A lawsuit filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern Division of Michigan against Southfield-based law firm Buckfire and Buckfire is more than a legal dustup. It should prompt Michigan’s academic, business, legal and philanthropic communities to consider whether their diversity initiatives can survive under new legal definitions of equality.
What was once considered diversity could now be considered discrimination.
Read more on the Detroit News (paywall).
A breakout session at a recent medical conference suggests that professional associations remain captured by the transgender ideology, even as the rest of the country reverses course. During the annual conference of the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), October 5-8, a session titled “Gender Affirming Puberty Suppression: Initiation and Management” instructed attendees to gratify a 12-year-old’s desires over and against the counsel of both his parents and the mass of emerging medical evidence.
The AAFP likely expected the materials from their conference to remain private, as they charge a hefty $1,195 to view the sessions online (AAFP members pay a discounted rate of $995). But “truth will out,” and one conference attendee shared the sordid details with National Review, which broke the story.
Read more on The Washington Stand.
You’d think that a medical society would focus fully on medicine. But as I just saw at the Pennsylvania Medical Society’s annual meeting, you’d be wrong.
On Oct. 18, I attended that meeting as a delegate, with the goal of getting the society to adopt my resolution opposing transgender drugs and procedures for children. While 27 states have protected children to varying degrees, Pennsylvania continues to allow teenagers and pre-teens to undergo invasive and irreversible treatments, even as a growing body of research shows how dangerous they are to children’s physical and mental health. Doctors, who take an oath to “do no harm,” have a medical and ethical obligation to protect these uniquely vulnerable young patients.
Read more on RealClear Politics.
Conservatives should welcome a new group, the Hippocratic Society, which will appeal to medical students and physicians of varied political stripes but will be particularly friendly to conservatives who might otherwise find themselves relegated to the margins of the medical profession.
The Federalist Society is a helpful, if imperfect, analogy. Like the Federalist Society, the Hippocratic Society will be a place where conservative views are hosted and put into debate with progressive perspectives. And undoubtedly, conservative-leaning medical students will find colleagues and mentors among its members.
Read more on National Review.
Seeking to bolster support for pediatric “gender care,” the American Academy of Family Physicians devoted a breakout session at its annual conference last month to discuss research asserting that puberty suppression and gender-transition procedures for minors are essential practices, peddling misleading claims about the beneficial effects of such procedures on young people.
The AAFP Family Medicine Experience is a private annual conference “where clinical expertise, practical strategies and real connection come together to lead what’s next in primary care.” The conference is not open to the press; National Review obtained presentation materials from an attendee.
Read more on National Review.
Do No Harm originally started in 2022 to “safeguard healthcare from ideological threats” and now has over 50,000 members, including medical professionals and concerned citizens in every state and 14 countries.
Yesterday, the organization won a major victory over a discriminatory Biden-era rule that awarded physicians who implemented “anti-racism” plans with higher federal payments. Implemented in 2021, the Biden administration sought to advance its “anti-racist” policy agenda by instructing Medicare physicians to “create and implement an anti-racism plan.”
Read more on Townhall.
The Trump administration is doing away with a Biden-era rule that created incentives for doctors to develop “anti-racism” plans and use race as a primary factor in medical treatment.
The Department of Health and Human Services reversed the rule last week, consistent with the administration’s broader opposition to left-wing racial ideologies.
Read more on National Review.
Are foreign doctors “critical to our national interest”? So says the American Medical Association as it tries to persuade the Trump administration to exempt medical professionals from the new $100,000 fee for H-1B visas, many of which are awarded to doctors from overseas.
It’s true that 1 in 5 U.S. doctors were born and educated in other countries, and many of them do outstanding jobs. It’s also true that many foreign-born doctors are actively pushing America toward socialism and other Third World ideologies.
Read more on The Washington Times.
On a cold day in Kansas earlier this year, Chloe Cole testified in front of the state Senate Committee on Public Health and Welfare on Senate Bill 63, the “Help Not Harm Act.” It would prohibit healthcare providers from performing “gender-affirming” surgeries or prescribing puberty blockers and hormones for minors. She explained how she was given puberty blockers and testosterone at 13, had a double mastectomy at 15, and now she must wear bandages on her chest every day, among other complications.
“My parents were warned that if not affirmed in my identity and decision to transition, it was likely I would commit suicide,” said Cole, now 21, who was 20 at the time of her testimony. “Medical professionals did not provide my parents with any other option.”
Read more on Washington Examiner.
