Former Intel Officials Scramble To Downplay Ratcliffe's Russiagate Releases

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Former Intel Officials Scramble To Downplay Ratcliffe's Russiagate Releases Tyler Durden Thu, 10/08/2020 - 11:45

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

US Intelligence officials were quick to speak through their stenographers in the media to downplay the contents of a memo released last week by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe about the origins of Russiagate. The memo made an explosive claim: Russian intelligence assessed that Hillary Clinton approved a campaign in July 2016 to link Donald Trump to Russia’s alleged hacking of the DNC to distract from Clinton’s email scandal.

After a week of sanctimonious statements from former intelligence officials, who according to Politico, were "aghast" with Ratcliffe’s decision to declassify the intelligence, the DNI declassified documents that showed the claim was not as "unverified" as these spooks would like the American people to believe.

Via the AP

In the memo released last week, Ratcliffe said handwritten notes from former CIA director John Brennan indicated that Brennan briefed President Obama on Clinton’s alleged plot. On Tuesday, Ratcliffe declassified those notes.

"We’re getting additional insight into Russian activities from [REDACTED]," Brennan’s notes read. "CITE [summarizing] alleged approved by Hillary Clinton a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service,"

Speaking with CNN after his notes were released, Brennan confirmed that he briefed Obama on this allegation.

"These were my notes from the 2016 period when I briefed President Obama and the rest of the national security council team about what the Russians were up to and I was giving examples of the type of access that the US intelligence community had to Russian information and what the Russians were talking about and alleging," Brennan said.

Before Brennan’s admission, the former CIA chief denounced Ratcliffe’s move to declassify the information and said the DNI is "is anything but an intelligence professional" and said Ratcliffe’s "selective declassification of information" was done to help President Trump. While Ratcliffe’s move was undoubtedly politically motivated, Brennan is in no position to judge anybody’s professionalism.

Brennan, who landed a job as an analyst for NBC in 2018, has used his prominence as a former CIA chief to make wild accusations about President Trump and Russia. After the 2018 Helsinki Summit, Brennan took to Twitter to accuse Trump of "treason" and said the president is "wholly in the pocket of Putin." In August 2018, Brennan penned an Op-Ed for The New York Times that said President Trump’s claims of no collusion are "hogwash." After Robert Mueller found no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, Brennan changed his tune and said he must have received "bad information." Whoops.

Ratcliffe also released a declassified CIA memo from September 2016 addressed to former FBI Director James Comey and then-Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok as part of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Trump campaign officials’ alleged ties to Russia.

"Per FBI verbal request, CIA provides the below examples of information the CROSSFIRE HURRICANE fusion cell has gleaned to date,” the memo reads. "An exchange [REDACTED] discussing US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning US presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering US elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server."

Last week, during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Senator Lindsey Graham asked Comey if he remembered receiving the memo, but the former FBI chief conveniently forgot. "That doesn’t ring any bells with me," Comey said.

The inspector general report on the FBI’s spying of the Trump campaign revealed multiple instances of the agency withholding and misrepresenting information to the FISA court to obtain surveillance warrants. For example, the FBI withheld the fact that Trump campaign advisor Carter Page had been working with the CIA in his dealings with Russia. The September 2016 memo alleging Clinton ordered to stir up a scandal linking Trump to Russia is just another example in a long list of information the FBI ignored to fit its narrative.

As Graham pointed out during the hearing and the great Russiagate debunker Aaron Maté pointed out on Twitter, the fact that the Clinton campaign tried to hype Trump-Russia ties is nothing new. It is well known that the campaign hired Fusion GPS and former British spy Christopher Steele to compile a now-discredited dossier about Trump’s alleged ties to Russia that relied heavily on internet rumors.

Ratcliffe’s memo says Clinton allegedly approved a campaign to stir up a scandal to distract from her emails on July 26^th, 2016. A look at the timeline of events suggests Russian intelligence based this analysis, at least partly, on open-source information.

