What Happened Today: August 11, 2022
1,000 teenage patients sue shuttered London gender clinic; $75K bonuses for pharmacists in high demand; Reaping the Strange Fruits of Kiwi Farms
The Big Story
In July, the National Health Service (NHS), England’s public healthcare agency, closed London’s Tavistock gender clinic following a damning external review that raised multiple safety concerns about the treatment of its teenage patients. This week, a U.K. law firm announced a medical negligence lawsuit against the shuttered facility, which was home to Britain's only Gender Identity Development Service and specialized in the use of hormone therapy puberty blockers to treat teenagers who presented with gender dysphoria. Representing more than 1,000 of Tavistock’s former patients, Tom Goodhead, an attorney at the law firm Pogust Goodhead, alleges that children and young adolescents treated at the clinic “were rushed into treatment without the appropriate therapy and involvement of the right clinicians, meaning that they were misdiagnosed and started on a treatment pathway that was not right for them.” According to Goodhead, “these children have suffered life-changing and, in some cases, irreversible effects of the treatment they received.”
Serving roughly 19,000 children since it opened its doors in 1989, Tavistock saw demand for its services explode in recent years. While it treated just 97 children—half of whom were born male, the other half born female—in 2009, by 2021 it was managing annual referrals of 5,000 teenagers, with two out of every three born female. According to an independent review commissioned by the NHS earlier this year, which is still ongoing, the extensive waitlists amplified the “unsustainable pressure” mounting on the clinic, which had adopted “an unquestioning affirmative approach” to treating gender-dysphoric teenagers. The medically unsound approach was exacerbated by “the gaps in the evidence base regarding all aspects of gender care for children and young people,” with “the most significant knowledge gaps in relation to treatment with puberty blockers.”
The lawsuit and closure of the clinic come after London’s High Court ruled in 2021 that patients who were 16 years or younger were not old enough to provide the legal consent required to receive what the court described as the “experimental treatment” of puberty blockers at Tavistock. The high court judges said they “did not think [Tavistock’s] assumption was correct” that “if they give enough information and discuss it sufficiently often with the children, they will be able to” grant sufficient legal consent. That decision was overturned by an appeals court that found “it was for clinicians rather than the court to decide” about a child’s capacity to grant consent.
In the Back Pages: Reaping the Strange Fruits of Kiwi Farms
The Rest
→ The FBI had a confidential informant (CI) inside the Trump camp, according to two unnamed senior government officials speaking to Newsweek. The FBI sweep of former president Donald Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club in West Palm Beach this week was driven by information provided to the FBI by the CI, including where the FBI might find classified documents. Hoping to “avoid any media circus” with Trump while agents swept the property, the FBI relied on the informant’s access to Trump’s schedule to access the facility when he was in New York City. The FBI agents zeroed in on three rooms during the sweep—a bedroom, office, and closet—which “suggests that the FBI knew specifically where to look,” according to Newsweek.
Read More: https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-informer-told-fbi-what-docs-trump-was-hiding-where-1732283
→ Joe Gerace, the health director of Anchorage, Alaska (pop. 292,000), resigned on Monday, citing health concerns. Missing from his announcement was the recent reports that he lied about having not one but two master’s degrees, as well as about being a member of the National Guard. Contacted about the falsehoods by the Anchorage Daily News, Gerace insisted that he did in fact get one of those degrees, even if the school had no record of it or any master’s program at the time Gerace claimed he enrolled. “I could see how they’d be misleading for some people,” he told the reporter of the claims on his resume. “If somebody asks me, I clarify them right away.” The health director of Anchorage oversees a staff of 100 people and a budget of $15 million, with matters ranging from COVID-19 policies to air-quality monitoring falling under the office’s purview.
→ Quote of the Day:
“I knew politics was dirty, but I didn’t know I’d have to dumpster dive.”
Trevin Thalheimer, an Indiana man who was hoping to run for town council in Brookville, a town of 2,500 people, until the town’s police chief and police lieutenant arrested him on fabricated charges because they believed he was “anti-police.” Franklin County Prosecutor Chris Huerkamp dropped rape and drug-possession charges against Thalheimer last month after Huerkamp learned that the police who charged him had openly discussed not wanting Thalheimer on the city council, with one of the arresting officers telling a friend, “We don’t want him on the town board because he hates cops.” Days after that conversation, police alleged that they smelled marijuana near Thalheimer’s home, charged him with drug possession, and tacked on rape charges from a case that was months old. Cross-examining the arresting officer, the county prosector asked about the “unusual” decision of charging someone with rape without either consulting the prosecutor’s office or a scintilla of DNA evidence. The two officers have now been suspended.
→ Facebook is for the dinosaurs. It’s all YouTube and TikTok for U.S. teenagers. A new Pew study found that a whopping 95% of teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17 were regular YouTube users, with roughly 20% saying they were “almost constantly” on the video site. Compare that to the 32% who were hopping onto the Facebook platform at all, and a scant 2% that were high-frequency visitors. The new findings are a stark change in teenage social media preferences: As recently as 2015, Pew reported 71% of teenagers preferred Facebook. Behind YouTube, the biggest draw for young Americans today is TikTok, used by 67% of the age cohort, and Instagram, which pulls in 62%. Platform preferences aside, 54% of teenagers say it would be difficult to get off social media altogether, while 46% believe they could quit the scrolling feeds completely, cold turkey.
