I know! It sounds so official and sciencey! It's got "college" in it, which is formal and academic, and "pediatricians", which are a kind of doctor, and you can never go wrong slapping "American" on your brand label. But they are a lie.
It’s also because the ACP is not a legitimate medical organization; its name is designed to be mistaken for the American Academy of Pediatrics, which is a national organization with some 60,000 members. The ACP, by contrast, is estimated to have no more than 200 members, and it has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its anti-LGBT positions.
“The American College of Pediatricians urges educators and legislators to reject all policies that condition children to accept as normal a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex,” the statement reads. “Facts – not ideology – determine reality.” The “facts” that follow actually reflect a social conservative ideology that rejects the very reality of what transgender children experience.
They've issued a statement that transgender kids are being harmed, based on claims that believing you are of a gender other than the one you were born with is a mental disorder (psychologists disagree), that it's just a phase kids go through (nope, again -- that's based on some bad studies), and that sex reassignment surgery, rather than discrimination and hatred, triggers suicide at a high rate (you can figure that one out).
I'm all in favor of facts. Unfortunately, painting the word "fact" on a lie does not make it true.
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This is not a comment, but failing to see any other means of contacting you directly, it is a request for permission to repost your article on the American College of Pediatricans. I am the managing editor of the blog Penigma, and I used your article in its entirety in a commentary on the MN GOP legislation against trans gender use of bathrooms and locker rooms.
I'm reasonably confident that I used your piece properly under fair use of copyrighted material, such that I didn't need to ask permission, but I feel it is still an important courtesy to ask, or at least notify you that in anticipation of your permission I did use it.
I am an admirer of your blog, and of good science reporting and commentary generally; there is not enough of it. You are a great asset to the Minnesota blogosphere.
Thank you in advance, and obviously -please do NOT publish this as a comment, at least not without deleting my real name. I've had more than my share of harassment as so many women writers do on the internet.
Dog Gone / DG (for short)
The ACP also promotes the lie that Gardasil causes premature ovarian failure. http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2016/03/01/one-more-time-theres-no-ev…
So if I have a superiority complex, because my "reality" is that I actually feel superior to others, then it must be factual, because that is the reality I'm experiencing. That's your reasoning.
I follow you now.
fazsha, that's quite an entertaining argument. Please tell us more.
The ACP's primary "expert" on transsexuality and transgender medical issues is one Paul McHugh, who has a long history of distorting the science in the service of a religious (Conservative Catholic) dogmatic presciption that it is better to suffer from gender dysphoria than to allow transfolk to be treated with now well established palliative protocols. McHugh knows (or should know) that these positions go against Evidence Based Medicine... most especially that his calls for treating transkids (and in fact, all LGBT teens and even adults) with therapy are contradicted by decades of evidence that sexual orientation cannot be changed by such so called 'repartive' or 'conversion' therapies... and that the same is true of gender identity.
The ACP is arguing from ignorance (our collective ignorance) of how to differentiate "gender non-conforming" / "gender atypical" children, who decades of research show are simply homosexual preteens (their gender atypicality being the childhood manifestation of their homosexuality) and which subset of such children also have extreme gender dysphora which will "persist" into adolescence and adulthood. Just because we don't have a good set of differential diagnostic tools at the moment does not mean that gender identity is malliable and "treatable"... (Truth be told, the ACP is really arguing that they be allowed to 'treat' preteens with gender non-conformity in such a manner as to "prevent" not just gender dyphoria, but homosexuality from emerging in adolescence... which is NOT likely to be possible.)
Paul McHugh has been spreading lies about transsexual and transgender medicine since the 1970s... and is simply getting better at getting his llies out to the public. You may read more about him and his most recent distortion of the science at my blog "On the Science of Changing Sex":
https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2015/06/10/a-wither-spoonful-of-poison/
wut u guys saying