Attorneys General Warn Academy of Pediatrics It May Be Breaking the Law With Child Gender Statements

I was pleased to see the news that 22 Attorneys General, including our great Texan Ken Paxton, have just sent a letter to the American Academy of Pediatrics, warning that corrupt organization that it may be breaking the law with its misleading statements about so-called "gender dysphoria" in minors and the best way to treat it. As reported in a press release by the Do No Harm organization:

Twenty attorneys general signed a letter to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Tuesday warning the medical association that its statements supporting gender medical interventions for children are “deceptive” and may violate states’ consumer protection laws.

The letter, led by Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador, asks the AAP to substantiate its claims that puberty blockers are reversible and to provide information on its communications surrounding its gender medicine guidance.

“Amid a fracturing consensus among the medical establishment on sex change surgeries and drugs for minors, the American Academy of Pediatrics has refused to reevaluate their recommendations,” said Do No Harm Senior Fellow Dr. Jared Ross. “We applaud Attorney General Labrador and all the other attorneys general who are holding the AAP accountable for endorsing unscientific, experimental, and potentially harmful treatments.”

The letter pointed to the AAP’s 2018 policy statement – that the organization reaffirmed in August 2023 – that characterized puberty blockers as “reversible.”

“The 2018 AAP policy statement itself demonstrates that the ‘reversible’ claim is  misleading and deceptive,” the letter states. “It acknowledges that ‘[r]esearch on long-term risks, particularly in terms of bone metabolism and fertility, is currently limited and provides varied results.’ The AAP has no basis to assure parents that giving their children puberty blockers can be fully reversed. It just isn’t true.”

As many of us may recall of our own early adolescence, it is a time of great emotional instability in which one's sense of self may shift radically within a short period of time. The best longterm study (by Dr. Kenneth Zucker) of minors who display symptoms of confusion about their gender shows that the majority of them will experience a resolution of these symptoms around the age of 18 or 19. About 10% of the boys simply come to terms with the fact that they are gay, and do not really long to become girls.

The Italian painter Caravaggio was fond of depicting effeminate looking boys. While often thought to have been a gay man, he once killed a man in a duel over a woman, so it’s not exactly clear where his preferences lay. The following image of an adolescent boy strikes me as very strange and mysterious.

The boy is being bit by a lizard—an apparent allusion to the Martial epigram, “Ad te reptanti, puer insidiose, lacertae Parce: cupit digitis illa perire tuis. (Spare this lizard crawling towards you, treacherous boy/It wants to die between your fingers).

Martial shared Pliny’s interpretation of a famous Greek sculpture mistakenly called Apollo Sauroktonos because it depicts a young Apollo who was thought to be about to slay a lizard crawling up a tree.

I believe that this Roman interpretation of the older Greek sculpture was probably wrong. The most important characteristic of the sculpture is that it depicts Apollo as an adolescent, and not as a grown man, when he became known for his ice cold and pitiless reason. Thus, it seems to me the better interpretation is that Apollo the adolescent wanted to play with the lizard, not to kill it. After all, boys do like to play with lizards.

Coincidentally, right as I received this great news that Attorneys General Labrador, Paxton, et al. have exhorted the Academy of Pediatrics to quit being stupid and misleading, I also received the following meme. While it may appear to be primarily intended as a form of extremely vulgar humor, as with all comedy, it's effective because it expresses an underlying truth.