WikiLeaks began publishing emails from the Democratic National Committee on July 22^nd, shortly before the Democratic National Convention. The emails were damning and revealed the DNC had a preference for Clinton and actively worked against the Bernie Sanders campaign.

The blog Moon of Alabama found Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook appeared on CNN on July 24^th and made what was possibly the first allegation that Russia had "hacked" the DNC in support of Trump. Mook made the claim with no evidence, citing unnamed "experts."

New on MoA:
DNI Letter Supports Allegation That Hillary Clinton Created 'Russiagate'
https://t.co/1IWhl9aKz9 pic.twitter.com/lbyTPdM4nZ

— Moon of Alabama (@MoonofA) September 30, 2020

"What’s disturbing to us is that experts are telling us Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, and other experts are now saying that the Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of actually of helping Donald Trump," Mook said.

As Bernhard put it at Moon of Alabama, "Mook’s TV appearance was probably a test balloon raised to see if such claims would stick." And stick they did.

The following day, The New York Times published a story that said, "the Russian-intervention narrative fits with Mrs. Clinton’s efforts to establish the idea that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia wants to see Mr. Trump elected to weaken America and hurt its closest NATO allies."

In an interview on July 26^th, 2016, President Obama alluded to the idea that Russia "hacked" the DNC to help Donald Trump. "What we do know is that the Russians hack our systems, not just government systems but private systems," Obama said. "What the motives were in terms of the leaks, all that – I can’t say directly. What I do know is that Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed admiration for Vladimir Putin."

The allegation that Russia hacked the DNC first came from the private cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike in June 2016. In its investigation, the FBI relied on CrowdStrike’s work and never had access to DNC servers. This year, a bombshell was revealed by declassified testimony from CrowdStrike President Shawn Henry before the House Intelligence Committee in 2017.

Henry admitted his firm had no "concrete evidence" that alleged Russian hackers stole data from the DNC servers. "There are times when we can see data exfiltrated, and we can say conclusively. But in this case it appears it was set up to be exfiltrated, but we just don’t have the evidence that says it actually left," Henry said.

As far as attributing the "hack" to Russia, Henry said, "There are other nation-states that collect this type of intelligence for sure, but the – what we would call the tactics and techniques were consistent with what we’d seen associated with the Russian state."

While Brennan and other former officials express their disdain at Trump’s DNI for selectively declassifying this latest information, it is important to understand that the claim underpinning the entire Russiagate narrative still has many holes. And the conspiracy would have never been born without selective leaks of information by Obama-era intelligence officials.

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As Boris Johnson Announces Britain’s ‘Great Reset,’ Were the Covid ‘Conspiracy Theorists’ Right All Along?

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The UK Prime Minister’s remote speech to his party conference saw him dismiss the idea of returning to normality. Is he using Covid-19 to follow the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ agenda, as many have warned?

‘It’s not really about public health or a virus. They have another agenda.’ That’s what the so-called ‘conspiracy theorists’ have been saying since March, when the first British lockdowns were imposed and our lives were turned upside down.

Those ‘conspiracy theorists’ were denounced, as always, as ‘cranks’ and ‘flat-Earthers’ but here we are in October, and, let’s face it, there is absolutely no sign, despite very low numbers of deaths ‘with’ Coronavirus, that we are returning to anything like normal. In fact, in his keynote speech yesterday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson specifically ruled out a return to normal, not even with a vaccine.

“After all we have been through, it isn’t enough just to go back to normal. We have lost too much. History teaches us that things of this magnitude – wars, famines, plagues, events that affect the vast bulk of humanity, as this virus has – they do not just come and go. They can be the trigger for economic and social change.”

