Jordan Peterson: Gender Pronouns and Free Speech War

A major medical insurer has withdrawn cover for private doctors who initiate gender affirming care for children under the age of 18. They calculate that the risk of litigation is too high. Sometimes money speaks in favour of good because there's two sides to economics - making money and saving money/limiting costs.

Medical insurer drops cover for private doctors who initiate hormone treatments in adolescents with gender dysphoria

One of Australia's leading medical insurers has dumped cover for private practising doctors who initiate hormone treatment in adolescents with gender dysphoria, a decision that may put even more pressure on public hospital waiting lists.

MDA National said it will also no longer insure private doctors, such as general practitioners, from legal claims arising from the assessment of patients under 18 as suitable for gender transition treatments, such as cross-sex hormones and gender affirmation surgeries.

The Australian Professional Association for Trans Health (AusPATH), representing hundreds of health professionals who provide care to transgender people, is aware of some GPs who have already stopped gender-affirming care — a model that supports the child's choices and can lead to medical interventions such as puberty blockers and hormone treatment.

AusPATH is concerned the MDA National decision will particularly affect trans youth living outside major cities, who struggle to access public gender services.

"It's going to stop a number of children ever being able to access gender affirming care before they turn 18," AusPATH president Professor Ashleigh Lin said.
The MDA National decision, effective from July 1, comes after the insurer reviewed the medico-legal risks amid what it described as "growing criticism globally of the research that underpins medical and surgical transition of children in response to gender dysphoria".

It was made in response to "the risk of potentially high-value claims arising from irreversible treatments" provided to children and adolescents.

Gender-affirming hormonal therapies with testosterone or oestrogen may cause temporary or permanent infertility.

MDA continues to allow doctors to prescribe puberty blockers to treat trans youth.

While there is evidence of long-term side effect for puberty blockers such as reduced bone density, the effects on puberty are reversible.

"Children are not able to transition without relying on the assessments of medical professionals," MDA National said in a statement to the ABC.

"This places doctors in a uniquely vulnerable position with respect to future litigation – particularly so, if courts take the view that the practitioner has influenced a child's decision to medically or surgically transition and that there are limits to a child's understanding and what they effectively consent to.

"This has led to our view that medical practitioners who assess children as being suitable for transition and/or who initially prescribe cross-sex hormones are at a heightened risk of receiving claims, irrespective of the strength of the consent process and the standard of care or the model of healthcare."

MDA National describes itself as "apolitical" and says it does "not make any commentary on the appropriateness of the informed consent model of gender-affirming care".

But it said: "Even though practitioners working in this space provide the very best healthcare and do everything that normally affords a robust defence in the face of a claim, ultimately, there is very little a practitioner can do to protect against claims from those, who, with the benefit of hindsight, believe their care should have been managed differently.

"As a doctor-owned organisation, we must act in the best interest of all our doctor members with respect to future claims, which are not paid for by the government, advocacy associations or the individual doctors that may be sued.

"The cost of these claims must be covered by the broader MDA membership, which is made up largely of private practising doctors."

MDA National is one of six medical indemnity insurers providing cover to Australian doctors.

News of its decision to deny private doctors cover for assessing children and adolescents as suitable for gender transition and for initiating cross-sex hormone treatment to patients under 18 years of age comes amid huge demand on public hospital gender services.

As of May 9 this year, the Queensland Children's Gender Service had 642 children and young people, ranging in age from four to 17, on its waitlist for assessment.

In 2022, the service provided care to 922 patients.

The ABC sought comment from the Australian Medical Association and medical colleges representing general practitioners, physicians, psychiatrists, and surgeons about the MDA National decision.

Only the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (RACS) responded, describing gender affirmation surgery as complex and involving "a multi-disciplinary collaborative consultation and management among various specialists, including psychologists, endocrinologists and surgeons specialising in plastic surgery, urology, colorectal surgery, and gynaecology".

"While RACS supports the training of gender affirmation surgery, it is important to note that the limited number of cases and the highly specialised nature of this field requires specific focus for a limited number of surgeons," it said in a statement.

"We therefore recommend that surgeons interested in pursuing expertise in gender affirmation surgery seek additional post-fellowship specialty training through specific national or international fellowships in gender affirming procedures and management."

The Australian Medical Students' Association (AMSA) was critical of MDA National's policy change, describing it as "not being grounded in comprehensive consultation with leading clinical experts and peak bodies for transgender health in Australia".

"AMSA stands for accessible gender-affirming care for all transgender and gender diverse people," AMSA's Dineli Kalansuriya said.

