Mick Hartley

From the man who uncovered the WPATH files:

There's nothing scandalous about the WPATH Files, say supporters of the organization. It's just doctors and therapists engaged in professional conversations about how to provide the best available care.

But anyone who bothers to actually read the WPATH Files will see that… https://t.co/vlMT0t5pg6

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) March 6, 2024

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Full text:

There's nothing scandalous about the WPATH Files, say supporters of the organization. It's just doctors and therapists engaged in professional conversations about how to provide the best available care.

But anyone who bothers to actually read the WPATH Files will see that there's nothing professional and everything scandalous about them.

The WPATH Files show surgeons, therapists, and trans activists raising concerns about, but also opposing, any obstacle to drugs and surgeries for children and vulnerable adults diagnosed with gender dysphoria.

What is being described isn't just unprofessional. It's profoundly unethical and, in some cases, likely illegal.

On the X Spaces below, everyone agrees that we need to provide the best available care to children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults experiencing gender dysphoria or distress.

But it's clear puberty blockers, hormones, and genital surgeries are the worst form of care, not the best. And yet, they're the first and only form of care that WPATH members are offering.

On the Spaces call below, Jamie Reed @JamieWhistle confirmed that in her 10 years working in a gender clinic, she and her colleagues never turned down a patient seeking drugs and surgery, aka "gender-affirming care."

A medical doctor who fought the opioid epidemic, Dr. Carrie Mendoza @fairinmedi , said professional doctors do not talk like surgeons, therapists, and activists in the WPATH Files.

In the WPATH Files, you see trans activists demanding no barriers or "gatekeeping" getting in the way of giving drugs and surgeries to vulnerable children and adults.

Mendoza suggests it would be like having pharmaceutical salespeople in the room where doctors discuss treatment, urging them to prescribe more oxycontin.

What's happening is madness. Gender ideologues are misdiagnosing anxiety, autism, and being gay as gender dysphoria and prescribing pseudoscientific sex conversion therapy consisting of irreversible surgeries and lifelong medicalization

We all went along with this it because of the culture of caring and the culture of fear.

The culture of caring meant people confused caring with pure affirmation and no gatekeeping.

The culture of fear meant that trans activists sought to destroy the careers and lives of the people who really cared and urged caution.

But things have been changing. Europe is changing. Nations there are reassessing the evidence and increasingly not allowing drugs or surgeries for children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults.

The media is changing. Major new exposes have appeared everywhere, from the Times of London to the New York Times to News Nation, blowing the whistle on the continuing medical mistreatment scandal of "gender medicine."

And now there are the WPATH Files, which are 170 pages of evidence that what's happening is neither medicine nor scientific.

This medical mistreatment will end. The only question now is how many more people it hurts before it does so.

The way forward is demanding honesty and accountability from governments and medical institutions.

There's nothing professional or normal about what's in the WPATH Files. Rather, they expose a shocking scandal and signify the beginning of its end.

Helping Russia, North Korean-style:

Kim Jong-un has given 1.5 million artillery shells to Vladimir Putin after their meeting last year, but half of them are duds, a Ukrainian intelligence chief has said.

According to Major-General Vadym Skibitsky, deputy chief of Kyiv’s intelligence directorate, North Korea is also supplying 500kg ballistic missiles that are being used in Ukraine, but the artillery shells that it has sent are more than half a century old.

“As of today, taking into account the available statistics, Russia has already imported 1.5 million rounds of ammunition from the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea],” he told the Interfax-Ukraine news agency. “However, these shells were made in the 70s and 80s. Half of them do not work and the rest need to be either repaired or checked before being used.”

Oh boy. David Rose at the JC:

The Foreign Office held a seminar at which officials were told that calling Hamas terrorists was an “obstacle to peace” and it was suggested that Israel was a “white, settler colonialist nation”, the JC can reveal.

Four academics, led by Professor Jeroen Gunning from King’s College London, delivered the session to civil servants, including those specialising in the Middle East, at the British diplomatic service’s London headquarters last Wednesday.

Many of the claims made during the 75-minute meeting directly contradicted Britain’s foreign policy, with Professor Gunning claiming that there could be “no future without Hamas”….

Several of the speakers said that to apply the “terrorist label” to Hamas was “unhelpful” and an obstacle to peace. In their view, Hamas’s “political wing” was “moderate”, and there was therefore a need to “engage with them”.

One of the lecturers, Dr Tristan Dunning, from the University of Queensland, said that as an Australian, “I know all about white, settler colonialism and stealing land from the native population”….

