Aggrieved Former Patients Object to Appointment of Canadian Pediatric Society’s New President The founder of a pediatric gender clinic in Ontario, Dr. Natasha Johnson, who now leads the nation’s association of pediatricians, has said that parents’ objections to gender-transition treatment should be ‘deprioritized,' I report for The @NewYorkSun. A prominent Canadian pediatrician, Natasha Johnson, has staked her career on the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Accordingly, a decade ago she established a pediatric gender clinic at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, to serve the needs of the fast-growing population of youth who are distressed about their gender or have otherwise adopted a transgender identity. So when the Canadian Pediatric Society announced last month that it had appointed Dr. Johnson as its next president, this was widely interpreted by Canadian physicians as the medical association burnishing its own DEI bona fides and squaring itself against the Trump administration’s aggressive opposition to medicalized gender transitions for minors. Amid roiling political conflicts south of the border about the safety, efficacy, ethics, and wisdom of providing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender-transition surgeries to treat gender-related distress in adolescents, Dr. Johnson has maintained in public statements that young people’s satisfaction with these interventions in Canada is extraordinarily high. And yet, while Dr. Johnson is on record pointing to at least some verifiable research to back up that assertion, The New York Sun spoke with three families who offered detailed accounts of their experiences at her gender clinic that sharply conflict with such a rosy portrayal of patient outcomes. It is, of course, entirely possible these families’ negative experiences with Dr. Johnson and her colleagues reflect only a small minority of those who have attended the McMaster gender clinic. Rare is the doctor with a 100 percent satisfaction rate. Nevertheless, the families collectively told the Sun they remained outraged that they did not receive from Dr. Johnson what they consider to be equitable and inclusive care for their particular needs. One former patient of Dr. Johnson’s, Faith Groleau said she was fast-tracked for testosterone treatment by Dr. Johnson as a teenager despite serious mental health conditions, proper attention to which Ms. Groleau later concluded should have overridden the impulse to medicalize her adolescent detour into a masculine identity. Ms. Groleau, 26, eventually stopped taking the powerful cross-sex hormone and detransitioned, meaning she reverted to presenting and identifying as her birth sex. Saddled, most noticeably, with a permanently masculinized voice as a consequence of her treatment, Ms. Groleau came to fault Dr. Johnson for what she characterized as “extreme negligence.” “She didn’t do her job of vetting me at all,” said Ms. Groleau of Dr. Johnson’s care. “She just sent me onto a pipeline of destruction.” The Sun also conducted interviews with two other families who asked to have their identities shielded — including a mother and daughter who requested to be known by first-name pseudonyms and a husband and wife who agreed for their child’s story only to be used as background reference for this article. All three families shared medical records, and in some cases email exchanges and other documents, that detailed their experiences at the McMaster gender clinic. Centrally, the families all faulted Dr. Johnson, who is not a trained mental health professional, for engaging in what is known as diagnostic overshadowing: focusing myopically on a gender-related diagnosis at the expense of attention to what the families argued to the Sun were more pressing mental health concerns. Dr. Johnson, the families said, egregiously put these three adolescent patients on a fast track to receive gender-transition interventions. This included approving a biological girl, who at the time identified as male, for a double mastectomy just as she turned 16, even as her mental health rapidly deteriorated. The girl later detransitioned and came to bitterly regret the surgery. Their stories offer testimony to the ongoing debate within the pediatric gender medicine discipline over whether minors seeking gender-transition interventions should undergo a comprehensive psychosocial assessment by a mental-health professional before being approved for irreversible modifications to their sex characteristics. Dr. Johnson has made conflicting statements on the matter. All three families who spoke with the Sun about her gender clinic said that while a social worker was on staff, the adolescents in these families were not provided a formal assessment by a mental health professional before being approved for gender-transition medications. The parents who spoke with the Sun uniformly expressed alarm and offense that, as they reported, their expressed concerns about the prudence of providing gender-transition interventions to their seriously mentally ill children were essentially dismissed and even stigmatized by Dr. Johnson. All three families reported that Dr. Johnson did not take kindly to having her authority challenged, and that in the face of pushback about her proposed or past gender-care plans, her typically pleasant demeanor could turn on a dime and become intimidatingly hostile and defensive. In some cases, these families said, Dr. Johnson pitted children against their parents, and in one case, pitted divorced parents against one another when it came to fraught decision-making about initiating gender transition interventions. Her office even called child protection services to report one mother for merely expressing concerns about her daughter undergoing a mastectomy, the mother reported. Dr. Johnson, who along with communications representatives from McMaster did not respond to repeated requests for comment, is on the record asserting that, as a matter of course, parents’ objections to their children receiving gender-transition drugs should at least generally not interfere with a child’s expressed desire for such medications. In a presentation she gave at the 2022 conference of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH, a video of which the Sun obtained, Dr. Johnson said that such feelings on the part of parents “should not be prioritized.” Ms. Groleau said she took great offense to the suggestion. “My mother was absolutely correct in being concerned because I did detransition,” she said.