"This policy change by MDA substantially impacts the provision of gender-affirming medical therapies in the community. Ultimately, their decision restricts the accessibility of these services for a medically and financially marginalised group of young people who are already underserviced by the healthcare system.

"Hospital gender clinics simply do not have the resources to treat the overwhelming number of referrals they receive annually."

Sad that it's still about money though and not genuine care for the patients.
 
They calculate that the risk of litigation is too high.

As you say, it is too bad that it is about litigation, yet noticed today this article featuring a surgical fool without a conscience who admits to a few things.

Take your children and run.



The following is a year old, where some of it looks to woke projection. The discussion (title is Who Has All The Power & Privilege?) is between Kate Wand and Bruce Pardy.


The discussion include judicial cultural workarounds from the standard 'judicial notice' (blind justice and evidence laid before to rule), to the new ways of adhering to premises. The premise is whatever has been agreed upon, and the heck with evidence, even if great pain and suffering are involved as long as the premise is upheld. The other major point with so many questions, is always locking at 'who' gets to decide (children, parents, courts, Health and so on and so forth). That should be the first question asked, who decides. Regular people used to, now they don't.

In another more recent talk, Pardy used words that seemed to more or less decide so many things for people, as being now rooted as a bureaucratic tyranny.

Talk Points:

  • Institutionalized Racisms
  • Weaponizing Empathy
  • Leslynn Lewis
  • Critical Theory (a little on AGW crowd and the woke law of projection)
  • Racism
  • Privilege
  • Race Discrimination
- this drifts to the off thread covid subject (related to the courts and more)
  • The Covid Courts
  • Vaccine Clinics
  • Critical Race Theory
  • Sick Kids Hospital
  • Vaccines
  • Legal limitations
  • Retribution
 
A South Korean trans cyclist has entered and won a women's race in order to prove how selfish trans athletes are being, competing in women's sports:


Born a biological male, one South Korean has continued her passion in completive cycling after transitioning to a woman against biological female riders — not for glory, but to prove a point to “selfish” trans athletes.
Na secured a victory at the Gangwon Sports Festival in June but had an out-of-character reason for racing and winning — she set out to prove biological men are physically superior to biological women.
“I have no unresolved feelings over winning because that’s no longer what I want. My goal was to stir controversy and get my story heard by competing,” Na told the Korean Times.
“I am not proud of myself at all. I believe other transgender athletes would feel the same way. They may not want to admit it, but they’re being selfish. There is no honor as an athlete in that,” she told the outlet.
Na is not “honored” by winning the race but used her momentum on the podium to send a message that athletic committees should include a “third gender” category for transgender athletes.

“It could be like how we have many weight divisions in some sports… Under the current binary system, women athletes will be discouraged, and their hard work might not be recognized due to the participation of transgender athletes,” she relayed to the outlet.

Decent bit of common sense in regards to most sports. I wonder if many more will be in favour of a third category in sports? Depends how far this whole trans thing ends up going I guess.
 


CNN 👏👏👏
Russia’s Duma votes for law to ban gender reassignment surgery in further crackdown on LGBTQ rights
Updated 11:06 AM EDT, Fri July 14, 2023
The Russian State Duma, or lower house of parliament, has voted in favor of a new law banning nearly all medical help for transgender people, including gender reassignment surgery, in a raft of new anti-LGBTQ laws in Russia.

The bill, which had its third and final reading on Friday, prohibits doctors from conducting gender reassignment surgeries, except in cases related to treating congenital physiological anomalies in children. It also restricts registry offices from amending official documents based on medical certificates of gender change.

The law must still be approved by the Federation Council and signed by President Vladimir Putin before it comes into force.

Amendments made for its third reading include disqualifying individuals who have undergone gender changes from becoming adoptive parents or guardians, as well as the possibility of annulling a marriage if one or both spouses undergo a gender change and update their civil status records.

Putin has toughened anti-LGTBQ legislation in recent months, as the Kremlin clamps down on free speech and human rights amid the war in Ukraine.

These recent legal developments in Russia expand the constraints on the LGBTQ community and reflect a tightening of regulations and control over transgender rights in the country.

In December 2022, Russia expanded its existing “gay propaganda” law to exert control over public discussions and narratives surrounding non-heterosexual relationships and identities. The package of amendments signed by Putin includes heavier penalties for anyone promoting “non-traditional sexual relations and/or preferences,” as well as gender transition.

Russia’s first transgender politician, Yulia Alyoshina, has warned of the severe consequences of the proposed transgender bill.

“Once the bill becomes law, the repercussions will be harsh, as transgender individuals will be denied the right for medical care, which is constitutionally guaranteed,” Alyoshina told CNN.

