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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 6 days

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By: Benjamin Ryan

Published: Apr 23, 2024

The prominent American transgender activist Erin Reed has repeatedly and insistently made demonstrably false claims about pediatric gender medicine.

During the two weeks since the publication of the Cass Review, England’s mammoth report about this controversial and politicized medical field, Reed has emitted a fusillade of false claims about the review, its findings and the systematic literature reviews on which it was partially based. Reed has only doubled down when fact checked, even when the corrections have come from lead author of the report, pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass, herself.

Reed publishes a popular daily Substack, “Erin In The Morning,” focusing on trans legislative, civil-rights and medical issues. Over the past couple of years, as access to gender-transition treatment by children has become a major political fight in U.S. statehouses, Reed has amassed a large following, both through her coverage of these issues and her activism against such laws and for gender-distressed children’s access to such treatments.

The Cass Review was four years in the making and published to considerable fanfare in the UK on April 9. The 388-page report scrutinized the field of pediatric gender-transition treatment and found it was based on “remarkably weak evidence,” as I reported for The New York Sun.

The report has heralded the end of an era in England. It helped shutter the troubled pediatric gender clinic, known as GIDS, that once provided puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to members of a burgeoning population of thousands of British minors distressed about their gender. Going forward in England, holistic psychological care will be prioritized for such young people, as it now is in multiple Scandinavian nations.

For gender-distressed minors in England, puberty blockers will only be available through a planned clinical trial. And the nation’s National Health Service looks likely to heed Cass’s counsel to reverse its recently announced policy to permit cross-sex hormones to 16 and 17 year olds. Furthermore, signs from Parliament suggest that the government will likely crack down on any private and overseas clinics prescribing of puberty blockers for gender distress. Even members of the Labour party have expressed support for Cass’s findings and recommendations.

Reed stands at the forefront of a full-court press by British and North American activists and online influencers to undermine and cast doubt on the Cass Review, including through falsehoods. This comes as English politicians and medical societies, the NHS, and even major UK LGBTQ organizations have fallen in line and pledged their support of the report’s findings, or at least refrained from fighting them. U.S. medical societies, meanwhile, have remained notably silent on the matter. They all unwaveringly support pediatric gender-transition treatment.

Most notably, Reed has falsely claimed on repeated occasions that the Cass Review simply “disregarded” a substantial proportion of the available medical literature on pediatric gender-transition treatment. Sometimes phrased as the notion that Cass tossed out 98% of available studies, some version of this false claim ran rampant during the first week after the report’s publication. The game of falsehood telephone stormed across social media, showed up in the opinions of LGBTQ charity leaders and English MPs, and in an error-laden Canadian Broadcasting Corporation article that I fact checked on X.

Finally, Dr. Cass herself cried foul.

In an interview with The Times published April 19, Dr. Cass did not mince words. She denounced those who had falsely claimed she had not included 100 papers on pediatric gender medicine in her review. (I explained the finer details of why this claim is egregiously incorrect in my Substack from last week, so I’ll go into only just a bit of explanatory detail about this later in this report.)

The Times reported:

Calling the assertion “completely wrong”, Cass said that it was “unforgivable” for people to undermine her report by spreading “straight disinformation”. The physician, 66, who has spoken about the toxic debate around the issue, also revealed that she had been sent “vile” abusive emails and been given security advice to help keep her safe. Of her critics, Cass said: “I have been really frustrated by the criticisms, because it is straight disinformation. It is completely inaccurate.

Reed’s false claims, about the Cass Review in particular and pediatric gender-transition treatment in general, have likely had a substantial impact on the global conversation about the care of young people with gender distress, given the wide reach of her platform. She has many eager followers and her tweets routinely rack up tens or hundreds of thousands of views. She is taken seriously by media outlets and even doctors and is routinely asked to speak at medical conferences.

I spoke with Erica Anderson, a trans woman, psychologist and the former head of USPATH, the U.S. branch of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH, about Reed’s influence on the larger conversation about pediatric gender medicine.

Dr. Anderson, who has become a vocal critic of WPATH’s full-throated support for pediatric gender-transition treatment, told me:

“It’s unfortunate that Erin Reed in her mistaken efforts to advocate for transgender persons repeatedly and demonstrably promotes falsehoods, including most recently about the Cass Commission report.”

Referring to the fact that, in every tweet thread that Reed posts promoting her Substack essays, Reed asks people to pay for a subscription, Dr. Anderson continued: “She asks the trans community to support her efforts financially. There is no way I can do so.”

[ All of Reed’s tweet threads about her Substack articles, which are often laden with errors, come with with a financial ask. ]

Reached for comment, Reed said: “Readers should not trust a fact check done by somebody like Benjamin Ryan, who himself has consistently misrepresented studies on gender affirming care and gotten basic facts about them incorrect.”

I stand by my own 23 years of professional science reporting and am proud that I have never had to run a major correction.

Erin Reed’s Two-Week Marathon of Falsehoods About the Cass Review

Over the past two weeks, Reed has repeated various versions of the false claim that Dr. Cass simply “disregarded” a stack of papers about pediatric gender medicine. Why did the author of the Cass Review do such a thing? Because, Reed claimed, those studies didn’t suit her “predetermined conclion [sic] ”—meaning conclusions.

