This article by David Weintraub is republished here with permission from The Conversation. This content is shared here because the topic may interest Snopes readers; it does not, however, represent the work of Snopes fact-checkers or editors.
Bright stars top Christmas trees in Christian homes around much of the world. The faithful sing about the “Star of Wonder” that guided the wise men to a manger in the little town of Bethlehem, where Jesus was born. They’re commemorating the Star of Bethlehem described by the Evangelist Matthew in the New Testament. Is the star’s biblical description a pious fiction, or does it contain some astronomical truth?
Puzzles for astronomy
To understand the Star of Bethlehem, we need to think like the three wise men. Motivated by this “star in the east,” they first traveled to Jerusalem and told King Herod the prophecy that a new ruler of the people of Israel would be born. We also need to think like King Herod, who asked the wise men when the star had appeared, because he and his court, apparently, were unaware of any such star in the sky.
These events present us with our first astronomy puzzle of the first Christmas: How could King Herod’s own advisors have been unaware of a star so bright and obvious that it could have led the wise men to Jerusalem?
Next, in order to reach Bethlehem, the wise men had to travel directly south from Jerusalem; somehow that “star in the east” “went before them, ‘til it came and stood over where the young child was.” Now we have our second first-Christmas astronomy puzzle: how can a star “in the east” guide our wise men to the south? The north star guides lost hikers to the north, so shouldn’t a star in the east have led the wise men to the east?
And we have yet a third first-Christmas astronomy puzzle: how does Matthew’s star move “before them,” like the taillights on the snowplow you might follow during a blizzard, and then stop and stand over the manger in Bethlehem, inside of which supposedly lies the infant Jesus?
The astronomer in me knows that no star can do these things, nor can a comet, or Jupiter, or a supernova, or a conjunction of planets or any other actual bright object in the nighttime sky. One can claim that Matthew’s words describe a miracle, something beyond the laws of physics. But Matthew chose his words carefully and wrote “star in the east” twice, which suggests that these words hold a specific importance for his readers.
Can we find any other explanation, consistent with Matthew’s words, that doesn’t require that the laws of physics be violated and that has something to do with astronomy? The answer, amazingly, is yes.
Astrological answers to astronomical puzzles
Astronomer Michael Molnar points out that “in the east” is a literal translation of the Greek phrase en te anatole, which was a technical term used in Greek mathematical astrology 2,000 years ago. It described, very specifically, a planet that would rise above the eastern horizon just before the sun would appear. Then, just moments after the planet rises, it disappears in the bright glare of the sun in the morning sky. Except for a brief moment, no one can see this “star in the east.”
We need a little bit of astronomy background here. In a human lifetime, virtually all the stars remain fixed in their places; the stars rise and set every night, but they do not move relative to each other. The stars in the Big Dipper appear year after year always in the same place. But the planets, the sun and the moon wander through the fixed stars; in fact, the word “planet” comes from the Greek word for wandering star. Though the planets, sun and moon move along approximately the same path through the background stars, they travel at different speeds, so they often lap each other. When the sun catches up with a planet, we can’t see the planet, but when the sun passes far enough beyond it, the planet reappears.
And now we need a little bit of astrology background. When the planet reappears again for the first time and rises in the morning sky just moments before the sun, for the first time in many months after having been hidden in the sun’s glare for those many months, that moment is known to astrologers as a heliacal rising. A heliacal rising, that special first reappearance of a planet, is what en te anatole referred to in ancient Greek astrology. In particular, the reappearance of a planet like Jupiter was thought by Greek astrologers to be symbolically significant for anyone born on that day.
Thus, the “star in the east” refers to an astronomical event with supposed astrological significance in the context of ancient Greek astrology.
What about the star parked directly above the first crèche? The word usually translated as “stood over” comes from the Greek word epano, which also had an important meaning in ancient astrology. It refers to a particular moment when a planet stops moving and changes apparent direction from westward to eastward motion. This occurs when the Earth, which orbits the sun more quickly than Mars or Jupiter or Saturn, catches up with, or laps, the other planet.
Together, a rare combination of astrological events (the right planet rising before the sun; the sun being in the right constellation of the zodiac; plus a number of other combinations of planetary positions considered important by astrologers) would have suggested to ancient Greek astrologers a regal horoscope and a royal birth.
