Partisan Opportunism Behind Gender Medical Scandal

Trans activists (left) incited violence against women’s right’s activist Kellie-Jay Keen (center), who was assaulted just minutes later at a New Zealand “Let Women Speak” event last month. Organizers of the “Trans Day of Vengeance” (right) canceled their event after a trans person murdered six people at a Christian school in Nashville.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER

Yesterday, the British government doubled down on its ban on puberty blockers for children confused about their gender. Earlier this year, the government banned the use of puberty-blocking drugs in the National Health Service. Yesterday, it banned their use in private clinics as well, at least until the fall when a new government will come to power.

Europe, in general, is cracking down on so-called transgender medicine in the face of widespread evidence of medical mistreatment of children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults.

Over the next several months and years, Democrats and progressives will have to address the rapidly growing body of evidence that gender medicine is, in the words of the Times of London, a center-left newspaper, “quack medicine.”

It will also be important for journalists to engage in some self-reflection. Why did they fail to cover this medical scandal properly? Why did journalists who believe themselves committed to science and caring for the vulnerable cheer on “quack medicine.”

To answer those questions, I want to closely examine a fascinating 2022 podcast between MSNBC host Chris Hayes and a gender medicine doctor named Dr. Izzy Lowell.

Dr. Izzy Lowell (left) and MNBC’s Chris Hayes (right)

Hayes opens by lambasting Republicans.

Hayes: It's been fascinating, not to mention kind of disturbing, even horrifying to watch the priorities of the Republican Party post-January 6th… They are criminalizing what's come to be known as gender-affirming care for trans youth.

Hayes went on to explain that the people who are concerned about transgender medicine are bigots who dehumanize trans people.

Hayes: There's this sort of long and gross obsession in mainstream culture and among folks who are not trans with like, you know, the specifics of the biology of trans folks, you know, like what exactly is, is, is happening physically with trans folks and there's this kind of Fetishistic and gross and, and, and dehumanizing aspect to that.

At the same time, Hayes said it was okay for people to want to know more about transgender medicine.

Hayes: there is also this sort of real question about like, what does this healthcare mean? And what does it look like? And what do you say to people who raise objections to it? Sometimes who don't sound like bigoted monsters. They sound like people with maybe good faith objections or, or worries about, uh, the hands that children will be in, in terms of, in terms of making decisions about their bodies.

And so Hayes interviewed a gender medicine doctor named Izzy Lowell.

Hayes: Dr. Lowell is a family medicine physician at a place called QueerMed, uh, that Dr. Lowell founded, which specializes in transgender medicine and treats trans patients in Alabama and across the Southeast and a lot of places where their healthcare is now under assault.

Hayes: And Dr. Lowell, it's great to have you in the program.

Lowell: Chris, thanks so much. It's really an honor to be here. I'm Dr. Izzy Lowell. My pronouns are she and her.

Lowell said she saw a rapid rise in demand for her services.

Lowell: I started a gender clinic at Emory in about 2015. And at first it was, there weren't very many people there, and then word sort of spread, and it became very popular, and people were traveling from all over the Southeast to see me.

Then, a few minutes into the podcast, Hayes asks about the evidence that the growing number of children who think that they're the opposite sex is a social contagion.

Hayes: One of the stories that people, particularly on the right, but not exclusively on the right, have told about the development of trans rights and trans equality is that this is essentially a kind of like a fad or a sort of cultural fashion that's like seizing the minds of young people who like want to fit in and I just wonder if you could talk about that.

Lowell responded by giving examples of trans people supposedly denied health care.

Lowell: I had a patient who reported that when, when they called our office, we were the 11th provider they had called that morning, and nobody else would agree to treat them. And this is in the Atlanta area.

Lowell: For patients in rural locations, there are just zero options.

But you see, Lowell never answered Hayes' question, so they moved on to something else. Hayes asked whether young kids can really decide whether they're the opposite sex.

Hayes: what are those consultations like? I mean, I think to the extent that people, again, I'm trying to sort of speak to an audience that I know is out there because they're in my inbox, who I think consider themselves enlightened and open minded people, but have some anxiety or worries about the decision making of children, which I think is not crazy, but I just to talk through like what that actual conversation and consultation is like when you're talking about 10 year olds or 11 year olds and the choice to go on on puberty blockers or begin cross hormone therapy.