Jonni Skinner was a “naturally effeminate” gay boy who struggled to be accepted by those around him. In the pursuit of acceptance and understanding, Skinner ended up getting a referral to the gender clinic at the University of Michigan and Mott’s Children’s Hospital. There, Skinner was told he wasn’t gay, but that he was born in the wrong body and put on a path to medically transition to a girl. He was 13 years old at the time.
What followed is a harrowing, heartbreaking story of medical abuse, malpractice, and fraud.
Read more on Townhall.
Texans should be worried about the state’s public universities. In September, a scandal erupted at Texas A&M after a student recorded a video of an English professor reading a book about a transgender 12-year-old and discussing different gender identities. The university president, Mark Welsh, put the dean of the school of arts and sciences and the head of the English department on leave before resigning himself. Yet Texas A&M is far from the only state school where divisive woke ideas endure. Despite federal and state attempts to rid campuses of “diversity, equity and inclusion,” that hateful worldview is still common across the Lone Star State.
Texas rightly prides itself as a national leader in the fight against DEI. In 2023 Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law prohibiting DEI offices, programs, activities and training at state colleges and universities. Most Texans probably thought this law, combined with President Trump’s executive order earlier this year rolling back DEI at taxpayer-funded institutions, had driven DEI out of state schools for good. Not so.
Read more on The Wall Street Journal.
MADISON – Young adults who received gender-affirming health care as minors could sue doctors for a wide range of injuries deemed to be related to the treatment under legislation considered in a Nov. 5 legislative hearing.
The bill, introduced by Sen. Rob Hutton, R-Brookfield, and Rep. Amanda Nedweski, R-Pleasant Prairie, would create a civil cause of action against a health care provider who performs a gender transition procedure resulting in “any physical, psychological, emotional, or physiological injury.” Lawsuits could be filed until the treated individual reaches age 33.
Read more on the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
What’s happening to our doctors? Researchers at an organisation called Do No Harm recently found that American healthcare professionals were more than two times likelier to be anti-Semitic than their share of the workforce, and that physicians are nearly 26 times overrepresented among individuals identified as having publicly shared anti-Semitic content. This is a worrying tendency which seems common across the West. A few weeks ago a UK-based doctor was accused of denying the Holocaust and celebrating the Hamas attacks of 2023; in August a doctor in Liverpool who praised Adolf Hitler was let back into work; a med-school student in Quebec was revealed in October to be the moderator of a Discord channel hosting anti-Semitic slurs; earlier this year two Australian nurses were suspended for threatening Jewish patients.
Read more on The Spectator.
As parents fight school districts in the courts to disclose when their children express gender identity at odds with sex, allied with a transgender child psychologist who has repeatedly urged judges to clue in parents, they face a lesser known roadblock to transparency about their children’s health: electronic health record systems that lock them out.
A report by medical advocacy group Do No Harm said “it appears that healthcare systems are using sexually transmitted infections, mental health concerns, and drug and alcohol exceptions” in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act’s privacy regulation “to remove parental access to their child’s entire medical record – well beyond the limits of the law.”
Read more on Just the News.
The Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) in Milwaukee required medical students to attend a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) workshop in October, according to documents obtained by the nonprofit Do No Harm.
The “Race Matters Workshop,” embedded within MCW’s “The Good Doctor” course on professionalism and ethics, featured learning objectives requiring students to “[d]emonstrate knowledge of inherent biases and how they affect the way we interact with patients and advocate for them.”
Read more on Campus Reform.
The conservative physician advocacy group Do No Harm recently flagged the UNM School of Medicine in a report as one of the five worst U.S. medical schools for still lowering academic standards to boost the number of racial minorities training as doctors.
Ian Kingsbury, director of Do No Harm’s Center for Accountability in Medicine, applauded Mr. Jakiche’s lawsuit against the school.
Read more on The Washington Times.
The National Institutes of Health has slashed funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion-focused projects by 80%, saving taxpayers $168.7 million in the first six months of the Trump administration, according to an exclusive Do No Harm study shared with Newsmax.
Dr. Kurt Miceli, medical director at Do No Harm hailed the cuts as a “turning point” that prioritizes “merit and scholarship over ideology,” redirecting resources toward high-impact biomedical research.
Read more on Newsmax.
The legal doctrine of government speech, which inhibits individual First Amendment rights, got a massive expansion from the Pacific to the Rockies thanks to a federal appeals court that upheld ideological requirements for ongoing professional licensing rules, according to lawyers for a California doctor challenging her state’s rules.
The Pacific Legal Foundation told Just the News it will file a petition for rehearing by the full 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals following a three-judge panel’s ruling Friday that deemed the Golden State’s mandatory “implicit bias” training in accredited continuing medical education, of which doctors must complete 50 hours every two years, government speech.
Read more on Just the News.