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By Jeff Cleghorn

On Wednesdays, CDM is going to publish "The Ugly Americans" series exposing the weaponization of lies to coerce Americans to accept delusions. 

Maryland, the birthplace of transgender medicine in the United States, is again front-and-center on the transgender issue, with the unfolding scandal about medical ethics and fraud committed on vulnerable children. 

Johns Hopkins, WPATH (The World Professional Association for Transgender Health), and Admiral Dr. Rachel Levine, the trans-identified male activist Assistant Secretary for Health at HHS, have been colluding to use ideology and politics as the basis for “trans healthcare.” 

WPATH commissioned Johns Hopkins to conduct a systemic review of the medical evidence underpinning trans healthcare, but then rejected Johns Hopkins’ report because it concluded the basis for trans healthcare was weak. 

WPATH published its revised Standards of Care, version 8 (SOC8) in 2022, omitting any mention of the adverse findings by Johns Hopkins. Johns Hopkins has remained silent, sitting on the content of the review which is unavailable to others. 

On a related, but different issue, Dr. Rachel Levine also pressured WPATH to remove minimum age limits in their SOC8 for medical or surgical interventions for children for political reasons and WPATH complied. 

This information was found in WPATH emails and documents obtained through discovery in litigation in Alabama and North Carolina lawsuits brought by the ACLU and Lambda Legal against state legislatives which passed bills to prohibit medical or surgical “treatments” for children with the DSM-5 gender dysphoria mental disorder.  (I served on the Lambada Legal Board from 2015-2017.) 

This discovery is on the heels of two recent bombshell reports involving pediatric transgender healthcare largely ignored by the US media. Namely, the WPATH Files Report and The Cass Review from the UK. 

The nonprofit group Environmental Progress recently published The WPATH Files Report, a voluminous batch of leaked internal WPATH communications.

The WPATH Files Report shows WPATH members acknowledging the high risk of life-long complications, like sterility and loss of sexual function. WPATH members have even expressed their awareness that their young patients lack the developmental capacity to consent to these life-changing medical interventions. 

The report compares the WPATH promotion of “the pseudoscientific surgical destruction of healthy genitals in vulnerable people” to the mid-20th-century use of lobotomies, “the pseudoscientific surgical destruction of healthy brains.”

Examples of WPATH members saying internally what they do not say to the rest of us include: “We try to talk about it, but most of the kids are nowhere near the brain space to really, really, really talk about it in any serious way. That always bothers me, but we want the kids to be happy, happier in the moment, right?…"We’re often explaining these kinds of things to people who haven’t had biology in high school yet.”

The efficacy and ethics of transgender healthcare for children is hotly contested around the world, with several European countries recently putting the brakes on the “gender affirming” approach. 

Most recently, the release of The Cass Report in the UK contains a damning indictment of the underlying claims of trans healthcare for children, after conducting a 4-year systemic review of the medical evidence. 

The Cass Report concluded the quality of research supporting trans healthcare is poor. The effect on cognitive and psychosexual development remains unknown, and “Clinicians are unable to determine with any certainty which children and young people will go on to have an enduring trans identity.” 

I have been following this story about Johns Hopkins’ role in misleading  “trans healthcare for children,” when I heard about a debacle at several recent Easton Town Council public meetings. 

My understanding in Easton (MD) was the question of whether to authorize purchasing of “progress pride” flags to display around town and then that had mutated into an allegation of a hate bias allegation filed by a trans activist against an elected official, which was addressed by the Sheriff in a letter to the President of the Town Council, who has now instructed the town lawyer to contact the Baltimore Sun for a correction of the story it was fed.

Nevertheless, the situation has now morphed into a NAACP local chapter head threatening the Town Council President publicly instead of focusing on the potential harm against children by pushing transgenderism. 

This tactic – of intimidation and aggression – I see all the time by angry transgender activists who don’t get their way. Time and again, trans activists have quashed or crushed dissent and refused to allow rational conversation to occur. 

Aside from whether spending money for flags makes sense, a bigger question ought to be the “why” behind activists’ emotional insistence on always getting their way. 

As a gay rights activist since 1993, I am appalled by what is happening in today’s “queer” and transgender activism. In particular, their obsessive and singular focus on children – with rainbows, unicorns, glitter, drag queens, and sexualized children’s books - to believe in the make believe. Made up identities (“nonbinary or eunuch”), sexualities (“demisexual or asexual”), genders (“pangender or genderqueer”), and pronouns (“aerself or faerself”) are pushed on children. 

This is an ideology, a far-left ideology, that many gay and lesbian homosexual people - me included - do not believe in.  What used to be a small group of mostly male transsexuals and transvestites, has mysteriously grown and morphed into today’s mess. "They do not believe in truth," says Andrew Sullivan about the queer movement. 

New gay rights groups are forming to fight back, including the LGBT Courage Coalition, founded by pediatric gender clinic whistleblower Jamie Reed - the first US whistleblower who has gone public about harms being caused by pediatric transgender medicine. She worked in a trans clinic in St Louis. 

“There are more than 100 pediatric gender clinics across the U.S., I worked at one,” Reed wrote in The Free Press. “Almost everyone in my life advised me to keep my head down. But I cannot in good conscience do so. Because what is happening to scores of children is far more important than my comfort. And what is happening to them is morally and medically appalling.” 

