Through the Looking-Glass: 'gender dysphoria' and kids

Part One: The growing business of "serving" transgender kids

When the history of our era is written, historians will scratch their heads over the attention lavished on sub-sets of minuscule minorities of once-obscure outliers of sexual-identity, summarized by the ubiquitous strings of capital letters which seem to get longer almost daily…

As one helpful source explained:

LGBTQIA+ is an acronym that means Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, Two- spirit, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, Ally, A-gender, Bi-gender, Gender Queer, Pansexual, Pangender, and Gender Variant. Keep an open mind because this is continuously evolving.

Which brings us to the current preoccupation with the T-word in the bundle… transgender, slightly denatured by the medical term “gender dysphoria.”

Defining that term gets us immediately into thickets of politics, group-identity, progressive orthodoxy, wishful thinking, outright lunacy. Take your pick among the buzz-words: ”gender incongruence,” “transgender and gender non-binary (TGNB),” “non-binary,” “non-binary assigned male/female at birth…” and on and on until we arrive at the ACLU’s 2019 Tweet that, “Men who get pregnant and give birth are men.”

It has become, inevitably, political: just this week a GOP candidate for Oregon governor, Stan Pulliam, was quoted in a lopsided Oregonian story…

“Schools have no business telling kindergarteners they can pick the gender and the bathroom of their choosing,” Pulliam said in a statement on his campaign website. “It’s absurd and it’s not their job. Parents know best, not school district administrators.”

This came hard on the heels of a story from (of course) Palm Springs, CA…

The city of Palm Springs, Calif. recently granted $200,000 to two nonprofit groups looking to design a pilot program to offer a universal basic income (UBI) of up to $900 per month to transgender and nonbinary Palm Springs residents who meet a poverty threshold.

And who can forget Lea Thomas, tearing up women’s swimming competitions; or Florida’s bill (“Don’t say Gay”) which had teaching kindergartners about “sexual identity” at its core; or Judge Kentanji Brown Jackson’s deer-in-the-headlights expression when asked to define the word, “woman.” And her answer—”I’m not a biologist”—which may outlive her tenture on the Supreme Court.

This writer’s interest in this topic was prompted by one of our eagle-eyed Dissenters, “Larry,” who dropped a strange URL into one of his Comments. It turned up a fascinating document, titled, “Safe Tucking,” Under the imprimatur of Oregon Health Science University’s Doernbecher Children’s Hospital.

It was read with a mixture of surprise and the sense that pursuing the implications of this document would involve a journey by Alice (or, maybe Al) through a modern looking-glass…

'Now, if you'll only attend, Kitty, and not talk so much, I'll tell you all my ideas about Looking-glass House. First, there's the room you can see through the glass--that's just the same as our drawing room, only the things go the other way.”

It was.

First, let’s put the writer’s cards on the table. If you are within the semi-religious grip of current sexual beliefs and definitions and politics gathered under the progressive umbrella, it’s time for you to peel off.

This writer believes that each adult individual has a right to do whatever they damn well please to their body (including removing it from existence). Portland’s remarkable range of talent in this department proves the point.

But the operative word in the above is “adult.”

Kids?

They’re different, something that anyone who is raising or has raised a kid through those perilous years knows full well. Anything that a teen can do that will get the elders riled up will be richly rewarded. Psychological literature is full of studies of what amounts to the pathology of the teen years.

Today’s kids live in a world that is stuck on permanent fast-forward, bathed in media and drama (which almost always has a happy ending, unlike real life); a hyper-sexualized, Photoshopped world of “influencers” and quasi-porn videos—and who can explain the fascination on Instagram with really big butts?

School? In Portland they’re factories of Critical Race Theory, progressive tropes, LGBTQ flags; everything politicized, dissent shouted down. Politics might have changed, but look at concert videos and you will see an ocean of adolescents in their favorite habitat: a big crowd amping together, mindless as a school of mackerel. Progressives love stupid, mindless mobs. They’d gladly welcome your teenage kid into one of them. (In fact, they’ll insist.)

The problem: the 20th millennium hasn’t repealed the fact that teens don’t have a complete brain—they won’t finish the last touches on the pre-frontal cortex until they’re 25. In a story explaining kids’ addiction to Tik-Tok garbage…

When kids do things that require prolonged focus, such as reading or solving math problems, they’re using directed attention. This function starts in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for decision making and impulse control.

These are skills notably absent in teens. They don’t have the equipment.

This is a truism that Oregon law has long recognized.

• A kid at 15 can drive a car—but only with an adult in the shotgun-seat.

• The “age of consent” is 18 (it’s statutory rape, unless there’s less than a three- years difference with the underage partner).

• The military won’t recruit anyone under 17.

• Liquor is verbotin to anyone under 21, although 18-year-olds can take a drink if they are with a parent.

• The age when someone can legally smoke marijuana is 21.

But there’s one truly weird exception: Oregon’s “medical age of consent.” Anyone over 15 can give permission for any legal medical procedure without parental consent—a law you can be sure had the medical profession’s fingerprints all over it.

Upon this law an edifice of “clinics” and non-profits and therapists has been built and prospers.