The alleged CEO shooter is Luigi Mangione:

I worked the Met Gala as a waiter a few times. It’s your basic gala dinner. A lot of hobnobbing and table hopping. The placement of people’s tables is *very* political. The last year I worked the party Mary-Kate and Ashley were seated in Siberia and the were NOT HAPPY.

Sorry everybody about the #monkeypox outbreak! I'll do better next time.🤷‍♂️

Charlie Kirk was scheduled to debate a progressive influencer, Hasan Piker, at Dartmouth College on Sept. 25. On his Twitch live stream, Piker reacted to the news with horror, urging some of his followers to stop making jokes about the shooting, and he expressed fear that he could be similarly targeted. “This is a terrifying incident,” Piker said. “The reverberation of people seeking out vengeance in the aftermath of this violent, abhorrent incident is going to be genuinely worrisome.”

This is my cousin, then 16, mourning her best friend, Cassie, who was murdered 25 years ago today, along with 14 others at Columbine High School. The anguish in her voice before they found Cassie's body haunts me. My cousin would live a hard life. We lost her, too, in 2020.

A lot of people are portraying USAID as some sort of bastion of looney DEI excesses. Let’s take a look at what the sudden arresting of their operation is doing to global health. Please read the thread (my thread, not Ryan James’):

Elon Musk has started restricting accounts who use that word that means someone isn't trans, calling it a slur.

What if you’re being chased by a cheetah?

I have people over to dinner about 15 to 20 times per year. I am invited over to dinner zero to one time per year. People often behave as if a social invitation is an onerous burden. They are in a long-term relationship with themselves.

I would once again like to apologize for inadvertently causing the entire global #monkeypox outbreak by typing too fast and leaving out a crucial consonant.

One day, activist-blogger Erin Reed said 80 incorrect things about pediatric gender medicine, so I fact checked her 80 times. She cannot defend herself on the merits of her words, so she just goes for an ad hominem attack to try to scare me off.

John Oliver, in arguing how the Dems should respond to the trans kids issue, falsely claims “there is no evidence” trans kids “pose any threat” to fairness in sports. There absolutely is evidence that trans females have a competitive advantage.

Malcom Gladwell says he is “ashamed” of having said in a previous panel discussion that trans women have a place in women’s sports. He says he was “cowed” into saying so. “Trans athletes have no place in the female category,” he says.

Also, Jimmy Fallon went around at the end of the night thanking all the waiters. Literally no one does that at gala banquets. He is a class act. Also, one time Kim Basinger made sustained eye contact with me and I nearly fainted from the glamor.

George W. Bish believed that as the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation, it was his duty as a Christian to save sub-Saharan Africa from widespread societal collapse under the pressure of AIDS. So he founded PEPFAR. Why do so many people ask questions like the one below like there aren’t, in fact, very logical answers. Colin Powell told Bush that AIDS posed a crucial international security risk because of how it threatened to decimate militaries and governments. Investing in Africa serves the United States’ economic and military interests.

Imagine as if Charlotte’s Web took a hard pivot and became a bloodbath in Chapter 2.

Welcome to the typo club.

