “trans healthcare” to minors. Double mastectomies are the most common trans surgery, and are performed in the U.S. on girls as young as thirteen. Letting children undergo these procedures is a violation of everything we adults owe to kids. Minors cannot consent to such procedures. Pumping kids full of drugs they don’t need and surgically destroying their healthy body parts is abuse.
And yet, adults who should know better are jumping at the chance to write their extreme ideology on the bodies of minors. In Matt Walsh’s documentary, What Is A Woman, Dr. Marci Bowers, a prominent gender surgeon who specializes in “bottom surgery” for male to female trans people, tells Walsh about doing the procedure–which involves dissecting and inverting the penis–on individuals as young as sixteen.
The liberal and “tolerant” adults who shout that transition for minors is a human right are enabling an atrocity. Like any atrocity, there is an era of secrecy before the truth is widely known and the bad actors are condemned. Light is just starting to shine upon the darkness of this massive medical scandal, despite ongoing harassment campaigns against those who have raised concerns over the years.
The Early Years: Raising Red Flags
In 2018, researcher Lisa Littman was pilloried when she published a study on a new phenomenon she observed: adolescents were coming out as trans–previously a very rare phenomenon–in batches. These were kids who had no history of gender dysphoria, a condition that entails severe discomfort with one’s sex. Littman found it curious that teens from the same friend groups were suddenly reporting gender dysphoria one after the other. She was reminded of the online communities that sprung up around eating disorders, where teens would encourage and teach each other in the ways of the disorder, contributing to its contagious nature. Could it be that this trend of kids claiming dysphoria was also a social contagion?
And we are told that these are the people who are fighting for trans kids. No, these people are the greatest enemy imaginable to young people struggling with dysphoria. They don’t care about the kids; they care about profit, power, and status.
Littman’s paper was attacked before it even came out: the online smears began when only the abstract was released. The journal that published her paper succumbed to social media pressure, pulled the study, and then put out a revised version after a post-publication review. Littman also lost her consulting job due to the controversy surrounding her paper. Her job was unrelated to the topic of transgenderism, as was her previous research, which focused on abortion. Littman was a scientific researcher looking for truth, not advancing a political agenda. But her findings were met with the raging hot wrath of the blindly ideological.
Abigail Shrier is another example of a non-activist, outside observer who wrote about the trend of teens transitioning in her excellent book Irreversible Damage. Shrier also endured heavy attacks, censorship, and calls for her deplatforming from powerful entities. One of the attacks on Shrier came from the ACLU’s Chase Strangio, who tweeted that “stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.”
The ACLU, once a principled defender of free speech, now sees its most famous lawyer (a transman—a woman identifying as a man) promoting outright censorship. Strangio and others insist that kids need access to “life-saving trans healthcare.” In framing gender transition for minors as a human rights issue, organizations like the ACLU have convinced many onlookers that if they support the gay rights movement, then backing transition for children is the mandatory next step in being on the right side of history.
The Trans Appropriation of Feminism and Gay Rights
While working on this column, I reached out to second-wave feminist Phyllis Chesler for her thoughts on why liberal culture has embraced gender identity ideology as the next human rights frontier. “Liberals support pornography, prostitution (which they call “sex work”), commercial surrogacy, and gender identity over and above sex identity,” she tells me. “Liberals, including gender-neutral feminist liberals, consider these positions to be ‘progressive.’” This statement reflects my own experience: when I was fired for my trans-critical tweets, my former boss was adamant that he fired me because the publishing industry is very liberal–the implication being that my views would never be welcomed there. Many liberals have simply shut their minds and mouths on the topic to prevent financial repercussions.
I asked Chesler how she thinks feminism as a movement can cope with a large number of self-described feminists supporting the mutilation of girls in the name of transgenderism. This support comes as no surprise to her. “Some liberal feminists have actually supported FGM—the surgical mutilation of female genitalia as a custom which cannot be judged by non-tribal, Western, white women. Some feminists also support all kinds of medically unnecessary cosmetic surgery,” she tells me. Besides their support for a movement that is sterilizing children, what’s sad here is the contempt for the natural female body from those who call themselves feminists. It’s insulting to tell women we are nothing more than plastic parts that can be taken away or added, like a doll. “Liberal feminists, like so many others, want to improve on nature and deny aging and death,” Chesler says.
The female genital mutilation comparison she brings up is chillingly relevant, as trans activists actually attempted to block a 2020 Wyoming bill to ban FGM on the basis that it could also prevent “trans kids” from having their genitals operated on. Liberal feminists have thrown their weight behind gender identity ideology, and embraced the idea that transwomen (men) should be centered in feminism. The appropriation of feminism has been crucial to the success of the trans movement. “Your feminism needs to be trans-inclusive, everywhere and every day”, preaches the Human Rights Campaign, America’s largest LGBTQ advocacy organization.
Because of the fear instilled in liberal groups by the trans activists bullies, so many individuals are going along with the trans kids phenomenon and unknowingly aiding in the coverup of this medical atrocity. As more and more mainstream platforms begin to cover the issue, we can be sure that trans activists will continue to try to silence their critics and push their narrative. And even while brave detransitioners speak up in an attempt to save other young people from their fate, the social contagion rages on.
Time Magazine, for example, just ran a photo series glorifying trans youth. The banner image is of a thirteen-year-old child named “Freedom,” who identifies as “two-spirit,” a concept that trans activists claim originates with Native Americans, and signifies a third gender, neither male nor female. Don’t worry, gender surgeons are keeping up with the trends and offering “genital nullification” surgeries for those who want to have nothing at all down there.
And we are told that these are the people who are fighting for trans kids. No, these people are the greatest enemy imaginable to young people struggling with dysphoria. They don’t care about the kids; they care about profit, power, and status. When child after child starts to experience crushing regret, and the social contagion starts to wind down, these adults will try to slink for cover under excuses of ignorance, good intentions, and denial. We can’t let them hide and get away with this. Those who cut up and drug children in the name of their ideology will pay a price. Whether that time comes sooner or later is the only question.