Lowell also says that she makes a very thorough diagnosis.

Lowell: It's a long consultation that initially we. go through their whole medical history, their whole gender history, and in terms of making it the diagnosis, quote unquote, even though it's not a medical problem

There, Lowell appears to recognize the glaring contradiction at the heart of so-called gender medicine. On the one hand, gender medicine advocates say trans kids are healthy and normal kids. On the other hand, they're demanding that their transgenderism be medically treated with drugs and surgeries. Lowell tries to dismiss this contradiction.

Lowell: In medicine, we like to diagnose everything, even if it's normal. So we, quote unquote, diagnose gender dysphoria, is the medical term for that, for the discomfort of being in the wrong gender.

Lowell makes it sound like she has a rigorous process before giving out drugs. However, in a different interview with PBS, she admits that she doesn't even require a letter from a psychotherapist.

Lowell: In my practice, it's not an absolute requirement that teens have a letter from a therapist affirming that they do meet the diagnostic criteria for hormones.

Lowell explains that this is because some of the children don't have access to a therapist.

Lowell: The reason it's not an absolute requirement for me is, you know, some patients just can't access it.

I find this claim very hard to believe, in part because there is so much telemedicine these days, particularly for psychotherapy. Indeed, Lowell herself tells Hayes, “I eventually left Emory in 2017 to found QueerMed, where we provide telemedicine services now across 10 states in the southeast.”

There are other contradictions. Lowell tells Hayes that most everyone knows their true gender by age 10 or 11. 

Lowell: I didn't know a lot of things when I was 10 or 12 or 20. I didn't know my sexuality. I didn't know if I wanted to have kids and I didn't know some huge decisions about major life things. But I did know what gender I was.

But in a 2018 interview with her alma mater, Williams College, from which she graduated in 2002, Lowell said the opposite. My own gender identity is not at all clear, she said. Nevertheless, Lowell gets Hayes to agree with her that children know their gender and don't change.

Lowell: If you think back, you know, when did you first know that you were a boy Early on, it's beyond the extent of our memories. We just grow up always, always knowing that.

Hayes: Right exactly! You can't identify it, right? I mean, I'm trying to, I'm actually thinking back now and it's like, right, it's so it's an invisible essence that is there before any conscious knowledge of it is in my own personal case,

Lowell: Right? You've always, you've, you like the vast majority of people have always known that. Many children, parents bring them in and say, Oh, we've known that, that she's a girl since she was four. Everybody knows that this person is a girl. She just needs some medical assistance to, to become a woman.

But even after this, Hayes still has questions:

Hayes: There's almost a part of it that feels like reifying of certain. Specifics when you say, well, part of the way that we know this person is a girl is this person wants to wear girl clothing or play in certain ways with certain, you know, quote, unquote, girl toys.

Lowell goes on to say that there are genuinely trans people and gender non-conforming people, and they're totally different.

Lowell: There are two different things we're talking about here. What you're talking about is gender non-conforming. Not all transgender people are gender conforming toward their target gender.

Hayes appears to buy this explanation. “The adjective you use of ‘insistence,’” notes Hayes. “It's ‘insistent.’”

Now is when things go off the rails. Lowell just got done saying that trans kids are just healthy, normal kids, but then she admits that many or most aren't.

Lowell: Many don't quite realize that they are transgender until they start puberty. They always sort of felt something was different or uncomfortable in certain ways. But it wasn't that bad, kind of.

Lowell: And then puberty starts and things really hit the fan at that point. That's when we see teenagers, you know, attempting suicide, doing really badly in school, developing behavioral problems, becoming severely depressed, having symptoms that mimic anxiety disorders and, and sort of agoraphobic. Even patients don't want to go outside.

Lowell: They don't want to interact with people. They have social anxiety.

In fact, a growing body of research shows that many of the children who identify as trans or are diagnosed as having gender dysphoria are suffering from an anxiety disorder, are autistic, or may just be gay. At this point, Hayes, who's the father of three children, appears somewhat troubled by the implications of pushing children down a path of irreversible medical interventions.

Hayes: I think that's the, that's why the stakes here feel so high, right? I mean, it's, it's in this like, it's essentially a moment of crisis you're describing,

Hayes asks if parents or children resist.

Hayes: Do you have people who, who decide, you know what, I don't want to do this?

Lowell: So far I haven't.

Hayes: Really?