When I heard Johnson utter those words I thought, ‘where have I heard this stuff before?’ Well, the answer is in the book ‘Covid-19: The Great Reset’ by Klaus Schwab, the executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, and Thierry Malleret. They too, like Johnson, invoked the Second World War as the trigger for fundamental changes, not only to the global order and global economy, but to society and the way human beings interact with one another. Like Johnson, they don’t want to return to normal. “Many of us are pondering when things will return to normal. The short response is never.”

Instead, Schwab and Malleret want a world changed forever by a virus which they admit is only ‘mild’ compared to others in history. Covid-19 is seen as the catalyst for the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’.

As to where all this is heading, I recommend you read Schwab’s ‘Great Reset’, and his earlier ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution’, but please don’t do so late at night, because they will probably give you nightmares. Schwab’s elitist Davos-man utopia is a trans-human, socially distanced, utterly soulless dystopia for the rest of us. Think of the most terrifying sci-film you’ve ever watched and that still doesn’t go anywhere near it. And the worst thing is that it is sold to us as some kind of ‘progressive’ vision.

Johnson, in his speech yesterday, showed he’s a fully-signed up ‘Great Resetter’. It was, for me, the most chilling oration ever made by any British prime minister at a party conference.

The man who justified a national lockdown in March on a purely temporary three-week basis to ‘flatten the curve’, and ‘protect the NHS’, and who said in the summer, after the lockdown had lasted three months, that he hoped Britain would return to ‘significant normality’ by November, now tells us: “We have been through too much frustration and hardship just to settle for the status quo ante – to think that life can go on as it was before the plague; and it will not… We are resolving not to go back to 2019.”

For Johnson, using the globalists’ phrase ‘Build Back Better’, this is the time to launch Britain on the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’. “From internet shopping to working from home, it looks as though Covid has massively accelerated changes in the world of work… as old jobs are lost and as new ones are created… The Covid crisis is a catalyst for change…” he said.

Did Schwab actually write his speech? It looks like it. Although Johnson didn’t use the phrase ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution’, he did mention a ‘Green Industrial Revolution’ twice.

Johnson foresees a future in which every home in Britain relies on wind power (he certainly produces a lot of that), and “instead of being dragged on big commutes to the city” people can “start a business in their home town… and bring up their children in the neighbourhoods where they grew up themselves.”

Working from home is here to stay, with “gigabit broadband,” shopping from home, conferencing from home… in fact, let’s do everything from home. Who needs to meet other human beings? Not that there’d be anywhere to meet, with pubs, cinemas and theatres all closed down due to the never-ending coronavirus restrictions.

Johnson pledged to make Britain “the greatest place on Earth” but to me it sounds more like hell. The question, as ever, is who benefits?

The World Economic Forum, founded by Schwab, has been incredibly influential when it comes to the changes we’ve already seen in 2020, and what is being openly planned for the future. It was the WEF which co-hosted the ‘Event 201’ conference in New York in October 2019, which modelled a fictional global pandemic.

It was at the WEF’s annual meeting in Davos on January 24, 2020 that Bill Gates’ Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovations (CEPI) held a press conference to announce a ‘new partnership’ to develop vaccines for the virus, when the number of confirmed worldwide cases was still in the hundreds.

It was the WEF’s Schwab who declared in June: “The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine and reset our world.”

It was the WEF that in July was promoting a Covid-19 ‘Health Passport’ app, the ‘brainchild’ of one of its ‘Young Global Leaders’, as the future for travel and attending events.

Travelling with confidence.

Read more: https://t.co/VIihRPwJPc pic.twitter.com/QmRGhYfURG

— World Economic Forum (@wef) July 30, 2020

And for those who don’t have the app or a ‘negative‘ test result? Well, you can just stay at home.

Conspiracy theorists eh?

