Twenty-six U.S. states have banned certain medical interventions for children with gender dysphoria. In a free country, the barrier for straight up banning a medical intervention needs to be very high. The evidence needs to be overwhelming that such interventions are bad—that they do far more harm than good. That is not the case for puberty suppressing drugs, hormone replacement therapy, or even surgery. Such bans are an insult to liberty and should be removed.
If a doctor, parent, and child, all agree that a particular medical intervention is the best solution for their problem, then who the Hell is the government to stop them? Who the Hell are you to stop them? It doesn’t matter how you feel about transgenders, unless such interventions are clearly net bad for patients to the point where no reasonable person would perform them, they should not be banned.
There are lots of studies on transgender interventions, and there is some evidence that puberty suppression, hormones, and/or surgery help children and adolescents with their gender dysphoria, their quality of life, depression, and even lessens their chance of suicide. Unfortunately, that evidence is mixed and the studies are far from conclusive. Researchers on both sides seem biased and exaggerate the quality of evidence for their positions while undervaluing the evidence in favor of other positions.
The evidence is mixed enough that doctors and parents need to approach such decisions with a heavy dose of caution. The burden of evidence for stopping, and especially changing, a child’s natural puberty needs to fall on the intervention. If doctors are negligently transitioning kids who should not be transitioned, then those doctors should be charged and sued under normal medical malpractice or negligence laws. We don’t need to ban procedures to enforce basic medical law.
I strongly encourage parents and medical professionals to be careful about transitioning children, and for parents to get second opinions from different-thinking doctors. The evidence in favor of such interventions is quite modest, and it’s hard to tell which children are more likely to benefit from them. Nevertheless, such decisions should be in the hands of the parents, doctors, and the children, not the government. We are not truly a free country if medical interventions can be banned on such weak justifications.
What the Science on Gender-Affirming Care for Transgender Kids Really Shows Heather Boerner. 2022 5 12. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-the-science-on-gender-affirming-care-for-transgender-kids-really-shows Mastectomy John Hopkins Medicine. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/breast-cancer/mastectomy#:~:text=A%20mastectomy%20is%20surgery%20to,a%20high%20risk%20for%20it. Correction: Access to gender-affirming hormones during adolescence and mental health outcomes among transgender adults Jack L. Turban et
“States’ efforts to create and then tightly regulate legal markets for pot have, ironically, made the black market for weed bigger than it’s ever been.”
“If stopping the flow of illegal drugs is as straightforward as Trump implies, one might wonder, why didn’t he do that during his first term? “I’m going to create borders,” he promised during his 2016 campaign. “No drugs are coming in. We’re gonna build a wall. You know what I’m talking about. You have confidence in me. Believe me, I will solve the problem.”
Trump did not, in fact, solve the problem. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the annual number of drug-related deaths in the United States rose by 44 percent between 2016 and Trump’s last year in office.
As drug warriors have been discovering since Congress banned nonmedical use of opiates and cocaine in 1914, prohibition creates a strong financial incentive to evade any obstacles that the government manages to erect between suppliers and consumers. That problem is compounded in the case of fentanyl, which is cheap to produce and highly potent, making it possible to smuggle large numbers of doses in small packages.”
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“Mexican drug cartels “move illicit fentanyl into the United States, primarily across the southwestern border, often in passenger vehicles,” the CRS reports. “The U.S.
Department of Homeland Security asserts that 90% of [seized] fentanyl is interdicted at ports of entry, often in vehicles driven by U.S. citizens. A primary challenge for both
Mexican and U.S. officials charged with stopping the fentanyl flow is that [the cartels] can meet U.S. demand with a relatively small amount.”
Finding those small amounts among the hundreds of thousands of cars and trucks that cross into the United States from Canada and Mexico each day is a daunting task.”
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” Even if the U.S. “managed to stop 100 percent of direct [fentanyl] sales to the US, enterprising dealers [would] simply sell into nations such as the UK, repackage the product, and then resell it into the US,” economist Roger Bate noted in a 2018 American Enterprise Institute report. “Intercepting all packages from the UK and other EU nations to the US will not be possible.” And “whether or not drugs are available to the general public via the mail,” Bate added, “drug dealers have domestic production and overland and sea routes and other courier services that deliver the product to the US.””
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“after Trump had four years to deliver on his promise that “no drugs” would be “coming in” during his administration. Yet he now claims that Mexican and Canadian officials could accomplish what he manifestly failed to do if only they tried harder.”
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“Even if severe legal penalties were enough to deter all Chinese suppliers of fentanyl precursors, that would not be the end of the story. As The New York Times recently noted, Mexican cartels already have a backup plan: They are recruiting “chemistry students studying at Mexican universities” so they can “synthesize the chemical compounds, known as precursors, that are essential to making fentanyl, freeing them from having to import those raw materials from China.””
https://reason.com/2024/12/11/trumps-plan-to-fight-illegal-drugs-with-punitive-tariffs-makes-no-sense/
“”The DEA’s attempt to classify DOI, a compound of great significance to both psychedelic and fundamental serotonin research, as a Schedule I substance exemplifies an administrative agency overstepping its bounds,” Rush says. “The government admits DOI is not being diverted for use outside of scientific research yet insists on placing this substance in such a restricted class that it will disrupt virtually all current research.”
