Yes, the idea of sci journals being a $30B industry is one of the most astonishing things I’ve learned in the last year. So many perverse incentives, it’ll make your head spin.
Has anyone asked to see if the advertised reduction in pediatric suicides has happened now that the wonder of "affirmative care" has been unleashed for a decade or so?
It is incredible how, somewhere along the way, the entire higher education system decided that it is easier to make a quick buck by jettisoning all the principles that made the American higher education system the envy of the world. Just for some short-term, filthy lucre.
It's more than that. They are ideologically captured by woke and trans activists, and angered/radicalized by Fox News et al, Trump, MAGA and George Floyd.
May 26Liked by Jenny Poyer Ackerman, Not so young anymore.
Hi Jenny, thank you for this article and I think you have a curious mind and a vested interest (your own daughter, as I do as well—two girls, in my case), so I do think you’re in your own way a journalist. Also, I dearly hope your two other people that are uncertain about their voices being heard do find a way to cautiously/carefully let us all hear their voices. I’m deeply curious and at the crux of it all, I want to know whether there are more folks out there like me/us.
Thank you so much to Dr. P. I think it has been extraordinarily rare for any pediatrician or pediatric nurse practitioner to speak out. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
My background is that I got a degree in nutrition by hook or by crook (took a long time, didn’t have a ton of family support, waitressed my way through college, etc.), did a Peace Corps stint in Maternal and Child Health, and then worked for WIC for five years in a rural community and finally went back to school for an associates degree in nursing and took the licensing exam and became an RN. I call myself a Renaissance Woman because though my credentials aren’t high and mighty and I took a few stumbles with my grades, I have arrived at where I am now and have a rich background that I summon up daily (hourly?) in my work now as a pediatric nurse in a doctor’s office in a very busy suburban area of a large metropolitan city on the East Coast. I’ve only been in pediatrics since 2020, fyi. I worked as a nurse in other specialties previously.
I have had two experiences with the trans stuff. One, was when I first began in the private doctor’s office and I encountered my first trans kid, this would have been 2021. I was so excited. The girl wanted to be called a boy’s name and had headphones on throughout all of my interaction with her, wouldn’t acknowledge or talk to me, there was only communication via her mother (who was on her phone a lot), and the patient had a very long list of MH diagnoses. I carried out the provider’s orders for the patient and they went on their way and I was very excited for having cared for my first ‘trans’ kid who was about 15 years old at the time.
We started getting more of the kids who were saying they felt “gender confused” and it seemed to be gaining in popularity as a social contagion but I hadn’t thought much of it.
Then in summer of 2021 my older daughter turned 14 and had been in a summer camp with about six other kids (this was still pandemic-y times) at a sailing camp. And also my daughter had a smartphone for the first time. Out of the six kids at that summer camp, three said they were trans and one said she was nonbinary and that “she wakes up in the morning and decides how she feels-male vs female”. (I only found out about the “decisions” this group of kids had made later).
In the fall of 2021, our previously girly girl began dressing like a male, got a very short haircut, and somehow acquired a binder. (Our other younger daughter had had to be hospitalized with anorexia after she had gained a lot of weight during the pandemic and when she returned to school, got teased about it and subsequently began restricting her food intake and I hadn’t realized she was having trouble. So I was quite distracted).
Our older daughter left me a two-page, scripted letter replete with footnotes with references for parent-support via GLAAD and HRC.org saying that at age 14 she had decided she wanted a double mastectomy and wanted to be called a boy’s name, blah blah blah
We were shocked to our core as parents. The school supported this nonsense as did a different summer camp we found out called her by this boy’s name, and everyone said she was so “brave”.
After a nearly six month close working relationship with my younger daughter’s (she was 10) brand-new, young pediatrician for the younger daughter’s anorexia, with weekly check-in’s at first and then continued monitoring, I decided to bring in my then nearly 15 yo daughter to the same pediatrician.
I had called ahead and said I wanted to discuss her “gender issues”. I think that, given that the more experienced pediatricians at the practice were also saying that my younger daughter’s voyage through dealing with anorexia was *helping* the new, young pediatrician learn, that the young pediatrician also may have first consulted with the older pediatricians about how to handle a “gender issue” case prior to our walking in to that appointment.