Although Hamas had failed to build civilian bomb shelters and barred ordinary people from its tunnels, the lecturers said, protecting civilians was the responsibility of the “occupying power” and the high civilian casualty rate was Israel’s fault.

Asked about the Israeli hostages, one of speakers claimed that Palestinian convicts in Israel were “hostages too”, adding that there were thousands of prisoners but only about 100 Israelis held in Gaza.

Professor Gunning and Dr Dunning were joined by Dr Anas Iqtait of Australian National University in Canberra and the University of Sydney’s Dr Martin Kear.

They had co-authored a paper submitted to the House of Commons on Foreign Affairs Select Committee on 7 November that claimed Britain was partly to blame for the October 7 massacre and could now be held accountable for “genocide”….

North Korean workers in China have apparently killed an official in a riot over unpaid wages. From the Daily NK:

North Korean workers in China are now subject to much more frequent ideological reviews following the recent death of a North Korean official in the country, Daily NK has learned.

According to a Daily NK source in China on Monday, garment factories, seafood processing plants, and electronics assembly plants in Liaoning and Jilin provinces that employ North Korean workers have been conducting daily ideological reviews since last month. The reviews and ideological lectures were initially held weekly.

The source said the intensified ideological crackdowns were due to the recent death of a North Korean official in Nanping Town, which is in the city of Helong, Jilin Province.

Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun recently reported that 2,000 North Korean workers in China conducted a demonstration after occupying their factory in January over unpaid wages. In the course of the action, they beat to death the North Korean official in charge of managing them….

A Daily NK investigation through multiple sources found that a male North Korean official in his 50s, who was in charge of managing overseas workers, was indeed killed in January by workers at a Nanping Town garment factory with thousands of North Koreans.

All the sources said that several workers got into a physical altercation with the official when they expressed dissatisfaction over wages and that the official was killed in the process. However, the sources pointed out that the factory was operating as usual on the day of the incident and afterward.

The official’s remains were returned to North Korea immediately after the incident, and many of the workers involved in the attack were quickly repatriated. North Korea appears to have moved quickly to stop rumors of the incident from spreading and to prevent similar unrest elsewhere.

In the wake of the incident, North Korean consulates in China have moved to reinforce the ideological vetting of officials tasked with managing trade or overseas workers. They have not mentioned the incident directly, nor have officials seen fit to mention it during ideological reviews of North Korean workers.

The ideological lectures focus mainly on how “the situation around the Korean Peninsula is becoming increasingly tense due to the plans of enemy nations like the United States and South Korea to suffocate North Korea” and how workers must “strengthen their loyalty to the state at such times.”

In particular, officials frequently mention passages from late North Korean leader Kim Il Sung’s memoir, With the Century, during ideological reviews each morning at large garment factories in Liaoning Province.

Nothing like a few passages from Kim Il Sung’s memoir every morning to get you in the mood for another long day of hard labour, where most of your miserable wages – if you get any at all – go straight to Pyongyang.

“North Korean workers in China typically earn between RMB 1,800 and RMB 2,300 [approximately USD 250-320] per month. Of this, they are forced to pay between USD 130 and up to USD 200 as party funds or dues to the Socialist Women’s Union of Korea or the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions,” said a garment factory worker in China. “They only get about USD 20 a month in pocket money, while North Korean officials say they will give them the remaining USD 100 when they return home. But many workers are worried about whether they’ll ever see that money.

“North Korean company managers who know about the incident [in Nanping Town] have recently been feeding their workers pork, and most of them paid their workers pocket money last month – even though they used to skip every other month – as part of efforts to appease unhappy workers,” she added.

Kathleen Stock in the Telegraph, on the WPATH files – The trans activist house of cards ought to be collapsing:

For some time it has seemed obvious that so-called “gender-affirming care” falls far short of established medical standards but, still, newly-leaked files by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) vividly reinforce the point.

From the mouths of doctors we find risky experimental surgeries recommended for minors, and a relative disregard for complications that in any other branch of medicine would be treated as unacceptable….

To the average outsider stumbling across this information for the first time, an outraged response comes easily – which raises the interesting question of why ethical sensibilities within WPATH seem to be so coarsened. Partly, no doubt, this is a result of a general fact famously observed by writer Upton Sinclair; namely “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”. But partly it’s also a function of the guiding myth of the modern transactivist movement: the supposed moral imperative of gender affirmation.