Wise men looking to the skies
Molnar believes that the wise men were, in fact, very wise and mathematically adept astrologers. They also knew about the Old Testament prophecy that a new king would be born of the family of David. Most likely, they had been watching the heavens for years, waiting for alignments that would foretell the birth of this king. When they identified a powerful set of astrological portents, they decided the time was right to set out to find the prophesied leader.
Giotto Scrovegni’s Adoration of the Magi depicted the Star of Bethlehem as a comet.
If Matthew’s wise men actually undertook a journey to search for a newborn king, the bright star didn’t guide them; it only told them when to set out. And they wouldn’t have found an infant swaddled in a manger. After all, the baby was already eight months old by the time they decoded the astrological message they believed predicted the birth of a future king. The portent began on April 17 of 6 BC (with the heliacal rising of Jupiter that morning, followed, at noon, by its lunar occultation in the constellation Aries) and lasted until December 19 of 6 BC (when Jupiter stopped moving to the west, stood still briefly, and began moving to the east, as compared with the fixed background stars). By the earliest time the men could have arrived in Bethlehem, the baby Jesus would likely have been at least a toddler.
Matthew wrote to convince his readers that Jesus was the prophesied Messiah. Given the astrological clues embedded in his gospel, he must have believed the story of the Star of Bethlehem would be convincing evidence for many in his audience.
A Pakistani convert to Christianity who nearly blew herself up in the name of Allah says a spiritual journey that began with a dream transformed her from being a jihadi-minded teen into a devout Christian who's making disciples for Christ.
...The light man
But about two days before Esther was set to go on her suicide mission, she had a dream where she sat in a dark graveyard. The dream came after she fell asleep during her early-morning Muslim prayer.
“I was in a graveyard. Everywhere was darkness. I was looking for a way out of the darkness. … As I was looking to come out from that graveyard, I saw a light appear,” she recounted. “And the light has arms, hands and face. I asked, ‘Is this a man made of light?’ I have never seen a man made of light. If it is an angel, there should be wings behind it. But there are no wings, just a man made of light.”
Esther said she called out to the light man, who responded with the words: “come and follow me.”
However, Esther told the man that she didn’t want to follow. At that point, the light man called out: “Esther, come and follow me.” Esther again refused, and for a third time the light called: “My daughter, come and follow me.”
“It was like, He had a connection with my thoughts. He started to walk. As he started walk, all the bushes and stones were moved off the path,” Esther said.
“I saw the light he made on the path. I started to follow the path. He stopped at one grave and he said to someone who was dead. He said, ‘Come out.’ And the person came out. I said, ‘Who are you giving life to dead people? He said, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life.’ These words, I never heard in all of my life. I said please help me to come out from this graveyard.”
Esther said she was then brought into an “amazing place” with a golden wall and tons of natural light. At that point of the dream, she woke up.
“I couldn’t sleep afterward. I was thinking about who was the light man and why did he call me Esther?” she asked. “Why did he say I am the way and the truth and the life. Why didn’t he call me by my name?”
She told a classmate at school about her dream the next day. The classmate turned out to be Christian but Esther refused to accept prayer from her. Growing up in Pakistan, Esther was taught that Christians and Jews are “infidels” and that she was not to mingle with them.
The next day, the classmate gave Esther an audio cassette and two books. One book was the Gospel of John and the tape featured a reading of the four Gospels. Esther destroyed the materials.
On the third day after her dream, Esther met a Christian man named John when she took her mother to the hospital for a checkup.
When John didn’t greet her with the traditional Muslim greeting, she found out that he was a Christian. She asked him why he wasn’t a Muslim.
“He asked if Islam could give you salvation. I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘I think you didn’t read your Quran,’” Esther recalled. “He said, 'Did you read in Quran where Allah said to Muhammad to say to your followers, ‘I don’t know what will happen with me and what will happen with all of you.’”
Esther said she thought that John had created his own version of the Quran to lead her astray. So she went home to look up that surah in her own Quran. But John was proven right by her own Quran, she said.
“I thought that if the leader didn’t know what will happen with him, what about the followers?” Esther said. “This was the point when I went back and started reading the Bible with John.”
“God’s plan”
When she learned about Esther in the Old Testament, she asked John to interpret her dream with the light man.
