The Highwire with Del Bigtree - EXAMINING THE SCIENCE BEHIND W.H.O.’S NEW HEALTH GUIDELINES FOR TRANS AND GENDER DIVERSE

Episode Date: February 3, 2024

After the WHO announced a team to produce global guidelines for trans and gender diverse people, the public pushback was immediate. We do a deep dive investigation into the lack of sound scientific evidence for hormone therapy and puberty blockers in children being widely given throughout US medical institutions.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

Looking at the media today, if you go on Twitter or X or you just read the headlines, there's so many polarizing events happening in the world today, seemingly appearing out of nowhere for people watching it, the conversation surrounding gender, the sexualization of children, and this evaporating idea of parental consent around all of this is creating a lot of division. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, take a look at this video. Fired up parents and students attended a school board meeting on a controversial topic. in school learn about gender identity. There is now a war on children happening within our K-12 school system.

Temperes flared over books on gender and sex that some parents are calling porn. You want to know what it has in it? Sodomy, rape, and drug use. Please stop the sexual grooming of our children by these types of books and illustrations. A controversial children's book teaching graphic sex. sex acts, complete with illustrations, making the rounds in school libraries and classrooms across the country, leaving parents and communities outraged. These kind of books in our pre-KK school system, by by binary.

One concerned pastor tried to read the book at a school board meeting, but officials asked him to stop. If you don't want to hear it in a school board meeting, why should children be able to check it out of the school system? This book is for children 10 years of that. age and up. It details explicitly with pornographic images, homosexual sex, lesbian sex, straight sex. One of the chapters in here is about sexting. I'm going to interrupt you at this point. Sounds like you have a concern about them. I don't understand how it's appropriate for kids and it's

not appropriate for the school board. You've made an abundantly clear that you will continue to pursue questionable subject matter without parental inclusion. It is a controversial topic that has fueled a lot of backlash whether to require teachers to address students by the pronouns they prefer. Send emails to students without parental consent asking if the children wanted to be known by another name or gender. Parents say this is an absolute betrayal on their ability to raise their children how they want to. I want her to hear from me as a parent what her gender identity means to her and to our family. Not from a book. My daughter went home crying, she did so afraid that she was so afraid that she could. turn it to a boy.

I just got up to phone my wife, who took my nine and seven-year-old boys to the doctor today. And the first thing this woman asks him is if he identifies as a boy, a girl, gender fluid, or non-binary. My son, he's never heard of any of that before. So what are you trying to plant a seed in his head? Storybooks that teach five, six, and seven-year-old children. seven-year-old children that they can change from a boy to a girl or that their sex is assigned or perhaps misassigned at birth. The day my daughter shared with her guidance counselor that she

felt like a boy, the counselor immediately affirmed this new identity. From then on, the counselor continued to have one-on-one meetings with my daughter without my knowledge. My daughter changed very quickly, was bullied. This was a time when she needed me the most and you kept it a secret from me. Treating every parent as a potential threat to their kids is wrong. Because my job to teach my kids about sex. It's y'all's job to help teach about reading, writing, arithmetic. It can be argued, oh, well, that's what we're doing to a transgender student, but are you not invading my daughter's privacy when a man walks into her bathroom?

You prey upon impressionable children and indoctrinate them into your insane ideological cult, which has the idea that boys are girls and girls are boys. Disturbing footage surface of a drag queen performing in front of infants, yes, infants. Now, does anybody in this room know how to twerk? And then you just move your above up and down like that. And that's twerking. Robbing kids of their innocence in America as we allow diversity, inclusion, and equity to dominate our schools.

School board, I quit. I quit being a cog in a machine that tells me to push highly politicized agendas on our children. Lead this district, protect our children, or get out of the way. Jeffrey, let me just take a moment. I just want to say to our audience, I want to be perfect. clear this is a very controversial issue and what we're going to talk about I you know I this is the United States of America live and let live if you're an adult however you want to express yourself you know as long as it doesn't hurt other

people that is perfectly fine I love you you're a brother you're a sister or whatever you want to identify as but the question we're going to be asking right now is what do we teach our children around these issues and again I don't think we should be afraid to be having these very difficult conversations in putting it on the table. This is what we're going to do here now. We mean no offense to anybody. We're asking what is safe for the children. Thank you. Yeah, and tell, there's a lot of offshoot to this conversation to focus on, but we're going to focus on the one that's grabbing the most headlines right now, and that is around the World Health Organization. And they announced new guidelines just last month. This was

the actual announcement. W.HO announces the development of a guide. on the health of trans and gender diverse people. And then shortly after that, they announced their board members. This is the announcement right here, guideline development group is what they called it. And shortly after that, the headlines erupted. Half of the WHO's transgender health committee members

have no medical background and majority are activists. You go into the article, it reads, half of the members of the WHO's transgender health policy committee are not qualified medical experts, and most are gender activists. Of the 21 member panel, who have been invited, who have been invited to help formulate guidelines that will shape how countries treat gender dysphoria. 11 have no formal medical training.