Lowell: I've had — you know that's not true, I've had one teen who was on testosterone for a couple of years and then eventually decided to stop.

In a lecture in 2021, a year before the podcast, Lowell said

Lowell: I have about 2,000 patients now in my clinic, and we've had, I think two teens choose to stop hormone therapy and they were not sad about it. They weren't sad that they had. Had taken hormone therapy. They just chose to stop for various reasons. And so that's it. We've had two and we probably see 800, 900 teens and two of them have chosen to discontinue therapy…. We start kids as young as 12, uh, sorry, 13, once in a while in the high 12s, on hormone therapy. So I think certainly 15 would be straight to, to testosterone without, without delay is what I would do for them.

Lowell admits that when it comes to blocking puberty, “There's a lack of long-term research.”

And then in her interview with Hayes, Lowell admits that she is not properly tracking patient outcomes.

Hayes: so you've had, you've had patients go through high school and then go off to college and I wonder if you keep in touch with them and what those, what, what kind of things you hear?

Lowell: Oh, yeah. I mean, they're still our patients. So we see children, teens, adults, everybody. I've had patients for since, since 2014, 2015, who've grown up, who've grown into adults. Now that they're grownups, I only see them once a year, which is sad, but they are just like, it's, and it's like a 15-minute visit once a year, because they're like, I'm fine, and I'm like, your levels are fine, great, here's a refill, you know. “Carry on.”

This is medical malpractice. Lowell has made drastic and irreversible alterations to the bodies of young people but is failing to properly track their outcomes.

Through it all, Lowell insists that everything's fine. “They're just, there's, it's regular, they're just, that's the best way I can describe it, just regular people.”

Now, at this point in the interview, Hayes appears to detect that there's something quite wrong going on here.

Hayes: Huh, “Regular.” That's an interesting word.

But then he waved it all away.

Hayes: There's a great Freud quote about, like, you know, he said something once about how the goal of analysis was to turn abject misery into ordinary unhappiness or something like that.

Lowell: Exactly. Yeah, I'm intentionally not using the word normal because I think that has so many different meanings. Totally. But just average in the best way. Yeah. A person who goes about their life totally regularly.

But there's nothing regular about what Lowell is doing to her patients. Many, if not most, will end up sterile. Many will lose sexual function. medicalized for life, as Lowell herself acknowledged in her 2021 lecture.

Lowell: We haven't studied what that does to put somebody on puberty blockers, which previously were used for precocious puberty…. Someone starting puberty at say age seven to block them until age 10. Now we're blocking them for five to seven years, potentially, which limits bone growth. And other things that we don't really know about, like development, intellectual development, personal development, a lot of personality develops in conjunction with hormone therapy with, with, with the hormones in your body.

In fact, says Lowell, “We don't really don't know what the potential harms are of putting somebody on blockers for many years.”

So why, in the end, did journalists like Hayes, who believes that he and other Democrats are more compassionate and evidence-based than Republicans, embrace this quack medicine? Part of the reason is precisely because he trusts blindly in science, and as trans activists had captured the scientific medical institutions, including the AMA and American Academy of Pediatrics, he fell in line.

Another part of the reason appears to be that Hayes believes medicalization is a good response to psychiatric disorders in general. “I have been on Lexapro, an [anti-depressant] SSRI since I don't know, 2007? I don't think I've ever talked about it publicly before. But it's been a really incredible thing for me.”

And another part of the reason is partisanship. For many Democrats like Hayes, Republican opposition to gender medicine couldn't have been principled. It had to have been based on bigotry. But by the end of the conversation, Lowell still hasn't answered Hayes's core questions. Are children and parents really giving their informed consent? Has Lowell broken her Hippocratic oath to do no harm? Hayes never pursues those questions and ends the podcast.

Hayes: That was so wonderful and I learned so much from that conversation, so thank you so much for doing it.

Lowell: Thanks so much for having me.

And that's the end of it, at least for that conversation. The WPATH files and what's happening in Britain and Europe have changed the conversation. It could be that the next British government, which is widely expected to be a labor government, will reverse the ban on puberty blockers by the conservative government, but I doubt it.

In Britain and in the United States, including in very progressive states like California, a majority of voters oppose so-called gender-affirming care for kids. That might mean that real change is on the way. And many progressives, Democrats, and journalists will also now need to answer why they got gender medicine so wrong.