“He said Joseph had a dream and that dream has meanings,” Esther explained. “Similarly, God gave me the dream. John said, ‘You are not here because of my effort. You are here because of God’s plan.’ He opened the book to John 14:6: ‘I am the way and the truth and the life.’”
At that point, Esther was reduced to tears.
“I was such a bad girl and God came to save my life,” she said. “I was going to kill His people but He came to save my life and my soul too.”
Esther said that she lived as a Christian secretly for a few months until her parents wanted her to marry a man of their choosing. But she refused and told her mother that she wanted to marry a Christian man.
After telling her mother about her new faith, Esther said her mother beat her. Esther's mother waited a few months before telling her more radical father. After the father was informed, he told people at the mosque about his daughter’s new faith.
At that point, Esther said people had gathered to kill her.
“Every day, I was thinking that today was my last day then I will be in Heaven with the Lord,” she said.
Esther said she even participated in debates with Muslim scholars at her house. She boasted that none of the scholars could stump her because she was just a vessel through which God was speaking.
Esther eventually married John, but the couple was forced to go into hiding because her father felt so dishonored that he spent much of his time and effort trying to find and kill the couple.
After two years on the run in Pakistan, the couple and their daughter escaped as asylum seekers to Malaysia.
Along with Sri Lanka and Thailand, Malaysia is a popular destination for Pakistani immigrants fleeing persecution.
The family spent about eight years in Malaysia where they were accepted as refugees.
In Kuala Lumpur, the couple served with one of the megachurches there to evangelize to non-Christians.
“We were just telling the truth through their own books, just like John used the Quran to tell me the truth,” Esther explained, adding that the couple has helped bring 10 Muslims and one Sikh to Christ during that time.
In 2016, Esther and John were given the approval to resettle in the United States, where they were eventually given green cards.
In the U.S., the couple serves a mission-sending agency called Globe International to evangelize to non-Christians settling in the U.S.
“We are working with international communities from Morocco, Iran and Iraq. We are working among migrants, refugees and students who are here to study,” she said. “We invite them to our home and we host them. We prepare meals for them. We let them see that we care for them. We are trying to make a bridge for them.”
As Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry looks to lead his team to victory in the NBA finals, episode five of his new Facebook series, “Stephen vs. The Game,” gives viewers a deeper look into his Christian faith.
The episode, which premiered recently, is titled “Faith,” and gives Curry’s followers a better understanding as to why the famous ballplayer lists “believer” first, on his social media profiles.
The three-time NBA Champion testified that his gifts come from God.
“I put believer first, because that is supposed to be the roots of everything that I do as a believer, as a husband, as a father, and on down from there,” Curry said on the show.
He shared how his relationship with Jesus Christ impacts his basketball career, family, and life’s successes and failures.
“Faith to me is believing in the unseen, and having a conviction that there is a higher power that has given me a purpose to what I am doing on this earth,” he continued. “For me, that is the foundation to how I live my life and how I want to see the world through that lens.”
While the point guard is optimistic by nature, he admitted that he's faced his share of testing on the court also.
“My faith is tested on the court as much as it is in life,” Curry is heard saying on the show.
“It’s the part that always keeps me focused on what I need to do when it comes to my family, when it comes to my job, when it comes to how I treat other people, my appreciation for life and all the good things that happen and how to deal with the bad things that happen,” Curry stated.
In the episode, Curry’s parents, Dell and Sonya, shared that they raised the young man to hold faith as a foundational value. He attended youth services on Wednesdays and he and his family would all attend church Sunday mornings.
“My faith to me is my strength,” Sonya Curry noted. “When I have questions, challenges, I read the Word, and it’s my beacon of light, my lighthouse.”
She ensures that her children read the word of God as well, “to emphasize putting God first.”
Curry’s faith, however, became his own when he was in the eighth grade.
“[Christianity] was more something that was important to my parents but I never really understood it,” Curry explained. “It was a decision I needed to make for myself. I was kinda just going with the flow.”
After hearing a sermon from a minister named Pastor Jason, Curry walked up to the altar to receive Christ as his savior for himself.
“I felt a calling, went down to the altar, and gave my life to Christ,” the athlete testified. “That became the beginning of my own personal journey.