Without going into too much detail, here is the truth:

Two systematic literature reviews, conducted by the University of York on behalf of the Cass Review and published by the BMJ the same day as the Cass Review, examined puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones as treatments for gender distress in minors.

Between them, these two reviews examined 103 studies. Using a validated scoring method, they identified two high-quality papers, 58 moderate-quality papers, and 43 low-quality papers.

Only the high-quality and moderate-quality papers were included in the review papers’ syntheses.

When reaching their ultimate conclusions—essentially that the evidence base was largely unreliable and inconclusive, although there was some evidence that hormones were associated with psychological benefits—the review papers leaned on the high-quality papers, but did not discount the moderate-quality papers.

[ The conclusion of the systematic literature review on cross-sex hormones. ]

Cass considered all these papers in her own analysis and did not simply disregard or discard any of them, as I reported on Substack last week.

That said, the central purpose of an evidence-based medicine approach is to discern which studies are more likely to provide reliable results and which are less likely to do so. This is meant to keep false study results, such as those driven by bias, from influencing medical practices. Reed and other activists mischaracterize this effort as capricious and biased, one that starts with a desired outcome and then reverse engineers it.

Discernment of study quality is particularly important, evidence-based medicine experts have insisted, when caring for the particularly vulnerable population of gender-distressed children. And it is of paramount importance, these experts say, to prioritize higher quality research when devising treatment guidelines for this group, considering that children cannot consent to their own care and may lose their fertility and sexual function as a result of treatment with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

These systematic reviews were conducted independently and were structured to be agnostic about their results.

Reed was not convinced.

On April 18, she denounced the Cass Review as a member of a collection of “sham reports concocted to justify escalating crackdowns on their care.”

The day after the Cass Review was published, Reed published a Substack condemning it. The false or misleading claims Reed made in this report included:

The report did not, as Reed claimed, “call for restrictions” on social transition. It advised that families observe “caution” when considering the social transition of a child.

The Cass Review did not “[advocate] for the blocking” of trans young adults receiving cross-sex hormones,” as Reed claimed. It advised a review of young-adult gender services, suggesting that the problems that have plagued the pediatric clinic may be similar in young-adult care.

The theory of rapid-onset gender dysphoria has not been “discredited”, as she claimed. It remains a hypothesis under investigation by researchers.

Systematic literature reviews are considered the gold-standard source of scientific evidence. They are not mere “reviews”, as she wrote—in scare quotes meant to dismiss them.

The Cass Report stated that there was not sufficient research to determine the rate at which young people who receive cross-sex hormones will detransition—meaning revert to identifying and presenting as their biological sex.

But Reed insisted that an audit of some 3,500 GIDS patients, mentioned in Appendix 8 of the Cass Review, showed that only 8 out of 3,000 detransitioned, for a rate of just 0.27%. (Approximately 9,000 patients were seen at GIDS since 2011.)

As I explained in the tweet below, Erin had the denominator wrong, and the true rate was about 1.6%.

Regardless, the 1.6% figure is woefully incomplete. Because this audit only considered GIDS patients assessed upon discharge, including because they turned 18 and aged out. And as Cass stated, her interviews with clinicians suggested that detransitioning can take 5 to 10 years. So the young people would likely need to be followed into their mid- to late-20s to establish a true detransitioning rate. But such data was unavailable to Dr. Cass’s team, because the NHS adult gender services refused to share it with them. (It looks likely the British government will ultimately force those clinics to hand over the data. However, activists have sought to convince these patients to forbid the NHS to share their personal, if anonymized, health records.)

In an April 18 appearance on the super-lefty Majority Report podcast with the super-cranky Emma Vigeland, Reed claimed that Dr. Cass was secretly conspiring to ban pediatric gender-transition treatment. Reed also falsely claimed that the Cass Review did not factor in the voices of trans people or their care providers.

Here is how the Cass Review diagrammed all the sources Dr. Cass and her team drew upon when crafting the report, including trans people and their care providers:

Reed then suggested to a super-credulous Vigeland that the Cass Review was aligning itself with an anti-trans propaganda machine, because in a footnote it referred to a video posted by that account’s YouTube channel.

Below is the video in question, which is an unedited, 37-minute video of GIDS director Dr. Polly Charmichael speaking at the 2016 WPATH conference. The YouTube account’s politics notwithstanding, the video itself is provided with no extra editorial comment by the account; it is just the words and slides of Dr. Charmichael.

youtube

In an April 18 Substack that she characterized as an opinion piece, Reed argued that “England’s Anti-Trans Cass Review Is Politics Disguised As Science.”

In the single paragraph below from that Substack, she made at least six false or misleading claims.

Reed falsely claimed that the Cass Review was crafted with a predetermined conclusion. In fact, as I mentioned, Dr. Cass commissioned seven independent systematic literature reviews on various facets of pediatric gender medicine from the University of York. Their findings informed Cass's conclusions.