In day-to-day life, this demand that gender be affirmed manifests itself as an expectation that a person’s preferred pronouns should be used, and that they get access to spaces, resources, and sports teams that best fit with their inner sense of who they are. But in the context of medicine, affirmation requires something even more serious: access to irrevocable drugs and surgeries in order to try to make a person’s outer body fit with their inner feelings and ideas.

The justification offered in all such cases is that the practice saves lives – quite literally – because without it, a trans-identified patient is likely to suffer horribly, or even take their own life. Viewed in this light, any side effects of medical treatment, no matter how severe, will seem tolerable and less serious in comparison.

Unfortunately, though, the premise is fatally flawed. There is no convincing evidence that refusing to affirm a trans-identified young person makes suicide inevitable or even strongly likely; and in fact, for some, affirmation demonstrably makes mental health outcomes worse.

Were this point to be properly faced, the house of cards would fall. But thanks to decades of distortions from transactivist organisations and figureheads, the message is still not getting through.

The scandal of an international organisation like WPATH may seem irrelevant to the UK, but it is not. For years, the organisation has been mindlessly cited in British medical contexts as a source of “international best practice”.

Though the NHS has officially distanced itself, the beleaguered Tavistock GIDS service remains underpinned by a service specification that says treatment is “in line with WPATH”. Several senior clinicians in NHS gender dysphoria clinics for over-17s are also listed as current WPATH members.

In short, there is much for NHS bosses to review here as a matter of urgency. For when it comes to responsibility for the healthcare of vulnerable young people, WPATH now looks seriously compromised.

From MEMRI TV:

A lecture at Masjid Al-Iman Fort Lauderdale (Fort Lauderdale Islamic Center) titled "The Blessed Land and the History of Palestine," which was streamed live on Facebook on February 19, 2024, stated that the Talmud is the "most dangerous book in the world." The speaker said that it calls to kill people, to rape girls at the age of three, and asks to commit usury. He continued to claim that it is worse than Hitler's Mein Kampf. The speaker said that the Torah tells the Jews to kill non-Jewish children and that they believe their god will bless them for killing non-Jews, whom they conceive of as animals. He said that Jews believe that Lucifer is their god and that they established the Illuminati. The speaker continued to say that the Jews "came up" with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as an "alternative" to the Talmud, which got them deported from European countries. He recommended that the audience read Henry Ford's The International Jew, in which he exposed the Jews' efforts to control the world.

The levels of distortion and hatred here are just off the scales, but it's far from unique. At mosques and Islamic Centres across the world stuff this vile, or at least approachiung this vile, is churned out on a regular basis – usually involving the demonisation of Jews. Check out MEMRI TV any time. Yes, obviously they pick out the worst – but it's there to be picked out. Imagine if a Christian or Jewish preacher leveled this kind of hatred against Muslims…wouldn't it make the news? Wouldn't people be shocked and horrified? – with calls to prosecute, and close down the institutions involved?

But no, we just get used to it….

David Bell, retired consultant psychiatrist and a former governor turned whistleblower at the Tavistock Clinic, on the latest WPATH revelations and the "dangerous nonsense of gender-affirming care":

Many critics of gender medicine, myself among them, have long been aware that treatments are being given to children and adolescents for which there is no evidence of benefit, and growing evidence of serious harm, both physical and psychological. These include social transition in early youth, puberty blocking in early puberty and cross-sex hormones from age 16….

We have campaigned for years to bring this matter to public attention. But from the beginning we have faced opposition from within the NHS, universities and other public bodies that have been captured by gender identity ideology and abandoned a balanced scientific approach. We have seen articles pulled, speakers dropped and even entire conferences cancelled simply because they are sceptical about overblown, unevidenced claims. Over the past few years this has started to change, and we are increasingly getting a hearing at conferences and in the media. However it has remained an uphill struggle. Only a few weeks ago, the Royal College of General Practitioners considered cancelling a meeting of international experts wishing to address the harm being done to gender-distressed young people (it backed down after robust challenge).

Central to the penetration of ideology into various institutions, including medical ones, has been the World Professional Association of Transgender Health, or WPATH. This body has been treated, both by professional associations of medics and clinicians and by the media, as if it consisted of experts with the knowledge and training to be able to opine with authority.

But this is simply not the case. Membership of WPATH is not restricted to clinicians: anyone at all can join on payment of a modest fee. Its so-called “standards of care” are in fact no such thing. The various chapters of the current version were produced by subgroups containing many people with no medical or therapeutic qualifications, and without reference to standard medical requirements to weigh evidence properly or consider such matters as patients’ capacity to consent and harmful side-effects of treatment.

