Mick Hartley

A crack in the edifice? Leor Sapir in City Journal – The American Society of Plastic Surgeons becomes the first major medical association to challenge the consensus of medical groups over “gender-affirming care” for minors.

The main justification for “gender-affirming care” for minors in the United States has been that “all major U.S. medical associations” support it. Critics of this supposed consensus have argued that it is not grounded in high-quality research or decades of honest and robust deliberation among clinicians with different viewpoints and experiences. Instead, it is the result of a small number of ideologically driven doctor-association members in LGBT-focused committees, who exploit their colleagues' trust. Physicians presenting different viewpoints are silenced or kept away from decision-making circles, ensuring the appearance of unanimity.

As the U.K.’s Cass Review pointed out, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and the U.S. Endocrine Society were especially important in forging this consensus, and they did so by citing each other’s statements, rather than conducting a scientific appraisal of the evidence. The “circularity” of this approach, says Cass in her report to England’s National Health Service, “may explain why there has been an apparent consensus on key areas of practice despite the evidence being poor.”

Well yes, that might explain it. You scratch my back…

Perhaps because it has never really depended on evidence, this doctor-group consensus has shown remarkable resilience in the face of major system shocks, including several whistleblowers, revelations from court documents that WPATH manipulated scientific evidence reviews, the Cass Review, a bipartisan commitment in the U.K. to roll back pediatric medical transition, and a growing international call for a developmentally informed approach that prioritizes psychotherapy over hormones and surgeries.

But the U.S. consensus now appears to have its first big fracture. In July, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, a major medical association representing 11,000 members and over 90 percent of the field in the U.S. and Canada, told me that it “has not endorsed any organization’s practice recommendations for the treatment of adolescents with gender dysphoria.” ASPS acknowledged that there is “considerable uncertainty as to the long-term efficacy for the use of chest and genital surgical interventions” and that “the existing evidence base is viewed as low quality/low certainty.”

The treatment of "gender dysphoric" teens in the US has become a conveyor belt, starting with the ideologically-captured mental health professionals, and driven by a fear of going against the consensus…and, of course, by the money. Plastic surgeons are the last in line, to try and make acceptable – to prettify – the butchery that constitutes the essence of "gender-affirming care". 

How they process the unfortunate children:

Gender clinics across the country have adopted letter-of-support and letter-of-medical-necessity templates to ensure that adolescents seeking surgery get approval, with few hiccups. The message these templates implicitly send to therapists, who are the first and arguably most important gatekeepers, is that gender surgery for minors is a standard procedure rather than an extreme departure requiring strong evidence.

The gender clinic at Seattle Children’s Hospital is an example of a major clinic that offers mental-health professionals a template to use for writing letters of support for surgery. The template contains language designed to bypass any concern that the candidate fits the profile of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD), the most common adolescent presentation and the one that prompted the course reversal in Europe. The template effectively instructs the referring therapist to attest that the ROGD presentation is really just a teen who has always known he or she was transgender but only disclosed that information to his or her parents during adolescence. This common anti-ROGD refrain is based on highly dubious research.

The author of this template appears to be Caitlin Thornbrugh, a creative writing instructor in the Department of English at Northeastern University who received the university’s “LGBTQA Resource Center Gratitude Award” in 2021.

Perfect. Rather than medical professionals making the decisions on clinical grounds, we have academics from the English department setting the tone – fuelled no doubt by their Judith Butler readings.

And the plastic surgeons may just have had enough:

[Sheila] Nazarian, the Beverly Hills surgeon, told me that surgeons in her professional network who perform gender surgeries typically defer to mental-health professionals and endocrinologists to determine for them whether minors should receive procedures like double mastectomy. That approach, she believes, is misguided, and reduces surgeons to mechanics.

“We are not highly trained technicians,” Nazarian told me. “We are physicians with responsibility for the health and well-being of our patients. We can get input from other clinicians, but ultimately the responsibility for determining medical readiness lies with us. That means that we have to examine all the data and studies available to us. Furthermore, you can’t help people by ignoring the reasons they want to go under the knife. With every patient, I exercise discretion as a professional and determine whether the procedure they are seeking is in their ultimate best interest.” The idea that surgeons should defer heavily to the prior assessments of clinicians struck Nazarian as wrong. “You can’t outsource your professional judgement to other clinicians. It’s your responsibility as the last in a chain of treatment to ensure you are doing what is best for the patient now and in the long term.”

Here we go again:

A 50-year-old man will sprint against women in the Paris Paralympics.

Paralympics President, @parsonsandrew, says “I think it is just fair that we treat [transgender athletes] respectfully.