“My faith is about the personal relationship, more so than following a certain religious tradition or practice. Challenges you to make sure that you are feeding your spirit with the right things versus what the world is throwing at us. It’s a constant battle, if I say I have it down, I’d be lying.”
After suffering some injuries on the court, Curry revealed that his mother challenged him to go into the Bible and find scriptures he can lean on when going back on the court. He began writing “I can do all things …” on all of his sneakers and it’s a scripture he anchors his faith on until this day.
“My mom challenged me to find a verse that I could rely on to give me strength, give me a sense of purpose and to remember who I was playing for every time I lace up my sneakers,” he explained.
“It reminds me why I am blessed with these talents, where I get my strength from, and who I am playing for,” Curry added.
“I strive to be myself, live out my faith, continue to learn, and not be afraid of that higher calling. I feel there’s a responsibility to that, and I own it,” Curry explained.
The episode ends with Curry driving his two daughters Riley and Ryan to school, he said a prayer over them in “Jesus name” and then his girls sang along to the radio as it played Lauren Daigle's hit Christian song “You Say.”
The Facebook series is the second season of “Versus On Watch,” a series meant to give a behind the scenes look at the lives of the greatest athletes. Curry’s season, titled “Stephen vs. The Game,” can be viewed in its entirety here.
The Warriors are currently behind, 2-3, against the Toronto Raptors in the NBA Finals. Game 6 will be Thursday night on the Warriors home court.
Doctors speak out: Lupron and the 'diabolical' push to sterilize, gender-transition confused kids
Pediatric endocrinologists, whose voices are being stifled, are sounding the alarm about a "diabolical" push to put children confused about their bodies on puberty suppressants and hormone blockers like Lupron to change their physical sex.
According to Drs. Paul Hruz, Michael Laidlaw and Quentin Van Meter, all of whom spoke recently with The Christian Post, Lupron — a hormonal agent that's employed to fight prostate cancer in men and is sometimes used to treat sex offenders — is now being injected into children who suffer from gender dysphoria.
The drug has never been green-lighted by the FDA for that purpose, nor have there been any peer-reviewed studies done on the drug's long-term physical and psychological side effects on children.
Lupron and synthetic hormones are ravaging their developing bodies, altering their psyches, and putting them on a pathway to permanent sterilization, these doctors say. Many of the long-term repercussions will not be felt for years. At present, endocrinologists who refuse to back these experimental treatments struggle to be published, and many in the medical field remain unaware of what is going on in dozens of transgender clinics at children's hospitals across the nation.
Pushing 'pause' on puberty?
To many people, the sheer fact that gender has been medicalized with high-powered drugs is nothing short of horrifying, and they wonder how this can be legal or allowed to happen.
"It's not unusual, actually, in pediatrics to prescribe a drug off label. However, whenever a physician does that they are taking on significant risk because if something goes wrong without the evidence, they are liable," Hruz, who is an associate professor of pediatrics and endocrinology at Washington University of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, told CP, when asked how it was possible that a high-powered drug like Lupron could be given to a dysphoric child given the lack of governmental approval for that purpose.
"There's just a lot we don't know about this form of intervention. It's often claimed that medical blockade of puberty allows a child more time to sort out issues of their gender identity, that it alleviates dysphoria in affected children, and that it makes it easier if and when they choose to go on and get other treatments, namely [sex change] surgery. It's also claimed that it's completely safe and reversible."
But among the many problems with that approach is that a normal developmental process is interrupted. Even if the hormone treatment is stopped after administering it for a few years and the normal signals for puberty resume, it's impossible to go back in time, he explained.
As a class of medications, hormone blockers like Lupron are indeed approved for and are used in children to treat precocious puberty — where kids go through puberty at an abnormally early age. It's given to children to delay the pubertal signals so that they, among other reasons, are not socially pressured into acting their pubertal age or subjected to hormonal drives that they are not prepared to handle.
But when used to suppress the normally-timed pubertal processes, the drug actually causes a pathological condition.
"So on its face value, what [transgender activists] are saying is really contradictory from what we know about normal development," Hruz said.
Clear evidence exists that the drug influences bone density, he continued. During adolescence and teenage years, youth accumulate bone mass, which is important for the rest of one's life.
"And there is conflicting information about how much of that bone density can be gained back" after going off the drug.
