Sigh. I remember Evan when she was Vanessa, writing about how proud she was to be a butch lesbian who didn’t adhere to traditional gender stereotypes for women. Oddly, it was not long after that when she said she was in fact a man, and had always been one. This was right around the same time one of her lesbian Slate colleagues, Mallory Ortberg - who had also written a lot of lesbian-focused content - also decided she was trans and started calling herself by a male name.
And yet people contest the research which says there is some social contagion associated with this, especially in young women.
Once Azeen’s pod dropped, Evan said he would withhold judgment until he finished listening to it, which was odd given he’d already trashed it. Then he never said another word about it. The pod was actually quite supportive of pediatric gender-transition treatment is the thing, so Azeen robbed him of the chance to land any punches.
How many sterilized and mutilated children would Wong consider enough to justify this debate? Because the current number is not “minuscule” when it’s your kid.
Maybe you should listen to Jamie Reed’s explanation of her claim and what Protocol left out of that confrontation. See the Informed Dissent podcast today for her explanation.
Thank you for posting this.....I also listened to it this morning and thought it was great. I agree with Reed that the Protocol podcast was really thin and to me, a disappointment.
Jesse, you write: "But I want to be clear that Urquhart is correct that Reed’s affidavit misrepresented Heidi’s experience." But that's not what Urquhart said. Urquhart wrote that the "affidavit misrepresented the medical history of Heidi’s daughter, Grace." Reed's affidavit actually gets the medical history right. You even quote Mitchell when he say's: "In actuality, Azeen had learned, the patient did experience liver damage." The main thrust of Reed's affidavit, in relation to this patient, was that the patient was given an experimental treatment bicludamide, a drug used to treat cancer that has feminizing side effects and known to cause liver damage and the patient suffered liver damage.
Mitchell goes on to say, "but the medical situation had been more complicated than the affidavit had accounted for." The podcast, conveniently, doesn't go into any more depth about this complication. According to Reed, the evidence presented to the court shows that the complication was that the patient was also given a COVID vaccine along with the bicludamide, both of which pose risks to the liver. So drawing a direct connection from the bicludamide to the liver damage is not a slam dunk. Nonetheless, the patient experienced liver damage and was advised to discontinue the bicludamine.
Reed did misrepresent the mother, Heidi's, quote about a "PR nightmare," which was really just sidebar to begin with, but Reed did not misrepresent "the medical history of Heidi's daughter." So Urquhart's statement is false.
These gender people refuse to engage in debate, so their arguments are weak and stupid. Contrast them with, say, Helen Joyce, who debates this stuff so much that her arguments are like freaking laser beams. She'd never say something so dumb.
Both this article and the podcast miss the mark on the crux of the issue: puberty is a fundamental and critical function of human development -- why isn't anyone talking about that?
p.s. this piece from Therapy First, while not about the podcast is succinctly about what the podcast and the current cultural discussions re: GAC miss:
I can understand why the mother didn’t want to be part of the podcast - I think she was already upset at Reed for dragging her family into a political argument - but the clip of her really made you empathize with her and realize Reed screwed up.
Reed didn’t screw up: she called attention to an actual injury (liver damage) done to that parent’s child. The parent had no idea the medication wasn’t a blocker but a cancer drug. The fuss over the PR comment is just noise designed to distract us from the harm.
I think Reed probably erred in including in her affadavit what was essentially hearsay, and would likely not be admissable in a court of law. So, sure, okay, she goofed.
On one thing.
Reed's testimony mostly holds up, and hyperfocusing on the bit she got wrong is a tactic for ignoring how much she got *right*.
She explains that the purpose of her affidavit was to alert authorities to possible cases of harm to be investigated. Of course secondhand information was not admissible in court—but the person who gave her the information (who considered whistleblowing) confirmed it with her. Reed hoped someone would follow up.
That her source (a nurse) misunderstood the “PR problem” comment doesn’t impeach the key fact here: a boy was put on a prostate cancer drug even though its known risk was liver damage. Furthermore, in the confrontation, the mother acknowledged that she thought the drug was a blocker instead. And the child did have liver damage.