Reed falsely claimed the systematic literature reviews were “highly susceptible to subjectivity.” The reviews used a validated scoring method, the Newcastle-Ottawa scale (NOS), and two independent reviewers each. The paper on the NOS scale to which Reed linked in her Substack actually states much more modestly that there is apparent “room for subjectivity in the NOS tool.”

She falsely claimed the Cass Review disregarded all research not deemed high quality.

She falsely claimed that the theory that gender dysphoria and trans identity may be influenced by social contagion has been "debunked". This remains an open question subject to ongoing research.

She makes the misleading suggestion about the YouTube footnote.

She falsely claims that the Cass Review asserts that rates of detransition are high. In fact, Cass states that the detransition rate is “unknown due to the lack of long term follow-up.”

In an April 19 Substack, Reed began pushing the particularly far-fetched claim that Dr. Cass had somehow, after publishing a nearly 400-page report following a four-year effort, suddenly reversed herself and endorsed the prescribing of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors outside of a clinical trial.

“Dr. Cass Backpedals From Review: HRT, Blockers Should Be Made Available,” Reed trumpeted in her headline.

Her source for this claim was a supposed transcript from an interview Dr. Cass had apparently given to The Kite Trust. The transcript was inexplicably written in the third person, referring repeatedly to “Dr. Cass.” Reed mischaracterized statements that Dr. Cass apparently made about how she envisioned children receiving puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in clinical trials of such drugs; Reed presented those statements as if they applied to everyday prescribing of drugs.

Fact Checked By Cass, Reed Doubles Down, Repeats the Same Falsehoods

Reed has remained resolute that she is right and Dr. Hilary Cass is wrong regarding the evidence backing pediatric gender-transition treatment.

After Cass castigated those who propogate such “disinformation” in her interview with The Times, Reed repeated her false claim that Cass discarded perfectly good research.

In response to an April 22 BBC tweet thread that painstakingly diagrammed how the misinformation about the Cass Review spread around the world, and why it was wrong, Reed responded:

“Not accurate.”

Reed then proceeded to mischaracterize the systematic reviews syntheses, describing them as if they were capricious processes and not structured to weed out study results that are unreliable. Referring to the 58 moderate-quality studies that were factored into the syntheses, Reed wrote: “Much of what was in the moderate section was also discarded, especially in Cass’s conclusions.”

This tweet came as the UK LGBTQ charity Stonewall backed off of its previous claims that Cass had egregiously discarded a large crop of research.

“We are grateful to Dr Cass for taking the time to clarify that both ‘high’ and ‘moderate’ quality research were considered by as part of the evidence review, both in the media and directly to trans and LGBTQ+ organisations,” a contrite Stonewall tweeted.

That same day, the UK Royal College of Psychiatrists also backed the Cass Review. Its president, Dr. Lade Smith CBE, stated in a press release: “It is a comprehensive and evidence-based assessment that needs to be acted upon with a fully resourced implementation plan.”

Who Is Erin Reed?

Reed has been Substacking for a relatively short time, but has quickly amassed a large following. She has 54,000 subscribers, among whom a group that is apparently in the thousands pays either $50 per year or $5 per month for their premium subscription.

She is recommended by doctors.

In the wake of the March publication of the so-called WPATH Files by Michael Shellenberger’s nonprofit Environmental Progress, Dr. Carl Streed, the current USPATH head, wrote in a letter to USPATH colleagues that he was “grateful” for Reed’s reporting about the Files—for correcting the “numerous false claims running rampant in the media.”

(Dr. Streed, whom I’ve interviewed a couple of times, took a clear swipe at me in the letter. First he called into question the findings of a recent Finnish study that found no independent association between receiving gender-transition treatment and the suicide death rate among gender-distressed youths. Then he wrote, “I seriously question the motives and ethics of any reporter, legislator, or professional citing it as evidence.” I was the only reporter to cover the study for a major U.S. media outlet, the New York Post. Reed was no fan of the article either and, as she noted in her message to me about this Substack, published her own takedown of my work in the Los Angeles Blade. I stand by my reporting. My motive is to report the truth. As it happens, Cass also found that there was no evidence backing the suggestion that gender-transition treatment impacts suicide deaths in youths.)

The Cass Review excoriated WPATH, saying that it exaggerated the strength of the research backing its influential guidelines for treating gender distress in children.

The LGBTQ nonprofit GLAAD, which has falsely claimed the “science is settled” on pediatric gender-transition treatment, is also a vocal supporter of Reed’s writing.

However, not all doctors see Reed as a trustworthy intellectual. Last October, at the Society for Evidence Based Medicine conference in New York City, I cited Reed when asking a question of a panel of researchers and physicians. When I noted that one major media outlet refers to Reed as a “legislative analyst,” the room broke out into derisive laughter.

Reed is no fan of SEGM’s and repeatedly claims they are a hate group. I got no such impression from the conference in particular, which provided a crash course on evidence-based medicine practice. Politics came up only briefly. This was a science conference.

Reed recently became engaged to Montana state Rep. Zooey Zephyr, a Democrat.

