Public Diary

A comprehensive new report commissioned by the Utah Department of Health and Human Services provides one of the most detailed and exhaustive assessments to date on the medical safety, effectiveness, and long-term outcomes of gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary youth. And despite recent political rhetoric suggesting otherwise, the findings are clear: gender-affirming medical treatment, when guided by evidence-based protocols, helps transgender adolescents thrive. The report “Gender-Affirming Medical Treatments for Pediatric Patients with Gender Dysphoria” was produced by the University of Utah’s College of Pharmacy Drug Regimen Review Center and submitted to the state in August 2024. It arrives in the wake of Utah’s controversial Senate Bill 16, which placed a moratorium on gender-affirming medical care for minors and tasked health officials with conducting a review to determine whether the ban should remain in place. Rather than validating the restrictions, the 900-page report systematically debunks the narrative that these treatments are experimental or dangerous. Instead, it affirms what many healthcare professionals, families, and transgender individuals already know from lived experience: that access to gender-affirming hormone therapy and puberty blockers reduces psychological distress, improves quality of life, and is supported by decades of research. The Utah report is among the most thorough reviews conducted by a state agency. It draws on more than 270 clinical studies from the U.S., Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, and Europe, spanning observational studies, randomized controlled trials, and long-term descriptive research. These studies examined the mental and physical health outcomes of transgender youth who underwent gender-affirming medical care, including puberty blockers (GnRH analogs), cross-sex hormones (testosterone or estrogen), and related medications. Key findings include: Significant mental health improvement in adolescents undergoing gender-affirming care, including reductions in depression, anxiety, suicidality, and eating disorders. Improved quality of life and self-image reported by TGNB youth after starting hormone therapy. Low rates of regret or treatment discontinuation, especially when care is delivered through comprehensive, multidisciplinary teams. No serious long-term health risks found in monitored populations receiving hormone therapy, including studies with follow-ups as long as 40 years. The authors conclude that there is more evidence supporting gender-affirming care than there is for many high-risk new drugs approved for children in the U.S., including recent gene therapies.

You... can just vote and do other stuff. Like, that is an action you can take, @apas-95. It's not like voting is expensive (to most people) and there are countriest other than the USA with more functional election systems, which routinely vote into power rather left-wing governments.

Your striving for ideological purity is either cynical to the point of fatalism or pitifully immature. If you cannot approach political action from a pragmatic standpoint, there isn't a conversation about political action to be had.

And don't get me wrong, I'd love nothing more than to replace the US with something that is less volatile, for the sake of literally the entire world.

An idea I recently came across is to categorize people into political opponents and political enemies. Opponents being reasonable people who play by the rules and can be negotiated with, enemies being... well, fascists. And it is a dangerously reactionary thing to lump the two together and treat opponents like enemies.

Kalama Harris, politically reprehensible as though every Democrat candidate is, is a political opponent. However corrupt the US system is, the Democrats at least pay lip service to the tenets of liberal democracy in a way the Republicans are currently not. Trump is downright a fascist, 100% a political enemy.

What I think you forget is that voting isn't declaring allegiance to a fan-club. It is chosing who you want to spend the next election term fighting. It is chosing the government you would like to petition, protest against, and criticize in the public debate. Whomever gets voted into office is the boss fight on the menu until the next election. And with that view in mind, voting for a party more likely to listen to reason is a really good strategy.

the way op carries on comparing voting to prayer after feigning acknowledgement of the "vote and do other stuff" approach fucks me up because the "do other stuff" is just immediately ignored, almost as though acknowledging actions beyond buying fair trade is inconvenient for the morally superior fatalist argument

The ruling is specifically “a former president can have committed illegal acts during his presidency but the punishment for that is impeachment and since you can’t impeach a former president they are immune”