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Hundreds of doctors resign from British Medical Association over its support for puberty blockers

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By Jonathon Van Maren

Hundreds of U.K. doctors are resigning from the British Medical Association over its opposition to a ban on puberty blockers for kids, accusing the union of ignoring evidence-based medicine and failing to represent its members’ views.

According to reports in The Times and The Telegraph, hundreds of doctors are not only going public to express their anger with the British Medical Associations’ decision to reject the Cass Review’s findings on the dangers of puberty blockers – and many are resigning.  

According to The Telegraph: “Doctors with decades of experience have resigned from the British Medical Association because of the union’s opposition to the Cass review.”  

As I reported earlier in this space, on August 1 the British Medical Association – the U.K. doctor’s union – called on the government to lift the ban on puberty blockers for minors and called for a pause on the implementation of the National Health Service’s Cass Review. 

Initially, 1,000 senior physicians from across the U.K. responded by publishing an open letter to chairman of the BMA, Professor Philip Banfield; that number is now up to 1,400, with 900 of those being BMA members. Among their accusations is that the 69-member council passed their policy at a “secretive and opaque” meeting.  

READ: Texas forbids changing sex on driver’s licenses, state IDs for ‘gender identity’ 

“We write as doctors to say, ‘not in my name,’” the letter read. “We are extremely disappointed that the BMA council had passed a motion to conduct a ‘critique’ of the Cass Review and to lobby to oppose its recommendations … It does not reflect the views of the wider membership, whose opinion you did not seek. We understand that no information will be released on the voting figures and how council members voted. That is a failure of accountability to members and is simply not acceptable.”  

The letter further stated that the Cass Review “is the most comprehensive review into healthcare for children with gender related distress ever conducted” and urged the BMA to “abandon its pointless exercise” of attacking and opposing the recommendations. 

“By lobbying against the best evidence we have, the BMA is going against the principles of evidence-based medicine and against ethical practice,” the doctors wrote, in an almost unprecedented broadside against their own union in protest of the BMA’s brazen transgender activism. 

As first reported by The Times, comments made beneath that open letter “reveal many doctors have torn up their membership cards in response to the union’s stance on the review.” One commenter stated: “On the basis of the BMA’s outrageous stance on the superbly researched and written Cass Report, which has my full support and endorsement, I have decided to leave the BMA having been a member for 50 years since I qualified as a doctor. Increasingly, they not only fail to represent my views, they display no respect for the very premise and ethos inherent in being a medical professional.” 

Another doctor wrote: “As a union, primarily, it is the role of the BMA to represent its members, and not to drive clinical opinion, especially in specialist areas. I am considering resigning after membership of 42 years.” A third stated: “I left the BMA partly because of this sort of behaviour on the part of the leadership, having been a member for some thirty years.” Jacky Davis, a consultant radiologist and council member, told The Times: 

This minority has voted to block the implementation of Cass, an evidence-based review which took four years to put together. They have no evidence for their opposition. The Cass review is not a matter for a trade union. It is not our business as a union to be doing a critique of the Cass review. It is a waste of time and resources.

GB News also reported on the exodus, reporting that: “Critics slammed the decision as not representing the views of all members, critiquing the BMA’s ‘abysmal’ leadership which was becoming ‘increasingly bonkers and ideologically captured.’” And according to the Daily Mail: “One signatory called for a ‘vote of no confidence in BMA leadership’ and another commenting that ‘activists appear to have been allowed to take over.’” 

What is so extraordinary about this is that LGBT activists have achieved phenomenal success by infiltrating and taking over organizations, and then imposing their agenda from the top-down. Once LGBT activists are in a position to pass policies, control votes, and even censor publications, their agenda is assured. This has been incredibly effective for decades. 

In this instance, however, the ideologically captured British Medical Association is facing a full-scale revolt from its own members, and its credibility is taking a severe hit. Even the press coverage of their move, which would have been laudatory only a few years ago, is almost universally negative.  

The BMA is still committed to its agenda – but its grip on the narrative has been broken, and it seems unlikely that the union will be able to reestablish it.  

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Jonathon’s writings have been translated into more than six languages and in addition to LifeSiteNews, has been published in the National PostNational ReviewFirst Things, The Federalist, The American Conservative, The Stream, the Jewish Independent, the Hamilton SpectatorReformed Perspective Magazine, and LifeNews, among others. He is a contributing editor to The European Conservative.

His insights have been featured on CTV, Global News, and the CBC, as well as over twenty radio stations. He regularly speaks on a variety of social issues at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions in Canada, the United States, and Europe.