Having spent the past year researching and studying the subject of pediatric gender medicine, I can answer your question, @JoyceCarolOates, about why voters care about the transgender issue so much: 1) People are concerned that this medical field is not grounded in sound science, and that children with multiple severe psychiatric conditions and sometimes autism as well are not receiving thorough psychological assessments before being put on life-altering medications that can render them infertile and with lifelong sexual dysfunction. 2) The population of young people identifying as trans or nonbinary has soared, as have diagnoses of pediatric gender dysphoria. So parents are increasingly likely to have this impact their family. 3) People are concerned about fairness in sports and women’s security in single-sex spaces. They see the inclusion of biological males who identify as female in girls’ and women’s sports as eroding hard-fought second-wave feminist gains such as the protections guaranteed to women by Title IX. And again, because the population of young people identifying as trans has soared, this is not just a matter of a few isolated incidents. Also, scholarships are on the line. So there are serious financial repercussions for girls and women.

Weren’t you in the room to begin with, making you one of the original 100 murderers? The question doesn’t clarify this.

I hope you will join me in cancer survivorship. I can greatly relate to having good days and bad days. Chemo is no joke. Here’s me at the end of chemo and then 9 months later:

This is misinformation about #monkeypox. The outbreak is occurring almost entirely among men who have sex with me. Public health experts agree that sexual contact is the principle driver of transmission and have asserted that risk to kids remains *very low*.

That's actually adorable.

I interviewed a number of the first monkeypox (mpox) cases in 2022. They were largely affluent gay men who enjoyed traveling around the world and going to sex parties. I am not certain how stigma is connected to such a pastime. During the outbreak, the CDC downplayed how central sex between men was to driving the outbreak. Dr. Daskalakis in particular invariably led with the exceptions to the rule of who was at risk, such as by uttering the misleading slogan, “Anybody can get monkeypox.” I once challenged him on this fact during a press call in August 2022 and asked why he wasn’t instead being direct and clear that gay men were overwhelmingly the ones at risk. He responded by saying he thought he and the CDC were doing a fantastic job. Meanwhile, I was constantly getting DMs from parents who were scared to send their kids back to school or to daycare, despite the fact that their children were literally at greater risk of being struck by lightning than getting mpox. Many people were angry that summer that some of the same people who insisted on masking children or keeping everyone at home during Covid were now insisting that gay men should not be asked to take a break from sex with multiple partners. It is evident that this contradiction eroded trust in public health, as you can see here from what @steveguest is saying:

My dad was a surgeon. We rarely saw him.

Mad respect for anyone who has ever suffered the indignity of working retail and has had to deal with rude and unruly customers.

This is the second to last time that I am going to lament that many people don't know what "penultimate" means.

Someone give this child a Ted Talk.

Trans people banned from women’s changing rooms, under proposed NHS guidelines

Today the federal government advised health insurance companies that they must cover pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) against HIV with no cost sharing. That means that people on PrEP are not required to pay any copays or deductibles for the medication, labs, or office visits.

🔔Breaking: Biden administration announces mass #monkeypox vaccination plan. The US will release supplies of Jynneos vaccine (which requires 2 doses 4 weeks apart): 56,000 doses immediately; 240,000 doses in the coming weeks; 750,000 by summer's end; 500,000 in the fall. 🧵⬇️

This question is stupid! It's a supposed trick question, but the trick is that the question isn't posed with enough clarity to properly answer it. #fail

NEWS: Trans and nonbinary identities are indeed in free-fall in college age Americans. Prof. Jean Twenge @jean_twenge found new survey data that supports @epkaufm's much disputed claim from last week. Twenge also found data indicating that trans identity increased exponentially by birth year until those born after about 2002. These identities have plummeted in those born more recently—who are now 20 to 23 years old. The problem with Kaufman's data is it didn't distinguish between trans and nonbinary identities. The data that Twenge found does. The decline in such identities in younger Americans raises important questions about the future of the field of pediatric gender medicine and the question of whether these identities are at least partially driven by social influences, as opposed to immutable, inborn traits.

Two years ago today, addled with chemo brain, I tweeted a typo that would change history:

Doesn't her being a TikTok influencer mean she isn't actually a housewife, but a working woman?