“But I do think science should give us the answer, because we also want to be fair with… pic.twitter.com/BVM9FniI4A

— Billboard Chris 🇨🇦🇺🇸 (@BillboardChris) August 12, 2024

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Full text:

A 50-year-old man will sprint against women in the Paris Paralympics.

Paralympics President, @parsonsandrew , says “I think it is just fair that we treat [transgender athletes] respectfully.

“But I do think science should give us the answer, because we also want to be fair with the other athletes in the field of play. It is a very difficult question. And science hopefully will be able to give us the answer.”

Science has given us the answer, Andrew.

Every human who has ever existed knows the answer. Babies know the answer. Dogs know the answer. Chimpanzees know the answer.

You disregard women and you ignore fairness in order to satisfy the narcissism of a 50-year-old cheat.

Article here.

Petrillo competes in the women's T12 classification – for athletes with visual impairment – and won gold in the 100m, 200m and 400m events at the 2021 Italian Paralympic Championships….

Petrillo, who won 11 national titles as a male between 2015 and 2018, has said that she 'deserves this selection'.

"I have been waiting for this day for three years and in these past three years I have done everything possible to earn it," she told BBC.

"I deserve this selection and I want to thank the Italian Paralympic Federation and the Italian Paralympic Committee for having always believed in me, above all as a person as well as an athlete.

"The historic value of being the first transgender woman to compete at the Paralympics is an important symbol of inclusion."

Inclusion for him: exclusion for the women competing against him.

It's kind of perfect, after the riots, that the hero of Leicester Square – who tackled the man with the knife and very possibly saved the girl's life – was a bloke called Abdullah.

As if the floods weren't bad enough….

North Korean authorities have turned recent flooding into an opportunity for a massive propaganda campaign. Loudspeaker trucks and propaganda teams have been touring affected and unaffected regions daily, blasting praise for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and calling on people to take part in recovery efforts in the morning and evening. Accordingly, people complain of intense fatigue.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a Daily NK source in North Pyongan province reported recently that loudspeaker trucks and artistic propaganda teams had been fully mobilized and are fervently engaged in agitprop activities in flood-stricken border regions along the Yalu River, swollen from recent rains, and non-stricken areas per orders from provincial, city and county party committees.

“In Sinuiju now, loudspeaker trucks roam the streets from 6 a.m. blasting propaganda about the Supreme Leader’s history of love, and the voice of the broadcasters resound twice in the morning and twice in the afternoon, calling on people to come together for recovery efforts in the flood-stricken regions,” the source said, referring to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Artists from the North Pyongan Grand Theatre have formed several small agitprop troops engaged in daily activities at mudslide recovery sites such as railways, roads and rivers. Sinuiju Nakwon Machine Complex’s mobile artistic propaganda team has been urging support for recovery efforts with daily performances calling for the do-or-die accomplishment of the decisions of the 22nd Emergency Enlarged Meeting of the Political Bureau of the Eighth Central Committee.

People express frustration with the constant presence of loudspeaker trucks in their neighborhoods. They lament that these vehicles seem to be the only ones “having fun” in today’s environment. The incessant broadcasts, described as “sickening sounds,” plague the citizens from dawn to dusk.

The wonderful self-styled "punk of fado" – full name Susana Maria Alfonso de Aguiar – has died aged 69. Here's La Chanson d´Hélène, with Iggy Pop as a disembodied voice:

Or, more traditionally:

Yes, Seb Coe will alomost certainly go for the position of IOC president after Thomas Bach steps down next year, and yes, he'll take steps to protect women's sport. Oliver Brown in the Telegraph:

Sebastian Coe has given his strongest indication yet that he intends on running to become the next president of the International Olympic Committee after vowing to protect women’s sport for as long as possible after the boxing eligibility controversy of the Paris Games.

Outgoing president Thomas Bach, widely derided for his handling of the boxing scandal that has plagued these Olympics, opened the door for Lord Coe to run when he conceded he was “no longer the best captain” to lead.

Bach, 70, had been expected to change the Olympic Charter to enable himself to continue governing beyond the IOC’s maximum 12-year term limit. But the German, buffeted by criticism over allowing two biologically male fighters to win Olympic gold medals in women’s boxing, made the surprise announcement he would step down next June, saying: “New times are calling for new leaders.”

Coe diverges from Bach in his protection of the female category in sport. Asked by Telegraph Sport for his views on the IOC’s stance, Coe, 67, said: “You have to have a clear policy. If you don’t, you get into difficult territory – and I think that’s what we’ve witnessed here. The reality is very simple: I have a responsibility to preserve the female category, and I will go on doing that until a successor decides otherwise or the science alters.”

