Dr. Norman Spack, evangelist-in-chief for early medical intervention

[GrinitchSpinach]

I think many of us have been wondering just how medical practices for dealing with gender identity issues in children have changed so rapidly over the past decade or so. Who is pushing earlier and earlier use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery in children, without controlled clinical trials (and apparently ignoring the evidence that does exist that many children will desist if allowed to go through their natural puberty)?

One Norman Spack appears to have played a major role. Spack is a pediatric endocrinologist who founded the Gender Management Service (GeMS) at Boston Children's Hospital in 2007. It bills itself as "the first major program in the United States to focus on transgender children and adolescents."

The Daily Mail called Spack "evangelist-in-chief for early medical intervention" and "the guiding light of Mermaids and a friend of both Susie Green and Dr Webberley."
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3973036/Jackie-Green-heart-controversy-children-young-nine-given-drugs-change-sex.html

from that article:
He wants children who identify as transgender to routinely be given hormone-blocking drugs around the onset of puberty, and then move to high doses of hormones to change their sex, after which they can consider surgery.

The Spack philosophy is that age limits are arbitrary and often cruel. ‘Why wait?’ is his mantra. He says he has put ‘about 200 children’ onto hormone blockers, and claims 100 per cent have gone on to take cross-sex hormones because ‘no one changes their mind’.

Here is a Q & A with the doctor published in 2008:
archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/03/30/qa_with_norman_spack/?page=full

Some bits that stood out to me (Spack in italics, my own comments in brackets):

All I know is that when I see preadolescents, they have been dressing in the underwear of the other sex for years. These kids are almost certainly transgendered. [As we know, the clothes make the man/woman/boy/girl.]

The puberty-blocking drugs work best at the beginning of the pubital process, typically age 10 to 12 for a girl and 12 to 14 for a boy. Stopping puberty is, in itself, a diagnostic test. If a girl starts to experience breast budding and feels like cutting herself, then she's probably transgendered. If she feels immediate relief on the [puberty-blocking] drugs, that confirms the diagnosis. [Gee there are no possible other reasons girls in our society might feel distress at body changes during puberty, huh?]

You have to explain to the patients that if they go ahead, they may not be able to have children. When you're talking to a 12-year-old, that's a heavy-duty conversation. Does a kid that age really think about fertility? But if you don't start treatment, they will always have trouble fitting in. And my patients always remind me that what's most important to them is their identity. [So he understands that his patients are incapable of truly informed consent to sterilization...]

My own rabbi said it best: The transgendered are also created b'tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. [If they are created in the image of God why do they need medical and surgical alteration???]

I need to do a little more looking to find out who funded this marvelous groundbreaking clinic that now has worldwide influence...

It sounds to me that he's in need of a trained and experienced psychotherapist's help, not just his patients, and more likely, his patients' parents.

Bloody hell!

'By the time a kid comes in to see me, both parents have agreed that the child is in danger and needs some form of intervention. And that has led to heavy-duty counseling for the child and parents. Therefore I see young people and families who have been evaluated by skilled professionals.'

This is what worries me. Policies and issues based on USA or sometimes Canadian norms get wafted over here to a completely different system. He's talking about seeing children as a specialist physician who have already got significant support via the Massachusetts school health/mental health system. I am willing to bet that the support and psychotherapy available in a rich US state to children with good medical insurance looks NOTHING like the support a child pitching up even at the Tavistock in the UK. We would be talking about a completely different population of children, if we talked about gender-questioning adolescents in Massachusetts vs the UK.

Grinitchspinach

Search 'follow the money pritzker' on youtube.

This is horrific.

Juells I watched the Youtube video but didn't see any connection between Pritzker and Spack, though Pritzker and the Tawani Foundation have clearly made huge donations to other hospitals and universities.

Pritzker didn't transition until 2013, so I don't know if donations were already being made more quietly back in 2007.

The hospital seems to have taken the press release from the clinic's opening off their site. Normally there would be some kind of "the generosity of xyz has made all this possible" bit to the announcement, no?

My own rabbi said it best: The transgendered are also created b'tzelem Elohim, in the image of God.**

And did his rabbi also say to him: Lifnei iver lo titten michshol - "Do not set a stumbling block in front of a blind person" (Leviticus)? And he also say to him Lo ta'amod al dam re'echa - "Do not stand in idleness while your neighbour is harmed" (also Leviticus)?

Do not in any way suggest that Judaism approves medicalised transing. That is utterly disgusting and offensive to a religion that bans castration even of animals, let alone humans.