BREAKING: Detransitioner Sues Johanna Olson-Kennedy, a Top Pediatric Gender Medicine Doctor, For Medical Negligence 🧵⬇️⬇️I report: Dr. Olson-Kennedy is the most prominent doctor yet to be sued by a detransitioner—for medical negligence after overseeing a mentally ill girl's gender-transition starting at 12 and mastectomy at 14. She recommended a hysterectomy at 17.

Also, and this was at the NY Public Library for another party, but I was butlering champagne at the entry and I kid you not, a clarion call of trumpets sounded and moments later Martha Stewart entered. The following week, she was indicted for insider trading.

I have people over for dinner about 15 to 20 times a year. I am typically invited over to dinner once or no times per year. No one else has a table as far as I know. theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv…

Welcome to a proud club, young fellow! And don’t worry, the hair should grow right back. Last day of chemo on the left, five months later on the right:

Pamela Paul writes for @NYTOpinion: In U.S. Gender Medicine, Ideology Eclipses Science. It Hurts Kids. Imagine a comprehensive review of research on a treatment for children found “remarkably weak evidence” that it was effective. Now imagine the medical establishment shrugged off the conclusions and continued providing the same unproven and life-altering treatment to its young patients. This is where we are with gender medicine in the United States. It’s been three months since the release of the Cass Review, an independent assessment of gender treatment for youths commissioned by England’s National Health Service. The four-year review of research, led by Dr. Hilary Cass, one of Britain’s top pediatricians, found no definitive proof that gender dysphoria in children or teenagers was resolved or alleviated by what advocates call gender-affirming care, in which a young person’s declared “gender identity” is affirmed and supported with social transition, puberty blockers and/or cross-sex hormones. Nor, she said, is there clear evidence that transitioning kids decreases the likelihood that gender dysphoric youths will turn to suicide, as adherents of gender-affirming care claim. These findings backed up what critics of this approach have been saying for years. “The reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress,” Cass concluded. Instead, she wrote, mental health providers and pediatricians should provide holistic psychological care and psychosocial support for young people without defaulting to gender reassignment treatments until further research is conducted. After the release of Cass’s findings, the British government issued an emergency ban on puberty blockers for people under 18. Medical societies, government officials and legislative panels in Germany, France, Switzerland, Scotland, the Netherlands and Belgium have proposed moving away from a medical approach to gender issues, in some cases directly acknowledging the Cass Review. Scandinavian countries have been moving away from the gender-affirming model for the past few years. Reem Alsalem, the United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, called the review’s recommendations “seminal” and said that policies on gender treatments have “breached fundamental principles” of children’s human rights, with “devastating consequences.” But in the United States, federal agencies and professional associations that have staunchly supported the gender-affirming care model greeted the Cass Review with silence or utter disregard. There’s been no response from the Department of Health and Human Services, whose website says that “gender-affirming care improves the mental health and overall well-being of gender diverse children and adolescents” and which previously pushed to eliminate recommended age minimums for gender surgery. Nor has there been a response from the American Medical Association, which also backs gender-affirming care for pediatric patients. When I reached out to H.H.S. officials, they declined to speak on the record. The A.M.A. referred me to the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society. The Endocrine Society, the primary professional organization of endocrinologists, told me, “the Cass Review does not contain any new research that would contradict the recommendations made in” the society’s own guidelines. (Cass’s mandate was to assess the quality and importance of existing research.) When the NPR station WBUR interviewed Cass, it asked the American Academy of Pediatrics for a response to the review. The pediatricians’ group issued a statement that said nothing about the Cass Review. Instead, it denounced what it characterized as “politically infused public discourse” and promised to stay the course, conducting its own research review, which it agreed to do last year under intense pressure. In later comments to The Times, Dr. Ben Hoffman…

SCOOP: Mamdani Identified as Asian and African American on College Application 🧵⬇️I report with @DanaRubinstein and @NPFandos for @NYTimes: Zohran Mamdani, the Democrat running for mayor of New York City, was born in Uganda. He doesn’t consider himself Black but said the application didn’t allow for the complexity of his background. @ZohranKMamdani

This is so Roman Roy of him.