Reed, whose writing has also been published by Harper’s Bazaar, was recently lionized as a journalistic force to be reckoned with by The Nation. The progressive outlet (which I have written for a few times) charactered Reed’s Substack as one of “the most reliable sources for information on the exploding campaign against trans rights.”

Don’t tell that to Laura Edwards-Leeper. She is a child psychologist who was part of the team to first import to the U.S., in 2007, the so-called Dutch model for prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat gender-related distress in children. More recently, Edwards-Leeper, who practices in Oregon, has become one of the most prominent voices calling for reform and caution in the pediatric gender-care field from within its ranks.

[ Laura Edwards-Leeper ]

Dr. Edwards-Leeper is no fan of Reed’s.

“Erin Reed is harming children with her false claims about the Cass Review,” Dr. Edwards-Leeper told me. “Because many providers, parents, and even professional organizations are believing these claims without taking the time to read the actual review themselves. By ignoring the Cass Review, the most comprehensive examination of the evidence for treating gender-distressed youth medically to date, providers and parents who believe Erin’s false synopsis are making decisions that are not accurate and will undoubtedly harm children.”

Echoing Dr. Cass, who said, “This must stop,” of the toxic bullying that has intimidated many health professionals out of speaking out about the subject of pediatric gender medicine, Dr. Edwards-Leeper said of Reed’s routine publication of falsehoods about the Cass Review and pediatric gender medicine:

“This behavior is unforgivable and must stop immediately.”

I encourage you to retweet a thread about this Substack: https://x.com/benryanwriter/status/1782653360207761431

Ben brought the receipts.

Follow-up:

PSA: Reed is most correctly addressed as Globally Discredited Shill Blogger "Erin" Reed.

#Benjamin Ryan #receipts #Erin Reed #Christopher Reed #compulsive liar #pathological liars #misinformation #dishonesty #disinformation #debunked #Cass review #Cass report #Hilary Cass #Dr. Hilary Cass #religion is a mental illness

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justinefrischmanngf · 1 year

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Excerpts from Battles Over the Queer Past: De-generation and the Queerness of Memory from If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of a Queer Past by Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed

[ID: Four screenshots of text.

The first reads: The years following the onset of the AIDS epidemic witnessed a discursive operation that instigated a cultural forgetting of the 1960s and 1970s, installing instead a cleaned-up memory that reconstitutes sanctioned identity out of historical violence. Like national identities, the sexual consciousness that emerges from such narratives of forgetting and sanctioned memory serves state interests, not least by turning gays and lesbians into a "respectable" (fit for assimilation) constituency ready to receive state recognition in the form of "rights".

The second reads: For Foucault, gay desire is itself a form of memory: "For a homosexual, the best moment of love is likely to be when the lover leaves in the taxi. It is when the act is over and the boy is gone that one begins to dream about the warmth of his body, the quality of his smile, the tone of his voice. This is why the great homosexual writers of our culture (Cocteau, Genet, Burroughs) can write so elegantly about the sexual act itself, because the homosexual imagination is for the most part concerned with reminiscing" ("Sexual Choice, Sexual Act," 224). Viewed through the lens of queer memory, intimacy becomes a shared history as much as a shared space. Internalized as behavior patters through its integration into memorial narratives of pleasure, intimacy becomes the basis for a transformative and erotic collective life.

The third reads: In contrast, the hope for the future, the novel suggests, lies with those of the younger generation who can draw survival lessons from the past. In a scene set during Gay Pride Weekend, 1991, two young lesbians watch a documentary on pre-Stonewall gay life. When on woman asks, "Do you relate to any of this?" her lover responds, "It's not us... But it's something. It's history." "Maybe it'll make sense later on," the first woman ventures, to which her lover asserts, "It makes sense to me now" (559). Only when history "makes sense" — when memory serves — can gay countermemories heal the antagonism generated not by AIDS but by de-generational discourses that make memory-based community a suspect concept.

The fourth reads: By taking too casual an approach to memory, we rick letting our historiography disastrously change our history. The politics of memory are particularly important in relation to AIDS. Even before the NAME Project made memory into a stirring art form, a common refrain in the gay community was that we must not forget those who have died. While these individual acts of memory are urgently important, we must also remember and continue to shape and deploy our memories of social networks, political strategies, and cultural theories, not to idealize or to reinvent the past but in order to think critically about what stories are credited with access to the social "real". Only in doing so will gay men's sexual representations transform the restrictive and normalizing cultural trends of the 1990s that grew from de-generational unremembering, allowing us to avoid unnecessary loss and become present to ourselves. /end ID]

#in the future i might post excerpts one at a time bc umm . this is a long ID and idk if anyone actually cares about my aids reading alskdjn #but for now you get this bc i've typed it all up <333 #anyway v v good book i don't agree w/ Everything they say but it's such an interesting read #aids history #lgbt theory #excerpts #christopher castiglia #christopher reed

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male-thirst · 2 months

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Christopher Saint and Spencer Reed | Titan Men's Dust Devils

#holesrus #christopher saint #spencer reed

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weirdlookindog · 5 months

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Terry Beatty - Original cover art for the 'Monster Memories 1999 Yearbook'

#terry beatty #monster memories 1999 year book #hammer horror #christopher lee #peter cushing #oliver reed #andree melly #yvonne romain #david peel #cover art #horror art #art #painting

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balu8 · 8 months

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Revenge of the Living Monolith (Marvel Graphic Novel #17)

by David Michelinie/James Owsley(=Christopher Priest); Marc Silvestri,...