“The World Economic Forum-backed project aims to create the first globally recognised proof that a passenger has tested negative for the virus before a flight, using a digital certificate downloaded to a mobile phone”

https://t.co/4RHLzeXeCv

— Simon Dolan #KBF (@simondolan) October 7, 2020

If you take a look at the ‘founding partners’ of the WEF’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution you’ll see names such as Microsoft, Palantir, Facebook, Netflix and Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, founded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Yes, that’s right, hi-tech online giants and hi-tech multi-billionaires supporting a big shift towards a stay-at-home, ‘do everything on the Internet’ society.

Is it a ‘conspiracy theory’ to say that Covid-19 is being used as a convenient opportunity to introduce long-planned changes to the economy and society, when those pushing for such changes like Schwab openly talk of there being a “rare but narrow window” for a major ‘reset’?

Actually, after Johnson’s speech yesterday, the biggest ‘conspiracy theorists’ now are those who DON’T think the British government is working to another agenda.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

The post As Boris Johnson Announces Britain’s ‘Great Reset,’ Were the Covid ‘Conspiracy Theorists’ Right All Along? appeared first on LewRockwell.

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Top infectious disease experts launch drive to end lockdowns

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(Pixabay image)

Leading epidemiologists have launched a petition calling for an end to lockdowns of the healthy and, instead, focusing on protecting the people who are vulnerable to the coronavirus.

Professors Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford and Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya of Stanford announced the effort in an interview Monday with Fox News' Laura Ingraham.

The Great Barrington Declaration states that as "infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection."

"Most of my colleagues in infectious disease," Kulldorf told Ingraham, "are in favor of risk-based strategy or an age-based strategy where we protect the elderly or other high risk groups while the younger resume life more or less normally."

At the time this article was published, more than 2,400
medical health and public health scientists had co-signed the declaration along with more than 2,700 practicing medical professionals.

Gupta and Bhattacharya emphasized that herd immunity should be the objective, contending it could be achieved in a relatively short amount of time.

COVID is not a "death sentence," Bhattacharya argued, alluding to survival rates of nearly 100% for those under 70 and nearly 95% for those who are older.

"I think we've created this idea in the public mind that it is something so unique and so deadly that we should utterly end all normal existence as a result of it," he said.

"That's not right. We can have a much better way. Protect the vulnerable. Shield them for a short period of time until we reach a level where there is population immunity," the Stanford professor said. "And for the rest of the world, let us live our lives."

The CDC last month issued new estimates that showed people under 50 years infected by COVID-19 have nearly a 100% survival rate. It broke down to a 99.997% survival rate for 0-19; 99.98% for ages 20-49; 99.5% for 50-69; and 94.6% for those over 70.

Those who died of coronavirus, according to the CDC, had an average of 2.6 comorbidities, meaning more than two chronic diseases along with COVID-19. Overall, the CDC says, just 6% of the people counted as COVID-19 deaths died of COVID-19 alone.

This week the World Health Organization said it currently estimates 10% of the world's population has been infected, meaning that by the U.N. body's own account, the infection fatality rate for COVID-19 is only 0.13%. That's a little more than one-tenth of 1%, which the WHO says is the rate for the seasonal flu.

The WHO's estimate in March of a death rate of 3.4% sparked panic worldwide, fueling the catastrophic lockdowns.

The Great Barrington Declaration argues that #COVID19 #lockdowns should be replaced with Focused Protection. Please sign.https://t.co/07nispEacW #GBdeclaration

— Martin Kulldorff (@MartinKulldorff) October 5, 2020

'Denying basic facts about biology'

Ingraham asked her guests to comment on White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci's insistence in an interview with CNN Monday night that "we need to flood the system" with "surveillance testing" to find out what the level of infection is in the community on a broad scale.

"I think that's a very inefficient use of very limited resources," Gupta said.

"What we really want to do is protect the vulnerable, so it makes every bit if sense to me that we would take those resources and use them to develop smart strategies to protect the vulnerable," she said.

By not testing those who have little risk, she said, "you actually allow that population to build up a level of immunity which in turn protects the vulnerable."

"So, it's a kind of win-win," she said.

