SANITYThe British Medical Journal is about to be cancelled - Urges US transgender medicine to adopt evidence-based footing, particularly in child care. At odds with Democratic Party and President Biden push to widen accessibility of surgical and medical interventions.

submitted by ClassroomPast6178 from bmj.com

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[–]ClassroomPast6178[S] 7 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 0 fun8 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Plenty of things that are done in medicine are weird and gross, the difference is that they are usually supported by reams of evidence. Gender “medicine” is largely evidence-free, and what’s more, collecting evidence and performing research is actively discouraged for fear of finding the wrong thing.

[–]Alienhunter糞大名 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Yeah all this. If we had actual hard evidence that chopping your dick off cured depression we'd have no shortage of evidence showing that. Hell if we had actually solid proof that gender transitions absolutely resulted in better outcomes for people in the long term then we'd be having a different as argument entirely. But nobody has produced that to my satisfaction.

It goes against the common sense, there's no medical research inconclusively backing it up. Research is one thing but it doesn't take a genius to realize that maybe someone who wants to chop their dick off is a bit touched in the head and might not be making the most rational decisions for their own happiness?

I mean I guess we can get into the whole thorny argument of, if self harm makes people happier, should we just let them harm themselves? But that ultimately leads us to the suicide problem. If someone is depressed and wants to die should we kill them? (And well I'd say that while death is a "cure" for depression, it's evil, and that we should find ways to help the depression)

Plus we're all going to die eventually anyway it's an inevitability to why rush it?

[–]Alan_Crowe 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I'd steel man William_World like this:

I don't care if science says that it helps kids, because science is like soylent green; its made of people.

Science done by angels out ranks human intuition about what is weird and gross.

Human intuition about what is weird and gross out ranks science done by humans.

Money for medical research is scarce. We should use good judgment here. Halt gender medicine, because it is weird and gross. Halt research on gender medicine because there are more promising topics to research. For example: post viral syndromes. They are in the news because of Long COVID, but there have always been problems with people failing to regain their stamina after a viral infection. It gets called ME/CFS and there is enough new knowledge about the immune system to make interesting research possible. Other possible research targets are heart disease. Arteries clogged with fat because of diet in the non-obese is pretty much a dead hypothesis. Arteries clogged with fat because of inflammation due to immune system problems is ripe for research.

[–]ClassroomPast6178[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Halt gender medicine, because it is weird and gross. Halt research on gender medicine because there are more promising topics to research.

Having actually worked in clinical research in a poorly funded area of cancer research I can tell you that withholding funding from one area doesn’t mean that the money goes to a more deserving area, it just stays in the pockets of whatever source it came from.

Things like NIH and MRC are good for getting funding to the poorly supported areas, but if there’s a political movement or possible profit, nothing is stopping money flowing to a particular area of research no matter how weird or gross.

I was in brain cancers first and then moved to lung, two areas seriously underfunded compared to breast and paediatric cancers. We used to laugh about it, but the suite of offices where the breast team worked had air conditioning whereas our offices were barely furnished and sweltering/freezing. The problem is, the way the money came in you couldn’t just divert funds to other causes, so after the institute topsliced their share the rest went to the team and they had to spend it.