WPATH promotes “non-binary” identities — neither male nor female — and experimental surgeries that give people the appearance of having both male and female genitals, or neither. There is no evidence base suggesting that such surgeries are medically necessary or advisable, or even that they make people feel any better. It also claims that boys can be born with a “eunuch” gender identity, and that suitable treatment for such boys might be castration. This shocking statement is similarly unevidenced.

In part simply because of the audacious name of the organisation, which makes it sound authoritative, WPATH has had a remarkable and wholly unwarranted degree of influence. Many medical organisations, both in the UK and elsewhere, proudly state they follow WPATH guidelines and standards of care, as if they were following the guidelines of an appropriately constituted authority (such as NICE).

I and many others have known that this ongoing experiment on gender-distressed children and young people has caused, and is continuing to cause, very considerable damage.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the newly released files is that they suggest some members of WPATH know full well that gender-affirming care is experimental — that they know it sometimes causes very serious harm, and that some patients who received irreversible medical treatments were incapable of giving meaningful consent, whether because of their immaturity, learning difficulties or serious mental illness. I cannot find any sign of this awareness in WPATH’s public pronouncements, nor in those of the most prominent cheerleaders for the gender-affirming care that WPATH so enthusiastically promotes.

I would therefore argue that WPATH shares responsibility for any resulting negligence or malpractice. I do not know how any responsible medical authority can do anything after the release of these files but break off all ties with WPATH, and indeed condemn its continued existence.

Danny Cohen, former director of BBC television, in the Telegraph – BBC Verify has become a tool for promoting anti-Israel bias:

Last year, the BBC announced a major new journalistic initiative with much fanfare. BBC News CEO Deborah Turness said that BBC Verify would “pull back the curtain” on the work of the organisation, producing “radical transparency”.

Unfortunately, the curtain being pulled back on BBC Verify itself only serves to highlight the consistent and consequential failures of the BBC’s reporting on the Israel-Hamas war.

I first noticed BBC Verify shortly after the terrorist massacre of October 7. A few weeks into the war I wrote in these pages about the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent, Caroline Hawley. This senior journalist’s Twitter feed read like a series of press releases from Hamas, with Hawley reposting propaganda from Gaza without context or any apparent attempt at basic journalistic verification….

Last week the BBC published a Verify-branded report on the tragic circumstances that surrounded the deaths of Palestinians at an aid convoy in Gaza. The reporting was based partially on the account of Mahmoud Awadeyah, described by the BBC as a “journalist”.

Thanks to the work of researcher David Collier, we know a lot more about the source that the BBC relied on for its supposedly forensic reporting. Awadeyah reportedly works for the Tasnim News Agency, which is associated with Iranian Revolutionary Guard. In other words, it appears that the BBC’s source is on the payroll of a country committed to the genocidal destruction of the Jewish State, one that uses its media proxies to promote its murderous ambitions.

Unfortunately, it gets worse. Mahmoud Awadeyah’s social-media timeline is filled with pro-terrorist and anti-Semitic material. BBC Verify’s source appears to be a man who celebrates the deaths of Jews. Last year, as seven lay dead after a terror attack on a synagogue in East Jerusalem, Awadeyah took to Facebook to describe his feelings: “A state of rejoicing, exuberance and mosques filled with exuberance. Revenge for the fetus”. And this apparent glee at the violent deaths of Jewish people was not an isolated occurrence.

In the summer of 2023, he posed in front of a mural depicting what seemed to be an Islamic Jihad rocket strike on an Israeli apartment building. Eighty year-old Inga Avramayan, who had been trying to assist her paralysed husband to a shelter, was killed in that attack. Yet as well as posing in front of the mural, Awadeyah promised more, writing: “Always rest assured that what is coming is more beautiful. God willing”.

Awadeyah’s social-media posts are publicly available for any journalist to see. Yet BBC Verify appears to have failed in the most basic of journalistic practices: checking one of their key sources. How could this have possibly happened?

The BBC has developed an apparent habit of accepting at face value what it is told by people presenting as Palestinian civilians or civic officials. It either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care that in too many cases these people turn out to be representatives of, or sympathetic towards, terrorist organisations.

It also appears to be increasingly the case that stories BBC reporters receive from Palestinian sources align with their negative assumptions about Israel, and that the corporation’s journalists don’t challenge or robustly investigate accounts that come from highly flawed and disreputable sources.

The failure of BBC Verify’s reporting on such a high-profile and emotive conflict is not just a profound journalistic failure. The stakes are regrettably much higher than that.

