After many years of clinical experience, however, doctors learn that these patients lives are only improved if you instead assist them in living as women. Ever so slowly (because social mores remain so strong it feels like it *can't* be the right answer) transition becomes the standard treatment.
Science is about asking questions and being open to surprising or counter intuitive answers. A doctor starts out in the 1920s with patients he believes to be men afflicted with a desire to be women, and so he tries to help them lose that desire and assimilate into manhood.
Treatments that result in healthy, thriving trans people - or autistic people who are recognizable autistic - cannot amass enough evidence to be acceptable to people who feel the correct number of trans people or autistic people is zero.
Eugenics, plain and simple. So next let's talk about science.
The eugenic angle is fairly transparent here, isn't it?
RFK Jr. and other conservatives don't want autistic people or trans people to exist. An approach that reduces their numbers is desired, a treatment that does not seek to reduce their numbers is unacceptable.
There are two pillars of conservative medicine: One is eugenics, the other is a hatred of science as a method of discerning objective truths and a need to replace scientific truth-finding with declarations from conservative authorities.
It seems like hypocrisy, right? But we're in a time where professed values are no longer expected to have any meaning, so a charge of hypocrisy these days carries no heft to it.
Instead, let's talk about the deep consistency in RFK Jr. and conservatives' approach to medicine.
Some of the efforts being made in Belfast right now to protect people, because the government can't or won't, will be familiar to Minnesotans.
RFK Jr and HHS claim puberty blockers and hormone therapy for trans youth - treatments that have been known, used, and studied for decades - need to be banned because the evidence base isn't strong enough.
But sedating babies with ketamine to inject them with stem cells? Perfectly acceptable.
"Europeans discover Americans aren't kidding about all that outside" and "Americans discover Europeans aren't kidding about all that history" are my two favorite travel genres