Gupta said three to six months is sufficient time for enough immunity to accumulate so that the vulnerable can resume their normal lives.

Battacharya was asked to comment on the ridicule of the strategy of achieving herd immunity adopted successfully by Sweden.

"I think that denying herd immunity is like denying gravity. Gravity exists and herd immunity exists," he said.

He explained that even if a vaccine is developed, it's herd immunity that protects the population against the virus.

The real question, Battacharya said, is how to achieve herd immunity, and he contends the strategy the declaration advocates "will get us there more quickly, with less loss of life and less damage to other aspects of public health that get ignored, I think, by these doctors that are essentially denying basic facts about biology."

Ingraham said that keeping children from in-person classes "will go down as one of the most outrageous abuses of supposed science that we've seen in the last 50 years."

"Children are being kept from school with a 99.997% survival rate of anyone under the age of 19? It's insanity."

"I would have to agree," Gupta said. ... "It's absolutely tragic, it's unconscionable."

"We should appreciate young adults who help generate herd immunity by living normal lives and keeping society afloat. When people throw misguided complaints at you, falsely claiming that you are endangering others, remember that the opposite is true." https://t.co/6GZSgYg6jH

— Martin Kulldorff (@MartinKulldorff) August 17, 2020

Kulldorf and Bhattacharya recently participated in a roundtable with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in which they said the widescale lockdowns actually increase the risk to the vulnerable, slowing down the building of herd immunity for the population.

Bhattacharya emphasized the sharp difference in mortality rate for younger people, pointing out it's lower than the seasonal flu.

The current Centers for Disease Control data shows influenza is deadlier among children ages 0-17 than COVID-19. During the 2018-19 flu season, the CDC recorded 480 flu deaths among children ages 0-17 in the United States. About 90 died from coronavirus complications from the beginning of the pandemic through mid-August, the American Academy of Pediatrics said.

See the interview with Ingraham:

'Irreparable damage'

The Great Barrington Declaration emphasizes the "irreparable damage" caused by the lockdowns.

"Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people," it states.

"Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice," the epidemiologists write.

"Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed."

They note that knowledge of the coronavirus is growing and it's now known that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is "more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young."

"Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza."

They argue that as immunity builds the population, the risk of infection for everyone, including the vulnerable falls.

"We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e. the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine," they write.

"Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity."

They argue that the "most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk."

They call that approach "Focused Protection."

The post Top infectious disease experts launch drive to end lockdowns appeared first on WND.

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DNI Declassifies Brennan Notes; Briefed Obama On Intelligence That Hillary Clinton Concocted Trump-Russia Allegations

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DNI Declassifies Brennan Notes; Briefed Obama On Intelligence That Hillary Clinton Concocted Trump-Russia Allegations Tyler Durden Tue, 10/06/2020 - 16:19

Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe on Tuesday declassified several documents, including handwritten notes from former CIA John Brennan after he briefed former President Obama on an alleged plot by Hillary Clinton to tie then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia as "a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server" ahead of the 2016 US election, according to Fox News.

Ratcliffe declassified Brennan’s handwritten notes – which were taken after he briefed Obama on the intelligence the CIA received – and a CIA memo, which revealed that officials referred the matter to the FBI for potential investigative action.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence transmitted the declassified documents to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees on Tuesday afternoon.

"Today, at the direction of President Trump, I declassified additional documents relevant to ongoing Congressional oversight and investigative activities," Ratcliffe said in a statement to Fox News Tuesday. -Fox News

"We’re getting additional insight into Russian activities from [REDACTED]," read Brennan's notes. "CITE [summarizing] alleged approved by Hillary Clinton a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service."

Working link for #2: https://t.co/XQICFDr7Kj

— Ivan Pentchoukov (@IvanPentchoukov) October 6, 2020

As we noted last week after Ratcliffe previewed the allegation:

On September 7, 2016, US intelligence officials forwarded an investigative referral to former FBI officials James Comey and Peter Strzok concerning allegations that Hillary Clinton approved a plan to smear then-candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian hackers, according to information given to Sen. Lindsey Graham by the Director of National Intelligence.