Jamie Reed’s 28-page affidavit is here: 2023-2 07 Affidavit draft - Final (mo.gov) and includes witnessing gender clinic “healthcare providers lie to the public and to parents of patients about treatment,” and center staff providing “puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children without complete informed parental consent and without appropriate or accurate assessment of the needs of the child.” 

"In July 2022, the FDA issued a “black box warning” for puberty blockers, the strictest kind of warning the FDA can give a medication. It issued the warning following evidence in patients of brain swelling and loss of vision. Despite this warning, doctors at the Center continued their automatic practice of giving kids these drugs" reads paragraph 62 of Reed's affidavit.

Let that sink in. Why would a parent would want to risk the infertility, loss of sexual function and blindness for their child? And, why would a school official, county official, health care worker, surgeon, psychiatrist, social worker, school or health care administrator, or any politician push this ideology and put anyone's child at risk? Why would Planned Parenthood in any state be willing to distribute these drugs without a parent's consent? 

Maryland is where the first “gender identity clinic” opened in the US in 1966, co-founded by Dr. John Money, whose history is now regarded as a brilliantly deranged fraud. To advance his theory that “gender” is not innate from birth, Money experimented with child sex-changes in the infamous Reimer Twins tragedy, leading to their deaths after Money’s mad-scientist-like experimentations on them, in addition to Money sexually abusing these two brothers.

Dr. Paul McHugh, John’s Hopkins chief of psychiatry from 1975 through 2001, closed Dr. Money’s gender identity clinic in 1979 after a systemic review of medical evidence underpinning trans healthcare and found it not fit for purpose. 

To date, Johns Hopkins Medical has never publicly acknowledged or apologized for Dr. Money’s sins of child abuse and his voodoo research. 

Instead, they reopened the clinic in 2017, returning to the very profitable world of “transgender healthcare” with vigor. 

The John Hopkins Center for Transgender and Gender Expansive Health prominently boasts - in the first sentence of its website homepage – a defiant embrace of the “standard of care” set by WPATH.  This decision was made despite Johns Hopkins knowing that trans healthcare is based on a flimsy foundation because they conducted the systemic review requested by WPATH and then rejected it.

Johns Hopkins is an ideological leader within today’s transgender movement, publishing an “inclusive language guide” in 2023 erasing women by describing lesbians as "non-men attracted to non-men," while referring to gay males as men. These same Johns Hopkins intellectuals, one month prior, rolled out to great fanfare a formal guide with "50" new pronouns, including xemself, perself, and verself. This pronoun program was created under the tutelage of John Hopkins' Paula Neira, who is its program director. This is Neira's reality that is being pushed on children and families. 

John’s Hopkins efforts to inform and guide the transgender ideological conversation is not subtle. They continue to embrace WPATH which their own systemic review shows is pushing junk quack medicine on vulnerable kids. And who is going to be interested in exotic pronouns and identities, if not the children? 

There’s a reason why drag queens never want to read for a senior’s center or nursing home and only focus on kids. 

Today’s “Queer” activists push taxpayers to fund their efforts to proselytize their belief systems (via public displays of “progress” flags).

These are the first steps in grooming children to believe in the make-believe on the pathway to clinics, like Johns Hopkins, conducting experimental medical and surgical “treatments” on them, not unlike the Reimer Twins. 

None of these “treatments” are FDA approved. Puberty blocker medications, like Lupron (a chemical castration drug costing $38k per year), and synthetic cross-sex hormones are not FDA approved to treat gender dysphoria.

Nor has any pharmaceutical company making them ever requested FDA approval for this purpose. The reason for this is clear. There is no reliable evidence these medications are safe and effective long-term. Sadly, there is a growing body of evidence they are not, including a large study released this spring finding people who undergo transgender surgery are 12 times more likely to commit suicide. 

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to consider the constitutionality of Tennessee's state ban on so-called gender-affirming healthcare for children, United States v. Skrmetti, and a decision should come in 2025. Dr. Money's dreams of medical and surgical experimentation with unproven treatments on distressed kids will be laid bare for all to see. WPATH, Dr. Rachel Levine, and Johns Hopkins may soon face the verdict of history.   

Groups like the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine and Genspect provide helpful resources for parents, teachers, doctors, and politicians, including objective explanations about transgender research.

Other new gay-rights groups like Gays Against Groomers and The LGB Alliance have formed to provide a voice for those alarmed by what is happening to children in our name. 

Another helpful resource is the Transparency Podcast, with candid content by and about transsexual people. Turns out many transsexual men and women reject this ideology, as well. 

Excellent books to read to get a grip on reality include:

• Helen Joyce (Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality); 
• Abigail Shrier (Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters);  
• Dr. Miram Grossman (Lost in Trans Nation: A Child Psychiatrist’s Guide Out of the Madness) 

Gay rights icon Andrew Sullivan’s essay, "Who is looking out for gay kids?" addresses the risks of imposing transgender ideology on young children and is a must read.  

Sixth generation Georgian, Army vet, and lawyer, Jeff Cleghorn became a gay rights advocate in 1993. He worked on the staff of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, in Washington, DC, from 1997 through 2003, and served on SLDN's Board from 2007 through 2013. Cleghorn also served on the Boards of Lambda Legal and Georgia Equality, and is a past president of Georgia's Stonewall Bar Association. He now speaks out against transqueer ideology and its harms to children.

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