An outfit called Grandview Research has a gimlet-eyed assessment of the gender dysphoria market:

The U.S. sex reassignment surgery market size was valued at USD 267.0 million in 2019 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.4% from 2020 to 2027. The rising incidences of gender dysphoria and the increasing number of people deciding for gender confirmation surgeries are expected to boost market growth over the forecast period.

If nothing else, Portland has got the market covered. One directory (essentially, classified ads) for “transgender therapists” in Portland listed 548 names.

Then there’s Outside In and Prism Health and Planned Parenthood. But it’s the big hospitals that dominate the market: The Gender Pathways Clinic at Kaiser Permanente Northwest; Legacy’s Gender and Sexual Health program; and the Doernbecher Children’s Hospital’s Gender Clinic, which claims that it treats 600 kids per year.

God bless America: we’ll monetize anything.

Even for someone who can recall—distantly—the stir in 1952 when one George William Jorgensen, Jr came back from an operation in Denmark as Christine Jorgensen and set the nation in a tizzy. (As Christine said of her newfound fame: "I guess they all want to take a peek.")

George-become-Christine was not a child. Being over 18, she would not have been admitted for treatment at Doernbecher. Or, for that matter, Legacy’s Randall Children’s Hospital, with its “Transgender Services” web page full of colorful pictures of…very young kids…

If these are kids with gender dysphoria, then Legacy is committing a serious breech of medical ethics; if they’re stock photos it ‘s grotesque advertising, a deep-dive into “What were they thinking?”

Doernbecher’s web site is more discreet, offering a smiling photo of Dr. Kara Connelly, who runs the Doernbecher Gender Clinic, atop a laundry-list of services:

• Puberty specialists who treat hundreds of patients a year.

• Comprehensive care that includes experts in primary care, hormone therapy and mental health.

• Family support from a psychologist, psychiatrist and social worker.

• Adolescent medicine doctors who specialize in the needs of teens.

• A safe, welcoming and gender-affirming environment…

Soup to nuts.

But let’s remember one fact: Doernbecher doesn’t treat anyone over the age of eighteen. And their recommended age for commencing drugs and other therapy is 10-11.

Kids.

Too young to smoke dope, have a drink in a bar, solo in a car or sign up for the Marines—but old enough to make some life-changing decisions. On their own, if they so please.

Let us also remember: Doernbecher isn’t a charity; it’s a business (albeit one with a tincture of public tax money, some of it gathered from Oregonians who differ, profoundly, with the transgender agenda). It provides medical services for a fee, although most hospitals are shy about disclosing their prices so they can game the insurers. But one web site estimates typical costs…

Transgender surgery is comprised of several surgical procedures that you can avail individually or as a package. The average transgender surgery cost for each procedure typically ranges from $1,500 to $26,000 but the total for all could be as high as $200,000 to $300,000.

Doernbecher’s Gender Clinic won’t discuss this tawdry stuff on its web site and why should they? The city of Portland, most insurance, and the Oregon Health Plan all cover transgender treatment, drugs, surgery. Enthusiastically.

As we have observed about many other feel-good enterprises—such as the scrum of “non-profits” and community groups infesting Homelessness, Inc.—Doernbecher has a more than passing interest in finding and treating troubled teens and their anxious families. No “dysphoria,” no Clinic.

But, you protest: they’re doctors! It’s medicine (the “world’s finest,” we are told repeatedly). Science!

Let’s first gloss over the fact that it’s easier to read critical evaluations of a car we’d like to buy than to find an honest, printed evaluation of any doctor. Doernbecher Clinic Director Connelly looks like a nice person in her scrubs…but parents who might seek her counsel will be told next to nothing about the staff at the Clinic beyond what the clinic wants them to know.

Stuff like:

One of the nation’s most comprehensive transgender health programs, with therapies not available elsewhere in the Northwest.

Yes, Virginia, it’s advertising. But it also prompts a question: why don’t the other gender clinics offer these “therapies?” What does Doernbecher know that they don’t?

Meanwhile, in the wake of Covid, many citizens have formed a somewhat different view of the medical profession than the profession’s Olympian view of itself. A cursory look at history (do they still teach it at PPS?) teaches that medical people are just as likely to follow the herd as any other self-interested group.

Medical history is loaded with procedures and fixations and fads. Blood-letting is now passé; lobotomies not long ago were an approved mode of treatment for mental illness; physicians were entranced with eugenics (until Hitler gave it a bad name). And that’s just the pick of a crop of medical mistakes and fetishes.

This raises a series of interesting questions, which were dispatched to OHSU’s 24/7 media relations outfit by your writer. Questions, based on the “Tucking” document, such as…

At what age are patients given this document?
Are parents notified? 
What is the research basis for instructing patients in this technique?
What is the outcome of this technique and how is that evaluated?
How many Doernbecher patients have been treated under this protocol?
What are the charges/costs of this therapy? 

Two queries were acknowledged with an automated reply…and then dead silence. In effect: “Get lost. We know what you’re up to.”

So, we’re left with the clinic’s web site, where we’ll be ushered into Alice’s room behind the looking-glass.

In Part Two: Building the perfect transgender kid.