Coe has a decent record of protecting women's sport as president of World Athletics.

A panorama of four 8×10 inch glass negatives stitched together. "Mississippi River, Algiers Point (at right), steamship Excelsior – New Orleans riverfront panorama."

[Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Publishing Co.]

As ever, click on th image to see the full-size Shorpy original.

So farewell then Thomas Bach. The beleaguered IOC president is stepping down next year, after presiding over the Olympics boxing farce. Oliver Brown in the Telegraph:

To Bach and his IOC acolytes, in hock to a belief that your sex is whatever you say it is, womanhood can be determined by passport status. Except athletes do not compete at the Olympics using legal documents or self-declared gender identities. They compete using their bodies, with their capabilities governed by the immutable laws of human biology. And so when the International Boxing Association wrote to the IOC 14 months ago, disclosing that Lin and Khelif were XY, the arbiters of global sport were duty-bound to investigate immediately, to demand test results of their own.

The decision to brush that letter aside was purely political. The IOC disavowed the IBA five years ago, citing worries over its finances and governance, and no longer trust anything the organisation says. The upshot is that, for the past two Games, it has run Olympic boxing itself, overseeing the 2024 instalment through an ad-hoc body called the “Paris Boxing Unit”.

It has been a recipe for confusion and turmoil. The major sports are all controlled here by federations that have seen sense, prioritising fairness by ring-fencing the female category for biological women. Athletics acted in response to seeing three athletes with differences in sexual development on the women’s 800 metres podium at Rio 2016. Swimming understood it had a problem when Lia Thomas went from being the 554th-ranked male in the United States to winning a national collegiate title as a female. Cycling was forced to draw a line when Austin Killips, a post-puberty male, won a UCI stage race for women. But boxing, the most perilous sport at the Olympics, has been left at the mercy of the IOC, the most ideologically captured body of all.

It saw no issue in sending Angela Carini into the ring to face Khelif, only for the Italian to be dismantled inside 46 seconds by punches so hard she said she feared for her life. It was not just because it disputed the IBA’s findings, but because it believed the Algerian should never have been tested at all. Its much-vaunted eligibility “framework” is rights-led rather than scientific. This means, in essence, that it is prepared to ignore anything to do with Khelif’s chromosomes. All that matters is being perceived not to discriminate….

It is worth studying the precise details of the IBA letter describing the tests carried out on the boxers. Summarising the results as “abnormal”, it declares: “Chromosome analysis reveals male karyotype.” It also includes imaging, for each athlete, of an X and a Y chromosome, highlighting that the tests were conducted at a Delhi laboratory certified by the Swiss-based International Organisation for Standardisation. But still the IOC maintains that the results are “arbitary”, not worth the paper they are written on.

The only possible conclusion is that the IOC simply does not want to listen, that it is more interested in burnishing its credentials as “inclusive” than in upholding what is fair. It is no wonder that Bach wanted to be nowhere near the boxers’ gold-medal presentations, instead delegating Khelif’s victory ceremony to Mustapha Berraf of Algeria, one of his arch-loyalists. He has, frankly, made himself foolish on this issue. He had been warned for six years that a story such as this could explode if the IOC did not draw clearer boundaries, but still he refused to react. Despite the IBA claiming that the fighters have been tested twice and that they are male, Bach insists there is no scientific means of discovering who is female.

Now, not before time, he has agreed to step aside next year, his credibility severely damaged by his handling of the controversy. It marks the dramatic culmination of a quite extraordinary episode. In the space of a single Games, the IOC has done nothing less than distort biological truth in a sport fraught with physical risk. In the eyes of many women, there could scarcely be a greater dereliction.

Given Rod Liddle's chosen vocation as something of a shit-stirrer against liberal pieties – tongue-in-cheek but calculatedly provocative – this piece in today's Sunday Times is a surprisingly (to me) fine piece of reporting. He goes back to his home town of Middlesborough after the riots:

The march was predicated upon a falsehood which everyone taking part knew was a falsehood. But that didn’t seem to matter, so long as they got a dust-up with the Old Bill and the chance to put through the windows of a few “Muslim” houses. Such as the front window belonging to Theophilus Abiagom, who isn’t a Muslim. He’d been dozing on the sofa with his little son when the rock came hurtling through the glass, not long after lunchtime last Sunday in Middlesbrough.

So a march to punish Muslims for the killing of three little girls in Southport, in which the subject is not a Muslim but a youth born in Cardiff to Rwandan parents, chose as one of its first victims a bloke who also wasn’t a Muslim. You get the feeling the demonstrators weren’t hugely picky about who got a bloody nose, or their car torched, or their front door kicked down. Religious affiliation was not copiously vetted: just skin colour.