Marvel

#marvel comics #marvel graphic novel #Revenge of the Living Monolith #fantastic four #she-hulk #reed richards #david michelinie #christopher priest #Marc Silvestri

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mythirdparent · 4 months

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jam-jackson · 1 month

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can someone from the Hammer Horror tag get in touch with me? let's get something going, I need to talk Lore, and characters, and start a heated debate on who wears that slutty white shirt the best.

#hammer horror #the curse of frankenstein #peter cushing #christopher lee #oliver reed #hammer horror productions #terence fisher you did the lords work placing it it prime Romantic Era costuming #make all the guys part of those fluffy romance covers

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lexyscross · 1 year

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New stills from Scream VI! 😱

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pain-suffering-even · 1 year

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headcanons: Lennart Niermann

content warning for religion, and mentions of manipulation and gaslighting

Quick headcanons -

Name: Lennart Niermann

Age: 27

Gender: Male

DOB/Place: April 14th, 2033, in Schwerin, Germany

Rank/Type: S Rank Mage

Guild/Occupation: Richter Guild Leader

Past Occupation(s): Wismar Guild

Skills: Charge

Weapons: Mana-powered gauntlets

Family: Ida Richter (mom) (alive)

Karl Niermann (dad) (alive)

Ella Niermann (younger sister) (alive)

Juliane Niermann (younger sister) (alive)

Karlotta Niermann (younger sister) (alive)

Winola Niermann (younger sister) (alive)

Gisela Braun (grandma) (alive)

Core Headcanons -

Hidden talent: Good with styling hair

Favorite food: His mothers vegetable soup

What motivates them: Setting the standard by making a comfortable work environment, making money in order to donate to groups and charities, helping civilians by taking care of these gates for them

Treasured possession: The pocket knife his mother gave him before he left

Deepest secret: He helped recruit people into a very cult-y church and was gaslit and brainwashed by them

Best/Worst thing to happen to them: His mother raising him right/his dad scrambling his brain

Random memories: His mom showing him the proper way to carve wood and letting him keep her pocket knife as long as he used it right from now on, picking berries with his sisters in the nearby woods and scolding them for getting their dresses dirty with blackberry juice and cleaning them as best he could before going home, seeing the stained glass windows in the church for the first time, confiding in another boy about his pocket knife and getting scolded for it by his father in front of everyone and giving it over, naming his guild after his mothers maiden name,

Best friend/Worst enemy: Thomas Andre/Karl Niermann

Good/Bad traits: Reliable, charismatic, altruistic, caring, passionate/Intense, paranoid, anxious,

Things they’ve done/like to do: Visit his mom and sisters back in Schwerin, whittle wood with his knife whenever he gets stressed, practice making his own blackberry jam that doesn’t taste quite like his moms,

Personality type: “Protagonist” ENFJ-T (70% extraverted, 30% introverted; 81% intuitive, 19% observant; 11% thinking, 89% feeling; 83% judging, 17% prospecting; 42% assertive, 58% turbulent)

Nervous habit: Playing with his knife, humming various disney songs under his breath,

Things they’re afraid of: Closed spaces, being taken advantage of again,

Things they want to accomplish: Officially becoming an international hunter, becoming the top guild in all of Europe, throwing his youngest sister the best 21st birthday party ever,

Additional Headcanons -

Has watched a lot of Disney/Pixar and knows a lot of the songs

He's traveled a lot and knows a handful of languages. Russian, Romanian, English, a bit of Chinese and Italian as well

He desperately wants to get into baking after seeing the great British bake off but alas he simply isn't meant to be in the kitchen. burns/under cooks everything

Really good at dancing. It may or may not be from watching K-Pop videos in his spare time

Sometimes he wears his hair in a ponytail or clips it back with barrettes. The media has a field day with the look, plastering his face on all the covers

He's really good at styling hair, since he had to learn to braid all of his sisters hair and do it just the way they wanted it

While he technically was born in Schwein, him and his sisters grew up in a cabin far out in the woods quite a distance away from Schwein

Their Timeline -

Age 8: taken by his dad to work for the church

9 years pass (the views of the church are pushed onto Lennart as a result from gaslighting and manipulation)

Age 17: gains his original C rank + leaves to defeat gates for the Wismar Church

2 years pass (as he is away from the guild, the manipulation tactics begin to wear off)

Age 19: gets his reawakening to S rank + creates the Richter Guild

Age 20: meets Thomas Andre and Christopher Reed

Age 21: America's West Coast Kamish Incident

6 years pass

Age 27: now

#tw // religion #solo leveling #only i level up #lennart niermann #head canons #mentions of other characters #thomas andre #christopher reed solo leveling #christopher reed #long post

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i-bring-crack · 7 months

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24/7 Constant thinking of: Brightest Fragment of Brilliant Light! Lee Juhee; Destruction Monarch! Cha Haein; Shadow Monarch! Sung Jinwoo; Absolute Being! Woo Jinchul.

