By Albert Driedger
I spent a couple of days paying attention to an online conference at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) concerning some aspects of medical record keeping in research projects and the examination of biases that obscure the value of research results to some of the participants. It became a major focus of the discussions that the simplistic designation of research subjects as either male or female, for example, overlooks a significant minority of people who do not choose to identify as either and, as a result, miss out on opportunities to participate in research that would improve their healthcare. It was shocking to learn that various Republican-controlled US state legislatures have passed slightly more than 120 bills, and counting, in the past 18 months alone, all to restrict the rights of transgendered people to receive medical care.
And not only healthcare; there was an example presented from Texas, in which a designated beneficiary was blocked from receiving the proceeds of a will on the grounds that she, being a transgender person, was not legally a spouse since transgendered people are not allowed to marry in that state. The presenters at this symposium were all concerned that any perverse interpretation of any obscure Scripture could be used to obstruct funding of any branch of scientific research. I agree that the dangers inherent in the Republican line of thought are real and very threatening. Similar things have happened in the past; remember that Hamid Al-Ghazali’s injunction against mathematics as the work of the Devil in the 11th century helped to destroy the science research structure of the Islamic world of his time.
The concept that medicine might prevent or cure a disease rather than just charitably reduce the misery of illness was resisted almost as soon as it was first articulated. In 1796, Edward Jenner, an English country doctor, noticed that milkmaids who worked closely with cows and were exposed to cowpox became immune to smallpox, a scourge that exacted a high mortality in the human population. Jenner became famous for his discovery, and his vaccination method first controlled and, in our lifetime, eliminated smallpox, but the Church severely criticized him for daring to interfere with the will of God. Since then and to this day, there has been opposition to immunization on a host of successive trumped-up excuses that have been as impervious to reason as was the original concept of the supposed will of God.
Nearer to modern times, following the development of the polio vaccine, the World Health Organization (WHO) embarked on a project to eliminate this disease from the Earth in the manner in which smallpox had been defeated. There was extensive success and eventually, polio remained only in a few hard-to-reach regions several decades ago. The job would have been done by now, except that some extremists began to proclaim an assertion that the immunizations were really intended covertly to sterilize Islamic women. Then, an entire WHO team was murdered. The project floundered in those turbulent times. Now, polio is making a comeback, and nowhere more inconveniently so than in Gaza last week.
Consider the social turmoil we endured over resistance to the COVID vaccine as recently as 3-5 years ago. Should there ever be a government elected with similar anti-vaccine tendencies, vaccine research funding might be interrupted. This is an issue of international importance because viruses respect no borders and rogue public health policies in just a single jurisdiction might destabilize the health of a large region or the whole world.
The continuous flow of intellectual pressure from scientific research along the margins of ignorance always bears unexpected dividends. Consider that the line of investigation that first led to the COVID vaccine is now providing the first-ever vaccine against malaria and that several similar vaccines, presently in development, show promise in cancer prevention and/or treatment.
We have close ties with the Americans in many areas, including astronomy. Consider here Canadian funding and collaborations of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) where our collective ability to look ever farther back in time is leaving creationists with an ever-decreasing space in which to postulate a creative hand of God. Are we at risk that a future American administration supported by fundamentalist Christians might be persuaded to reduce or withdraw the funding of basic research such as this?
Among the best consequences of Charles Darwin’s theory was that he opened a door for biology and medicine to progress from specimen collecting and anecdotes to experimental biomedicine. In the Soviet Union, Stalin rejected the Darwinian view outright; some objecting scientists and physicians were exiled to the Gulag and others executed for their dedication to intellectual integrity. The result was that for the duration of that regime, there was a disincentive to test bold hypotheses for reasons of personal safety. In the absence of vigorous reality testing, there isn’t likely to be a major advancement in any field. The USSR produced no new antibiotics, cancer therapies, etc. throughout its lifetime. The echoes of the Soviet past are discernible in the Republican themes and too close for comfort.
I’m a scientist and not a politician, but I’m smart enough to know when one should be concerned. I don’t want to be a doomsaying prophet, and I take heart in the increasing likelihood that Kamala Harris will help Americans refocus themselves toward governance through values, policies, and legislation and away from the impulsive and prejudicial arbitrariness that has been the hallmark so far in this American election cycle. I share the concerns of the trans people, as detailed at the NIH conference, and of other minorities should their fears be realized, but, in fact, at this moment, we are all in danger.
Albert Driedger is a retired physician and scientist and Professor Emeritus at Western University, Faculty of Medicine. He retired to Huntsville three years ago.