This picking holes in the affidavit is not undermining the essential issue here (off label experimental drugs given to children for cosmetic not medical purpose).
Did she attribute a quote in the affidavit to the parent without disclosing the fact that it was second hand information for which she had no direct evidence? I actually think she came off sounding ridiculous when defending herself in the podcast when the parent "this text never existed", her response was... "unfortunately I don't know that it never existed". I think that entire exchange hurts Reed's credibility (as it should), which makes it even weirder that activists would take NYT to task for including it.
The mother had actually said, as it turns out, that it was going to be “a huge PR problem for her [the mother]” (because some of the child’s other family members had objections to her transitioning the child.)
That's just more hearsay from the same source she got the quote wrong from originally... Jamie herself has not seen the chart or the texts from the parent.
Yes, this segment was designed to cast doubt on Reed's credibility, of course. Should she have used quotation marks? I think not. But was it a "lie"? She was reporting on a problem she had been told about and wanted authorities to investigate. She was not claiming she knew everything about that case.
This concern over whether or not it was a correct quote or not of the mother is really not that important. What is important is that Reed was concerned that a young boy was given a cancer drug for prostate cancer, usually given to older men to suppress testosterone, without a medical purpose, experimentally, off label, and at great risk. The child did suffer liver damage. That should be what we are concerned about, not a misquote about a "PR problem."
The concern is whether or not she presented accurate information in the affidavit... Has there been any evidence other than her claiming to "know of" this case that corroborates what drugs were administered and why? She says she never looked at the chart, but also appears to imply Free Press concluded they could print it because they verified it somehow? It wasn't clear to me how she explained it. As is, the only thing we have evidence of is the fact that part of the information she got second-hand from a nurse (the quote) was wrong. I think it was important for her to be more clear about the source of this information. The fact that she claimed to "know of" might be cute, but it's sill comes across as misleading.
Reed describes what the Protocol did not include of that confrontation: Reed explaining that the cancer drug was risky and the mother insisting that the child was given a puberty blocker--the mother didn't know it wasn't a puberty blocker. She then exclaimed something about how it didn't matter that she didn't know--her child understood. As if a child should be giving consent to an experimental use of cancer drug instead of the parent.
I think there's a chance that mother didn't want audio of her sounding clueless.
Yup. Caught that. Not saying the recording shouldn’t have been included, just that I understood her anger, and in the context came across fine, but angry. I’ll check out the links from dollarsandsense though.
This is what happens when you pretend journalism has high minded ideals rather than being shameless muckraking that sometimes incidentally holds power to account.
A few months ago Urquhart was on Bluesky purporting to have discovered, "tucked...deep in the appendices" of the Cass Review, data showing GAC had no adverse effects. This would be quite the scandal, given Cass's primary concern re. GAC was about lack of high-quality evidence regarding the long-term benefits and risks. Thanks god an intrepid science journalist did the hard work of reading the fine printI Except, as it turns out, Urquhart was referring to Appendix 8 of Cass, which reviews records from the time a patient is referred to GIDS to the time they are discharged -- in other words *short-term* data of a few years, and little or nothing into adulthood. This kind of motivated illiteracy is the hallmark of the guy's work. He's the Shellenberger of journalism on trans-issues, getting things right with the regularity of a broken clock. https://bsky.app/profile/evanurquhart.bsky.social/post/3lcznwj5udc2d
Sigh. I remember Evan when she was Vanessa, writing about how proud she was to be a butch lesbian who didn’t adhere to traditional gender stereotypes for women. Oddly, it was not long after that when she said she was in fact a man, and had always been one. This was right around the same time one of her lesbian Slate colleagues, Mallory Ortberg - who had also written a lot of lesbian-focused content - also decided she was trans and started calling herself by a male name.
And yet people contest the research which says there is some social contagion associated with this, especially in young women.
Once Azeen’s pod dropped, Evan said he would withhold judgment until he finished listening to it, which was odd given he’d already trashed it. Then he never said another word about it. The pod was actually quite supportive of pediatric gender-transition treatment is the thing, so Azeen robbed him of the chance to land any punches.