Strong ideological influences driving this entire paradigm cannot be ignored, he said, when asked how this is happening, especially given that most people expect doctors to govern their practices based solely on medical science.
The first ideological error many make is trying to redefine what "sex" actually is, Hruz said.
"In much of the discussion, people have lost sight of what sex is in relation to reproduction and that is the only way you can make these claims about someone being born in the wrong body or make assertions about sex being 'assigned' at birth. It's not assigned; it's recognized," he maintained.
The vast majority of the children who are being put on these puberty blockers have normally functioning sex organs. Physicians prescribing this kind of treatment are doing so under the understanding that it's benefiting patients but are simply not looking at the evidence, he said, and they are willing to dismiss the evidence when contrary to the prevailing politically correct narrative.
Overwhelming evidence exists that the vast majority of affected children will spontaneously realign their gender identity with their biological sex when left alone, Hruz said of the relevant medical literature on the subject. And if they do realign, they're not going to be tethered to the medical establishment for the rest of their lives because their bodies are not dependent on the chemicals.
"The reality is that there is no long-term data about treating children, and the only data that we have in adults indicates that medical interventions to align the appearance of the body to a transgendered identity does not fix the problem," he said.
The manipulation of infertile kids
What's often said in public opinion forums and even within some medical circles is that despite the risks, it's better, necessary even, that children receive this controversial medical treatment rather than wind up dead by suicide.
Worse still, if parents express hesitation or opposition, activists and some physicians will hint at or tell them they will be guilty of "medical neglect," Hruz noted. But that's patently untrue.
"[Parents] need to continue to love their children. They need to continue to affirm their human dignity. Yet they shouldn't have to jettison biological reality to be able to put what they're being told into practice, in terms of disrupting normally timed puberty."
He added that the largest studies that have been done in post-transition adults continue to show rates of death by suicide that are markedly above the background population.
"We need to be very objective, thoughtful. We can't close the door on what I would say are alternative hypotheses, other ways we might be able to address this very real and concerning problem. And the dialogue has shifted really far away from that," Hruz said.
How Lupron works
The first well-documented case report of a puberty blocker like Lupron (a similar medication called triptorelin which has an identical mechanism of action) being used in a young patient with gender confusion was published out of Holland in 1998 where a pediatric endocrinologist, working together with a psychiatrist, decided to use the medication on a 13-year-old girl suffering from gender dysphoria, according to Dr. Michael Laidlaw, a Rocklin, California-based board-certified physician who specializes in endocrinology and diabetes.
The rationale was that the patient should have the drug because the effects of going through puberty would be too traumatic to endure and that "pausing" those signals in the brain would give the person time to adjust and then later decide whether to move toward surgical transition.
When puberty is initiated in the human body, the hypothalamus increases its pulsatile release of gonadotropin-releasing hormone. This, in turn, triggers the pituitary to release LH and FSH hormones into the bloodstream. These hormones then affect the gonads and cause the release of testosterone from the testicles of boys or estrogen from the ovaries of girls.
These same LH/FSH hormonal signals from the pituitary are released in adults to maintain testosterone or estrogen levels. Lupron, also known as Leuprolide, blocks the release of LH/FSH, thereby stopping testosterone from being produced and released from the testes or estrogen from the ovaries. It is used to treat prostate cancer because testosterone will grow prostate tissue, including prostate cancer tissue. The therapeutic idea is that when the hormone is decreased to a very low or undetectable level, cancer growth is prevented. The drug is also used to treat endometriosis in women by lowering estrogen levels through the same pituitary mechanism.
Intimidation games
Being from Rocklin, Laidlaw got a swift education into the world of transgender medicine when an area charter school read the I am Jazz transgender children's book and reportedly facilitated a gender transition ceremony for one of the 5-year-olds during class, traumatizing other students, as CP previously reported. The school put out a statement disputing that this happened.
"The awareness of what is going on today, even within the medical community, has been very low," he explained, speaking of his own journey.
Behind the push toward this particular medical paradigm is a highly politicized group called the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, an organization that has effectively overhauled the entire conversation.
"What they did very cleverly was get involved with the largest global professional organization representing the field of endocrinology, called the Endocrine Society," of which Laidlaw is a member, he said.