In the end 400 or so inchoate yobbos, or yobbo fellow travellers, caused mayhem in my home town for reasons which, before the march, were never openly articulated. The total number of arrests for this fun-packed afternoon stands at 43, so far, with more to come. How did this happen in a town which has always been proud of the fact that it was built by immigrant labour (largely Irish, hence our fine Roman Catholic cathedral) and as a port, was long accustomed to living cheek by jowl with people from beyond our continent?

The grammatically remiss call to arms, festooned with emojis, came to a select group of likely adherents via Facebook, as indeed it had done at Hartlepool and Sunderland and Southport. These riots, or protests, were choreographed — one day Hartlepool, the next Sunderland and then Middlesbrough (which drew the short straw of Sunday afternoon). Durham was meant to be next but nobody turned up — a very different demographic.

The post was, of course, all in block capitals: “MORE AND MORE ATROCITIES HAPPENING EVERY WEEK … IT IS ABOUT TIME TO SHOW WE HAVE HAD ENOUGH AND WE WILL NOT ROLL OVER AND LET OUR COUNTRY BECOME A THIRD WORLD COUNTRY … STAND UP AND BE COUNTED … TIME TO PUT THE GREAT BACK IN BRITAIN.”

And yet in this long, self-pitying screed, what exactly the writer was complaining about was never actually explained: you want bad things to stop happening? Is that it? Maybe the writer didn’t actually know what they wanted, or simply feared his post would be spiked by Facebook if he wrote, “Come on, let’s beat up some foreigners”.

The local sender was a man who, according to his previous Facebook posts, had recently received a 150-hour community service order and a ban from all football grounds in England and Wales for three to five years. “Looks like I will be at a few more [Glasgow] Rangers games this season,” he added, with some pride.

You cannot overstate the involvement of football hooligans with these riots — and remember, the English Defence League was originally a convocation of balding, overweight football “supporters” clad in Stone Island jackets and bearing a grudge. So it was in Middlesbrough, as the crew stamped its way up Linthorpe Road singing “Tees, Tees, Teessiders” as if they were still in the Red Faction (Boro Ultras) quadrant of the Riverside stadium cheering on Middlesbrough FC.

It did not take long to get nasty, not least when they turned into frowsy, down-at-heel Parliament Road, which is home to a large Muslim community. Bricks were thrown, cars were trashed, windows broken. There was a battle with the local coppers and about one tenth of the crowd was arrested. They met with resistance from the local Muslims, too, who were also guilty of a certain vicious overreach. Gangs of young Asian lads armed with crowbars and the like went searching for anyone who looked a bit white and when they found them, beat them up….

Meanwhile the white marchers — and, it has to be said, they were all white — were bricking windows, vandalising cars and smashing up local Asian groceries, such as the corner shop owned by 54-year-old Parvez Akhtar, who works a 72-hour week. There are reports too that the peaceful marchers (as that original Facebook post insisted they would surely be) also looted that not notably Islamic institution, Tesco.

The reaction of most Middlesbrough folk was one of revulsion at the mayhem, which was put down to sheer thuggery, but also a certain realisation that this sort of confrontation had been brewing for an awfully long time — perhaps as far back as 2001 when, after the riots in Oldham and Bradford, a government inquiry suggested that Middlesbrough was named as a “future tension point”.

Andy Preston, the leftish, independent former mayor of Middlesbrough told me that he thought “Ninety per cent of the damage is being done by white British youths seeking thrills and adrenaline … they were indiscriminately smashing windows and causing chaos, not driven by ideology or genuine rage, but by a desire for excitement.” Preston added that he thought the far right had been “emboldened” and conceded that “normal people” felt they were not listened to when they raised concerns about immigration….

Meanwhile, Yasmin Khan is working from home right now and maybe for the foreseeable future. The charity she runs for victims of domestic violence is closed. She says she dare not go outside. She is frightened to park her car in case it gets set alight. Her young niece was spat at in the street.

“I don’t feel safe,” she told me. “I am absolutely on edge. We’re all working from home. People have been racially abused, women and girls. And I think this has been festering for a really long time. I never thought in my lifetime we would see this again.” Grasping towards a solution she blames the rise of the far right and the incendiary language used by “mainstream politicians” — I think she means the Tories and Nigel Farage. We need to use a different language, she says, and we ought to be part of the conversation….