“This bill is not just discriminatory; it is a real genocide of transgender people,” she added.

In October, amid the hearings on “LGBTQ propaganda” law amendments and the bill passing its first reading in the State Duma, Alyoshina, who obtained her new passport in 2020, resigned from her position as a regional head of the Civic Initiative party and chose to end her political career.

‘Politics of terror’

The latest restrictions seem to be closely intertwined with the ongoing dissent on the political and human rights activity in Russia.

Notably, on the eve of the final reading, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) announced it had detained a transgender activist on suspicion of treason.

The FSB alleged that the activist, a Russian citizen from the Oryol region, supported the Armed Forces of Ukraine by providing financial assistance through a donation to the independent human rights monitoring group OVD-Info.

The Russian state labeled OVD-Info a foreign agent in 2021 under a law that critics say suppresses dissent. The group has continued to document alleged rights abuses inside Russia and expanded its mandate to help anti-war protesters following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Vanya Solovey, a trans rights campaigner, said, “it is no coincidence” that the law is being read in Russian parliament amid Moscow’s war on Ukraine.

“Russia’s anti-gender discourse and politics have intensified since it started the full-scale war. For months, Putin and other officials have been increasingly targeting trans people in their statements,” Solovey, an advocacy and program officer for Eastern Europe and Central Asia at the trans rights group Transgender Europe, told CNN.

“This anti-trans politics is indeed a politics of terror. It affects not only trans people but everyone living in Russia.”

Действительно?
 
Maybe these companies are just slow to catch on, or maybe these boycott's/backlashes against their pandering to a woke agenda just aren't working (or they just don't care…)

Makeup company Maybelline now using bearded 'men' to promote cosmetics…

Wonder if they will get their BudLight moment…


Maybelline make-up maestros have ruffled feathers online by featuring bearded men in its promotional videos.

Posting the videos to its social media platforms, the cosmetics company has received backlash from some angry sections of society.

Referred to as ‘Maybelline Partners,’ the two bearded men can be seen filming themselves applying make-up.
Already hinting that Maybelline could feel the effects of a boycott, popular comments said “now you know what brand of cosmetics not to buy,” and “adding Maybelline to the growing list of companies I won't buy from anymore.”
 
JBP interview with Jim Caviezel and Tim Ballard - 1:36:26

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson discusses the new film “Sound of Freedom,” with star Jim Caviezel and real life inspiration Tim Ballard. The film details Ballard’s work as a Special Agent to fight against sex trafficking and the child sex trade. They go into depth on the psychology of pedophilia, the nature of good and evil, and how a steady faith in God has guided all three.
 
California state superintendent tried exceeding his allotted speaking time so the local school board shut him down and sent the police on him.
California school board has police escort state ed bureaucrat out of meeting and passes parental rights transgender policy

CARLOS GARCIA
July 21, 2023

A school board in southern California angered many on the left when it kicked out the state's public education bureaucrat from a meeting during which it voted to preserve parental rights over the transgender agenda.

The contentious episode is the latest in a fight between some cities in California pushing back against the increasingly progressive transgender policies of the Democrat-controlled state government.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond spoke at the meeting for the Chino Valley Unified School Board in an attempt to dissuade the members from voting for a policy requiring parents be informed about their children's gender decisions.

When Thurmond tried to speak past the allotted time, he was berated by Chino Valley Unified Board President Sonja Shaw who accused him of trying to "pervert" children and said he had threatened the board.

Videos on social media showed police officers escorting Thurmond out of the meeting.

Many in the crowd applauded while he left.

The board went on to vote in favor of the policy securing parents' rights, 4 to 1.

"We think he's a danger to our students," said Shaw to KTVU-TV, "he continues to push things that pervert children and he continues to push out parents and bring in policies to create division between families."

Thurmond strongly objected to the action of the board on his official social media account.

"I don’t mind being thrown out of a board meeting by extremists. I can take the heat — it’s part of the job. What I can’t accept is the mistreatment of vulnerable students whose privacy is being taken away," he tweeted in part.

He went on to say he had sponsored a bill to force schools to include books in their curriculum with pro-LGBTQ themes.

"Let me be clear: I will always stand with California students and will use every power of my office to protect them from politicians who seek to divide our communities instead of keeping our kids safe," he tweeted.

Shaw fired back and doubled down on her position.

“We’re going to safeguard parental rights,” she told KTLA-TV. “That is a constitutional right and we’re going to make sure that our parents at Chino Valley know they’re sending their kids here to be taught, not to be anything else.”