"The Endocrine Society put out guidelines for everything to do with gender affirmative therapy from medications to surgical treatments for adults and children in 2009 and then revised them in 2017."
Pro-transition recommendations were given the group's formal stamp of approval. Laidlaw knew of no organized opposition to the change. Other medical groups have since published similar guidelines, lending further professional-sounding credence to them. Thus, when someone sees that a prominent group like the Endocrine Society or the American Academy of Pediatrics has endorsed this, they think it's fine when it's not, he pointed out. But these professional organizations have been co-opted by WPATH and other radical activists.
"And then there is the fear factor, of course, where physicians who are leery about this treatment are afraid to say anything because maybe they work for say [health care provider] Kaiser. I have been told by a Kaiser doctor: 'Well, I can't say anything about this or I may lose my job. I have a family to feed.'"
"There have been few physicians willing to stand up and say, 'We need to question this, there is something wrong here. Why are we using cancer drugs on kids without cancer and stopping normal puberty?" he said.
Many times parents who initially thought it was a good idea to help their children transition later change their minds, but are strong-armed into continuing by being told that their child might commit suicide without the treatment, he said.
"It's another bully tactic," Laidlaw emphasized. "It's a gun to parents' heads, the way I look at it. These kids should be getting psychological therapy and counseling, not hormones."
Such bullying has also been legally used in courts to remove children from their parents. Earlier this year, Judge Sylvia Hendon in Hamilton County, Ohio, ruled that a 17-year-old should be removed from the custody of her parents due to their objections to transgender medicine.
"Gender dysphoria is not an endocrine condition, but is a psychological one and should, therefore, be treated with proper psychological care. But it becomes an endocrine condition once you start using puberty blockers and giving cross-sex hormones to kids," Laidlaw stressed.
While admitting he's not a psychologist, he knows of no psychological condition that is treated by putting hormones out of alignment from their normal levels.
"In other cases, like hyperthyroidism, for example, patients might have high anxiety and even psychotic features due to high thyroid hormone levels. What we're doing as endocrinologists is bringing those hormones back into balance to in turn balance their psyche. With gender affirmative therapy they are doing exactly the opposite, taking hormone levels from being in most cases in balance, to then extremely out of balance."
"And there is a form of psychological addiction happening when they are giving puberty blocking medications — either because of a direct psychotropic effect or because the child can reassure themselves that they are not growing into an adult male body or an adult female body. It continues the illusion."
The endocrinologists with whom CP spoke explained that the average endocrinologist in the United States doesn't know what's going on because it's an area where they haven't had any experience and therefore feel inadequate. They then scramble to find resources and what many end up doing is going to their Endocrine Society guidelines, which are now in favor of transitioning children.
Why would a national society publish guidelines based on low to very low-quality scientific evidence, they ask themselves. Doctors are usually preoccupied enough with their practices so they ultimately defer to the guidelines and send patients to the transgender specialist. This is, unfortunately, a standard situation and a weakness in the endocrine community, they say...
Are medical malpractice lawsuits coming?
Laidlaw believes that in a few years those who regret going on Lupron and other hormones, particularly when the reality of lost fertility and other side effects hits them, will be making noise and taking legal action against those who encouraged them down this path.
"I would imagine what is likely to happen is that these kids will go into young adulthood and will start desisting and realize what they've been through and how traumatic it was. And I would think they would start having lawsuits against physicians, hospitals, and even pharmaceutical companies," he told CP.
"I'm sure some young adults are going to start asking: 'How come I can't have children at this point?' Well, it's because their fertility was destroyed by some combination of puberty blockers, wrong sex hormones and surgery."
While it's often framed in mass media that the only people opposed to transgender ideology are bigoted right-wingers and religious people, opposition to this does indeed span the political spectrum. Some radical feminists and others on the left have referred to the transing of young people as "gay and lesbian eugenics."
"If you look at it from a certain point of view, it makes sense," Laidlaw concurred.
"They are seeing that this will cause sterility to these young people and also likely sexual dysfunction as well. It's such an early stage of these children being treated that we don't hear a lot of these side effects cropping up yet."
Many people simply cannot believe this is happening because it seems too outlandish, he emphasized, but it is occurring. And it doesn't just stop with hormonal agents. Today, girls as young as 13 are undergoing mastectomies, Laidlaw said, citing a Sept. 12 investigative report from Jane Robbins at The Federalist.