Seven are trans themselves. 10 have no, 10 have a medical background. And of those, eight are doctors. The rest are a mixture of activists, social justice advocates, human rights, lawyers, STD researchers, and policy advisors. Several are also members of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, WPath, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting medical treatments for gender dysphoria, which has been cues of being too pro medication. So let's look at what some of them said. One of the panelists is a controversial Canadian trans TikToker who has co-written a study that said puberty blockers and hormone

therapies ought to be treated as a default option for children with gender dysphoria. Another member believes that transitioning causes no health problems and claims the only actual side effects of getting a sex change are a significantly improved quality of life and trans joy. Here is the group WHO chose, and you can look at this entire group here, and here are the ones who aren't medical professionals with the circles on them. So you can obviously, you know, just by this conversation here, you can see that there's not consensus across the board. You have articles already coming out here. This is the Washington Examiner. They basically highlighted a letter by a woman named Riem al-Salem. Riem al-Salem is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on

violence against women and girls. She wrote a letter directly to the WHO director general Tadros saying, saying amongst other things this. And this is the article right here. UN Women's Rights Leader criticizes WHO's transgender health policy. She says, it says in the article, El Salam also highlighted that from the 21 person group, not one appears to represent a voice of caution for medicalizing youth with gender dysphoria or the protection of female-only spaces. And you can see here, bringing back from our last segment, the CDC jumps right into this, female-only spaces and erasing those. Here's the headline, CDC erases women from new vaccine guidance, now uses gender, neutral,

pregnant people. That was from a while back. But you can see this is kind of, this is infiltrating a lot of different parts of society. But the backlash was pretty fierce for the WHO and they announced that. So they actually had to come out on January 15th with an update or, in their words, a frequent asked questions on the developmental guidelines, and they wrote this in there. The scope will cover adults only and not address the needs of children and adolescents, because on review, the evidence base for children and adolescents is limited and variable regarding the longer-term outcomes of

gender affirming care for children and adolescents. So they were spotlighted, clearly scared, getting pushed back, forced to step away from the kids. But here in America, we're going full steam ahead. This is the American Academy of Pediatrics in their own journal. This is the headline of the article that they have posted prohibition of gender affirming care as a form of child maltreatment reframing the discussion. So they want to reframe how people think about this. They says this article has two main aims. One, to refute the idea that gender affirming care of GAC is child maltreatment and to demonstrate how withholding GAC is harmful to children and amounts to state sanction medical neglect and emotional abuse. So they're going hard in the other direction

and saying if you don't do this for kids, it's medical neglect and emotional abuse. So obviously there's to say polarizing division is not even accurate. There's hard polarizing division here in this conversation. And you can see it even in the legislation. So this is just recently, Ohio became the 23rd state to really throw their hat in the ring here. Ohio bends gender affirming care and restricts transgender athletes despite GOP governor's veto. They joined 22 other states. You can see by this map here who have restricted gender affirming care. Those are in red. So one of those states is Missouri. They did so. They passed laws on this topic after an internal investigation started from a whistleblower. Here's one of the headlines. Missouri

officials investigate transgender youth clinic. This is one of the biggest youth clinics, transgender youth clinics in the state. And a whistleblower came forward with an app to David, and this is really what it said in here. Let's look at just some of what was said. During my time at the center, I personally witnessed center health care providers lied to the public and to parents of patients about the treatment or lack of treatment and the effects of treatment provided to children at the center. I witnessed staff at the center provide puberty blockers and cross hormones to children without complete informed parental consent and without an appropriate or accurate assessment in the needs of the child.