Officials in Temecula, another city in southern California, similarly rejected a social studies book that praised gay activist Harvey Milk after some school board members pointed out that he had admitted having a relationship with a 16-year-old male while in his thirties.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom lashed out at the board and called its members "radicalized zealots" and "extremists."

Here's a local news report about the incident:
 
The above post was the only mention I found on the forum regarding Dr. Frances Widdowson.
She seems to be embroiled in a situation JP refers to as “woke mobbing”, all kinds of accusations and twisting of her comments on many different subjects.
From the article:
“A scheduled February 1, 2023 lecture at the University of Lethbridge (U of L) by highly published but controversial scholar Dr. Frances Widdowson dismissed in December 2021 from her tenured position at Calgary’s Mount Royal University [MRU] saw a late politically-motivated cancelation by its central administration on January 30 after she had already arrived in Lethbridge.”

Had followed Frances's problems, and indeed "mobbing" was a factor. However, on the subject of mobbing itself, came across Kenneth Westhues (University of Waterloo) discussion. Kenneth, as read, initially wrote about Denis Rancourt on his legal fight with the University of Ottawa, initiated back in 2006 and resolved 2019 (Ottawa's Dismissal of Denis Rancourt). JP would likely have known of that fight, and of possibly even Westhues's mobbing reference as he himself has been attacked ad nauseam:

For the record, here is how Westhues framed it back in 2006, and of course the mobs have more or less, perfected it and are more rabid then it may seem from reading below:


The Unkindly Art of Mobbing

From Academic Matters: the Journal of Higher Education, OCUFA, Fall 2006, pp. 18-19.
watarts.png


Ken Westhues describes how academics can gang up on unpopular colleagues — and alerts readers to the signs that an academic "mobbing" is in the works.

Twenty years ago, Swedish psychologist Heinz Leymann gave the name mobbing to this terror, taking the word from Konrad Lorenz’s research on aggression in nonhuman species. Mobbing of alien predators and sometimes of conspecifics occurs among many birds and primates. Something about the target arouses a fierce, contagious impulse to attack and destroy. Mobbers take turns vocalizing hostility and inflicting wounds. The target usually flees. Sometimes it is killed and eaten.

Violent mobbing is endemic to our species. Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson has analyzed lynching as a cannibalistic “ritual of blood.” Teenage swarming is similar, as in the murder of Reena Virk in Victoria, BC, in 1997. Her friends set upon her in a frenzy of bloodlust, reviled and tortured her, eventually held her head under water until she was dead.

Leymann studied the nonviolent, polite, sophisticated kind of mobbing that happens in ostensibly rational workplaces. Universities are an archetype. If professors despise a colleague to the point of feeling desperate need to put the colleague down, pummeling the target is a foolish move. The mobbers lose and the target gains credibility.

{Back then (2006) it may have make sense, however it seems that more recently their "foolish" acts get traction, and like a mob of Hyena's, they try to devour.}

The more clever and effective strategy is to wear the target down emotionally by shunning, gossip, ridicule, bureaucratic hassles, and withholding of deserved rewards. The German word Todschweigen, death by silence, describes this initial, informal stage of workplace mobbing.

This is often enough to achieve the goal. Many targets crumble, flee to a job elsewhere, or take early retirement. Others surrender to the collective will, behaving thereafter like a dog that has been bested by another dog in a fight for dominance.

If the target refuses to leave or acquiesce, the mobbing may escalate to a formal outburst of aggression. Mobbers seize upon a critical incident, some real or imagined misbehavior that they claim is proof of the target’s unworthiness to continue in the normal give and take of academic life. A degradation ritual is arranged, often in a dean’s office, sometimes in a campus tribunal. The object is to destroy the good name that is any professor’s main resource, to expose the target as not worth listening to. Public censure by the university administration leaves the target stigmatized for life. Formal dismissal with attendant publicity is social elimination in its most conclusive form.

In its more advanced stages, mobbing is rare. Leymann estimated that fewer than five percent of ordinary workers are mobbed during their careers. The percentage among professors may be a little higher.

In his comprehensive book on academic freedom, York historian Michiel Horn recounts some famous cases from Canada’s past of what would today be called mobbing. Biochemist George Hunter’s firing from the University of Alberta in 1949 is one example. Historian Harry Crowe’s ouster from United College in Winnipeg in 1958 is another.

My own research has been on recent mobbings in academe. About two dozen of the hundred or so cases I have analyzed are from Canadian universities.