Yet even as these horrors are being exposed, it hasn't slowed down the steady march toward normalizing these procedures on the West Coast.
The Rocklin physician was one of the doctors who testified earlier this year against AB 2119 in California, legislation that guaranteed resources for "gender-affirmative" treatment for children in the state foster care system who identify as transgender or nonbinary.
Dr. Andre Van Mol of Redding, California, a friend and colleague of Laidlaw who testified alongside him, noted in the Public Discourse in late October that the legislative hearings amounted to "kabuki theater" where they had limited time to make their case.
Nevertheless, they implored lawmakers to scrap the measure.
"Please do not pass this bill. Instead, I call for a formal investigation into ethical violations and violations of federal law regarding human experimentation on minors at UCSF and Children's Hospital Los Angeles. I have specific details of the laws being violated if you wish to ask," Laidlaw testified at the time.
"Children are being sterilized. Their sexual function is being permanently destroyed. They are being exposed to lifelong health risks for this 'affirmative' therapy, without being given the needed psychological therapy. AB2119 is a mistake. Please strike it down."
AB 2119 was passed and signed into law on Sept. 14.
Why has this been allowed to happen?
While transgenderism has been covered in news outlets more visibly in recent years, the medical developments have been brewing for decades under the radar.
In the 1970s, Dr. Quentin Van Meter, a pediatric endocrinologist in private practice in Atlanta, Georgia, was a fellow at Johns Hopkins where Dr. John Money began the concept of gender as an identity of one's inner sexual self. It was called "transsexual" back then, Van Meter explained to CP. Prior to this, the word "gender" was linguistic, generally used interchangeably with "sex" and was not medicalized.
"He had patients that he treated as adults and then he also had the pediatric patients treated with surgical and hormonal manipulations with really phenomenally bad outcomes," Van Meter said.
The Atlanta doctor credits Money with dividing sex and gender in a way that has spread so much confusion, both in the lives of patients and more broadly in culture.
"He thought perhaps we could societally change one's gender by treating people differently, socially and with hormones. And what he found was that he was trying to change sex," which was impossible, he said.
The entire project collapsed and Johns Hopkins ultimately closed the program in the early 1980s. It stayed relatively dormant until 2006 when Dr. Norman Spack in Boston, Massachusetts, decided to reinvigorate transgender medicine in the United States, Van Meter explained, "and from there it literally spread like a viral infection."
Van Meter recalled hearing a presentation from Spack at the combined European Pediatric Endocrine Society and the American Pediatric Endocrine Society and was appalled by what he heard, particularly what Spack was calling "solid science."
"There was no 'solid science' but it was not in a forum where I was comfortable raising my hand and saying, 'Excuse me, but where did you make up all this crap?' It wasn't my modus operandi and I just thought 'Well, this is a crazy person, this isn't going anywhere."
He was wrong.
Little did Van Meter know that between 2006 and 2009 Spack would help engineer the now infamous guidelines for the Endocrine Society. In Europe, prior to 2006, the thought of administering blockers to children was widely regarded in the academic and medical community as "wild nonsense," he told CP, and providers of this kind of treatment and surgeries were sparse and largely underground in the United States.
Yet with new professional directives, everything changed rapidly.
"When the 2009 guidelines were published they were astonishingly devoid of science. They were mostly recommended on hopeful thinking," Van Meter said, and they have only gotten worse.
Between 2009 and now the number of transgender medical clinics went up from a mere few to 55 in the U.S., he added, "and every academic center is clamoring to have one."
"Johns Hopkins has reopened their clinic with much fanfare, praising the work of John Money."
Since the updated 2017 version of the Endocrine Society's guidelines were published —which were even more liberal and argued for starting patients on cross-sex hormones earlier while minimizing the psychological evaluation of the child — the approach now has been to train the parents psychologically to accept transition as the route to a new destiny for their child, he explained.
"And the most recent terrible iteration of the guidelines came from the American Academy of Pediatrics, published in October, which essentially said that counseling is of no use whatsoever in terms of looking for medical psychological issues, so bypass that and go directly to puberty blockers."
Like Hruz, Van Meter concurred that with youth who begin puberty at an abnormally early age they have plenty of clinical experience and evidence for using blockers for a short time and then the hormonal signals will resume at the proper age.