I witnessed children experience shocking injuries from the medication the center prescribed, and I saw the center make no attempt or effort to track adverse outcomes of patients after they left the center. She goes on to say, but nearly all children who came to the center here presented with very serious mental health problems. Despite claiming to be a place where children could receive multidisciplinary care, the center would not treat these mental health issues. Instead, children were automatically given puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, even though

the Dutch study excluded persons experiencing mental health issues. We're going to get into that in a second. The Dutch study is really, there's a series of two studies, one in 2011, one in 2014, that form the basis medically of transitioning with puberty blockers and these hormone therapies for kids. But it says in there, that's whistleblower says in there, and this has been a common theme people have come forward that, you know, whether people have, if they have a mental health problem, if they're coming in with any type of issue like that, the default option is just to throw them

on these medications and start this transition as if it's a panacea, as if this will fix all of their problems. Here's a clinical social worker in basically an information session. The clinical social worker is kind of the go-between between the insurance company and getting these therapies green-lit. This is the clinical social worker in a training session. Take a listen. we sort of will go again into understanding that I'm not going to be a gatekeeper. I'm not going to be a person that's going to stop them from accessing care. I'm not there to determine if they're trans enough. I'm going to write them this letter.

Any psych history that might be helpful to sort of showing the necessity. So if let's say a client has a psych history that includes like suicidal ideation or a suicide attempt, and you can connect it to the gender dysphoria, that actually can be sort of a positive, persuasive essay piece. And I'll talk about that in a little bit because you can kind of show what this is so necessary, right? This is how this is impacting this person's life. And this is why this procedure is necessary and needed. I have found that when I frame it in a, you know, we're going to kind of use this as a persuasive essay and we're going to really, you know, kind of stick it to them.

there's a little bit more fun with it in the way we even use language. So I found that to kind of be helpful with clients. So stick it to them. Amazing. Yeah. So, I mean, you can see there, obviously there's just one person, but open door policy, suicide attempts, suicide ideations, that's fine. Let's just get them on these, get these, yeah, full speed ahead.

So we're talking about, you know, endocrine disruption by medication. So 21 of some of the world's most qualified endocrinologists have come forward in the Wall Street Journal and published an article titled this, Youth Gender Transition is pushed without evidence. This conversation is really getting mainstreamed here. And they're saying psychotherapy, not hormones and surgery, is increasingly the first line of treatment abroad. So we have, this is a systemic review looking at all the data here. And they're looking at the title of this is hormone therapy, mental health, and the quality of among transgender people. And this is where this conversation is really going, because they're looking

at it all, all the studies. And they said certainty in this conclusion is limited by high risk of bias in study designs, small sample sizes, and confounding with other interventions. We could not draw any conclusions about death by suicide. So they're saying mental health in general, there's way too many risks of bias, small sample sizes. There's a lot of issues with these studies. But when it becomes a suicide, impossible to draw any type of conclusion if these hormones are actually helping or not. And why might that be? Well, a lot of people point to studies like this. This is another kind of literature review on brain development and puberty, understanding the role of puberty and structural and functional development of the adolescent brain. So remember, you're blocking puberty. It says,

overall, this review reveals a mixed literature concerning the role of puberty in the development of the adolescent brain. Evidence from animal studies reveal that puberty has effects some sex specific on development of different brain regions. Furthermore, manipulation of puberto hormones and animal models has shown that delaying or preventing puberty impacts brain development. Although the number of studies investigating the relationship between puberty and different aspects of the human brain development has increased in the past few years, this review demonstrates that there continues to be limited data across neuroimaging domains and the data

available are not always consistent. In other words, we don't know yet what's going on. And a lot of the Nordic countries have already abandoned this. And remember, the Nordic countries were famous for getting out of the COVID-19 vaccine business for kids because of myocarditis. So they seem to be moving away from this conversation as well. At least for- Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, they have obviously some good medical professionals there with courage. And so here's one of the studies that was coming out of a Nordic journal. This is adolescent development and psychosocial functioning after starting cross-sex hormones. for gender dysphoria. And when we read this, it almost seems like common sense, but they said this, results. Those who did well in terms of psychiatric symptoms and functioning before cross-sex hormones

mainly did well during real life. Those who had psychiatric treatment, needs, or problems in school, peer relationships, and managing everyday manners outside of home continue to have problems during real life. They concluded that the medical gender reassignment is not enough to improve functioning and relieve psychiatric comorbidities

among adolescents and gender dysphoria. dysphoria. And they're talking about really appropriate intervention interventions are warranted, blah, blah, blah. So they're basically, I mean, it's a common sense study there saying, look, these puberty blockers are not going to solve everything. We really need to look at this in a different way. And this is what other countries are doing. This is what your headlines are seeing in England here. England's health service says it won't give puberty blockers to children at gender clinics. And then in Sweden, this is in 2022. Their National Board of Health and Welfare had to update their recommendations for hormone therapy for gender dysphoria, specifically in young people.