There was never much racial discord in Middlesbrough. Not when I was growing up. But there has been an influx which has unbalanced the town, much as it has unbalanced similarly impoverished northern post-industrial redoubts. Its cheap housing — you can still buy a four-bed terrace in Middlesbrough for around £60,000 — has made it a useful dumping ground for successive governments….

But it is not all about racial identity and nationalism, or even perhaps mainly. While parts of Teesside thrive, Middlesbrough has been left behind. Its once bustling centre is close to moribund: nobody goes there any more.

It still suffers from the appalling depredations of the recession occasioned by the Conservative government in the 1980s — and by the architectural vandalism of the Labour councils at the same time. Ugly concrete flyovers to carry the A66 westward brutally bisect Middlesbrough and the giant out-of-town shopping centres have ripped the heart out of the commercial district.

The centre cannot hold because there is no longer a centre, no sense of a Middlesbrough community. Just two groups of people from different cultures. The impoverished whites who believe in a vision of our country which the British establishment now disdains and feels embarrassed about, and the Asians who cling to their own culture because in truth nobody ever tried to persuade them to adopt our own.

Hadley Freeman in the Sunday Times:

Should women ever trust the Olympics again? This is what many will be asking themselves tonight as the closing ceremony plays out. But this is the wrong question. The correct one is, how much longer will women put up with the International Olympics Committee punching them in the face?

Photos of female boxers making protest “x” signs above their heads after their matches — emphasising that they have XX chromosomes and are therefore female, and implying that their opponents, Algeria’s welterweight Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s featherweight Lin Yu-ting who both won gold medals, are XY and therefore not — will be the emblematic images of women’s sport from the 2024 Olympics.

Well, we had four good years, gals! Four years when women were granted — and please forgive the inevitable sporting cliche here — a level playing field at the Olympics.

It’s only since 2012 — yes, ye olde 2012 — that women have been allowed to compete in every Olympics event. Women were at last graciously granted permission by the IOC to take part in the ski jump, because previously there was concern their uteruses would fall out — gosh, I hate it when that happens! It was also the first year there was women’s boxing at the Olympics.

Alas, that sweet taste of sporting equality endured only until 2016, when all three medals in the women’s 800m were won by athletes with XY chromosomes, meaning they are biologically male: Burundi’s Francine Niyonsaba, Kenya’s Margaret Wambui and — famously — South Africa’s Caster Semanya. These athletes all had a difference of sexual development (DSD), meaning they appeared to be girls at birth but were actually males with internal testes. Thus, after puberty they had the superior strength and speed that males have over females, which is the sole reason women’s sport exists as a separate category. “Being born with internal testicles doesn’t make me less of a woman,” Semanya later said, to which the response is: Well, it does mean you shouldn’t compete against women.

When GB’s Lynsey Sharp complained in 2016 about being denied a medal because of the three DSD runners, she was barraged with death threats. “Lynsey is a good runner. She would’ve been even better if she’d just bit her lip and trained,” Semanya sniped in her 2023 memoir, The Race to Be Myself.

By failing to deal with the DSD issue then, the IOC left Semanya, Wambui and Niyonsaba open to intrusive speculation, and denied women athletes their deserved medals.

Their tactic this time was to tell journalists not to use “harmful” (aka factual) terms, such as “biological male” when referring to trans or DSD athletes. Yes, far more important to prevent harmful words than harmful punches! Because unlike the 2016 Olympics, the problem here is not speed but violence, and male boxers have on average 162 per cent greater punching power than female ones. The IOC knows this, and they also know that Khelif and Lin have a DSD. This month the IOC president, Thomas Bach, huffily insisted, “This is not a DSD case”, only for the IOC to issue a hasty correction that Bach had meant to say, “This is not a transgender case”, ie, it is a DSD case.

And still they let women (the irrelevant XX kind) be pummelled by them and then insisted that anyone who objected was engaging in “hate speech”, as Bach put it. On Friday Bach made like a Labour MP circa 2019 and pretended there is no way of knowing what a woman is. He said: “If someone is presenting us with a scientifically solid system how to identify men and women … we would be more than pleased.” Well, he could push them down a ski slope and see if their uterus falls out? Or the IOC could take a swab from inside their cheeks, which is all a sex test involves.

There's now a 100% success rate for men boxing in the women's Olympics, after Lin Yu-ting followed Imane Khelif in gaining a gold medal, after another one-sided bout as he pursued his hapless opponent round the ring, punching at will:

Lin fighting for gold. Already in the lead pic.twitter.com/RS50nCPWM8

— FairPlayForWomen (@fairplaywomen) August 10, 2024

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Both men, Khelif and Yu-ting, won every round in every match on their way to gold.