And the added bonus of:

Monarch of Beggining! Goto Ryuji

Beast Monarch! Baek Yoon Ho

Iron Body Monarch! Lennart Niermann

Plague Monarch! Kanae Tawata

White Flames Monarch! Esil Radiru

Frost Monarch! Kei

Destruction Priest! Choi Jong In

Priest of Giants! Reiji Sugimoto

Priest of Plagues! Shimizu Akari

Beast Priest! Park Heejin

4 winged Archangel! Laura

Heavenly messenger! Norma Selner

Ruler of War! Thomas Andre

Ruler of Oceans! Liu Zhigang

Ruler of Magic! Siddhart Bachchan

Ruler of Spirits! Jonas

Ruler of Flames! Christopher Reed

Ruler of Earth! Sung Il-Hwan

Side bonus idea of Jinwoo and Jinchul having a deep conextion due to Ashborn and AB. But then there's also the past yearning of Antares and Ashborn so there Haein and Jinwoo angst, as well as Brightest Fragment and Antares having a close bond due to them seeking to kill and killing AB, but then there's also that angst side of AB and Brightest Frgament, which makes the entire relationship between Juhee and Jinchul be strained— Jesus christ everyone here has a complicated relationship due to past lives ahahah.

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 8 days

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By: Benjamin Ryan

Published: Apr 18, 2024

On April 9, the long-awaited��Cass Review detonated in England. Its effects have been felt around a world torn asunder by the politicized subject of gender. The 388-page report, which was supported in part by six independent systematic literature reviews that were published by the BMJ, scrutinized the science behind pediatric gender-transition treatment.

Cass found that the practice of prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors was based on “remarkably weak evidence.”

In the report’s fallout, furious clouds of misinformation have formed, fueled by people who doubtfully have read much—or any—of the report or the BMJ papers. These people have falsely claimed that Cass only accepted randomized controlled trials, or RCTs, as evidence to consider in her massive report.

I write this article as the same lone warrior who battled monkeypox misinformation (and made a typo doing it) two years ago. I write in hopes of setting the record straight on a few key points. I write as a dismayed middle-aged man who remains, at his heart, the same frustrated child who always did the reading before class, and who was forced to sit and listen to those who hadn’t done their homework dominate the discussion.

The following is a distillation of various fact-checking tweet threads I’ve published regarding the Cass Review. Individual tweets are hyperlinked throughout the text if you would care to refer to, comment upon, or retweet them.

To learn about the specifics of the Cass Review, you can check out my coverage in The New York Sun, my tweet thread about that article, and my thread about the report.

This particular article will be devoted to the dying art of fact checking.

Here’s What’s At Stake

Many advocates of gender-distressed young people are furious that systematic literature reviews, they argue, set the evidentiary bar too high. They say these reviews forbid the acceptance of lots of promising findings from perfectly good studies on pediatric gender-transition treatment.

Others say those evidence-based-medicine standards of assessing the strength versus weaknesses of research are vital to prevent research that makes erroneous claims from impacting health policy and sending it astray.

They note that the stakes are high when it comes to pediatric gender-transition treatment, in particular considering the drugs in question may impact fertility and sexual function. Fertility, they say, is a human right. And since children cannot consent to their own care, the adults responsible for their care—parents or guardians and doctors—need to be especially sure before they consent to or provide drugs that could take a child’s fertility.

Here’s the question: Where does the pediatric gender-dysphoria care field go from here, now that Cass has said the evidence is weak and uncertain (as have multiple previous systematic literature reviews)? Should it accept the claim of GLAAD, the LGBTQ media watchdog group, that the “science is settled,” and that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones should be widely provided to gender-distressed children?

Or should the pediatric gender-medicine field follow the lead of Cass and England, and of Scandinavian nations, re-classifying pediatric gender-transition treatment as experimental and, accordingly, restricting it to clinical trials only Then, if the results of those clinical trials are favorable, it is possible that those European nations will change course again and broaden access to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors? Perhaps then they would be satisfied that the evidence is strong enough?

Here in the US, we have a split-screen system, quite unlike the European nations:

23 red states have passed bans of pediatric access to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for gender distress. Many are tied up in the courts. The Supreme Court will almost surely settle the matter.

Blue states support liberal access to such medications.

The major US medical societies, in particular the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society, along with the medical/activist group WPATH, all support liberal access to pediatric gender-transition treatment. This is in stark contrast to Cass/England’s approach.

So wide is the gulf between Cass and WPATH that after Cass supported forbidding puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors, WPATH said that the majority of gender-dysphoric adolescents would fare better on such medications than with the holistic mental-health care Cass advises and that is now policy in England.

At stake here is the question of how scientific research is translated into health policy.

Who gets to decide, and what methods do they use to assess the research?

What is the best way to do this, to ensure that the best possible care is provided to vulnerable young people?