The reason the HPV vaccine is recommended for preadolescent children is that the goal is to get them to finish the sequence *before* they become sexually active. The vaccine is shown to prevent multiple cancers in both men and women. And there is no evidence it impacts sexual behavior in young people.

"A federal judge ruled last night that the US Postal Service must give Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington documents about potential conflicts of interest by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy."

The only time I ever said yes to a guest asking if they could put their dirty wine glass on my tray of new, filled wine glasses (a MAJOR pet peeve of mine from my catering days) was to Claire Danes at the Met Gala. She was gorgeous and sweet.

The top reader’s pic comment on ⁦@nickconfessore⁩’s NYT Mag article on the DEI debacle at U Mich:

On a related note, Charlotte’s Web is one of the greatest books ever written and I encourage parents to read it to their kids. It teaches kids about the power of friendship, the meaning of a life that only lasts so long, and secular humanism.

Eh, let's leave it. We all need a laugh.

Update: Now The Guardian has cut from this article about Tyler Robinson the quote from the unnamed high school friend about his being “leftist”.

The tech suffers from a failure of telling the person to stay still.

Colorado Rep ⁦@laurenboebert⁩ recently expressed disappointment that she was not the number one person on the list tweeting the anti-#LGBTQ slur “groomer”.

Speaking about pediatric gender medicine with @BillMaher on @PodSaveAmerica, @JonLovett claims that “study after study shows that gender-affirming care saves lives.” This is false. There is no such study. Only one study has ever assessed the direct association between using cross-sex hormones to treat gender dysphoria in youth and an independent, statistically significant difference in the suicide death rate. The study, conducted in Finland and published a year ago, found no such association. One would hope that someone with a platform as large as Lovett’s would read up on the science before making such a sweeping declaration to the contrary.

This really shocked me. Never did I think of Donald Sutherland as ugly!

Tip: never ask a waiter with a tray of freshly filled wine glasses if you can put your dirty glass down there. Of course not! How do you think that would look? That’s what the drip tables are for.

BREAKING: The State of Texas has sued Dr. May C Lau, a pediatrician at UT Southwestern for allegedly prescribing testosterone to at least 21 natal girls under the age of 18 contrary to state law. 🧵The stage alleges Dr. Lau "has engaged in deceptive trade practices, including by misleading pharmacies, insurance providers, and/or patients by falsifying medical records, prescriptions, and billing records to represent that her testosterone prescriptions are for something other than transitioning a child’s biological sex or affirming a child’s belief that their gender identity is inconsistent with their biological sex."

I simply cannot believe that @WashingtonPost ran an oped by Eric Feigl-Ding about #monkeypox. He is not an expert in this subject and has already developed an egregious history of fear mongering and inaccurate statements about the outbreak. washingtonpost.com/opinions/…

This @CNN clip centers on a fierce dispute over whether calling transgender girls “boys who play in girls’ sports” is a slur. The man who says it isn’t one says that most people are uncomfortable with this and this helped cost Harris this election.

I cried because my mother loved Tracy Chapman's cassette tape. We played it in the car when I was a kid and she played it in the kitchen. I’ve never stopped listening to the album. It reminds me of my mom. She died 25 years ago last week.

The rich get richer because they have the *extra cash* to invest. Matt here is presenting these choices as purely discretionary, blaming the poor for spending their money unwisely. This despite the fact that the poor by definition don't have extra money to spend on frivolities.

Eric Feigl-Ding's constant fear mongering is deeply harmful. A new @NEJM #monkeypox study of 528 global cases found just 0.6% were from household transmission; 95% were likely transmitted via sex between men. 🧵⬇️ nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/…

Trump: “They’re all saying, ‘What a great deal he made.’” Barbara Walters: [confidently, defiantly] “No they’re not.”

When I was a kid, my mom didn’t have immediate access to a machine that, upon a frenzied impulse amid a torrential rage, would allow her to publicly humiliate me in front of the entire world.

I’m never deleting Hinge.

Um, hello:

After the Covid vaccine came out, the adjusted excess death rate in Ohio and Florida was 43% higher among Republican voters compared with Democratic voters, this study found. There was no such gap based on political party before the vaccine. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam…

Saying, “I don’t know.”