SSDP describes the two compounds as “essential research chemicals in pre-clinical psychiatry and neurobiology,” noting that their unscheduled status has made them accessible as tools for studying serotonin receptors. It says DOI, in particular, has been “a cornerstone in neuroscience research” due to its selectivity for the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor, crucial for understanding the therapeutic effects of psychedelics. Scientists have used DOI to “map the localization of an important serotonin receptor in the brain critical in learning, memory, and psychiatric disease,” SSDP notes, and DOI studies “have shown encouraging results in managing pain and reducing opioid cravings.””
“”Manufacturing a paper bag takes about four times as much energy as it takes to produce a plastic bag, plus the chemicals and fertilizers…create additional harm to the environment,” explains National Geographic. “(F)or a paper bag to neutralize its environmental impact compared to plastic, it would have to be used anywhere from three to 43 times.” Given that paper bags aren’t very durable, “it is unlikely that a person would get enough use out of any one bag to even out the environmental impact.””
“On the one hand, Trump frequently claims credit for the Supreme Court’s decision eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion — and well he should, since the three Republicans he appointed to the Supreme Court all joined the Court’s 2022 decision permitting abortion bans. As Trump told Fox News last summer, “I did something that no one thought was possible. I got rid of Roe v. Wade.”
At the same time, Trump at least claims that he has no interest in signing new federal legislation banning abortion. When a reporter asked Trump if he would sign such a ban last month, Trump’s answer was an explicit “no.”
Behind the scenes, however, many of Trump’s closest allies tout a plan to ban abortion in all 50 states that doesn’t require any new federal legislation whatsoever.”
“It is not yet clear whether the alternative protein products known variously as “lab-grown,” “cell-cultivated,” or “cultured” meat will deliver the environmental benefits touted by their boosters or when they will be appealing and cheap enough to be competitive with conventional poultry, beef, and pork. But Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis already has made up his mind, deeming these products so repellent that selling them should be a crime.
When he signed the nation’s first ban on cultivated meat last week, DeSantis said he was “fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals.” That bizarre, Orwellian spin, which portrays legal restrictions on consumer choice as a blow against authoritarianism, illustrates how right-wing virtue signaling—in this case reinforced by protectionism—compromises conservative principles by turning even activities as mundane as a trip to the supermarket into a political issue.
The technology that revolts the governor, first developed in 2013, uses cell samples to grow meat in bioreactors, obviating the need to raise and slaughter animals. Worldwide, more than 150 companies are working on such products, but they have been approved for sale only in Singapore and the United States, where their distribution so far has been limited to chicken sold by restaurants in San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
DeSantis nevertheless claims to think the threat posed by this nascent industry is grave enough to justify its criminalization. His reference to mandatory bug eating, bewildering on its face, goes to the meat of his complaint.
As DeSantis tells it, a “global elite” is conspiring to stop people from eating good, old-fashioned meat based on dubious environmental concerns, leaving consumers with icky alternatives that include insects as well as “fake meat.” As evidence of that conspiracy, DeSantis cites a 2021 World Economic Forum article describing insects as “a credible and efficient alternative protein source,” which he says reflects “the World Economic Forum’s goal of forcing the world to eat lab-grown meat and insects.””
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“Although the Yale-educated, Harvard-trained lawyer’s populist pose is hard to take seriously, he evidently thinks it will appeal to Republican voters gullible enough to accept his equation of coercion with freedom. DeSantis is also playing to entrenched economic interests, as reflected in his promise to protect “100% real Florida beef” produced by “local farmers and ranchers.””
“In spring 2022, just months before the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Republicans in Florida passed a law banning abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, down from the previous legal threshold of 24 weeks. It took effect that summer, but advocates for reproductive rights challenged it in state court as unconstitutional.
One year later, Republicans in Florida took even more aggressive action against reproductive freedom: Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a new bill to restrict abortion at six weeks of pregnancy. But the fate of that law rested on what the court would decide about the 15-week ban. If it decided that ban was legal, the six-week ban would be, too.
In early April, nearly two years after challengers first filed their lawsuit, the Florida Supreme Court finally issued its ruling: The 15-week ban is constitutional under state law, and therefore the six-week ban would take effect 30 days later, on May 1.
In practical terms, six weeks is a total ban. Many people do not even know they’re pregnant by then. Even if they are aware, Florida requires patients seeking abortions to complete two in-person doctor visits with a 24-hour waiting period in between, a challenging logistical burden to meet before 15 weeks and a nearly impossible one before six.
Not only will the six-week ban decimate abortion access for Florida residents, but it will also significantly curtail care for people across the South, who have been traveling to Florida from more restrictive states since Roe was overturned. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research group, there were 8,940 more abortions in Florida in 2023 compared to 2020—a 12 percent increase that researchers attribute largely to travel from out-of-state patients. Residents of Florida’s bordering states face either a total ban (Alabama) or a six-week ban (Georgia).”
“Abortion bans with no health exception are horrible for women and for medical professionals. Oregon doctor Jennifer Lincoln referred to them as “not dead enough yet” rules. If a pregnant woman shows up at a doctor’s office or hospital with serious and potentially-but-not-yet life-threatening complications, doctors’ hands are tied.
Under such a paradigm, performing an abortion is illegal until it’s certain a woman’s life itself is in jeopardy. This leaves women in the terrible position of having to wait while their health worsens, knowing all the while that a (possibly much-wanted) pregnancy cannot continue and also that the longer they wait, the greater the chance of damage to their reproductive organs or other body parts. And steep penalties for performing an abortion outside of life-threatening emergencies may lead some doctors or health systems to be overly cautious from a liability perspective, further putting pregnant women’s health at risk.
Meanwhile, doctors are put in the position of having to either send women in such circumstances out of state if possible or simply watch and wait while their patient’s condition deteriorates.”