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The Real Person!
The Real Person!
Luckily the US has had Biden and likely Harris to follow scientific advice and encourage initiatives to fight climate change.
Instead of them being stuck with Trump.
“Existence of Climate Change Questioned by President Trump.”
.
Unfortunately Canada could be stuck with Poilievre.
PCs also prefer the ever popular Ostrich Solution.
“Conservative delegates reject adding ‘climate change is real’ to the policy book”
Everything Poilievre says about the carbon tax and it’s effect on inflation is a lie.
For a list of 26 articles that debunk fanatical PC lies regarding the carbon tax and energy go to:
https://doppleronline.ca/huntsville/to-a-good-future/
3 more
https://southmuskoka.doppleronline.ca/letters-conservatives-are-telling-tall-tales-on-carbon-tax/
Trump has shown PCs in Canada that blatant lies hardly affect polling numbers at all.
Search “What Pierre Poilievre and Donald Trump have in common”
“we now have a Canadian Conservative leader who trades in the same trademark combination of bombast, belligerence, and bs.”
Provincially Ontario used to be 96% non-fossil fuel power and rising.
Something to be proud of.
It would have only taken a small amount of renewable energy and storage to get up to 100%.
Until Ford cancelled 750 green projects already under construction and wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars doing it.
Due to Ford’s meddling we are down to 90% and dropping fast.
Something to be embarrassed about.
Ford needs to sort out his priorities.
$1.1 billion cost/loss in revenue with licence plate sticker renewals.
$500 million of public money for a parking garage for a private spa.
“Doug Ford’s change to booze sales could cost far more than $225M”
Not a dime for minor roof repairs at the Science Centre which has inspired kids to go into STEM for decades.
What is with Ford’s obsession with booze?
Clearly drunks are his base.
They have never been inside the Science Centre either.
Like Doug.
The displays would baffle him.
Ford has no use for science for facts or truth or engineers or architects.
“Cost of Ontario Science Centre temporary location exceeds cost of roof repairs”
Roof repairs?
Ford’s inflated number $22-40 million.
Temporary Science Centre for a few years 1/10 the size?
$72 million!!
Make sense only to drunks. And Doug.
“The true cost of repairing the Ontario Science Centre is much, much less than what Infrastructure Ontario has been saying—and the proof is in its own documents”
Watch the video: Original architects say Science Centre didn’t have to close.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
The so-called “Evangelicals” that form today’s religious right in the southern US are decedents of the men and women who rationalized their actions by convincing themselves that God approved of them keeping up to 500 slaves in their plantation pens to support their very privileged way of life. 620,000 Americans died in the civil war of 1861 that was fought on that issue, but obviously the issue is still not totally settled.
Today, the anti-science movement and climate change deniers are organized and supported by the fossil fuel industry and their investors who are desperately trying to wring the last drops of profit out of rapidly shrinking reserves. If they succeed, and the world runs out of oil and gas before they are replaced by new forms of energy, we will see an unprecedented global economic collapse.
In his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, Trump said the US has the world’s biggest oil reserves under foot. That is just patently untrue. If the US had to rely on their own domestic proven reserves, they would last 6 years. Yesterday’s Washington Post article listed 24 billionaires who are supporting the Trump campaign. In another article yesterday, the writer was excited about finding a high-pressure deposit of oil thousands of feet under the Gulf of Mexico. That deposit is a mere 5 billion barrels and the last time they tried to tap such a high-pressure well in 2010, it exploded, killing 11 workers, and creating an underwater gusher that spread floating oil over a wide area of the Gulf.
Here in Canada, the Fraser Institute, Sun Media, Rebel News, and even Conrad Black’s National Post are spreading the same kind of misinformation. If the fossil fuel industries and their investors want to have a livable future for themselves, their children and their grandchildren, they should be moving ASAP to transition into the many new and emerging zero-emission technologies that are now available, as the global auto industry is doing.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
Thanks for all of this Bob.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
Thanks for a well balanced thought proving article.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
Scientific papers have a hierarchy of credibility, with opinion letters being the least credible, all the way up to randomized controlled trials near the top, and at the very apex of scientific credibility there are systematic reviews — the gold standard for evidence-based analysis. Numerous systematic reviews have been painstakingly undertaken to analyze medical “sex change” treatment for minors, and every single one has concluded that the evidence for “gender affirming care” for kids (as it is euphemistically called by activists) is weak to nonexistent, and does not hold up to the grave risks and harms associated with such treatment.