NEWS: U.S. Study on Puberty Blockers Goes Unpublished Because of Politics, Doctor Says The leader of the long-running study said that the drugs did not improve mental health in children with gender distress and that the finding might be weaponized by opponents of the care. An influential doctor and advocate of adolescent gender treatments said she had not published a long-awaited study of puberty-blocking drugs because of the charged American political environment. The doctor, Johanna Olson-Kennedy, began the study in 2015 as part of a broader, multimillion-dollar federal project on transgender youth. She and colleagues recruited 95 children from across the country and gave them puberty blockers, which sthttps://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/science/puberty-blockers-olson-kennedy.htmlave off the permanent physical changes — like breasts or a deepening voice — that could exacerbate their gender distress, known as dysphoria. The researchers followed the children for two years to see if the treatments improved their mental health. An older Dutch study had found that puberty blockers improved well-being, results that inspired clinics around the world to regularly prescribe the medications as part of what is now called gender-affirming care. But the American trial did not find a similar trend, Dr. Olson-Kennedy said in a wide-ranging interview. Puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements, she said, most likely because the children were already doing well when the study began.

Kennedy asserts that the Cass Review “has already been discredited by 3 peer-reviewed publications.” She cites: 1) Cal Horton’s criticism of Cass’s interim report, which Horton published before the Cass Review came out 2) McNamara et al’s non-peer-reviewed white paper, which was not published in a journal, rather was placed on the Yale Law School’s website 3) Noone et al, which is a preprint and not a published journal article. @natachakennedy Noone: osf.io/preprints/osf/uhndk McNamara: law.yale.edu/sites/default/f… Horton: tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.…

Finally, Whole Foods has a Harry Styles section.

One year Diana Ross sang and was very much not in key. That was distressing to me as a big Motown fan.

Irish discipline is not to be messed with.

UCSF child psychiatrist and pediatric gender-transition treatment advocate Jack Turban has resigned from an NCAA committee that advised about competitiveness safeguards after it capitulated to Trump’s executive order to restrict women’s sports to natal females.

Before you join the Meghan Markle pile-on, stop and ask yourself what forces might have created the global Markle hate machine, which is a wildly lucrative business generating countless millions for various media outlets and authors. Are you this machine’s unwitting accomplice?

What’s remarkable about @IamJohnOliver’s false claims about trans females in sports is he has a staff of fact checkers. There are multiple studies indicating that even when receiving estrogen, natal males who identify as females are stronger and faster than women & girls.

Each time Kieran wins a major award, he has a new kid. The Culkin dynasty will last forever.

The reason the public is reacting so strongly to the @CNN clip is because trans girls, for the purpose of fairness in sports, are not in fact girls, full stop, as Mr Michaelson argues here and said on the show. They are biological boys who thus have a competitive advantage. Many people are happy to treat natal males who identify as female according to their expressed gender identity and not their sex. But this consideration changes when the discrepancy between the person’s sex and gender identity permits them entry into single-sex spaces reserved for females when they are in fact biologically male, and in particular if they still have a penis. These spaces are segregated for the sake of fairness, because males are stronger and faster than females and females would barely stand a chance in athletics if they didn’t have their own category. And they are segregated for females’ perceived and actual security in spaces involving nudity, such as changing areas.

A new report by @UNSRVAW Reem Alsalen UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls finds that transgender women (natal males) competing in women's sports won at least 890 medals, beating more than 600 female athletes in 29 sports. documents.un.org/doc/undoc/g…

Hepatitis B is not solely transmitted through sex. It is also transmitted through blood, including sharing drug-use materials, and from mother to child (perinatally). Before universal infant vaccination (recommended in 1991), about 18,000 U.S. infants were born each year to mothers with chronic hepatitis B. Many became infected perinatally. Of infants infected at birth, ~90% develop chronic infection, and ~25% of those will eventually die of cirrhosis or liver cancer. CDC modeling (1991–2000s) estimated that universal infant vaccination prevents ~3,000–4,000 deaths per birth cohort over a lifetime — largely from cirrhosis and liver cancer.