They separated me and my daughter. Consulted alone with my daughter for a while. Then separately spoke to me and informed me my daughter was trans. And that she’d felt this way for a long time. And that they were going to be going forward calling her by a boy’s name and would change her name in her medical chart. The pediatrician got super close to my face and said “this is happening, this is best practice” and intimated that it was “life-saving” care though my daughter was not depressed in the slightest. And though this pediatrician had first met her the year prior when she was a bouncy, sweet, girly 13yo. And though I told the pediatrician that four out of the six kids at her summer camp the previous summer had all “come out”. The pediatrician said this is what the American Academy of Pediatrics advises.
When I told my younger daughter’s psychologist that we were now having a situation with the older daughter she squealed in delight “this so wonderful!” (that our daughter was saying she was trans) and that it is so “rare” and she was so brave. She “strongly encouraged” us to seek out a “gender specialist” and sent me a list. One of them were as “kink-friendly”. I told the psychologist about the four out of six in the summer camp but she brushed it off. I told her I’m not sending my 14 year-old daughter to a “kink-friendly” therapist.
We continued to see that psychologist for the younger daughter and then, fairly predictably, my younger daughter began to imitate her older sister and the “transgender trend” I guess she was seeing lots of places (school, social media, her own sister, camps, etc.) and her psychologist (who I later fired) “celebrated” my younger daughter’s “discovering” her own trans identity.
These two providers gaslighted me, did not rely upon evidence-based practices, and shamed and threatened us as parents for not following in lockstep what they were saying to do (and what the AAP says to do and what Jack Turban has written articles about in Contemporary Pediatrics journal) though I HAD followed in lockstep what was absolutely life-saving care and was evidence-based for my younger daughter’s eating disorder.
My experience in working in my own pediatric’s office is that the providers often don’t want to rock the boat regarding certain ideologies and they are busy so they often rely upon an “Academy”’s summation of how to take care of certain issues. This has been exploited via bad actors within the American Academy of Pediatrics which can carry great heft and influence.
I was shocked to my core and, after soul searching, realized they’d lost my trust in them as an institution.
The older daughter is (slowly) coming out of her ideology at age 16 and the younger daughter at age 13 has recovered (mostly) from the eating disorder but still is dressing like a boy.
I wonder if it is because society is reaching “peak” with all of this. I hope so.
I lost all respect for pediatric docs, therapists and school guidance counselors. I've lost friends. And I'm not the least bit sad because i think they're all idiots. But the hard part is my kids are all brainwashed. They repeat the mantras and catechisms. Whenever i try to show them common-sense povs, they call it right wing or propaganda. One screamed at me about the genderbread man and said “they know who they are.” our government allows men to change sex on passports and birth certificates. That is now “proof” of sex? Sex is not “assigned” its observed. And it’s certainly not a feeling. Sex is hardwired from conception. This is biology 101. Wth happened?
I feel you, Elle, but they’re not all idiots: Dr. P isn’t. Dr. Mason is a hero who exposed and challenged the AAP. There are others like them, but it takes a different skill set to do battle against a captured army (of powerful idiots) than the skills and temperament common among doctors, teachers and counselors. I think we need to recognize courage wherever we find it, and have their backs.
I define idiot to be someone who agrees with nonsense to get along. I haven’t met one professional in power who has stood up to this madness. I do not have their backs. I’m disgusted. They are cowards. They don’t deserve all this pandering to their fragile egos or excuses. Innocent children are at stake.
I can easily see why a parent would feel utterly failed by the people who should be helping. What upsets me greatly is how this ideology sets the teens and young adults against their parents. I’m a parent of an adult. Family means everything to me. The cult like breaking of family bonds is extremely disturbing to me as a person. I have nothing but compassion for parents in this situation.
May 27Liked by Jenny Poyer Ackerman, Not so young anymore.
This was the biggest thing to me, Not So Young Anymore. I just could not believe this. Especially since psychologist’s are TRAINED in and ought to know about child development principles, one being that the parents are their kids’ stable base. It is very rare, as Sasha Ayad has said, for the parents to not be the best, most invested in, most loving people in their own beloved offspring’s lives.