The most important question is this: How can patients, families and healthcare and mental-health providers be provided the most robust and informative information possible to guide their shared decision-making as they weigh the risks versus benefits of treatment?

Cass says that WPATH’s guidelines are weak. WPATH countered in their recent statement by asserting that they, WPATH, are the subject-matter experts on pediatric gender-transition treatment, not Cass. The American Academy of Pediatrics, meanwhile, has been sued, along with the author of its 2018 policy statement backing pediatric gender-transition treatment and the overall “affirmative” model of care, in a medical-malpractice suit that I covered for The New York Sun.

False Claims Have Widely Circulated That Cass Rejected all Non-Randomized Controlled Trials

Cass does indeed state that randomized-controlled trials are the gold-standard of scientific studies. Meanwhile, many claim that an RCT for gender-transition treatment would be unethical to conduct among children, because the preponderance of evidence indicates the treatment is safe and effective. (Others vigorously dispute that such a trial would be unethical and that such evidence is trustworthy—hence, they say, the need for an RCT.) Furthermore, it is not possible to blind such a study, because the effects of the drugs (i.e., suppressed puberty or cross-sex puberty) are too obvious.

However, neither of the two systematic literature reviews on which Cass was partially based—one about puberty blockers, the other about cross-sex hormones to treat gender distress in minors—place RCTs as the bar that the 103 studies they assessed needed to meet. Rather, they used a validated assessment tool known as the Newcastle-Ottowa scale, which is designed to assess the strength of observational studies.

This is how one of the papers described the scale:

Neither of the studies deemed high quality by the reviews were RCTs.

And so, the widespread claims that the Cass Review set an impossibly high bar to reach by demanding only RCTs, discarding 101 out of 103 studies of pediatric gender-transition treatment, are: FALSE

Let’s examine how Dr. Hilary Cass and her team did factor in the systematic literature reviews about puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

One systematic literature review examined puberty-blockers for gender distressed kids. It examined 50 studies, and included in its synthesis one high-quality study and 25 moderate-quality studies. It did not simply ignore the 24 low-quality studies.

The other systematic lit review examined cross-sex hormone use for gender distress in minors. It examined 53 studies, and included in its synthesis one high-quality study and 33 moderate-quality studies. But it did not simply ignore the 19 low-quality ones.

What about the Cass Review? How did it make use of the two systematic lit reviews? The claim that Cass simply discarded the 101 moderate/low-quality studies and only looked at the two high-quality studies is: FALSE

She folded the analyses of the 103 studies into her report.

Let’s zoom in to the 388-page Cass review. To see where she first folds in the findings of the systematic literature review of cross-sex hormones, go to page 183. Here is how she introduces that paper:

Cass includes in her report the following chart from the lit-review paper on cross-sex hormones, which breaks down all the studies it analyzed and what outcomes they addressed. Cass is pointing out key areas where more research is needed, in particular about fertility outcomes. So you can see that this report is about way more than just the narrow question of treatment efficacy. It’s about the whole field of pediatric gender medicine and the research apparatus behind it.

On page 184 of the Cass Review, she goes into considerable detail about the findings of the systematic literature review about cross-sex hormones. She does not solely focus on the one high-quality study, although she does certainly highlight it. She refers to all 53 studies.

The review discusses the findings of the systematic literature review on cross-sex hormones for minors amid discussions of lots of other individual papers about pediatric gender-transition treatment. The review also folds in the findings from the systematic literature review about puberty blockers for gender distressed minors (p. 175).

Cass includes the following chart from the review paper on puberty blockers for gender-distressed kids, which breaks down the outcomes examined by the 50 studies. It points to areas where much more research is needed, especially about…fertility.

From page 176 to 177, Cass has lots to say about the specifics of the puberty blocker systematic literature review. She does not restrict her discussion to the one high-quality study included in the review.

The Review includes 15 pages of footnotes of studies, guidelines, and other sources on which the report is based. The report is not solely based on two studies.

In sum, those who say Cass and the lit reviewers simply discarded 101 studies are incorrect. However, because the quality of the study findings was overwhelmingly weak, Cass was indeed very limited in which studies she could rely on in assessing safety and efficacy in particular.

Cass sums up the matter as follows in her introduction:

Who Has Made False Claims That The Cass Report Rejected All Non-RCTs?

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation published an article quoting doctors repeating, and failing to challenge, the false claim that the Cass Review disregarded any studies about pediatric gender-transition treatment that were not randomized controlled trials. The article made various other false or misleading claims, such as that puberty blockers are at least believed to be safe and reversible. Sallie Baxendale’s recent scholarship, along with Cass’s findings, have shown how neither of those claims are known to be true. Much more research is needed.

Continuing a running theme in our culture of late, hundreds of academics have signed a letter protesting the Cass Review that strongly suggests they have not read the review or the systematic literature reviews on which it is partly based. Their letter falsely claims the Cass Review “does not include a proper systematic literature review since it disregards most research evidence because it fails to reach the impossibly high bar of a double-blind trial.”

The letter was spearheaded by transfeminist sociologist Natacha Kennedy and her colleagues at the Feminist Gender Equality Network.

