Big Government and Big Tech are working to deny or conceal the truth in service of a new transgender orthodoxy. I’ve tried to sound the alarm about the real harms that would result, but the activists have a lot of corporate and political power on their side — as I was reminded recently when Amazon canceled my book.

Imagine feeling so alienated from your body that you would consider taking cross-sex hormones and removing your genitals. That’s the tragic situation that many people with gender dysphoria experience. They aren’t faking it, and they didn’t actively choose it.

But they aren’t getting the care they deserve — and, even worse, Big Government and Big Tech are working to deny or conceal the truth in service of a new transgender orthodoxy. I’ve tried to sound the alarm about the real harms that would result, but the activists have a lot of corporate and political power on their side — as I was reminded recently when Amazon canceled my book.

Some activists and self-proclaimed gender experts say the best solution to gender dysphoria lies in hormonal and surgical transition, a claim my book disputes.

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For instance, media outlets trumpeted a 2019 study that claimed to offer evidence in support of such interventions. But last August, the American Journal of Psychiatry was forced to issue a correction, acknowledging that “the results demonstrated no advantage of surgery in relation to subsequent mood or anxiety disorder-related health care.” In fact, the study’s authors also admitted that those who surgically transitioned “were more likely to be treated for anxiety disorders” than those who had not.

But media outlets seemed to all but totally ignore the correction. Just as they ignored what the health experts in the Obama administration had to say.

In August 2016, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid wrote that “the four best designed and conducted studies that assessed quality of life before and after surgery … did not demonstrate clinically significant changes … after (gender reassignment surgery).”

What does that mean in plain English? A population of patients is suffering so much that they go through radical surgeries, and the best research the Obama administration could find suggests that these surgeries bring them no meaningful improvements in their quality of life.

Things are even worse for children. Right now an experimental medical regime is being pushed — the off-label use of puberty blocking drugs to indefinitely block biologically appropriate puberty, administration of cross-sex hormones, and even double mastectomies on teens. Don’t believe that last claim? In a study published in 2018, mastectomies were even performed on two 13-year-old girls with gender dysphoria.

Most people recognize that children are too young to know what it even means to be a man or a woman, let alone to consent to such procedures. Indeed, for many of today’s genderfluid teens, something other than historic gender dysphoria may be at issue.

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