They said, following a request from the National Board of Health and Welfare, SBU has drawn up a literature review in which all relevant studies on the effect and safety of hormone treatments have been reviewed. In the report, which is published today, it appears that it is not yet possible to draw any definite conclusions about the effect and safety of treatments based on the scientific evidence. based on the results that emerged, the National Board of Health and Welfare's overall conclusion is that the risks of puberty inhibiting and gender-affirming hormone treatment for those under 18 currently outweigh the possible benefits for the group as a whole. So that's a pretty resounding statement right there from the Swedish Medical Board. And so what we're talking about here, again, we'll go back to this, is these Dutch studies, this laid the medical foundation

for the puberty suppression. There was one in 2011, puberty suppression and adolescents with gender identity disorder and then a follow-up in 2014. And what a lot of people looking at this in the medical community objectively are really describing here.

They're calling it runaway diffusion. And this is a term, it's a new term to me when I heard it. It's basically a phenomenon where the medical community mistakes a small experiment or one or two studies as a proven practice.

and then these potentially non-beneficially even harmful practice spread rapidly into the general clinical setting. So there's a study or kind of a commentary that looked at these Dutch studies and basically pick them apart and showed all of the flaws with this. They never should have been the cornerstone of this gender affirming care, but they turned out to be. So you can read that here. It's called the myth of reliable research in pediatric gender medicine, a critical evaluation. of the Dutch studies and the research that is followed. But in there, they speak about more of the, they take a step back and talk about the entire space in general.

And they say this, what makes this arena exceptional is the radical, irreversible nature of gender affirming medical and surgical interventions desired by the exponentially growing number of youth in the Western world. Another unique aspect of the gender medicine field is that a number of clinicians tasked with caring for gender distress have taken on the role of political, campaigners and in doing so have traded wisdom and nuance for blunt activism. And they close with this. And they say, when clinician activists misuse the eminence of their institutions and medical societies to deny or obfuscate important facts about pediatric gender transition, that puberty blockers are

prescribed to peripubal children as young as 8 to 9, that mastectomies are commonly provided to teens, that the wave of detransition is rising and already far exceeded what's been historically recorded and that no other pediatric intervention of similar drastic nature has ever been delivered at scale based on such low quality of evidence. They may succeed in scoring a political or legal victory in the short term, but they also contribute to the longer term erosion of public trust in the medical profession. They also inadvertently contribute to the medical harm. That's an interesting closing statement there. And let's look at puberty blockers as a whole. They're looking at puberty blocker claims.

This is your insurance company claims by year for ages six through 17 years old. And you can see starting in 2017 up through 2021, that's the latest data, see 120% increase. There's obviously a trend going on here. So what happened in 2017? Where did this conversation come from? Well, we don't have to look far. We go right back into this article here. California, LGBT inclusive textbooks to be implemented in California,

classrooms. And as California goes, so does the rest of the country. And that's what history shows. And even in this space, I mean, it's like I was saying at the top of this segment, there's really no space you can talk about here that's not polarizing. Even in this space, you have polarization, you have division. So let's look at United States map now where we're at currently from that 2017 decision. We have in the dark green, those are, there's six states. Those are states that have laws explicitly requiring LGBTQ inclusion in state curricular standards. That dark orange, those are about seven states. Those are, those are states that have state laws explicitly censoring the discussion of LGBTQ people in school. And then the lightest tan color, they're basically

like Switzerland in this conversation. They have no preference. They just want to stay out of it. But you can see it's there's just a checkerboard across the United States. but this isn't just about gender. Schools are deeming themselves, as we saw from that opening clip, the sexual educators of our children. And it feels like it showed up in our schools out of nowhere. Where did it come from and who's doing it? Well, it doesn't take that far to go back to the WHO on this conversation. And under their watch, how have they proposed to educate our kids? Remember, the WHO is planning their international pandemic treaty, international health regulations. And this is under the sustainable development goals, SDGs under Agenda 2030.