How many sterilized and mutilated children would Wong consider enough to justify this debate? Because the current number is not “minuscule” when it’s your kid.
And, like, a fifth of the other girls in your kid’s grade
Maybe you should listen to Jamie Reed’s explanation of her claim and what Protocol left out of that confrontation. See the Informed Dissent podcast today for her explanation.
Thank you for posting this.....I also listened to it this morning and thought it was great. I agree with Reed that the Protocol podcast was really thin and to me, a disappointment.
https://open.substack.com/pub/informeddissentpodcast/p/episode-28-jamie-reed-responds-to?r=h5nu&utm_medium=ios
Jesse, you write: "But I want to be clear that Urquhart is correct that Reed’s affidavit misrepresented Heidi’s experience." But that's not what Urquhart said. Urquhart wrote that the "affidavit misrepresented the medical history of Heidi’s daughter, Grace." Reed's affidavit actually gets the medical history right. You even quote Mitchell when he say's: "In actuality, Azeen had learned, the patient did experience liver damage." The main thrust of Reed's affidavit, in relation to this patient, was that the patient was given an experimental treatment bicludamide, a drug used to treat cancer that has feminizing side effects and known to cause liver damage and the patient suffered liver damage.
Mitchell goes on to say, "but the medical situation had been more complicated than the affidavit had accounted for." The podcast, conveniently, doesn't go into any more depth about this complication. According to Reed, the evidence presented to the court shows that the complication was that the patient was also given a COVID vaccine along with the bicludamide, both of which pose risks to the liver. So drawing a direct connection from the bicludamide to the liver damage is not a slam dunk. Nonetheless, the patient experienced liver damage and was advised to discontinue the bicludamine.
Reed did misrepresent the mother, Heidi's, quote about a "PR nightmare," which was really just sidebar to begin with, but Reed did not misrepresent "the medical history of Heidi's daughter." So Urquhart's statement is false.
These gender people refuse to engage in debate, so their arguments are weak and stupid. Contrast them with, say, Helen Joyce, who debates this stuff so much that her arguments are like freaking laser beams. She'd never say something so dumb.
Thanks for this. I look forward to Katie and Jesse talking through The Protocol.
For a MUCH more nuanced picture of the philosophical-socio-political-psychological and "medical" recent history of GAC, see:
https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/hype-disappointment-reinvention-cycles?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Both this article and the podcast miss the mark on the crux of the issue: puberty is a fundamental and critical function of human development -- why isn't anyone talking about that?
p.s. this piece from Therapy First, while not about the podcast is succinctly about what the podcast and the current cultural discussions re: GAC miss:
https://therapyfirst.substack.com/p/developmental-considerations-for
The podcast is great. I just finished it. Azeen is brave, just like Jesse.
For another perspective on Protocol, consider this response:
https://open.substack.com/pub/informeddissentpodcast/p/episode-27-dissecting-the-protocol?r=h5nu&utm_medium=ios
I can understand why the mother didn’t want to be part of the podcast - I think she was already upset at Reed for dragging her family into a political argument - but the clip of her really made you empathize with her and realize Reed screwed up.
Reed didn’t screw up: she called attention to an actual injury (liver damage) done to that parent’s child. The parent had no idea the medication wasn’t a blocker but a cancer drug. The fuss over the PR comment is just noise designed to distract us from the harm.
I think Reed probably erred in including in her affadavit what was essentially hearsay, and would likely not be admissable in a court of law. So, sure, okay, she goofed.
On one thing.
Reed's testimony mostly holds up, and hyperfocusing on the bit she got wrong is a tactic for ignoring how much she got *right*.
She explains that the purpose of her affidavit was to alert authorities to possible cases of harm to be investigated. Of course secondhand information was not admissible in court—but the person who gave her the information (who considered whistleblowing) confirmed it with her. Reed hoped someone would follow up.
That her source (a nurse) misunderstood the “PR problem” comment doesn’t impeach the key fact here: a boy was put on a prostate cancer drug even though its known risk was liver damage. Furthermore, in the confrontation, the mother acknowledged that she thought the drug was a blocker instead. And the child did have liver damage.
