My Washington Post Oped on Pediatric Gender Medicine, My Cancer CT Scan, and a Threat to My Safety

It's been an eventful week for me to say the least.

This Substack is essentially a newsletter to blast out three pieces of news:

• I’ve just published an editorial in the Washington Post calling upon the American Psychiatric Association to stop ignoring the systematic literature reviews about pediatric gender medicine.

• I had my two-year CT-scan cancer follow-up on Tuesday and the result came back negative, much to my profound relief.

• For the first time in my life and reporting career, I received a clear threat to my safety—quite evidently because of my work reporting about pediatric gender medicine.

My Return to the Washington Post

Here is a link to my Washington Post editorial, as well as a tweet thread about it if you’d care to share that and comment on the piece there.

This editorial is 18 months in the coming and is the product of all the study and reporting on this issue I’ve engaged in during that span of time. I hope you’ll give it a read and use it as a basis off of which to have discussions with others. There are lots of hyperlinks in the text to primary sources if you want to explore this topic more deeply.

The last time I was in WaPo’s pages was the summer of 2022, when I wrote a couple of opeds about monkeypox (now called mpox) that were so controversial in certain corners of the gay community that today there are people who are still enraged with me over what I wrote.

I presume that the response to my new WaPo piece, at least from some people, will also be fierce. I am ready for that and plan to stand firmly in support of my words.

I Remain Cancer-Free

As many of you know, I was first diagnosed with testicular cancer in December 2021. I swiftly had surgery, and then was initially cleared of cancer, only to recur at my first CT-scan follow-up in April 2022. I endured four cycles of chemo that ended in late July 2022.

My last day of chemotherapy, July 29, 2022. I felt pretty awful that day, but knew the week ahead was going to be harrowing. Chemo side effects would hit me directly after the end of the five-day treatment week and are cumulative; so they worsen with each successive cycle.

It took me a year to regain my bearings after that brutal experience. I otherwise have permanent neuropathy in my feet and fingers (chemo is neurotoxic), which is annoying but a small price to pay. I’ve remained officially cancer-free since August 2022 and have only an approximate 5% chance of recurring during my required five-year monitoring period that ends in 2027.

At my last check-up with my oncologist, I asked him what type of treatment I would need to receive should my cancer recur. He said if it comes back within three years—by spring 2025—it would be considered an aggressive recurrence, requiring high-dose chemo and a stem-cell transplant.

He then took a beat and said, “It’s just as awful as it sounds.”

About six weeks ago, I made the mistake of reading in The Emperor of All Maladies, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the history of cancer, exactly how harrowing that particular treatment is. There’s a disturbing section in the book about how in the 1990s, a fervor for high-dose chemo plus a stem-cell transplant to treat breast cancer overtook the global oncology field.

Excerpt from The Emperor of All Maladies

Forty thousand women underwent untold agony with this regimen, only for it to turn out that this overly aggressive treatment protocol was the product of one fraudulent doctor faking his data.

Science and medicine failed those women. I wrote on Twitter in detail about this medical travesty, plus a similar story about how difficult it was to prove that the radical mastectomy was a bad idea.

All this is to say I’ve been in something of a doom loop recently, convinced that I was destined to have recurrent cancer and suffer from a treatment so toxic it would nearly kill me.

So it was much to my profound relief when the CT scan promptly came back negative on Tuesday! I promptly turned on Carly Simon’s “Let the River Run” and did my best Joan Cusak impression:

(Doesn’t make me Madonna, never will.)

And then, being me, I swiftly got back to work. (I did, after all, spend all but a single week of the summer I was in chemo furiously reporting about mpox.) I was finishing my WaPo oped edits, all while I tried to pay attention to the fact that Columbia protesters had occupied the building where I took most of my English classes as an undergrad a quarter century ago. And then everyone in Hamilton Hall was summarily carted off by the NYPD.

As for my cancer follow-up, I’m good for the next 12 months. Provided the May 2025 CT scan comes back clean, there will be no high-dose chemo for me. I am very overjoyed to have blue skies ahead.

Things are looking up!

Someone Has Threatened My Safety

As many of you know, I’ve incurred an uncanny about of wrath, abuse, accusations, slights, insults and calumny during the 18 months since I first started tweeting about pediatric gender medicine. (I first started publishing articles on the subject in December.) And for the first time this week, I received an actual threat to my safety, via direct message on Instagram. A person wrote me and said, ominously:

“We know your face. You aren’t welcome in the city. Watch your back.”

If anyone recognizes this person, kindly get in touch with me. I will be filing a report with the NYPD about this.

I wrote some of my thoughts about this threat on Twitter, which include the following:

First, I have lived in New York City for 27 years, since I moved here to attend college at 19. It is not for anyone else to say whether I am welcome in my home here.

Second, just as I will not be cowed by GLAAD’s bullying (see below), I will not be intimidated by threats of violence.

Tony Morrison, who is a senior communications rep for GLAAD, said this about me on Twitter in February in reaction to my NY Post article about the Finnish study finding that gender-transition treatment is not associated with a difference in the suicide death rate in youths with gender distress. https://x.com/THETonyMorrison/status/1762032299690897642.

Third, the freedom of the press is a vital pillar of democracy and serves as an important check on the scientific and medical establishment. Reporting is my job, which I take very seriously.

If anyone believes I have ever published anything in error, please tell me.

But I refuse to bend to threats or other expressions of anger that do not come with any form of constructive criticism.

I remember when I started chemo, I told people that I wasn’t going to carry on about who I’d be “thinking positive” or any such nonsense. I said that I was going to be brave. Because bravery, or courage, is soldiering on in the face of real threat and fear.

I hope that other reporters will be brave and join me in covering this topic.