So everyone will be taught the same throughout the world. So let's look at some of their international sexual education guidance. So this is their kind of their book, their pamphlet, international technical guidance on sexuality education. It's by UNESCO and the WHO, hundreds of pages long. And you go in there and you look under just for example, five to eight year olds. This is what they're proposing. For five, as young as five, you're going to state that people show love and care for other people

in different ways, including kissing, hugging, touching, and sometimes through sexual behaviors. So you'll say to a five-year-old that if you like somebody, you can show them, you know, love through sexual behaviors. Okay. Well, we go into Europe, and this is directly published out of WHO's regional office in Europe. And the title of this new document here is Standards for Sexuality Education in Europe. And this goes even further. So now we have that same breakdown of age groups, but a little younger, a lot younger. Zero to four. Zero.

Enjoyment, this is we're going to be teaching. Enjoyment and pleasure when touching one's own body, early childhood masturbation, zero to four. Then you go into nine to 12 ages, acquire modern media competence, mobile phone, internet, dealing with pornography. So you can look at that and say, well, they're going to teach them maybe how to to stay away from that, that that's bad. But at age nine, do we really want a classroom

a teacher, breaching the conversation about online pornography with kids? And how about the child whose family's doing a really good job of just keeping pornography off the internet out of their phones? And suddenly you introduce, don't go look at this. If that's even what's being done, the power of suggestion is we're seeing this increase

in gender affirming care as soon as you introduce transgender discussions in school, So these things really do seem to set the precedent. Yeah, and you know, what does that look like? Well, here's a video out of Europe to just show a window into possibly what this may be happening. Take a look. Sex is not only functional, when you only make any sense of making. We have also a lot of it, also like to do.

He got on deck how works your life and how work my life? And you, have you always on your pimole? Go you once on your pimble sit? And how it? And when do you that?

Do you that? Do you that do you that then as we're on the eating not? No,

or in the class? No, not. Why do you that not in the class? When can you now

on your pimel sit? If you my face train. But that is not only youngers that can come, also girls can come, but they have then

no seed-loat, because we have no sautious, but it is well a pretty feel. And you have, your vagina always bekekeke, you have your schaamlipper, and your inner-ste-shawn-lipper, and there are two gauges,

one on plas, and one where the baby out comes. But over the gaugia is also a sort of you? Have you that always seen? No, we've never never ever studied,

but that's never, And that knob-you-that-knobes, but if you're on it sit, can that a very fine feel that it really pretty good if you're feeling that it's actually pretty if you're on that button sit. And if you're there, then, that can you, be, for example, on forciven with your finger, you know, when we watch that, I mean, you can see that many different ways. Personally, I think most people would say, I think the parents should be handling a conversation that appears to be how teachers in the Netherlands are

being taught to potentially teach children. I want to talk about the video just for a second because I want to talk about some of the research that we do here. We weren't sure exactly where that was sourced. At first, the video said it was from the WHO. We couldn't prove that. We did track it to Rutgers,

and Rutgers has since taken that video down saying it was misunderstood. One of the comments that they have online referencing Rutgers Foundation, we all want children to experience healthy and safe development appropriate to their age environment and the questions they have. This helps them to make responsible choices at a later age when they become sexually active. I also want to say that I reached out to a friend of mine that lives in Holland to say,

is this being accurately transcribed? They said that the word dick should have really been penis, but, you know, it is essentially exactly what's being said there. And they asked me, you know, what is this video about? I said, well, we're going to talk about these discussions. Is it appropriate for young children? And my friend said, oh, yeah, that's a huge issue here in the Netherlands. We have this thing that's now called Purple Fridays in which they're bringing education to our young children discussing gender and all sorts of curriculums that have had a lot of people in an outrage here.

So clearly, this isn't just an issue in America. And we kind of think of that sort of liberal, sometimes people call it forward thinking the Netherlands, whatever you may think. think they are finding themselves in the controversy around this. So that's just a little bit of a background on that video. It has since been pulled. Rutgers threatens anybody that decides to play it. I guess that means they're threatening us, but it was out there. It was thought to be an educational material at some time. Due with that, those are watching what you will. And there is a surge against the background of all of this. There is a surge all time high of people homeschooling their children. I mean, obviously that's because of what happened during COVID.

with the mandates, but it's not separate. This isn't all in a vacuum. So you can see a lot of people watching that video. You can see why they would maybe want to homeschool their kids. Or you can see these headlines or these guidelines by the WHO and UNESCO and what's coming into the school. So again, a completely polarizing and divisive conversation and topic. And the public really is, there's only really two sides.

We're trying to bring some sense to a lot of this conversation. And even the medical community is saying, is starting to side with the fact that we really don't have the evidence for this. We kind of jump the gun is what they're really looking like they're saying. And we need to step back a little bit and really do the real research long term especially.