Numerous accounts on X (formerly Twitter) broadcast the false claim that the Cass Review and two of the systematic literature reviews on which it was based simply discarded 101 of 103 studies on pediatric gender-transition treatment. This includes the British singer Billy Bragg, Dr. David Gorski (who also falsely claimed that Cass referred to so-called rapid-onset gender dysphoria in her report) and activist Substacker Erin Reed:

In her most recent Substack published April 18, Erin Reed continued to further the falsehood that Cass “disregarded” all but high-quality studies. She also made false or misleading claims about: the subjectivity of the systematic literature review’s scoring system; the ongoing debate over whether gender dysphoria is influenced by social contagion; the false notion that the Cass Review aligned itself with an anti-trans propagandist; and the detransition rate.

In a lengthy YouTube video, British political activist and pundit Owen Jones (who once interviewed me about monkeypox when I was very swollen and bald from chemo) repeatedly made the false assertion that the Cass Review excluded all non-RCTs.

youtube

Jones also falsely claimed that none of England’s pediatric-gender-clinic patients were sped through the assessment process. The Cass Review shows that at a minimum, hundreds of children were referred to endocrinology after no more than four assessment appointments.

Jones also repeatedly said that the rate of detransitioning—people who after taking cross-sex hormones stop the medications and revert to identifying as their biological sex—is about 1 percent, saying that long-term studies show this. This despite the fact that Cass said in her report that because of a lack of long-term follow-up, the detransition rate is unknown.

How Did All This Misinformation Get Started?

From what I can estimate, the first person to have pushed the false claim that Cass simply discarded 98 percent of the available studies about pediatric gender-transition treatment was trans activist and attorney Alejandra Caraballo.

The key problem is that Caraballo cited the wrong systematic literature reviews in a viral tweet about the Cass Review.

Five hours before the Cass Review was published on April 9, Caraballo tweeted a screenshot of what appeared to be the new systematic literature reviews that would be published alongside the Cass report. But these screenshots were actually from the so-called NICE reviews—from 2020.

The tweet quickly racked up hundreds of thousands of views and has 850K to date.

The NICE reviews of the pediatric use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for gender distress relied on the GRADE system, which with rare exceptions only gives high-quality ratings to randomized controlled trials.

Caraballo apparently did not yet have a copy of the final Cass Review report at this time. If Caraballo had waited until the new systematic literature reviews on which it was partly based, Caraballo would have seen that they did not throw out all but RCTs.

I am quite certain Caraballo did not have access to the Cass Review’s final report before the embargo lifted (at 7:01pm ET April 9), because shortly before the embargo was set to lift, Caraballo tweeted what was quite apparently thought to be the Cass report. But the link was to the review papers, not the report. As you can see, I told Caraballo on April 9 that the tweet had not, as claimed, linked to the Cass Review:

And of course amid all this, uber-popular debunking podcaster Michael Hobbes, who once hosted a show called You’re Wrong About, weighed in.

This reminds me of the time Hobbes hate tweeted about the feature in The Atlantic that I wrote about carpal tunnel syndrome and spent half the summer researching. He dismissed it with a wave of the hand. It was obvious he had not read it.

I will leave you, dear reader, with one small, yet mighty request:

PLEASE DO THE READING.

About the Author

Benjamin Ryan is an independent journalist, specializing in science and health care coverage. He has contributed to The New York Times, The Guardian, NBC News and The New York Sun. Ryan has also written for the Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Nation, Thomson Reuters Foundation, New York, The Marshall Project, PBS, The Village Voice, The New York Observer, the New York Post, Money, Men's Journal, City & State, Quartz, Out and The Advocate.

Learn more about Ryan’s work on his website, and follow him on X @benryanwriter.

Make no mistake, these gender fanatics aren't mistaken or misinformed or confused. This is malicious and deliberate. They're liars and they know they're lying.

How do we know? They don't say things like, "ah, that makes sense now," or "I didn't realize that," or "I misunderstood that."

Instead, they pivot, and then they pivot, and then they pivot again. They create one lie, then another, then another, then another.

"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it." -- Brandolini's Law

It's not criticism or analysis. They're anti-science religious fundamentalists doing the same kind of thing anti-evolution creationists do: strawman, misrepresent, misinterpret or outright lie in order to create a false sense of doubt or uncertainty. It's religious apologists producing propaganda for the faithful.

Note: Even Stonewall has had to backpedal, which they've done while pretending how the research was evaluated was "unclear." Community Notes has pointed out that dedicated sections in the report itself explain exactly how this was done.

Meaning, Stonewall was either lying about having read it, or they read it but were lying about what's in it. It's most likely they didn't read it and simply took the word of one or more of the already named frauds and activists LARPing as "journalists."

#Benjamin Ryan #Cass Review #Cass Report #Dr. Hilary Cass #Hilary Cass #disinformation #pathological liars #compulsive liars #Michael Hobbes #Alejandra Caraballo #Erin Reed #Christopher Reed #gender propaganda #trans propaganda #science #anti science #propaganda #religion is a mental illness

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