There’s a reason that no other generation before ours had ever countenanced the concept of a “transgender child,” and it’s not that the times were less accepting in the past. It’s that “transgender” is a social concept rather than a “natural category.” There have always been feminine boys and masculine girls; there have always been gays and lesbians; there have always been harmless, socially awkward eccentrics, many of whom are on the autism spectrum. “Transgender” is a social concept that has captured the imaginations of these cohorts of young people through social media — it’s a social contagion, like the “multiple personalities” craze was in the ’80s and ’90s, and the anorexia epidemic in the early 2000s. (In fact, the very same demographics who were affected by those previous crazes are being caught up in transgender mania: predominantly teen girls and young women with mental health comorbidities.)
I say this as a very liberal gay man who experienced gender dysphoria in my own childhood and have worked with adult transsexuals since the 1990s: I can understand people’s wariness about the conservative right when it comes to the rights of sexual minorities. But transgender is not like homosexuality: “trans” is highly medicalized. involving irreversible, profoundly life-changing surgical and endocrinological interventions with very high rates of complications and regrets. It should not be examined through a left-versus-right culture war lens. In Europe it’s the liberal progressives who are moving to restrict “youth gender medicine” to protect the health and safety of girls, gays, and autistic youth who are being confused and coerced into serious and irreversible “sex change” surgeries because “discovering that you’re really trans” is marketed to kids on social media as the cause and solution to all of life’s problems.
Transsexual medical treatment is a very adult phenomenon, and a rare one, and it it should rightly remain rare and for adults only: it involves permanent changes to adults’ sex organs and sexual function, and the risk of regret and suicide is very high. It’s also historically been very rooted in adult sexuality. (Did everyone suddenly forget that The Rocky Horror Picture Show openly and lightheartedly depicted the link between transsexualism and fetishism? You can watch that film right now on Disney Plus, that’s how not-remotely-shocking it is to point out the obvious connection between trans and kink among adult men. And if you need further evidence, the entire field of sexology has books and books about it.)
It’s great to see society catch up on gay people’s rights, and the rights of people to express their feminine and masculine sides more freely. But “transgender” is not a simple celebration of people’s “identities” and we cannot abandon our commitment to rigorous scientific oversight, especially when it comes to experimenting on children’s bodies, simply because we want to show the world how far we’ve progressed socially.
“Gender affirming” youth “medicine” is a scandal and it’s already on its way out. For more information about it, I recommend you follow LGBT Courage Coalition online, a group of science-oriented transsexuals and homosexuals who work to improve the medical treatment of gender nonconforming youth.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
Mr Morty…..I am not sure what “our generation” is to you, but in 1975, I worked at the Clarke Institute Transgender Clinic (which had opened in 1969). It was a very active clinic with “patients” as young as 12 or 13. The John Hopkins’ clinic had opened in 1966. Magnus Hirshfield had a transgender clinic with gender affirming surgery as early as 1918 (shut down by the ascension of the Nazis).
It is worth noting that homosexuality was illegal in the US until 1962 and 1969 in Canada.
Thus I would dispute that previous generations are anything but less tolerant than younger generations today.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
If you worked at the Clarke Institute (where I, too, briefly interned), you must be very familiar with my friend Dr. Ray Blanchard and his colleague Ken Zucker. Their work at the Clarke has shed much scientific light on the phenomenon of transgenderism:
Blanchard showed that the majority of adults who wanted sex changes were older straight men with sexual paraphilias. He coined the term “autogynephiles” for the otherwise masculine, straight men who developed a sexual and romantic attachment to the idea of becoming the women they’re attracted to. I’ve worked around transsexuals since the ’90s and I can confirm this: the majority of them are straight males with kinky private lives.
(Or that was the case before the flood of teens began coming out as “nonbinary” and “trans boys & girls” following prolonged exposure to relentless marketing of “trans” on social media.)
Zucker, who worked with children as opposed to adults at the Clarke Institute, showed that the vast majority of children who were in distress about their biological sex were merely young budding gays and lesbians, and confusion about their gender nonconformity was a natural phase that they went through in adolescence. Given a healthy environment to grow and come out of the closet, the vast majority of them desisted from their distress, reconciled with their bodies & their sexual orientations, and went on to become perfectly happy, healthy homosexuals with no need for surgeries or medical treatments for the rest of their lives.
Having worked at the Clarke, you might also be aware that the numbers of young people presenting with gender dysphoria were infinitesimally small prior to the social media contagion which took hold following the profusion of internet-connected smartphone devices in children’s hands.