Compare the photos released by authorities of the alleged shooter with those of the person who was found in PA and is now being questioned, Luigi Mangione:

That has to be fake. For one thing, he'd be violating HIPPA regulations about medical privacy were he to say this about a patient.

I'd never seen this 2013 article before. It asks whether the notion that Matthew Shepard was murdered for being gay was, in fact, a myth. That's me on the right in the picture, on the front line of a riot in Manhattan over his death in October 1998. I believed the myth! But after reading Steven Jiminez's book, I no longer do. Michael Hobbes made abundantly clear on his 2018 podcast on the subject that he remains a true believer. I think he's Wrong About that. @RottenInDenmark @IfBooksPod

This is unexpected: The alleged CEO shooter, Luigi Mangione, retweeted my 2022 monkeypox typo:

Trump pardoned all the Jan 6ers who assaulted cops.

Unsealed Court Documents Show That Admiral Rachel Levine Pressured WPATH To Remove Age Guidelines From The Latest Standards Of Care A head-on collision between science and politics, @JesseSingal reports.

It is time for someone to investigate and deconstruct the wildly profitable 24/7 Meghan Markle media and social-media hate machine.

“It’s a bloodbath,” a source from the NIH told me today, regarding the sweeping cancellation of research grants.

For the first time, a detransitioner medical-malpractice lawsuit will proceed in court, deemed by a judge to be legally viable. Prisha Mosley @detransaqua has sued in North Carolina “multiple doctors and health facilities on seven counts of fraud, facilitating fraud, breach of fiduciary duty rising to the level of constructive fraud, civil conspiracy, medical malpractice, negligent infliction of emotional distress and unfair and deceptive trade practices,” @foxnews reports. foxnews.com/media/judge-gran…

The New York Times editorial board writes: America Mourns Charlie Kirk The assassination of Charlie Kirk — the founder of a youth political movement that helped revolutionize modern conservatism — at Utah Valley University on Wednesday is a tragedy. His killing is also part of a horrifying wave of political violence in America. Since last year alone, a gunman killed a member of the Minnesota State Legislature and her husband and shot another Minnesota politician and his wife; a man set fire to the home of Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania; and a would-be assassin shot Donald Trump on the campaign trail. In 2022, an attacker broke into Representative Nancy Pelosi’s home and fractured her husband’s skull. In 2021, a violent mob attacked Congress, smashing windows and brutalizing police officers. In 2017, a gunman shot four people at a Republican practice for the congressional baseball game, badly wounding Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana. While the motives of Mr. Kirk’s killer are unclear, Mr. Kirk was a prominent political figure speaking at a political event. His killing is political in its consequences. Such violence is antithetical to America. The First Amendment — the first for a reason — enshrines our rights to freedom of speech and expression. Our country is based on the principle that we must disagree peacefully. Our political disagreements may be intense and emotional, but they should never be violent. This balance requires restraint. Americans have to accept that their side will lose sometimes and that they may feel angry about their defeats. We cannot act on that anger with violence. Too many Americans are abandoning this ideal. Thirty-four percent of college students recently said they supported using violence in some circumstances to stop a campus speech, according to a poll from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression published a day before the Kirk shooting. Since 2021, that share has risen from 24 percent, which was already unacceptably high. Surveys of older adults are similarly alarming. This editorial board disagreed with Mr. Kirk on many policy questions, and we are unreservedly horrified by his killing. We grieve for his loved ones. We mourn his death. Amanda Litman, president of the left-leaning group Run for Something, offered an appropriate response: “Political violence is meant to scare and silence — it is absolutely never acceptable. We don’t have to agree with someone to affirm they have a right to speak their mind without fearing for their life or safety.” Many prominent Democrats and Republicans offered similar sentiments. Whatever the killer’s motives, it is clear that political violence is a problem that extends across ideology. Prominent conservatives, moderates and liberals have all been victims in recent years. The intensity of our political debates will not disappear. The stakes are too high, and the country disagrees on too many important questions. But we Americans have lost some of our grace and empathy in recent years. We too often wish ill on our political opponents. We act as if people’s worth is determined by whether they identify as a Republican or a Democrat. We dehumanize those with whom we differ. This is a moment to turn down the volume and reflect on our political culture. It is a moment for restraint, rather than cycles of vengeance or the suspension of civil liberties, as some urged on Wednesday. It is also a moment to engage with people who have different views from our own. When societies lose the ability to argue peacefully and resort to violence to resolve their political debates, it usually ends very badly.