Exactly. All very basic, very common sense norms were tossed right out the window in 2020. Fresh air is now something to fear? Beaches getting sprayed with toxic chemicals over an invisible virus (that isn’t even alive) and men are now woman of the year.
This is very sad and hard to deal with. Most generalists defer to ‘experts’ and Jack Turban put himself out there. It’s shameful. Common sense would tell you there is social contagion. And for years the AAP preached that the adolescent brain isn’t developed / but suddenly it is? I think there also some ‘savior ism’ among some of these clinicians. I’ve seen that too.
It's already been happening for years. AAP members have been bugging leadership to do a systematic review of evidence to inform their official position on transition, and they only recently finally agreed.
May 28Liked by Jenny Poyer Ackerman, Not so young anymore.
And when parents like me display their disgust and mama bear energy, quitting their pediatric practices and firing their children’s psychologists (as I have per my comment above), doctors and psychologists may also get the hint (not to mention losing the $$).
This is an excellent way in to the conversation that needs to be had. Perhaps starting up a US Pediatric Research organization might be a way of marginalizing the AAP which sounds more like an affinity group. The AAP has influenced pediatric policy of so many other countries. I hope you are able to find other peds to interview.
There was already a split in the AAP, over LGBTQ parenting. The ones who wouldn't go along with the official line that 2 same-sex parents were as good as 1 of each formed the American College of Pediatricians. The AAP's membership is 100x bigger than the ACP's.
I would like to understand what goes on at the CDC and NIH. I think they’re highly vulnerable to politics where they should be sealed off from it, but in theory don’t we have the research framework up and running? I like the idea of a new and uncorrupted lab but I can’t imagine where the $$ would come from.
Trust The "Science"...That Just Retracted 11,000 "Peer Reviewed" Papers
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/trust-sciencethat-just-retracted-11000-peer-reviewed-papers
Yes, the idea of sci journals being a $30B industry is one of the most astonishing things I’ve learned in the last year. So many perverse incentives, it’ll make your head spin.
Has anyone asked to see if the advertised reduction in pediatric suicides has happened now that the wonder of "affirmative care" has been unleashed for a decade or so?
If docs don’t stand up to this, what hope do parents have?
It is incredible how, somewhere along the way, the entire higher education system decided that it is easier to make a quick buck by jettisoning all the principles that made the American higher education system the envy of the world. Just for some short-term, filthy lucre.
It's more than that. They are ideologically captured by woke and trans activists, and angered/radicalized by Fox News et al, Trump, MAGA and George Floyd.
Hi Jenny, thank you for this article and I think you have a curious mind and a vested interest (your own daughter, as I do as well—two girls, in my case), so I do think you’re in your own way a journalist. Also, I dearly hope your two other people that are uncertain about their voices being heard do find a way to cautiously/carefully let us all hear their voices. I’m deeply curious and at the crux of it all, I want to know whether there are more folks out there like me/us.
Thank you so much to Dr. P. I think it has been extraordinarily rare for any pediatrician or pediatric nurse practitioner to speak out. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
My background is that I got a degree in nutrition by hook or by crook (took a long time, didn’t have a ton of family support, waitressed my way through college, etc.), did a Peace Corps stint in Maternal and Child Health, and then worked for WIC for five years in a rural community and finally went back to school for an associates degree in nursing and took the licensing exam and became an RN. I call myself a Renaissance Woman because though my credentials aren’t high and mighty and I took a few stumbles with my grades, I have arrived at where I am now and have a rich background that I summon up daily (hourly?) in my work now as a pediatric nurse in a doctor’s office in a very busy suburban area of a large metropolitan city on the East Coast. I’ve only been in pediatrics since 2020, fyi. I worked as a nurse in other specialties previously.
I have had two experiences with the trans stuff. One, was when I first began in the private doctor’s office and I encountered my first trans kid, this would have been 2021. I was so excited. The girl wanted to be called a boy’s name and had headphones on throughout all of my interaction with her, wouldn’t acknowledge or talk to me, there was only communication via her mother (who was on her phone a lot), and the patient had a very long list of MH diagnoses. I carried out the provider’s orders for the patient and they went on their way and I was very excited for having cared for my first ‘trans’ kid who was about 15 years old at the time.