This picking holes in the affidavit is not undermining the essential issue here (off label experimental drugs given to children for cosmetic not medical purpose).
Did she attribute a quote in the affidavit to the parent without disclosing the fact that it was second hand information for which she had no direct evidence? I actually think she came off sounding ridiculous when defending herself in the podcast when the parent "this text never existed", her response was... "unfortunately I don't know that it never existed". I think that entire exchange hurts Reed's credibility (as it should), which makes it even weirder that activists would take NYT to task for including it.
The mother had actually said, as it turns out, that it was going to be “a huge PR problem for her [the mother]” (because some of the child’s other family members had objections to her transitioning the child.)
That's just more hearsay from the same source she got the quote wrong from originally... Jamie herself has not seen the chart or the texts from the parent.
Yes, this segment was designed to cast doubt on Reed's credibility, of course. Should she have used quotation marks? I think not. But was it a "lie"? She was reporting on a problem she had been told about and wanted authorities to investigate. She was not claiming she knew everything about that case.
This concern over whether or not it was a correct quote or not of the mother is really not that important. What is important is that Reed was concerned that a young boy was given a cancer drug for prostate cancer, usually given to older men to suppress testosterone, without a medical purpose, experimentally, off label, and at great risk. The child did suffer liver damage. That should be what we are concerned about, not a misquote about a "PR problem."
Judge for yourself as to Reed's credibility here: https://informeddissentpodcast.substack.com/p/episode-28-jamie-reed-responds-to
The concern is whether or not she presented accurate information in the affidavit... Has there been any evidence other than her claiming to "know of" this case that corroborates what drugs were administered and why? She says she never looked at the chart, but also appears to imply Free Press concluded they could print it because they verified it somehow? It wasn't clear to me how she explained it. As is, the only thing we have evidence of is the fact that part of the information she got second-hand from a nurse (the quote) was wrong. I think it was important for her to be more clear about the source of this information. The fact that she claimed to "know of" might be cute, but it's sill comes across as misleading.
https://open.substack.com/pub/informeddissentpodcast/p/episode-28-jamie-reed-responds-to?r=h5nu&utm_medium=ios
Reed describes what the Protocol did not include of that confrontation: Reed explaining that the cancer drug was risky and the mother insisting that the child was given a puberty blocker--the mother didn't know it wasn't a puberty blocker. She then exclaimed something about how it didn't matter that she didn't know--her child understood. As if a child should be giving consent to an experimental use of cancer drug instead of the parent.
I think there's a chance that mother didn't want audio of her sounding clueless.
The clip also included audio of them informing her she was being recorded.
Yup. Caught that. Not saying the recording shouldn’t have been included, just that I understood her anger, and in the context came across fine, but angry. I’ll check out the links from dollarsandsense though.
Every one digs chicks with dicks
This is what happens when you pretend journalism has high minded ideals rather than being shameless muckraking that sometimes incidentally holds power to account.
Looked up “solidarity journalism”. What a load of horseshit.
Looked up “solidarity journalism”. What a load of horseshit.
A few months ago Urquhart was on Bluesky purporting to have discovered, "tucked...deep in the appendices" of the Cass Review, data showing GAC had no adverse effects. This would be quite the scandal, given Cass's primary concern re. GAC was about lack of high-quality evidence regarding the long-term benefits and risks. Thanks god an intrepid science journalist did the hard work of reading the fine printI Except, as it turns out, Urquhart was referring to Appendix 8 of Cass, which reviews records from the time a patient is referred to GIDS to the time they are discharged -- in other words *short-term* data of a few years, and little or nothing into adulthood. This kind of motivated illiteracy is the hallmark of the guy's work. He's the Shellenberger of journalism on trans-issues, getting things right with the regularity of a broken clock. https://bsky.app/profile/evanurquhart.bsky.social/post/3lcznwj5udc2d
The New York Times runs the world, while we all just live in it.
Transphobes do not exist. This is a false flag operation by MAGA 😡😎😀😀
Transphobes are a very very very small minority of bigotx so it doesn't really matter.