Of course all humans are made b'tzellem Elohim, in God's image. Why does this 'doctor' feel the need to change that image, to cause a lifetime of physical and emotional harm, and to justify it religiously?

Disgusting.

Pat - in the US, 14 states, the District of Columbia & dozens of municipalities have passed laws banning "conversion therapy" for youth who are gay, transgender, non-binary, GNC, questioning. These laws prohibit mental health & medical providers from encouraging their young patients who claim to be the opposite sex to explore what's behind their gender confusion; no questioning, only affirmation of a trans child's gender identity is allowed.

Some professional organizations for mental health therapists have adopted similar rules.

Kids in the US are routinely going directly to doctors like Spack who put them on blockers & cross-sex hormones right away with little or no mental health counseling beforehand.

The TV series about the American transgender poster child Jazz Jennings is a case in point. Though Jazz apparently started taking anti-depressants well before puberty, she seems not to have had any mental health therapy before going on puberty blockers at 10 & estrogen at 12. In her teen years her depression deepened, she became a compulsive eater, had social problems with peers severe enough for her to leave school, & her parents & grandparents tried to talk her into getting therapy, but Jazz always refused. Only when she was 16/17 & started talking to physicians about getting genital surgery did she relent, & then only because the doctors required a mental health professional to clear her for surgery. Yet even then, Jazz resisted seeing a real therapist as long as she could, & at one point she & her parents tried to prove Jazz's readiness for genital surgery by using a letter from a relative who had not treated her instead...

MNHQ: all I've said here about Jazz Jennings is public information from her television show, I Am Jazz, on TLC.

"Pat - in the US, 14 states, the District of Columbia & dozens of municipalities have passed laws banning "conversion therapy" for youth who are gay, transgender, non-binary, GNC, questioning."

I actually feel like these laws would be an effective way to approach challenging the affirmation only approach. We have all read many stories of families where the parents are homophobic and clearly delighted at the opportunity to convert their gay son into a straight daughter. It's medical conversion therapy.

The only problem is who sues for damages. It will have to be these kids, suing for being sterilized without their consent.

"The puberty-blocking drugs work best at the beginning of the pubital process, typically age 10 to 12 for a girl and 12 to 14 for a boy. "

This is bollocks.
Both mine started puberty at 8.5.
Of course he can't put that as people will baulk so lies about when puberty starts.
Aim is to get it accepted for 10-12 year olds (secondary / sounds "old enough") then push it down from there.

Puberty starting at 10-12 typically for a girl is just waaaaay off.

I started my periods at 12 and that was 30 years ago, I wasn't particularly early. Onset of puberty is approx 2 years before 1st period. And it has got earlier since I was a girl > yet I'm at the bottom end of his "typical".

This is not based on fact it's based on making things seem palatable.

NHS

It's completely normal for puberty to begin at any point from the ages of 8 to 14. The process can take up to 4 years.

So I was wrong about 2 years before periods, up to 4 is normal. Well there you go.

With that idea that distress at growing breasts = trans

Tells me that Dr Sprack neither likes nor understands girls AT ALL.

Thanks for explaining NeverUseThisName - I was wondering about this. It reminded me of something Rabbi Janner-Klausner said when she did that Thought for the Day slot.

I think a lot of this sort of stuff comes from male view of the world

Women have breasts
Breasts are sexy
Women like to be sexy they like attention from men
Therefore for a girl to grow breasts is a time for her to be super happy
If a girl isn't super happy to be growing breasts (and starting to fulfil her sexual desiny as eye candy for het men) then there must be something fundamentally wrong with her
Ergo they aren't "proper" women / girls

Men who think like this see everything with male gaze, literally everything, and see women/girls as 2D sex objects who must love this position in life or they are ill.

This has been the male story about women/girls who do not COMPLY and revel (or pretend to revel) in their role of sex object, forever. There is something wrong with them.

Pat Not all of Spack's patients come from Massachusetts, a state where people from all over the world travel for its internationally-renowned medical care. I'd bet good money that the majority of Spack's patients come from outside the state.

As to your point that children seeing Spack "have already got significant support via the Massachusetts school health/mental health system" - wish it were true, but it's not. There is no such thing as a connected & coordinated "school health/mental system" set up to work as one to protect children in MA or any other US state. The British have such a system, but nothing like it exists in the US. In Massachusetts & virtually every other state, children get very little mental health support - & kids all over the US are being medically transed with no counseling or only "affirming" counseling beforehand. It's a scandal of astounding proportions.

My impression is that for all the problems with the NHS, the UK is providing much better care for gender-confused children than the US, which is subjecting such children to Mengele-mad levels of medical barbarism.