We started getting more of the kids who were saying they felt “gender confused” and it seemed to be gaining in popularity as a social contagion but I hadn’t thought much of it.
Then in summer of 2021 my older daughter turned 14 and had been in a summer camp with about six other kids (this was still pandemic-y times) at a sailing camp. And also my daughter had a smartphone for the first time. Out of the six kids at that summer camp, three said they were trans and one said she was nonbinary and that “she wakes up in the morning and decides how she feels-male vs female”. (I only found out about the “decisions” this group of kids had made later).
In the fall of 2021, our previously girly girl began dressing like a male, got a very short haircut, and somehow acquired a binder. (Our other younger daughter had had to be hospitalized with anorexia after she had gained a lot of weight during the pandemic and when she returned to school, got teased about it and subsequently began restricting her food intake and I hadn’t realized she was having trouble. So I was quite distracted).
Our older daughter left me a two-page, scripted letter replete with footnotes with references for parent-support via GLAAD and HRC.org saying that at age 14 she had decided she wanted a double mastectomy and wanted to be called a boy’s name, blah blah blah
We were shocked to our core as parents. The school supported this nonsense as did a different summer camp we found out called her by this boy’s name, and everyone said she was so “brave”.
After a nearly six month close working relationship with my younger daughter’s (she was 10) brand-new, young pediatrician for the younger daughter’s anorexia, with weekly check-in’s at first and then continued monitoring, I decided to bring in my then nearly 15 yo daughter to the same pediatrician.
I had called ahead and said I wanted to discuss her “gender issues”. I think that, given that the more experienced pediatricians at the practice were also saying that my younger daughter’s voyage through dealing with anorexia was *helping* the new, young pediatrician learn, that the young pediatrician also may have first consulted with the older pediatricians about how to handle a “gender issue” case prior to our walking in to that appointment.
They separated me and my daughter. Consulted alone with my daughter for a while. Then separately spoke to me and informed me my daughter was trans. And that she’d felt this way for a long time. And that they were going to be going forward calling her by a boy’s name and would change her name in her medical chart. The pediatrician got super close to my face and said “this is happening, this is best practice” and intimated that it was “life-saving” care though my daughter was not depressed in the slightest. And though this pediatrician had first met her the year prior when she was a bouncy, sweet, girly 13yo. And though I told the pediatrician that four out of the six kids at her summer camp the previous summer had all “come out”. The pediatrician said this is what the American Academy of Pediatrics advises.
When I told my younger daughter’s psychologist that we were now having a situation with the older daughter she squealed in delight “this so wonderful!” (that our daughter was saying she was trans) and that it is so “rare” and she was so brave. She “strongly encouraged” us to seek out a “gender specialist” and sent me a list. One of them were as “kink-friendly”. I told the psychologist about the four out of six in the summer camp but she brushed it off. I told her I’m not sending my 14 year-old daughter to a “kink-friendly” therapist.
We continued to see that psychologist for the younger daughter and then, fairly predictably, my younger daughter began to imitate her older sister and the “transgender trend” I guess she was seeing lots of places (school, social media, her own sister, camps, etc.) and her psychologist (who I later fired) “celebrated” my younger daughter’s “discovering” her own trans identity.
These two providers gaslighted me, did not rely upon evidence-based practices, and shamed and threatened us as parents for not following in lockstep what they were saying to do (and what the AAP says to do and what Jack Turban has written articles about in Contemporary Pediatrics journal) though I HAD followed in lockstep what was absolutely life-saving care and was evidence-based for my younger daughter’s eating disorder.
My experience in working in my own pediatric’s office is that the providers often don’t want to rock the boat regarding certain ideologies and they are busy so they often rely upon an “Academy”’s summation of how to take care of certain issues. This has been exploited via bad actors within the American Academy of Pediatrics which can carry great heft and influence.
I was shocked to my core and, after soul searching, realized they’d lost my trust in them as an institution.
The older daughter is (slowly) coming out of her ideology at age 16 and the younger daughter at age 13 has recovered (mostly) from the eating disorder but still is dressing like a boy.
