by Maria Polaris, Ohio Cardinal Support Network
The American Medical Association’s (AMA) troubling past with social issues, and apparent continued willingness to lie to the American public when it comes to the idea of transgender, should alarm everyone. At this point, it is widely known that the data supporting the safety and efficacy of transgender medicalization is poor at best.
So, the fact that the medical community continues to medicalize trans identified individuals and to defend this so-called treatment can only mean one thing: they would like to continue to profit from confused individuals and gullible/easily influenced young people for as long as it remains socially, politically, and economically viable to do so. It’s time for the public to apply the lessons of history and curb the transgender trend before it results in even more human suffering.
Transgender is not the first time that AMA has gotten things horrifically wrong, and we’d do well to learn from our recent history. For decades, young Americans, who just wanted to fit in and be cool, were encouraged to smoke cigarettes. The media promoted smoking incessantly, while AMA and the medical community downplayed the risks or even said that smoking was safe. Over the course of decades, millions of people took up smoking. Endorsed by celebrities, seen in movies, tv shows – smoking was depicted as a perfectly normal thing to do, and everyone seemed to be doing it. For years, smoking was actively and aggressively marketed to young people, even using cartoons, like the Joe Cool camel, and trendy ads. We need only look to this wholesale promotion to the public and youth of cigarettes to see that there is no reason to trust the AMA now and to stand by as we repeat history, this time with gender transition.
Because of the high medical burden of trans, the risks and repercussions of the promotion of gender ideology are arguably even worse than with tobacco. For the novice, medical gender transition means halting the natural puberty of a healthy child with drugs, and injecting wrong-sex hormones at age 16 or younger. At 18, surgeries often come into play to further this medical transition, which supposedly is the cure for dysphoria. The obvious path for a girl is a bilateral mastectomy; in some states, such as Oregon and California, the age is much younger. The surgeries on minors remove secondary and eventually primary sex organs so they can mimic the opposite sex. These children are rendered sterile for life, believing they are “born in the wrong body” – a statement for which there is zero scientific or medical evidence. Further, once the natural hormone-producing organs are gone, the wrong-sex hormones are required for the rest of their lives.
Years into the tobacco crisis, and only after many deaths, it came to light that, far from believing cigarettes to be fun and harmless, the tobacco industry and many in the medical field were well aware of the deadly risks, but chose to cover up and suppress the evidence for years. We know that they hid the data because they had no interest in curbing sales of their product, or damaging their reputations by admitting that smoking was dangerous. In this case, what was best for young people was hidden away so the profitable tobacco trade could continue unabated.
The gender industry is now in this place – promoting transition as life-saving medicine, while at the same time depicting trans as cool and edgy to teens and young people through all media channels. So, do the AMA and drug corporations actually believe that children can be born in the wrong body, and therefore, by marketing their services, they are altruistically supporting medical transition, as helpful cure for gender dysphoria? Do they have overwhelming evidence that it’s right and helpful to administer wrong-sex hormones to children who are not old enough to smoke, drive, vote or drink?
It turns out that this is no different than what happened with Big Tobacco. There are many studies contraindicating gender transition as a panacea to cure gender dysphoria. The medical community, and AMA, sadly, are aware of the risks, studies, and evidence and is choosing to ignore them. Organizations, such as www.SEGM.org, have been releasing information for years. Studies are non-existent or woefully unrepresentative, and countries like Sweden, Finland, and the UK have halted or ended these experiments on children. AMA knows all about the Danish study from 2002 which states that post transition, adult suicide rates increased 19 times that of an adult who pursued mental health therapies instead. The data is out there. Modern day suppression of this information includes misinterpreting inconclusive or contraindicating studies to the public in handy tweets, stigmatizing and dismissing any counter-narrative information as “transphobic” and blocking and cancelling on social media anyone who dares to speak up.
With cigarettes, eventually the chickens came home to roost for the tobacco industry, but not before huge profits were made over decades of sales of this unethical product. It was not until the Surgeon General stepped in, under tremendous public pressure, that the AMA was forced to end their relationship with their profitable cigarette-touting bedfellows, and to admit that there were risks to smoking after all. But they had already over 40 years of collecting profits from innocent minors, who were addicted for life to their products and suffered dire health consequences including death. The medical community did virtually nothing to stop the juggernaut because they continued to profit from the patients and because they feared the legal liability of admitting fault and complicity in the burgeoning health crisis, even when it was obvious and rampant worldwide.
Just like last time, we can’t count on an ethical medical community to put a stop to harming people via gender medicine – and, as in the past, only a public outcry will end the crisis. Why? Because, like with tobacco, the gender industry has aligned with the AMA and other previously trusted medical associations to control the dialogue and influence public opinion about the risks of gender transition. Because of this, we now have radical medical practitioners that operate with a halo of false righteousness – people such as Johanna Olson-Kennedy, who received $5 million dollars from a government grant and completed bilateral mastectomies on our little California girls, without a control group. She stated: “they’re not girls, they’re boys!” And “they can go get them (breasts) back if they want them.” In this world, amputation of healthy organs is no big deal, and even brave and life-saving!
We all know that business is motivated by profit, not altruism, and therefore we should have a proper amount of cynicism when we see businesses promoting their work in gender ideology. However, like with tobacco in the past, untangling the ties between drug companies, medical associations and media is a difficult task, because the ties are obscured through many layers of corporate structure. We’re only now beginning to understand how intertwined the medical community and big Pharma are in creating a market for gender “treatment”. There are vast sums of money to be made from Big Pharma by creating a new market for gender services and, absent regulation, our populations are being exposed to gender marketing continuously. For example, you have to wonder what motivates Eli Lilly to include in their marketing a view of a post-bilateral mastectomy young woman, shirt off with scars on her chest during Pride month.