In the old days a lot of girls who felt like this became feminists.

Now they are distracted away from that undesirable outcome with drugs, choice of pronouns, and lifelong surgical interventions.

According to their presentation at WPATH 2016, the clinic are now consulting with patients as young as THREE years old.

wpath2016.conferencespot.org/62620-wpathv2-1.3138789/t002-1.3139895/f0240-1.3140049/0706-000157-1.3140055

This is monstrous.

"Stopping puberty is, in itself, a diagnostic test. If a girl starts to experience breast budding and feels like cutting herself, then she's probably transgendered."

or she's been sexually abused, or is uncomfortable with her body like nearly all women are but to a more extreme extent.

"If she feels immediate relief on the drugs, that confirms the diagnosis"

Or she's feels relief because she's been led to believe she doesn't have to become a woman with all the negativity that brings.

"But if you don't start treatment, they will always have trouble fitting in"

Dr. Spack is ensuring these children will never fit in. With hormone treatment, some of them will appear to be the opposite sex. That is as far as it goes. In terms of sexual function, he is robbing many of these children of the chance to have any sex life at all - not simply a lack of fertility. Does he discuss that with his patients? I somehow doubt it. Even if their sexual organs develop in some way on cross-sex hormones (which by the way we have no studies on - Dr. Spack have you informed your patients of this?), they will forever have a mixture of primary and secondary sexual characteristics, which very few people are interested in. They will need to seek out other Trans people and a limited number of kinksters for any sex life at all.

Well, both Trans men and Trans women still have holes men put their penis in. I expect that's all Dr. Spack believes is important.

There must be a lot of parents feeding into this. If one of my DDs had told me she was a boy/should have been a boy/wanted to be a boy I'd have said "that's nice, love. Wear your jeans today."

An awful lot of poeple are vvv uncomfortable with those who do not conform to gender role.
And gender role has become so much more extreme now esp for girls.

Bottom line is that any girl who isn't primarily concerned with being "pretty" > must have something a bit wrong with her.

It's pervasive > not in your face> but there all the time just below the suface.

Many gay people are GNC, which adds a homophobic dimension which I'm sure is at play here as well, sometimes in your face esp with boys but with girls also.

My DD who is very "girly" gets way way more positive attention that my other DD who was GNC when younger and rejected "girls" stuff entirely, and now just walks a neutral line.

Interesting to watch. Not good, obviously.

From the WPATH link posted by GrinitchSpinach

Collaborating with families over time and providing on-going support is an integral part of treatment for gender non-conforming youth and their families.

So now simply being gender non-conforming means children need 'treatment'.

Some parents seem to go on a crusade, though. If their little Johnny wants to be Jenny, then everyone else's child must be encouraged to think this is the way to go.

If your child was diagnosed with diabetes (as a friend's was) and you thought you could avoid life-long medicating by taking him/her for counselling or therapy, wouldn't you jump at the chance? :( Why would anyone 'support' their child in choosing such a dangerous path when children don't know which end of them is up half the time?

The stand-offs that most parents have with their teenagers demanding to do ridiculous things! It seems to be what parenting teenagers is all about.

Why would anyone 'support' their child in choosing such a dangerous path when children don't know which end of them is up half the time?

This is where the suicide threats come in.

"Well you might think it's safer not to intervene, but if you don't go along your child has a 40% chance of attempting suicide." "Better a live son than a dead daughter" etc.

Extract from OP current thread:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3468339-Doctors-Speak-Out-Lupron-and-the-Diabolical-Push-to-Sterilize-Gender-transition-Confused-Kids?

"Behind the push toward this particular medical paradigm is a highly politicized group called the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, an organization that has effectively overhauled the entire conversation.

...

The entire project collapsed and Johns Hopkins ultimately closed the program in the early 1980s. It stayed relatively dormant until 2006 when Dr. Norman Spack in Boston, Massachusetts, decided to reinvigorate transgender medicine in the United States, Van Meter explained, "and from there it literally spread like a viral infection." -- isn't Spack the specialist Susie Green to whom took her child for cross sex hormones at a younger age than the NHS would consider prescribing them?"

I’m gender non conforming. There’s no pink in my wardrobe, I live in jeans and t shorts and hoodies. I dont wear make up. I played with construction and ‘boy’ toys as a kid. I hated dolls, I ran around our local park and climbed trees. I’m a scientist. I don’t do anything I can think of that’s stereotypically ‘girly’.

That’s normal. Being a girly type girl is also normal. The idea that I am some sort of deviant because I’m not confirming to An arbitrary set of repressive sex stereotypes can fuck right off.