"But when you give puberty blockers to a pubertal-aged child, what you're doing is sideswiping them out of the physiological development that puberty is intended to create and facilitate. You are taking calcium out of the bones of girls which cannot be introduced later; you're putting them at risk for osteoporosis. On top of that, you're taking the ovaries and testicles, which have not yet started to mature to the stage of fertility, and you're cutting them off at the knees, essentially making them sterile."
"It's all based on hope and wishes, and there are no controls to show that not doing this, or letting the kid go through appropriate counseling, has a better outcome. We already know that to be the case," he said, pointing to Toronto's Dr. Kenneth Zucker's work with 560 patients over the course of 30 years.
Transgender activists have called Zucker's data "old and useless," Van Meter said, and they have asserted that his patients were never transgender.
"That's a political tactic. If you don't like what they're saying make something up and throw it in their face and see if they'll shut up," Van Meter said.
"But the answer is no. We will not shut up."
Silencing dissenting doctors
"We can't get published anywhere," Van Meter continued.
"The bias, all the people that are controlling the studies that we do will not allow you to be published in the major journals. I cannot give talks on this to the Endocrine Society or the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists because I'm not invited. When I invite myself they don't want me."
That has not stopped him from continuing to try. Van Meter and few other like-minded endocrinologists have co-authored a letter of protest to the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism about these pro-transition guidelines.
"This is how it works," he recounted with disgust. "There is a core of very diabolical people who are filtering large sums of money into this and using mass social pressure."
When they attempt to write rebuttals, they can't do so because they "get thrown in with 'xenophobe, homophobe, transphobe, phobe-phobes' and we're all called 'right-wing Christian nutcases' and that summarily dismisses us because they supposedly have the science and we don't."
Speaking to the view some hold about the transing of young people being a form of "gay and lesbian eugenics," he surmised that it's an attempt to eliminate same-sex attraction by "medicalizing it to make it essentially a valid biological disease ... which it's not."
"And in the process, they're permanently damaging thousands upon thousands of children nationwide."
CP asked Van Meter how many minors he estimates have been transitioned in the dozens of gender clinics in the U.S. While he could not give a number, he does know such facilities are burgeoning with prospective patients. He has been told of one particular clinic in upstate New York that has an approximately 700-patient waiting list.
At Emory's clinic in Atlanta, they had 40 patients in their transgender clinic two years ago and in 2017 that number had more than doubled, he said. Even more alarming, hospitals are rewarded in prominent publications that provide influential rankings for all kinds of institutions for increasing their numbers.
"If you do not have a transgender clinic and you don't have enough numbers you don't get points," he explained. "There's a perverse incentive by our lovely U.S. News and World Report's Best of the Best Children's hospitals. It's to get more points by making sure you have more transgender patients in large numbers and you're helping these kids out, supposedly."
In addition to all the medical risks, the endocrinologists are particularly concerned about the psychological effects of the drugs.
'It's theoretically 'Oh we're going to create so much more happiness.' Of course, when you do stop puberty in a kid who does not want to go through puberty you can ask them and they'll say 'Heck yeah, I don't want to go through things I don't believe I'm supposed to,'" Van Meter said.
"Well, you're not doing a blind study where you're treating one group with injections that do nothing and others with blockers and then both ask about happiness levels, not by the investigators, by an independent team to sort out what the benefits and side effects are. There is no control group whatsoever."
Doctors must start speaking up, he reiterated.
"Something has to stop this. And we will. We will be relentless in our best efforts to get this out in front of the public in any way we can."
What can parents do?
All three endocrinologists with whom CP spoke recommend appropriate counseling to uncover root causes for distress instead of immediately thinking something is wrong with their bodies and that gender change is the solution.
"Every one of those kids has an undercurrent of a psychological issue that is causing them to look for gender confusion as an outlet to explain how they feel," Van Meter said.
"And what they need to do is find regular, routine, local counselors to go to and find out what the real issue is. And it may be painful because the parents might be involved unwittingly in creating an environment that is causing the anxiety and depression for their child.
"But it's much easier to accept that and go clean out the cobwebs and the dark places in the basement and bring in light than it is to cover over it with this fake nonscience."
