Blue Ridge Style & Beyond
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Ten parents are suing the Department for Education (DfE) in negligence. The DfE has failed to act to prevent serious harm to children in violation of its own statutory guidance and the law, which prioritises child safeguarding and prohibits political indoctrination.
Over the past 10 years gender ideology has embedded itself across our education system. It is in primary schools and secondary schools; in state schools and private schools; in grammar schools and comprehensive schools; in all areas of the country and in all social groups. No child or family anywhere is safe from its pernicious influence.
Through negligent management of our education system, activists have infiltrated schools and gender ideology has become mainstream in our classrooms, causing untold harms to children and their families; indoctrinating children to believe they were born in the ‘wrong’ body; and encouraging vulnerable children and adolescents to engage in physical dissociation from reality by abandoning their biological sex for some mythical ‘gender identity’ – in some cases leading to dangerous medical experiments with puberty blockers, cross sex hormones and surgery, as well as the breakdown of family relationships.
Policy Exchange has warned in a recent report, Asleep at the Wheel, that three quarters of all schools are teaching children they could have been born in the wrong body. Schools frequently do not inform a child’s parents when a child expresses a desire for ‘gender transition’, or dismiss parents’ concerns as ignorant or bigoted.
Source: democracythree.org
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But will it be an honest review? Leor Sapir has written an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal asking some important questions. Along with his usually brilliant observations.
The piece is behind the normal WSJ paywall, so here are the highlights.
According to Sapir, the AAP is essentially a trade union. Given its vested interests as a trade union, which understandably prioritizes its members, i.e. the same doctors who have performed gender-affirming care, will this be an impartial review? Or will this be an example of confirmation bias, and/or simple CYA?
The AAP has consistently advocated for the safety and effectiveness of sex-trait modification, influencing various stakeholders from insurance companies to the Biden administration.
The AAP and prominent members have consistently assured policy makers and judges that sex-trait modification is safe and effective and based on strong science. Insurance companies have based their coverage decisions on these claims. Democrats have used them to cast opponents as bigots. The Biden administration regularly cites the AAP in its efforts to guarantee minors unfettered access to hormonal drugs and life-altering surgery. Parents have accepted AAP claims and agreed to allow doctors to disrupt their children’s natural puberty, flood their bodies with synthetic hormones, and amputate their healthy breasts.
Yet existing systematic reviews from European health authorities have found weak evidence supporting the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.
Given these findings, Sapir suggests the AAP should advise extreme caution in using these interventions for youth gender dysphoria, as other countries have done, while its own review is ongoing. (Reviews typically take 12 to 18 months)
Unlike narrative literature reviews, systematic reviews follow a transparent, reproducible methodology on the same body of research. Anyone who uses the same methodology should arrive at more or less the same result. The existing systematic reviews on the benefits and risks of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, conducted by health authorities in three European countries, all found “very low” quality evidence for these interventions.
Given the finding of every existing systematic review to date that the evidence for “gender-affirming care” is exceptionally weak, the AAP should immediately recommend extreme caution in the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries in treating youth gender dysphoria. This is a no-brainer; health authorities in the U.K., Norway, Sweden, Finland and France have done it. “There is not enough evidence to support the safety, clinical effectiveness and cost effectiveness to make the treatment routinely available at this time,” said the statement from England’s National Health Service.
Source: Wall Street Journal [emphasis mine]
We’ll be watching.
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