Trans has completely permeated our culture, just like the smoking fad did in years past. In schools, educators are forced to learn gender ideology and pass it on to students, generally under the guise of anti-bullying programs. If teachers disagree or question, they are fired or called transphobic, which continues to promote the view that everyone is in agreement about trans, when they are not. Trans affirming children’s camps abound. In a circle of reinforcement, the media, including influencers and movie stars, glamorize trans to the public (in some cases even publicizing their own “trans” children) through magazines, social media, television and movies. This creates a public demand, which, in turn, drives more media sales for things like Disney movies promoting transgender themes, and more customers for transition drugs, which must be taken for a lifetime. Even our language has been coopted to support the view that the religion of gender ideology is a normal and accepted part of our lives, as the public has been re-educated to use gender ideology terms like “cis”, “trans”, “queer” and more, and to view gender stereotypes as the equivalent of biological sex.
These strategies to build acceptance and demand for trans medicalization have been remarkably successful. There are now 300 gender clinics in the US to support the rising demand for medicalization of healthy kids. In some states, such as Ohio, these gender clinics are even inside pediatric hospital wings, conveniently located to support all kids convinced they are in the wrong bodies, having learned about this online and from media. Planned Parenthood and other trans lobbies, such as Living With Change, have set up shops near college campuses to take advantage of the new market demographic of confused teenage college students, who are living away from home, without parental oversight for the first time.
Like with big tobacco, gender clinics, cross-sex hormone producers, and gender affirmers will not give up their cash cow without a fight. They will continue to undercut their competitors and advertise their wares until they are stopped through legal or regulatory action, combined with social pressure. In this case, their competitor is talk therapy. This is therapy to address the root cause of gender dysphoria and help to resolve it without medical intervention. To cut out the competition, the gender industry bills this type of treatment as abusive, transphobic “conversion therapy”, despite evidence that shows that 95% of dysphoric children would accept their biological gender with time and talk therapy. Talk therapy is cheap and effective, and requires no medicine or surgery. Since it can put the gender industry out of business, so it must be maligned and discredited across the board.
I challenge the reader to think critically about all this. Are you and your children being tricked once again, just like prior generations were with tobacco? AMA would have the public believe that puberty blockers are safe, just like they once advertised for cigarettes. Parents: the AMA has become radicalized like so many other government agencies and Big Pharma and Big Tech. This is not “gender-affirming healthcare”. It’s a billion dollar industry, and our children are the affirming industry’s cash cows, and the children’s hospitals that these clinics reside in are trading our kids’ health and future opportunities for profit. The medical community benefits financially by hiding their heads in the sand about the evidence. And they will continue to do this until the public stands together to make it stop, like in the case of Tobacco and E-cigs.
Parents like me are boycotting every industry we can that perpetuates these lies to our children. We don’t care that celebrities are doing it. We no longer plan to buy the Legos, drink the Coke, or Budweisers, or the Pride Kool Aid. Parents like us are done with the dangerous virtue signaling and the lack of control and the media craze that is selling a utopian fantasy to our kids during their most vulnerable years. We are doing everything we can to protect them so they can be healthy adults, regardless of their sexual orientation. Remember, this won’t stop until we make it stop, just like with Tobacco. There’s money at stake, and a whole industry that will continue to perpetuate the myth of transition as a cure-all until we all stand together and stop it, by making the cost too high to justify the profits. Working to bring about the end of the era of widespread transition is not transphobic, it’s called protective parenting.
From our society’s experience with tobacco, we know that the only thing that will stop this insanity is legal action, and a shift in public opinion. This process needs to start, and it needs to start now.
- AMA and History of Cover Ups: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Camel
- https://uncommongroundmedia.com/stryker-arcus-billionaires-lgbt/#comment-3009
- https://pjmedia.com/uncategorized/stacey-lennox/2021/05/10/is-anheuser-busch-drunk-the-beer-behemoth-is-forcing-the-woke-gender-unicorn-on-its-employees-n1443382
- http://www.adrespect.org/common/11064/default.cfm?clientID=11064
- https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-states-stop-interfering-health-care-transgender-children
- https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-states-stop-interfering-health-care-transgender-children
- https://uncommongroundmedia.com/stryker-arcus-billionaires-lgbt/#comment-3009
- https://csts.ua.edu/ama/
- https://www.webmd.com/men/news/20161026/fda-warns-of-dangers-from-testosterone-supplements
- https://stopswithme.com/exposing-big-tobacco/targeting-our-children/
- https://blog.ongig.com/diversity-and-inclusion/companies-celebrating-pride-month-with-logos-tweets-events-more/
- https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/entertainment/2021/april/disney-pixar-casting-for-its-first-animated-transgender-character
“The character, Jess, is a 14-year-old transgender girl,” the notice read. “She’s compassionate, funny, and always has your back.”
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/_WYsOe7wxTo?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
- (Levine) described as a trailblazer.
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22005209/ (autogynephilia)
- https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VG30CYPOQOrjEaYP2ocTYH272uqZo3TG/view
- https://www.lung.org/quit-smoking/smoking-facts/tobacco-use-among-children
- https://gsanetwork.org/what-is-a-gsa/
Originally published at https://pitt.substack.com/p/ama-repeats-history-with-transgender reproduced by kind permission.