Because McGill University closed down its inquiry into her death, the 1994 case of Justine Sergent is especially noteworthy. She was a successful neuropsychologist there whose adversaries positioned her on the wrong side of the local research ethics board. Sergent received a formal reprimand and grieved it. The Montreal Gazette learned of the dispute from an anonymous letter and ran with the story. “McGill researcher disciplined for breaking rules,” the headline read. The humiliation was more than Sergent could bear. She and her husband, Yves, wrote poignant letters the next day and then committed suicide.

My most detailed study has been of the seven-year mobbing of theologian Herbert Richardson at St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto. His formal dismissal in 1994 was the most publicized in Canadian history. The case is unparalleled in its complexity and documentation, and in the insight it offers into current cultural trends.

Other recent Canadian mobbing targets include theologian Hugo Meynell at Calgary, linguist Hector Hammerly at Simon Fraser, social work professor Kathleen Kufeldt at Memorial, and mathematician Jack Edmonds at Waterloo.

All these cases are contentious. Stigma, once officially imposed, is generally thought to be deserved. Like everybody else, professors want to believe the world is just. Academic mobbings are as hard to correct as wrongful convictions in courts of law.

At a practical level, every professor should be aware of conditions that increase vulnerability to mobbing in academe. Here are five:
• Foreign birth and upbringing, especially as signaled by a foreign accent;
• Being different from most colleagues in an elemental way (by sex, for instance, sexual orientation, skin color, ethnicity, class origin, or credentials);
• Belonging to a discipline with ambiguous standards and objectives, especially those (like music or literature) most affected by postmodern scholarship;
• Working under a dean or other administrator in whom, as Nietzsche put it, “the impulse to punish is powerful”;
• An actual or contrived financial crunch in one’s academic unit (according to an African proverb, when the watering hole gets smaller, the animals get meaner).

Other conditions that heighten the risk of being mobbed are more directly under a prospective target’s control. Five major ones are:
• Having opposed the candidate who ends up winning appointment as one’s dean or chair (thereby looking stupid, wicked, or crazy in the latter’s eyes);
• Being a ratebuster, achieving so much success in teaching or research that colleagues’ envy is aroused;
• Publicly dissenting from politically correct ideas (meaning those held sacred by campus elites);
• Defending a pariah in campus politics or the larger cultural arena;
• Blowing the whistle on or even having knowledge of serious wrongdoing by locally powerful workmates.

The upshot of available research is that no professor needs to worry much about being mobbed, even in a generally vulnerable condition, so long as he or she does not rock the local academic boat. The secret is to show deference to colleagues and administrators, to be the kind of scholar they want to keep around as a way of making themselves look good. Jung said that “a man’s hatred is always concentrated on that which makes him conscious of his bad qualities.”

The target of intense, collective humiliation is ordinarily scarred for life.
Most of the mobbing targets I have studied were dumbstruck that such impassioned collective opprobrium could be heaped on them. They thought they were doing good work – as indeed they were, by standards broader than those locally in force. They trusted overmuch in reason, truth, goodness, and written guarantees of academic freedom and tenure. They missed the cue for when to shut up.

Mobbing is by now well researched and widely recognized as a workplace pathology. It is formally illegal in most European countries. Quebec enacted North America’s first anti-mobbing law in 2004. Such laws force mobbers to use subtler techniques.

Professors and other workers will continue to be mobbed from time to time. Most will be idealistic high achievers with loyalties higher than the local powers that be. Targets will be humiliated and punished – though less harshly than Socrates was. The academy has in some ways progressed.

Kenneth Westhues is Professor of Sociology at the University of Waterloo. His books on mobbing include Eliminating Professors (1998), The Envy of Excellence (2005), and The Remedy and Prevention of Mobbing in Higher Education (2006). For web resources on academic mobbing, google his name or go to mobbing.ca
 
Maybe these companies are just slow to catch on, or maybe these boycott's/backlashes against their pandering to a woke agenda just aren't working (or they just don't care…)

Makeup company Maybelline now using bearded 'men' to promote cosmetics…

I am confident these companies know exactly what they are doing, but are being asked or told to go along with the agenda and to take the profit loss from the divisiveness on the chin. These are circus distractions.
 
I am confident these companies know exactly what they are doing, but are being asked or told to go along with the agenda and to take the profit loss from the divisiveness on the chin. These are circus distractions.
The number of companies "enrolled" in this madness is astounding, giving the false impression that "everyone is supporting the movement," while in fact they are pushing a very unpopular stance that is blown out of proportion. So many companies are just "front doors" or "smoke screens," which fuels the illusion of choice because the debate over critical issues is not "to do or not to do" it's more "how to do <insert-already-planned-madness>"—and so these companies are different only in the way they apply the lunatic agenda; the man pulling the strings is the same.
 
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