→ Tweet of the Day:
A new study published in Academic Questions uses metadata from more than 175 million published scholarly articles to track the prevalence of terms “denoting prejudice” (such as racism or sexism) from 1970 to 2020. This study follows a review of similar terms appearing in The New York Times, in which the authors found an “abrupt increase” beginning in 2010 that then reached “historical highs through at least the first five months of the Biden administration starting in January 2021.” This more recent study said that the increasing prevalence of such terms in academic articles was “not mirrored in news media content” until after 2010, when the increased appearance of the language “is apparent in both academic and news media content, but it is more acute in news media.”
→ In an ugly legal battle between the City of New York and the parents of Apolline Mong-Guillemin, a 3-month-old girl who was killed in Brooklyn when a car being chased by police jumped the curb, the city’s lawyers are now claiming that Mong-Guillemin’s parents “caused or contributed to” the baby’s death and that “any and all risks, hazards, defects, and dangers … were of an open, obvious, apparent, and inherent nature, and were known or should have been known to plaintiff[s].” It turns out taking a walk in New York City is now openly characterized—by the city itself!—as an inherently dangerous act. Mong-Guillemin’s parents’ lawyers argue that the city made a series of mistakes, from failing “to design, construct … and maintain [roads] in a reasonably safe condition” to “showing wanton disregard” for pedestrians while chasing a suspect across a residential neighborhood.
→ The digital divide that has left rural America with limited internet options and painfully slow broadband will not get better anytime soon, as the Federal Communications Commission announced that it is denying SpaceX-owned Starlink nearly $900 million in federal funding that had been earmarked for the company to build out internet service in rural areas. An FCC review of Starlink’s technology determined that such funding would be a “risky” investment for the government to make. The pulled funding would have been one of the largest investments by the the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, a $20 billion program expanding rural broadband access.
→ Struggling to recruit enough pharmacists amid growing complaints of poor working conditions and intense burnout, Walgreens has rolled out $75,000 bonuses to lure more employees to its pharmacies. Smaller bonuses were being doled out by pharmacy chains at a rapid clip during the COVID-19 pandemic, as stores had to cut hours because of staffing shortages just as locations saw massive demand for COVID-19 testing and the administration of vaccine shots. Even as the need for tests and shots have waned, a red-hot labor market has made employee retention difficult, and CVS has gotten into the big-bonus game, offering upwards of $30,000 to some of their pharmacy hires. The upfront cash comes on top of a median salary of $127,820 in 2021, per the U.S. Labor Bureau, but pharmacists say high income aside, their extended shifts and growing list of tasks (from filling prescriptions to shots in the arm) lead to unsafe conditions for them as well as their customers.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
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Reaping the Strange Fruits of Kiwi Farms
Finding the lines between harassment, entertainment, and suicide on the infamous internet forum
By Katherine Dee
On June 29, 2019, Null, the owner of the forum KiwiFarms.net, published the following statement on the site:
The Kiwi Farms is an entertainment site. It is a lighthearted discussion forum that exists to talk about people. It’s not a Jigsaw-esque torture chamber to teach people the value of life. It’s Internet nerds gossiping about their favorite e-celebs. It’s catty women talking about fat girls on YouTube. Sometimes, it’s even anime avatars talking about vtubers. These are ordinary people who are having fun on the Internet, and everyone is welcome to join us.
It was in response to Henry Martin, who, two days earlier, published a Google Doc to Twitter stating that his friend, a nonbinary, autistic game developer who was known both as Near and Byuu, had committed suicide.
In Martin’s note, he blamed harassment originating from Kiwi Farms for Byuu’s death. Byuu would be the third person whose suicide was blamed on Kiwi Farms. But according to Null, there was no evidence that Kiwi Farms users had harassed Byuu. There was a thread about Byuu, but Null pointed out that it was only 13 pages long, quite short for a website where threads often grow to thousands of pages, sometimes ballooning into entire sub-forums.
Byuu had participated in the discussion and was at peace with what had been posted there, according to Null. But, by Null’s own account, days before the suicide, Byuu had offered to pay him $120,000 to remove information about them from the site. Null—who, if we take his words and actions at face value, is a “free speech absolutist”—declined. (Null also famously refused to hand over Kiwi Farms’ user data to the New Zealand government after footage of the Christchurch massacre had been posted to the website.)
It’s hard to sympathize with Null as an individual, and it can be even harder to sympathize with Kiwi Farms as an institution, but there does seem to be a cold consistency to how they operate.
Null’s response to the death of another subject, Julie Terryberry, also struck me as strange. In a post titled, “How Our Community Handles Death,” Null wrote:
We are also afraid of seeing messages wrought with unnecessary and frankly embarrassing expressions of guilt. You were not important enough in her life to be even partially responsible, and believing you were is [sic] self-aggrandizement. There is enough selfishness involved in the act alone; no one needs you playing up your shitposts as murder weapons to complicate matters.
Was his message aloof but morally engaged, or was he purposely minimizing the role his website might have played in a woman taking her own life? The answer to that is genuinely unclear to me.
It’s much easier for me to put myself in the position of the people who are the butt of jokes, the lolcows, though I’ve experienced it to a much lesser degree.
I’ve experienced the obsessive hatred that has an awful way of finding you when you’re publicly too self-effacing or melodramatic online. It’s more than just hurtful; it will make you crazy.
Read the rest here.