According to Fox News' Chad Pergram, "In late July 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump," after one of Clinton's foreign policy advisers proposed vilifying Trump "by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services."

2) DNI info to Grahm:...by tying him to Putin and the Russians' hacking of the Democratic National Committee. The IC does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.”

— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) September 29, 2020

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Australia: Mom arrested at beach for traveling 'outside her permitted 5 km radius'

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(ZEROHEDGE) – We've previously detailed protests that have sprung up in various major cities across the Australian continent over authorities' ultra-restrictive coronavirus lockdown measures, which are especially stringent and far-reaching in the southeast state of Victoria.

There's been multiple instances caught on video of police cracking down on elderly people and even pregnant women for merely resting outside on park benches, supposedly in "violation" of coronavirus social distancing measures, even as case numbers have significantly dropped since August. And now here's the latest incident to go viral as citizens flock to newly reopened beaches, after Victoria slightly relaxed some of its more severe lockdown restrictions.

Police were out in force this weekend looking for 'excessive crowds' and 'mask rules violators'. And more outrageous is that Victoria is currently enforcing a law that says citizens cannot venture five kilometers from their home.

Read the full story ›

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PCR Inventor: “It doesn’t tell you that you are sick”

There has been a great deal of controversy over claims that Kary Mullis, the creator of the PCR technology that is being widely used to test for so-called ‘cases’ of COVID-19, did not believe the technology was suitable for detecting a meaningful presence of a virus.

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US College Campus Update - 70,000 "positive" PCR tests and only 3 hospitalizations. Herd Immunity being reached.

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US University Update:

70,000 Positive PCR Tests

3 Hospitalizations

0 deaths

Most of the 70,000 "positive" PCR tests will be from tiny traces of viral remains from recovered people, who are now immune and not a threat to anyone.

A few will be asymptomatic infections, who are unlikely to have enough viral load to be infectious.

A tiny proportion will be new cases with people who have mild flu symptoms.

A miniscule number 3 out of 70,000, (or 0.004%) have become seriously ill, requiring hospitalisation.

Young people are more at risk from lightning strikes than Covid.

Having more young people in their late teens and 20's exposed to the virus is a good thing, as there is very little risk of them becoming ill and they will bolster Herd Immunity when they recover, reducing the risk of elderly vulnerable people over 65 catching it.

US is at or near Herd Immunity in large parts of the country, as witnessed by the slowly declining official daily new cases and daily new deaths.

 

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Forget What Gender Activists Tell You. Here’s What Medical Transition Looks Like

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At a recent gathering, a daughter’s friend told us, “I’m probably trans because I don’t like female puberty.” This instantly got my attention, because I have known this child for years, and I never saw any indication of her being trans. I innocently asked her why she would say that. Was it a joke, perhaps? She replied, “I don’t like my boobs growing, and Reddit says I’m probably trans.”

That night, I tracked down these Reddit exchanges, and my jaw dropped when I saw how many people and organizations were heavily pushing the possibility of her being trans. But perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, given the way such attitudes have gone mainstream. This includes the pediatrician mom whose recent opinion piece for the New York Times was titled What I Learned as the Parent of a Transgender Child. For kids Googling this subject, the overall effect is the equivalent of one big glitter bomb going off on their screen.

I write all this as a 47-year-old transgender man who transitioned five years ago. I’m also a parent to three teenagers. Though I admire the good intentions of parents who seek to support their children, I have serious concerns about reckless acquiescence to a child’s Internet-mediated self-diagnosis. Many older transgender folks share these concerns, too. In many cases, we are people who have been quietly going about our lives in society for years, anonymously sharing shops, offices, elevators, and sidewalks with everyone else, without making a big deal of our identity or proselytizing to others. We like it that way. But given the current climate, we now need to speak out.