He is the author of The Culture WarSeeing is Believing: Why Our Culture Must Face the Victims of AbortionPatriots: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Pro-Life MovementPrairie Lion: The Life and Times of Ted Byfield, and co-author of A Guide to Discussing Assisted Suicide with Blaise Alleyne.

Jonathon serves as the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.

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Health

Oxford study finds transgender surgery increases depression, suicide ideation rates

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From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

This study, along with scores of others conducted in recent years, explodes the media-enforced narrative that so-called ‘gender transition’ procedures are beneficial for the gender-confused.

A study published in the Oxford Journal of Sexual Medicine found that undergoing so-called “sex change” surgery, far from reducing depression rates among the gender dysphoric, substantially increased rates not only of depression, but of anxiety, suicidal ideation, and substance use disorders. 

Males who underwent transgender surgery had a depression rate of 25.4 percent, compared to 11.5 percent in those who did not have surgery. Likewise, females who underwent surgery had a depression rate of 22.9 percent, compared to 14.6 percent in those who did not. 

The study notes that males undergoing “feminizing” surgeries demonstrated a particularly high risk for depression and substance use disorders. 

“From 107,583 patients, matched cohorts demonstrated that those undergoing surgery were at significantly higher risk for depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and substance use disorders than those without surgery,” the researchers found.  

Rather than concluding that so-called “gender affirming” surgery is a dangerous, unnecessary practice that should be discontinued because it puts patients’ lives at risk, the researchers instead suggest that that their findings show a need for “gender-sensitive mental health support following gender-affirming surgery to address post-surgical psychological risks.” 

Exploding the myth  

This study, along with scores of others conducted in recent years, explodes the media-enforced narrative that so-called “gender transition” procedures are beneficial or even “necessary” for the happiness and well-being of the gender-confused.  

significant body of evidence now shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures. 

Studies find that more than 80 percent of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “transition” procedures fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.  

Last year, a massive, peer-reviewed study provided unequivocal evidence that those who undergo so-called “gender reassignment” surgery put themselves at a vastly increased risk of suicide – an astounding 12 times that of the general population.  

The giant study, “involving 56 United States healthcare organizations and over 90 million patients,” analyzed data collected over a 20-year period, from February 2003 to February 2023, examining “suicide attempts, death, self-harm, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) within five years of the index event.”   

The researchers compared the experiences of persons aged 18-60 who visited hospital emergency rooms and who had previously undergone “transition” surgery with those who visited emergency rooms without having undergone transgender surgery: A stunning 3.47 percent of those who had surgically “transitioned” were treated for suicide attempts, versus 0.29 percent for non-“transitioned” patients.    

The authors of the study, like those of the one just published in the Oxford Journal of Sexual Medicine, sidestepped the obvious conclusion that attempts to surgically “transition” the gender-confused are both dangerous and futile.   

Instead they concluded: “Gender-affirming [sic] surgery is significantly associated with elevated suicide attempt risks, underlining the necessity for comprehensive post-procedure psychiatric support.” 

In 2016, The New Atlantis, A Journal of Technology and Society, produced a landmark report offering a summary and an up-to-date explanation of research on “sexual orientation and gender identity” from the biological, psychological, and social sciences, covering nearly 200 peer-reviewed studies.  

“The hypothesis that gender identity is an innate, fixed property of human beings that is independent of biological sex — that a person might be ‘a man trapped in a woman’s body’ or ‘a woman trapped in a man’s body’ — is not supported by scientific evidence,” according to experts Lawrence S. Mayer, M.B., M.S., Ph.D, scholar-in-residence in the Department of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University, and Paul R. McHugh, M.D., professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.  

According to their report, the vast body of scientific evidence tells a different story from the one most have been told through mainstream media. “Sexual identity” or “sexual orientation” are so commonly used that they go unquestioned and are perceived to have been derived from biological or medical science, but they are not. These terms are merely expressions of desire, behavior, and identity, all of which are fluid and may change over time. Additionally, “gay,” “lesbian,” and “transgender” are not scientific terms. People who suffer from homosexual inclinations and/or gender confusion are not separate species of human beings. 

The only thing that science actually tells us is that we are born either male or female. 

One young man, Yarden Silveira, was so distraught after “sex change” surgery that he committed suicide in 2021.    