She has my deepest sympathies. Hinge is hell.

Journalist @MegynKelly, speaking with impassioned moral indignation, tells @BillMaher that pediatric gender transition treatment is “the issue of our time with respect to children and women’s rights.”

I saw Timothée Chalamet’s off-Broadway debut in John Patrick Shanley’s Prodigal Son in 2016. It counts among the top 5 stage performances I’ve ever seen. A star was clearly born.

The most degrading catering job I had was a fashion magazine launch party in ~2007. A model, probably high on coke, was flailing her arms near where we were exciting the kitchen. I tried to get her to move and she kicked me as hard as she could in the butt. Her friends all laughed. Because I was so used to being demeaned into oblivion in this job, it did not occur to me to tell my supervisor or to report that I had been assaulted to any kind of an authority such as the police. Instead, I took matters into my own hands. We were serving trays of blue curaçao cocktails. (Which is why I had tried to get her to move, for fear she'd knock one over.) So I put one on a tray, walked past her, and "by accident" spilled it all over her tan suede dress. As I walked away, an ice cube hit the back of my head. It was sweet vengeance.

Please listen to Stephanie Nolen. Seriously, actually listen. And think. Reflect that maybe you don’t understand US foreign aid the way you think you do. Seriously, actually stop and think. Seriously. “@K.M Thanks for reading. I know many people share the view that it is inappropriate for the United States to spend money to assist developing countries when there are people struggling to access health care or other assistance at home. The thing that I think this perspective misses, based on my many years of reporting on this subject, is that much of the U.S. spending is not altruistic. It's done to directly serve the interests of the United States. The U.S. funds almost all disease surveillance in Africa, for example – and yes, that protects Africans, but it also protects Americans, who are much safer when Ebola or a new mpox strain are detected while still in Uganda or D.R.C., rather than when they have traveled with a passenger bound for Kansas. The U.S. funds tuberculosis treatment in poor countries because Americans are less safe if extremely drug resistant strains of TB are permitted to evolve and spread. U.S. agencies do many clinical trials in developing countries. Supporting primary health care in very fragile states helps maintain peace. I could list 1,000 examples of how this spending directly contributes to U.S. national security. Is money spent to support these kinds of projects then actually money spent to assist Americans? (It also doesn't hurt to maintain an international image as a country interested in partnership, when seeking places for military bases or a friendly environment for U.S. mining companies, for example.)”

My typo is teaching people about global pubic health! #monkeypox

Fact check: The regret rate after gender-transition surgery among adults is unknown due to large loss to follow-up in the few efforts to study this. And as for the regret rate for surgeries conducted on minors, that rate is totally unknown, due to a lack of efforts to study it over the long term. @kristopherwells

When I was in the seventh grade, the girls in my class arbitrarily chose a girl to socially ostracize and torment into a fine powder. The girl finally switched schools. This is the same behavior I see in how the internet treats Meghan Markle.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @AOC took her pronouns out of her X bio. According to the Internet Archive, this happened at some point between Aug. 3, 2023 and May 18, 2024. In Nov. 2022, she apologized for not including her pronouns in her Insta bio, saying "They fell off."

After making a series of fiercely ideological and political statements on social media in the wake of Trump’s win and being pilloried for doing so, @SciAm editor in chief Laura Helmuth is now back pedaling. She claims she is committed to editorial objectivity.

Okay, the South Koreans are clearly geniuses. This is the most clever idea ever.

Meghan Markle is releasing a cooking and home décor show on @Netflix and the haters are going to lose their damn minds.

I sat in on a web meeting today run by public-health leaders who, distraught and horrified by Trump’s win, discussed the myriad ways he would likely make their job hellish. The meeting opened with a lengthy land acknowledgment and a plea for all speakers to make one. None did.