Latest news with #AzeenGhorayshi
Fox News
2 days ago
- Health
- Fox News
First-known puberty blocker patient says 'insulting' youth gender movement makes mockery of true dysphoria
The first known patient to take puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria sharply rebuked the modern youth gender identity movement as "insulting" in a podcast interview with the New York Times published last week. The Times spoke with "FG," a patient in adolescent transgender medicine from the Netherlands, who was the first known person given puberty blockers at 13years-old in the 1980s to stop female development. "FG" explained dealing with anger issues as a child and feeling uncomfortable living as a girl. The fear of going through puberty led the teen to express suicidal thoughts in a letter and eventually seek out medical treatment to stop normal development, as well as cross-sex hormones and gender reassignment surgery later on. Now, living as a man decades later with no regrets, "FG" believes puberty blockers "saved my life." Despite being a proponent of these medical interventions, "FG" was not supportive of the modern gender diversity movement. "So many of the young people now want to visibly challenge the binary," New York Times reporter Azeen Ghorayshi told "FG," asking, "What do you make of that? And what do you make of what that means for getting the medical treatment that you pioneered?" "I find that it's gone — it's gone a bit extreme to the other side," "FG" replied. "So it makes a laughingstock of what it's really about. Or at least, it seems to be a fashion statement nowadays." "FG" equated the current gender climate to other youth rebellion movements of the past where young people forged their identities "to stand out," saying gender seemed to be another forum for that today. "And for the group that is pure, like proper transsexuals, this flirting with pronouns and gender identity — it's insulting," "FG" continued. "FG", who works in the medical field and asked to stay anonymous out of a desperate desire to fit in as a man, said it seemed like young people now treat their gender identity as a fad. "Because like I said, we spend all our time trying to just fit in or be able to live the life that we feel we should have had. And it's not a great help when you've got people shouting from the barricades and trying to give you a different position, a third sex or whatever, and then talk about things that we don't want you to talk about, so that they can identify you," "FG" added. "I don't take a lot of these people that seriously, because it does seem to be a bit of a fashion statement." Shortly after taking office for his second term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order cutting off federal funding for institutions who engage in "chemical and surgical" sex-change procedures for minors. "Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child's sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions," the order, titled "Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation," states. "This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation's history, and it must end." A number of hospitals nationwide challenged the order earlier this year, with some vowing to continue providing these medical interventions for minors.
New York Times
7 days ago
- Health
- New York Times
Our New Podcast
Health care for transgender youths is deeply personal and important to thousands of American families. It's also one of the most divisive cultural and political issues of our time. Twenty-seven states have banned surgery, hormone treatments or puberty blockers for minors. The Supreme Court will decide soon whether those bans are constitutional. The Times just published a special six-part podcast on the history of these treatments and the contentious debate. It reflects two years of work by Azeen Ghorayshi, who has reported on the intersection of gender and science for a decade, and Austin Mitchell, a senior audio producer. Jodi, who oversees Times newsletters, spoke to Azeen about the project's ambition, how she got people to open up, the biggest surprises in the reporting and how her own work has been weaponized. How was this project different from your prior work on this beat? What were the big unanswered questions you set out to explore? With this audio series, the interviews are more like long, in-depth conversations. People can connect more easily when they hear others in this way, and it can help challenge assumptions. The big question we were trying to answer was, How did we get here? The science and the politics have gotten so entangled, but something this reporting made clear is that politics has been baked in all along. The show is titled 'The Protocol,' after the Dutch Protocol, which grew out of the pioneering treatments in the Netherlands in the 1990s and 2000s. Why start there? Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