Before taking his own life, Yarden wrote 

I wish I never listened to the medical and psychiatric community when they told me it was possible to change my sex. What a lie. Very dangerous and unethical. Sex reassignment [sic] surgery is a hit and miss type of surgery, but they don’t tell you that. They never do. And maybe if I didn’t have autism, maybe if my brain wasn’t so defective, I would have caught on before it was too late…   

This is what I get for messing with nature… I just wanted friendship and love. I wanted life to be easier. I wanted to be a woman since I was 15. I wish I had the knowledge that I have today. I was a confused kid with no identity. I wish I could have done everything different, but it’s too late now. I’m royally screwed…  

The Transgender Ideology and its lies, along with the pro-gay media, medical and psychiatric community, have killed me. The feminization of America will continue to produce outcomes like mine. It wasn’t my fault for failing. Everyone failed me, my death shouldn’t surprise anyone.  

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Alberta

Province announces funding for interim cardiac catheterization lab at the Red Deer Regional Hospital

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Alberta’s government is partnering with the Red Deer Regional Health Foundation to expedite the delivery of life-saving cardiac services to central Alberta residents.

Alberta’s government is partnering with the Red Deer Regional Health Foundation to expedite the delivery of life-saving cardiac services to central Alberta residents.

Alberta’s government is committed to ensuring that Albertans have access to the health care they need, including life-saving cardiac care and lab services, no matter where they live. For those in central Alberta, the Red Deer Regional Hospital Centre plays a critical role in providing that care, which is why the $1.8-billion Red Deer Regional Hospital Centre redevelopment project includes two state-of-the-art cardiac catheterization labs.

While the project is expected to be completed by 2031, the government recognizes the urgent need for cardiac services for the 450,000 Albertans from Red Deer and surrounding rural communities. If passed, Budget 2025 will provide $3 million in startup funding and ongoing funding to cover the operational costs for an interim cardiac catheterization lab at the Red Deer Regional Hospital Centre.

“Every Albertan should have access to the health care services they need close to home. Albertans living in the Red Deer area have long advocated for a cardiac catheterization lab and I am pleased to support a project that we know will help save lives.”

Adriana LaGrange, Minister of Health

A cardiac catheterization lab is a dedicated space where specialized teams can carry out diagnostic tests that examine and evaluate heart function to aid in the diagnosis of cardiac health concerns and treatment of coronary artery disease. The lab will be equipped with specialized imaging equipment to allow for cardiac procedures primarily including ablation, angiogram and angioplasty.

The interim cardiac catheterization lab will be located within the existing Red Deer Regional Hospital Centre in a space currently being used as a physician’s lounge. Preliminary design plans are already in place and construction is expected to begin by fall 2025.

The Red Deer Regional Health Foundation has committed to funding the capital cost of the project, which is expected to be about $22 million.

In October 2024, the foundation announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding with Alberta Health Services to fast-track the opening of a cardiac catheterization lab at Red Deer Regional Hospital Centre.

“We are incredibly grateful for the generosity of the Donald and Lacey families, whose support is bringing life-saving cardiac care closer to home for the benefit of all central Albertans. Together with all our health care partners, their commitment to advancing health care will make a lasting impact on countless lives for years to come.”

Manon Therriault, chief executive officer, Red Deer Regional Health Foundation

The foundation’s work is made possible by the generosity of donors, supporters and champions across the region. To support the development of the interim cardiac catheterization lab, the foundation announced a $10-million donation from the John Donald family.

“I am pleased to support the development of cardiac services in central Alberta, something we’ve long advocated for. This initiative will provide essential care to our community and ensure that more lives are saved closer to home.”

John Donald, Red Deer Regional Health Foundation donor

By prioritizing the development of an interim cardiac catheterization lab, patients will have access to critical services about three years earlier than expected. The interim cardiac catheterization lab is expected to be operational in early 2027.

“Developing this lab will allow us to treat more cardiac patients closer to home and support them in their recovery. Enhancing our cardiac services will also support our efforts to recruit and retain the talented professionals needed to care for our region’s patients.”

Janice Stewart, chief zone officer, Alberta Health Services Central Zone

Being able to meet the needs of the province’s rapidly growing population is a top priority for Alberta’s government.

Quick facts

  • The $1.8-billion Red Deer Regional Hospital Centre redevelopment project will upgrade several services throughout the hospital site, including:
    • an additional patient tower
    • six new operating rooms
    • a new medical device reprocessing department
    • two new cardiac catheterization labs
    • renovations to various areas within the main building
    • a newly renovated and expanded emergency department
    • a new ambulatory clinic building to be located adjacent to the surface parkade

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