That one comment by my daughter’s friend caused me to investigate the organizations that purport to advocate on behalf of the trans community. I found that they typically push an approach based on quickly and enthusiastically affirming any indication of gender dysphoria. As someone who is trans myself, I know that this is the wrong approach. Yes, some children who say they are trans really will need to transition one day, because they have a lifelong condition. But parents who automatically assume that this is the case with their child aren’t necessarily following the child’s best interests.

Transgenderism isn’t a vague feeling, or a distaste for stereotypical roles. It’s a serious internal condition that causes you to want to become the opposite sex. Medical transition, such as the kind I went through, can enhance an illusion that helps some gender dysphoric individuals navigate the world with more comfort. It did for me, and it was the right path for me to choose.

I wasn’t “born in the wrong body.” I was born female. But I didn’t like it. So I changed my appearance, at significant monetary, psychological, and physical cost, with plastic surgery and hormones. My sex never changed, though. Only my appearance changed.

Anyone going through this is in store for a brutal process. Yet we now have thousands of naïve parents walking their children into gender-treatment centers, often based on Internet-peddled narratives that present the transition experience through a gauzy rainbow lens. Many transition therapies are still in an experimental phase—as you will learn if you become sick during or after these treatments.

During my own transition, I had seven surgeries. I also had a massive pulmonary embolism, a helicopter life-flight ride, an emergency ambulance ride, a stress-induced heart attack, sepsis, a 17-month recurring infection due to using the wrong skin during a (failed) phalloplasty, 16 rounds of antibiotics, three weeks of daily IV antibiotics, the loss of all my hair, (only partially successful) arm reconstructive surgery, permanent lung and heart damage, a cut bladder, insomnia-induced hallucinations—oh and frequent loss of consciousness due to pain from the hair on the inside of my urethra. All this led to a form of PTSD that made me a prisoner in my apartment for a year. Between me and my insurance company, medical expenses exceeded $900,000.

During these 17 months of agony, I couldn’t get a urologist to help me. They didn’t feel comfortable taking me on as a patient—since the phalloplasty, like much of the transition process, is experimental. “Could you go back to the original surgeon?” they suggested.

Whenever you question the maximalist activist line on trans affirmation, you are directed to The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (or WPATH) as a reference. But much of what you find there consists of vague phrases such as “up to doctor’s discretion.” Several lawyers suggested I had a slam-dunk medical-malpractice case—until they realized that trans health doesn’t really have a justiciable baseline. As a result, treatment often is subpar, as I have experienced first-hand.

Lupron, the hormone blocker some doctors seem intent on giving to kids like Tylenol, isn’t even FDA-approved to treat children with gender dysphoria. (In 2001, the manufacturer pled guilty to fraudulent sales practices with regard to its marketing as a prostate-cancer drug.) We don’t yet know its long-term effects off-label, despite the fact parents have been assured that its effects are safe and even reversible.

Here is what we do know: The long-term use of synthetic hormone therapy shortens lives. Specifically, these medications are associated with an increased risk of heart attacks, pulmonary embolisms, bone damage, liver and kidney failure, mental-health complications, and more. Almost a quarter of hormone-therapy patients on high-dose anabolic steroids (such as the testosterone taken by female-to-male transitioners) exhibit major mood-syndrome symptoms. Between three and 12 percent go on to develop symptoms of psychosis.

Children who claim to be trans typically are receiving such drugs at a pivotal time in the development of brains and bones. They’ve become a generation of guinea pigs, to answer such questions as: What will happen to a biological boy who takes sex hormones associated with the opposite sex (or vice versa), and grows up without the benefit of natural puberty? What happens to a male body on estrogen over the long term? No one knows.

