Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Speaking of self-discipline and judegement.

Per this 1966 Statement, professors are obligated to “exercise critical self-discipline and judgment in using, extending, and transmitting knowledge” and to “practice intellectual honesty”. We take this to mean that as academics, we also have a responsibility to the public to not misconstrue the scope of our expertise, nor comment in our capacity as academics on issues where we lack the requisite expertise.

Would that not also apply to supporting and promoting trans ideology? Is it possible to be an expert in lies and bullshit, in “care” that harms, and has no basis in reality? Do the signers of this letter themselves possess the knowledge base to know that this stuff actually works? And how could they know when the “practioners” themselves are in the dark? (See below.)

Given your lack of the requisite expertise, we believe it is inappropriate for you to engage in the shaping of national medical policy on gender-affirming care for trans youth.

Then exactly the same charge should be levelled at those who instituted the current policies on “gender-affirming care for trans youth” in the first place. Hello; the existence of desistance, of detransitioners, the untreated comorbidities, the lifelong “gender journeys”, and the basic fact that nobody is “born into the wrong body,” should make any unbiased observer question if “gender affirming care” is on as solid a footing as it imagines itself to be.

If the phenomenon you’re claiming to be addressing is somewhere between “undefinable” and “nonexistent”, then how can you begin to treat it? Any success you might have is going to be purely accidental. Your patient’s suffering is real, but if you’re approaching it through a false framework or hypothesis, then you might as well join the astrologers and exorcists for all the “expertise” you might think you possess. But then astrologers don’t go around drugging, mutilating, and sterilizing children, which is what “gender affirming care for youth” results in. Gender medicine is more like exorcism. It too is centered on the unscientific, religiously motivated torture of mentally troubled people, supposedly possessed by entities that do not exist, whose actual ailments cannot be “cured” by the “experts” treating them. Undoing a harmful practice that has no sound theoretical footing or clear etiology doesn’t require any expertise in the bogus rationale used to prop it up. Just stopping it is a useful, valuable first step, because it ends further harm.

Your concern at someone contributing to a “report” is touching, but comes at the wrong end of all of this. How much of this train wreck was ever governed by anything “appropriate”, and why did you wait until now to become so goddamn self-righteous? Where was all that supposed knowledge when these “procedures” first started taking hold? Where is the definition of “gender identity” upon which any such treatment must be founded? Where were the studies? Where was the follow up? Where was the screening? Where was the caution and critical examination you would expect to see when such totalizing medical procedures are proposed? Where was the honesty in relaying what was possible – and what was not? What was being promised, and was it even possible? (Hint:, nobody in history has been the recipient of a functioning neo “vagina” or neo “penis”.) Where was the evidence of efficacy beyond hand-waving and wishful thinking?

And what of the abominable treatment meted out to anyone from outside the self-reinforcing bubble of the gender-industrial complex who dared to address any of these shockingly huge knowledge gaps, or address the laxity in standards and practices of “gender medicine”? They got more than strongly-worded open letters. Some people lost their jobs, just as you’re gunning for Byrne’s job.

It’s only dissenters who have no right to utter a peep on the subject.

Exactly. Critics are evil people who want to hurt and kill “trans kids.” Case closed, no appeals.