The BBC’s reporting is contributing to an atmosphere in the UK in which Jewish people feel unsafe, its flawed journalism adding fuel to the fire of anti-Semitism that is glowing ever more dangerously.

It is hard to think of a more damning indictment of the BBC. And yet, nothing changes. Senior BBC managers send emails about their commitment to fighting anti-Semitism, but words are meaningless to the Jewish community. Only actions matter, and the consistent anti-Israel bias of the BBC is a real and present danger to Jewish people.

It is time that the BBC’s senior leadership took accountability for this disastrous state of affairs.

Michael Shellenberger at UnHerd – Leaked WPATH files show gender clinician abuses:

Over the last few years, prominent doctors, medical experts and media figures have claimed that the best way to help adolescents in distress about their gender is to give them puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries to align their physical sex with their gender identity. The alternative to doing this, they have said, is suicide. And yet a new study published last month found no scientific evidence to support the claim that drugs and surgeries prevent suicide among people with gender dysphoria.

While we should be concerned about children and adolescents experiencing distress over their biological sex, there is new evidence to warrant far greater caution in how we treat them. Last year, whistleblowers presented me with a video and selection of messages from an internal chat system sent between members of the World Professional Association For Transgender Health (WPATH).

The WPATH files show surgeons, therapists, and activists discussing internally how to treat people with gender distress. They reveal that what is happening is neither good science nor good medicine. There is a discussion, for example, of blocking the puberty of a 10-year-old girl and a 13-year-old developmentally delayed child. Another exchange details carrying out genital surgery on people with schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder.

At the core of medical ethics is the principle “do no harm”. Doctors and medical professionals obtain what is known as “informed consent” from the people receiving the medicine or their caregivers.

Yet these files outline overwhelming evidence that some gender clinicians associated with WPATH know that they are not receiving consent from children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults or their caregivers. They are fully aware that the so-called “gender-affirming care” they provide can result in lifelong complications and that their patients do not understand the implications, including sterility and the loss of sexual function.

The documents also reveal that, despite decades of surgeries and drugs, there is nothing scientific at all about so-called gender medicine. WPATH has produced eight versions of its “Standards of Care”, but they are based on ideology rather than science. As a result, the surgeons, doctors, and therapists practising “gender medicine” are essentially making it up as they go along, conducting uncontrolled experiments and doing barely anything to follow up on whether they work.

After I received these files, my colleagues and I tried to report on them as journalists would. We quickly became overwhelmed by the size and complexity of the project, and decided to produce a full report about the files for Environmental Progress, our nonprofit research institute, to provide context of the best available science about gender distress. That report, written by journalist Mia Hughes, is now available to read, its entirely justified subtitle referring to “Pseudoscientific Surgical and Hormonal Experiments on Children, Adolescents, and Vulnerable Adults.”

See also from Sex Matters – WPATH: The truth about “gender-affirming healthcare”.

These documents suggest that some WPATH members brush off concerns about long-term patient outcomes, despite being aware of potentially debilitating and even fatal side effects of cross-sex hormones and other treatments. 

Taken together, the files paint a disturbing picture of so-called “gender medicine” as neither evidence-based nor safe. And since the first rule of medicine is to do no harm, it is not medicine.

And a more, um, sensational line from the New York Post – Secret files show how international group pushes shocking experimental gender surgery for minors.

Newly leaked files from the world’s leading transgender health-care organization reveal it is pushing hormonal and surgical transitions for minors, including stomach-wrenching experimental procedures designed to create sexless bodies that resemble department-store mannequins.

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health documents demonstrate it’s controlled by gender ideologues who push aside concerns about whether children and adolescents can consent to medical treatments that WPATH members privately acknowledge often have devastating and permanent side effects.

Yet the US government, American doctors and prominent organizations nonetheless rely on WPATH guidelines for advice on treating our youth.

As does (or did) the NHS.

Update: from the Telegraph:

Doctors on a leading transgender healthcare body have admitted that patients have developed cancer owing to the effects of hormone treatment….

Another said they would go ahead with a double mastectomy (called “top surgery”) on a 16-year-old girl even though hormones had likely given her liver cancer.

UN Women UK delegates all seem to have something in common: they're men.

pic.twitter.com/Q1pHiWr7gl

— Triceraterf (@mid502) March 4, 2024

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Last week we heard about the lovely Martin 'Katie' Neeves. And let's not forget Munroe Bergdorf, selected as UN Women's UK Champion.

Yep, the UN are indeed "having a fucking laugh".