In regard to the emotional effects of transition, many activists will refer you to a 2018 Pediatrics journal article entitled “Transgender Adolescent Suicide Behavior.” But the study reported therein was based on just three years of data—collected between 2012 and 2015. What matters is the long term. And in this regard, the gold standard is a study of 324 medically transitioned adults, based on 30-year longitudinal data. The authors found that completing sex-reassignment surgery was associated with “considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity” as compared to the general population. Kids who are suicidal before their transition will likely continue to be suicidal, and the most intense ideation often comes years after transitioning. (Transgender folks themselves sometimes speak anecdotally of a seven-to-10-year trans suicide “itch” observed within the community.)

Death from any cause as a function of time after sex reassignment among 324 transsexual persons in Sweden. Source: NCBI.

None of this is information that radicalized trans activists seek to publicize. In 2019, they trumpeted an article entitled Reduction in Mental Health Treatment Utilization Among Transgender Individuals After Gender-Affirming Surgeries, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, which purported to show the benefits of transition. When the same authors came back in August 2020 to admit that their data actually didn’t show any significant benefit from transition, few bothered to report the correction.

I have observed that when any argument is raised against a policy of no-questions-asked affirmation, activists seek to pre-empt discussion of the actual data by instead summoning up the specter of suicide—some version of “I would rather have a live daughter than a dead son.” Terrified parents are made to feel as if any expression of concern or skepticism is a gateway to the grave. It’s a passive aggressive form of emotional terrorism.

From my own experience, and from countless conversations with my transgender friends, I can report that most of us regret at least some—though maybe not all—parts of our transition. Even for those who transition successfully, finding peace has stages and takes time. At first, everything is new and exciting. Then, as the years go on, reality sets in, and you have to face up to the reality of biological sex, not to mention the health issues. This is not a life of glitter bombs.

The UK seems to be further ahead than North America in coming to understand that treatment decisions are happening too fast. The National Health Service (NHS) recently changed its stance on medically transitioning children, from presumed approval to a more cautious approach, even warning parents (accurately) that it is “not known whether hormone blockers affect the development of the teenage brain or children’s bones.” The NHS also notes that “most treatments offered at this stage are psychological rather than medical. This is because in many cases gender variant behaviour or feelings disappear as children reach puberty.” Perhaps the law suits are causing people to wake up. “I should have been challenged on the proposals or the claims that I was making for myself,” reports one British plaintiff. “And I think that would have made a big difference as well. If I was just challenged.”

As someone who has experienced medical transition first-hand, I am convinced that it’s better to err on the side on discretion, and leave life-altering decisions to adults who have the benefit of a fully developed brain. The next time my daughter’s friend, or any child, comes to me for advice on their gender dysphoria, here’s what I’d tell them: “There are people who need to medically transition to walk peacefully through their lives, and you, kiddo, might be that person. But, right now, you are a child, and your body is developing everything you need to be a healthy, happy, strong adult. When you grow up, you get to decide about your life.”

For parents, I would say this: It is simply not your right or duty to decide to medically transition your child. Remove that burden from your mind. Medical transition is for adults. The negatives associated with medical transition are vast, and you won’t be the one who lives with the consequences. It will be your child. If your child tells you they will kill themselves if you do not allow them to medically transition (perhaps following a script he or she is provided on Reddit or Tumblr), take them to the hospital so they can be treated for suicidal ideation. Suicidal ideation and seeking transition are separate issues, so separate them.

We talk a lot about oppression and marginalization. Well, I’m one of the people who’s been oppressed and marginalized—more so now that I have outed myself so that I can try to help others. The least you can do is pay attention to my message.

 

 

Scott Newgent, a 47-year-old transgender man and trans-father living in Texas, is the founder of TReVoices, a group of trans educators who oppose radical gender activism, and seek to educate politicians and families about the reality of gender dysphoria. He tweets at @ScottNewgent.

Featured image: Author Scott Newgent.

 

The post Forget What Gender Activists Tell You. Here’s What Medical Transition Looks Like appeared first on Quillette.

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