I wonder if it is because society is reaching “peak” with all of this. I hope so.
JFC
I lost all respect for pediatric docs, therapists and school guidance counselors. I've lost friends. And I'm not the least bit sad because i think they're all idiots. But the hard part is my kids are all brainwashed. They repeat the mantras and catechisms. Whenever i try to show them common-sense povs, they call it right wing or propaganda. One screamed at me about the genderbread man and said “they know who they are.” our government allows men to change sex on passports and birth certificates. That is now “proof” of sex? Sex is not “assigned” its observed. And it’s certainly not a feeling. Sex is hardwired from conception. This is biology 101. Wth happened?
I feel you, Elle, but they’re not all idiots: Dr. P isn’t. Dr. Mason is a hero who exposed and challenged the AAP. There are others like them, but it takes a different skill set to do battle against a captured army (of powerful idiots) than the skills and temperament common among doctors, teachers and counselors. I think we need to recognize courage wherever we find it, and have their backs.
I define idiot to be someone who agrees with nonsense to get along. I haven’t met one professional in power who has stood up to this madness. I do not have their backs. I’m disgusted. They are cowards. They don’t deserve all this pandering to their fragile egos or excuses. Innocent children are at stake.
I can easily see why a parent would feel utterly failed by the people who should be helping. What upsets me greatly is how this ideology sets the teens and young adults against their parents. I’m a parent of an adult. Family means everything to me. The cult like breaking of family bonds is extremely disturbing to me as a person. I have nothing but compassion for parents in this situation.
This was the biggest thing to me, Not So Young Anymore. I just could not believe this. Especially since psychologist’s are TRAINED in and ought to know about child development principles, one being that the parents are their kids’ stable base. It is very rare, as Sasha Ayad has said, for the parents to not be the best, most invested in, most loving people in their own beloved offspring’s lives.
Exactly. All very basic, very common sense norms were tossed right out the window in 2020. Fresh air is now something to fear? Beaches getting sprayed with toxic chemicals over an invisible virus (that isn’t even alive) and men are now woman of the year.
It will always be a mystery to me why so many people got lost in this mess. I don’t mean just young people. But highly educated people.
This is very sad and hard to deal with. Most generalists defer to ‘experts’ and Jack Turban put himself out there. It’s shameful. Common sense would tell you there is social contagion. And for years the AAP preached that the adolescent brain isn’t developed / but suddenly it is? I think there also some ‘savior ism’ among some of these clinicians. I’ve seen that too.
All these organizations have become money making machines. When doctors really start to stand up and ask for evidence will things be different.
It's already been happening for years. AAP members have been bugging leadership to do a systematic review of evidence to inform their official position on transition, and they only recently finally agreed.
And when parents like me display their disgust and mama bear energy, quitting their pediatric practices and firing their children’s psychologists (as I have per my comment above), doctors and psychologists may also get the hint (not to mention losing the $$).
Trust me I get it. If I was in your shoes I’d do the same. I’m ashamed of many people in my profession.
What is your profession, if I may ask?
Pediatrics
But looked what happened during Covid those that DID stand up got knocked down.
What EXACTLY do Doctors receive to belong? Anyone EVER go to an office and say "hey are you members of the AMA cause that is really important"??
But to be honest, the Cass review is the answer. The AAP simply needs to accept it.
Yep.
This is an excellent way in to the conversation that needs to be had. Perhaps starting up a US Pediatric Research organization might be a way of marginalizing the AAP which sounds more like an affinity group. The AAP has influenced pediatric policy of so many other countries. I hope you are able to find other peds to interview.
There was already a split in the AAP, over LGBTQ parenting. The ones who wouldn't go along with the official line that 2 same-sex parents were as good as 1 of each formed the American College of Pediatricians. The AAP's membership is 100x bigger than the ACP's.
I'm talking about a pediatric evidence based research organization which would be different again.
I would like to understand what goes on at the CDC and NIH. I think they’re highly vulnerable to politics where they should be sealed off from it, but in theory don’t we have the research framework up and running? I like the idea of a new and uncorrupted lab but I can’t imagine where the $$ would come from.