And let’s not forget: the Clarke Institute (now a part of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health) was of course a mental health institution. Which is to say, the patients were there to be treated for a medical and psychological condition: gender dysphoria.
None of the clinicians who treated people in distress about their sexed bodies believed that their patients were literally “born in the wrong body”, which is the metaphysical belief about transgender that the present-day activists promote. The consensus among credible scientists has been that gender dysphoria is a condition that develops under certain circumstances, as opposed to, say, homosexuality, which is an innate attribute that is more-or-less fixed before a child is even born, rather than a product of the social environment and circumstances one grows up in. (Dr. Blanchard has also produced much work corroborating that as well.)
Society is currently far more tolerant than in the past, and that’s a wonderful thing for a gay man like me and for my many transsexual friends and colleagues as well. But social tolerance and scientific scrutiny are not mutally exclusive: tolerance for people who identify as “trans” and/or have undergone “sex change” treatment does not preclude rigorous scientific evaluation of the root causes of gender dysphoria, and the best possible treatments for it. I want the best possible medical & psychological outcome for anyone in distress, and the fact is, that might involve them abandoning their “transgender” identities in favour of coming to terms with what sex their bodies are and realizing they’re actually just gay or lesbian, or autistic, or just temporarily distressed & confused. This is a point that radical trans activists are afraid to confront, though I know many transsexuals who are perfectly comfortable conceding it.
Activists have worked hard to downplay the drastic and irreversible medical aspects of trans, and instead they frame it through the lens of identity politics: it’s “the new gay”. Gay rights lobby groups are only too eager to play along now that they’ve run out of major causes to fundraise around, following the achievement of gay marriage and legal equality for gays, lesbians & bisexuals.
But as I said, the science is catching up with the radical transgender activists and the politicians who back them. This topic is moving out of the “culture war” and back to the medical field. The trend is shifting firmly back towards giving kids therapy first for their “gender” distress, and saving “sex change” treatment strictly for the adults, and strictly as a last-order treatment when other therapies fail to help the patient, due to “sex change”‘s invasiveness, and extreme risk of complications, regrets, and suicidality following treatment.
And I’m glad to report that the shift away from invasive surgeries and metaphysical folk tales about wrong-bodied “souls” is greatly to the benefit of gender nonconforming people. (Even though some very vocal activists don’t see it that way.)
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
I read the comments on this post and realise that I grew up in a very MF world. In no way do I feel bad about that. There was always the LGBQ faction out there but it was not of great importance to me. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t important to some, just not to me.
The people that I remember would be in a ‘natural’ category, with tendencies that were outside mainstream. Parents (and there are parents, ’cause kids don’t happen without them) will become aware and then generally do what they can to deal with and understand the situation. In some instances, maybe not.
Over the years, I and people like me became more aware of the Gay communities need to keep adding letters to the heading. But mostly it was within that ‘natural’ category. Part of my world but part of it only if they chose to be.
But then the headlines began to make me aware of, as is mentioned in the above posting, the “social concept” category. Those who have and are choosing radical methods to achieve ‘who they want to be’. I have to say I have no understanding of the lengths they feel they must go to. Especially when you can’t be sure you’ll be where you want to be when it all over and done.
Read the previous posts and there is a lot going on that I wasn’t aware of and am pretty sure I can get by with it staying that way. Ignorance is bliss? More just a way of keeping any cold knot in the gut from developing and letting spiders out.
I had heart surgery because without it ……. ! But to slice and dice, chemically alter and destroy parts of one’s person in search of something you hope will make you what?…… happy?….satisfied? Pretty big ante on a questionable bet.
I’m sure there are those who will pounce on what I’ve written with lots of fervor, berating me for “not understanding” and “not getting it”. And you will be right. I don’t get it ‘nor do I understand.
But I do fear for you.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
Thank you, Albert Driedger, Bob Braan, Hugh Holland, and Arty Morty.
I concur with your concerns about the sidelining of science. Science is frequently in catch-up mode to help explain/understand seemingly new phenomena.
Some very helpful discussion for me.
I especially appreciated and highlight here: “… the science is catching up with the radical transgender activists and the politicians who back them. This topic is moving out of the “culture war” and back to the medical field. The trend is shifting firmly back towards giving kids therapy first for their “gender” distress, and saving “sex change” treatment strictly for the adults, and strictly as a last-order treatment when other therapies fail to help the patient, due to “sex change”‘s invasiveness, and extreme risk of complications, regrets, and suicidality following treatment.” (Arty Morty).