It’s as I’ve been saying all along with regard to self-identification: why go through bother of gender reassignment surgery and hormone replacement therapy when you can just simply change your mind?
If you think and feel yourself to be the opposite sex, you are - at least now Jack Turban has made that abundantly clear.
Jack Turban MD MHS is a researcher, medical journalist, and chief child and adolescent psychiatry fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine. He is co-editor of the book Pediatric Gender Identity: Gender-affirming Care for Transgender and Gender Diverse Youth.
Dr. Turban graduated from Harvard University magna cum laude with a B.A. in neurobiology. He earned his MD and MHS degrees from Yale School of Medicine, where he was an HHMI medical research fellow and graduated with highest honors with an award winning thesis entitled, “Evolving Treatment Paradigms for Transgender Youth.” He completed his adult psychiatry training at MGH/McLean (Harvard Medical School).
He is currently a child and adolescent psychiatry fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine. He has several active research projects through The Fenway Institute and Stanford University School of Medicine. He is a member of the media committee of The American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry and the communications council of The American Psychiatric Association.
He also thinks that if you don’t immediately start medically transitioning your child at the first sign of gender dysphoria you are engaging in conversion therapy and that your child will kill themselves over it.
Oh, and something something right wing bigoted talking points.
For the record, conversion therapy - a pseudo-psychological belief that homosexuals can be cured of their homosexuality - is illegal in 18 states including the District of Columbia precisely because it’s torture that is against the Geneva Conventions and would never be used on terror suspects.
It’s no wonder that lately this abhorrent “treatment” is being eschewed in favor of gender reassignment surgery because why have a gay son when you can have a straight daughter as witnessed by the explosion of pediatric gender clinics popping up all over the country.
Dr. Turban bills himself as an Allopathic & Osteopathic Physician. But he’s famous for his advocacy for certain positions regarding transgender medicine – for advocating for the “Gender Affirming Care for Trans and ‘gender-diverse’ youth” as part of his work on “Pediatric Gender Identity” and vigorously advocating for, and downplaying the risks of medical transition, while selling books on the same.
In short, he’s not at all interested in what evidence a child bases their gender dysphoria on: he’s prepared to take them at their word.
Dr. Turban is quick to dismiss anyone as a “right wing bigot” to deign to question the “affirmative care” model. Indeed, when author Abigail Shrier raised alarms in her book “Irreversible Damage” about the transitioning of young girls and the consequences of putting them on a path to medical transition and sex reassignment surgery, he went on the attack of the medical professionals who have endorsed her.
This is at odds with the Mayo Clinic’s study that puberty blockers come with all kinds of health risks, infertility among them.
So a question is begged: why exactly is Jack Turban such a proponent of puberty blockers? According to Open Payments Search Tool used to track payments made by drug and medical device companies to physicians and teaching hospitals, Jack Turban has received at least $15,000 (US) from Arbor Pharmaceuticals, manufacturers of Triptodur™, (triptorelin) which, through extended release injectable suspension, has been shown to arrest or reverse the clinical signs of puberty, in cases of precocious puberty – the exact purpose Arbor advocates Triptodur for.
A doctor insistently promoting the “benefits” of puberty blockers, who repeatedly insists on their safety and who seemingly has endless amounts of time to attack, denigrate, and smear doctors who disagree, has at least a $15,000.00 incentive to downplay the risks of and push a drug, paid directly by the manufacturers.
In any other instance this alone should disqualify Dr. Turban from, at a minimum, entering into any policy discussion about the safety and efficacy of puberty blockers as he clearly has a financial conflict of interest.
This isn’t to say that every doctor who’s ever received money from a pharmaceutical company should be banned from having opinions but, at the very least, doctors who stand to directly benefit from pushing certain pharmaceutical drugs should, at a minimum, refrain from entering into the fray that is social media about it.
Jack Turban receives money from a pharmaceutical company that manufactures and distributes puberty blockers - a drug that, as more children undergo medical transition - will be in higher demand while he engages in denouncing of journalists, authors and medical professionals alike who are concerned about, quite literally, sterilizing children and putting them on a path of lifelong dependency on hormones and other drugs.
He also dismisses mounting alarm from medical professionals about suppressing puberty.
Even more disturbing is a recent and explosive 60 Minutes segment on transgendered individuals who decide to “detransition” - ergo, to stop undergoing gender reassignment altogether - where Dr. Turban decided to weigh in on the subject and instead of coming across as a sober, reasonable medical professional Dr. Turban has fully adopted the language and rhetoric of Trans Rights Activism.
“Detransition” testimonies expose what so many of us (especially parents) suspect, but are too afraid to say – that maybe we ought not allow children to chemically or physically castrate themselves at the first sign of confusion. We need more journalists to dig into what happens when we blindly affirm minors, not less.
Having now said that gender is just a figment of one’s imagined self, Dr. Turban should shut down his practice immediately as there’s no longer a need for gender reassignment surgery or hormone replacement therapy.