April 16, 2048
WASHINGTON --- Rep. Oliviah Carlisle (G-CA) announced last night that she would be bringing a new piece of legislation before Congress that would streamline the procedure for delivering state financial assistance to sufferers of Chronic Leuprorelin-Induced Wasting Syndrome (CLIWS), a multi-system health disorder that attacks the bones, muscles, reproductive organs, and brain of those who were administered the drug leuprorelin (once sold under the trade name Luprod by the company Cabot Laboratories, and by other names by other companies) during the Gender Panic of the first third of the century. Many CLIWS sufferers also suffer from Leuprorelin-Induced Developmental Disorder (LIDD), a learning disorder stemming from total pubertal disruption that leaves them with an approximately ten-point deficit in IQ, which, once believed to be minor, upon long-term followup, has been correlated with significant reductions in educational attainment, job security and productivity, and income potential which, when combined with CLIWS symptoms, makes them particularly vulnerable.
CLIWS patients, often called subadults due to their failure to reach sexual maturity, were administered the prostate cancer drug -- which had never been tested in children -- for several years, before being given either synthetic testosterone (for girls) or synthetic estrogen (for boys). By 2022, children were receiving leuprorelin as young as eight years old in hundreds of gender clinics, offline and online, across North America, Britannia, Europe, and Australia. Scientists began studying the effects of combining early-age leuprorelin administration with wrong-sex hormones in 2028, but struggled to publish their results in English, as over sixty medical journals faced legal and sociomedial attacks if they did. Finally in 2034, under increasing pressure from members after a catastrophic nurses’ strike, the American Medical Association released a guidance paper in which they recommended that genderologists, family doctors, pediatricians, endocrinologists, and physician’s assistants tasked with treating gender patients test their pediatric and ex-pediatric patients for bone loss, muscle wasting, cardiovascular defects, neurological deficiencies, developmental retardation, sexual dysfunction, and infertility.
Over the course of the next several years, as more than 180,000 leuprorelin patients were diagnosed with what would later be described as CLIWS in the medical literature, the FDA issued a recall of leuprorelin and related drugs, after unsuccessfully attempting to stem their illegal sale. Associated with this recall, it is estimated that the spike by over 80,000 prostate, ovarian, and breast cancer patient deaths is due to the disappearance of the GnRH agonist drug class, which had been effective in slowing cancer growth. Death rates from ruptured cysts, internal hemorrhage, and organ damage in endometriosis patients also rose after the drugs were withdrawn from the market.
A further series of complications was suffered by men who received uterus implants during the years they were performed (2029-2033). Those men who had undergone leuprorelin administration in lieu of puberty, followed by estrogen therapy, were placed on transplant anti-rejection regimens to support the organs. All were removed within four years as fatal complications, initially underreported, became pervasive. It is believed -- although research was limited due to the swift banning of the procedure -- that the underdeveloped bodies of the men were too weak to withstand anti-rejection drug regimens. Investigations carried out by womyn holdouts found that about 65% of the harvested uteruses were taken from prostituted women from Melt Belt countries; 20% from women suffering with Gender Identity Delusional Disorder (GIDD); 10% from women seeking prophylactic contraception; a further 5% were donated by cisters. Uterus implants to men’s abdominal cavities were suspended in 2033 in the US although they continued to be performed abroad; in Thailand they were available as recently as 2042. Implanted uterus prostheses overlapped with donor uteruses for several years and had replaced them completely by 2033.
Uterus transplants continue to be performed on women who had hysterectomies during the Gender Panic, with varying success, and only temporarily until birth. About 35% of recipients are able to support a pregnancy with IVF procedures; however, all of these successes have occurred in cisters who had donated their uteruses in order to gain inclusion in the Cis Allies List, and none of whom had been administered leuprorelin. To date there have been no recorded cases of women becoming pregnant naturally, or of natural childbirth, with a secondary uterus. Feminists have protested the continuation of this procedure, on the basis that women who had non-essential hysterectomies of healthy organs are now receiving transplanted organs from refugee and prostituted women, who in turn are losing their reproductive powers: some have compared this to genocide. Some feminists also point out that the effects of anti-rejection drugs on a developing fetus are not well understood, but in kidney transplant patients, it is well known that fetal development and health are negatively impacted by the presence of these drugs. Health assurance companies in the US rarely lend for the secondary uterine transplant procedure. In countries with health rights, including Britannia, Quebec, and the Eunion, this procedure is considered elective and is not covered.
In 2041, when the Gender Police was disbanded in the United States, over 16,000 medical professionals, educators, social workers, parents, and others had been incarcerated for gender crimes including abusing pronouns; referring to an individual by assigned name; or questioning gender ideology in private or public communications. Due to the severity of sentences for those who worked actively in areas such as detransitioning and re-identification, gender criticism and defiance, feminism, and other gender-resistant areas, very few doctors and other professionals were able to speak publicly during those years, although anonymous papers and pamphlets were circulated online and in womyn-holes.
In the aftermath of the Gender Panic, the US population’s sex distribution is 40% female, 49% male, and 11% unsex. It is estimated that approximately 19% of the native US population aged 25-55 has been chemically sterilized (this figure does not include classical female and male sterilization procedures like tubal ligation and vasectomy). Although the demographic effects of the Gender Panic are not expected to be felt in strict numerical terms, as population replacement levels continue to be robust due to immigration from the Melt Belt, psychologists and family balance specialists have expressed concern over the high rates of suicide and self-harm among people who are not able to have the children they want.
CLIWS sufferers’ quality of life is so dramatically affected by their disease, especially when it is comorbid with LIDD, that they often cannot work, and rely on government financial assistance to live. Rep. Carlisle’s bill would streamline the process by which CLIWS sufferers can apply for assistance, no longer requiring them to submit to lengthy medical exams (sometimes described as “humiliating”) to determine the severity of the effects of their leuprorelin and wrong-sex hormone damage. Rep. Carlisle said that the bill “would remove the gatekeeping measures that make it so difficult for CLIWS sufferers to access the assistance they need.”
Feminist campaigners have argued that medical exams are necessary to prevent misuse of funds, which are taken from the limited and shrinking pool of funds available for all non-men’s services; several have pointed out that the system is open to abuse from anyone self-identifying as a CLIWS sufferer, as records of who was administered leuprorelin have not been kept, due to privacy regulations, successive name changes of patients, and widespread black-market sales of the drugs in the 2020s and 2030s. Patient advocates have attempted to discredit these campaigners on the grounds that gatekeeping measures which prevent patients from receiving needed financial assistance lead to drastically increased suicide rates. Conflicting reports show that suicide rates may or may not be affected by access to funds.
Beverly Mason, 48, a doctor in Bethesda, MD at the Sex Restoration Center, which aims to assist men and women who have lost organs, suffered endocrine damage, and have little or no sexual function, was critical of the proposed legislation. “These patients need ongoing medical care. CLIWS sufferers are already ‘permanent patients’ and have been since childhood; they are on life-long drug therapy; they are receiving counseling. The signs of CLIWS are unmistakable and it is not a difficult task for a physician specializing in sex recovery and restoration to identify. We don’t need less gatekeeping, we need more involvement of the medical community, more research, and more interaction between patient and physician.”
Athan Jackson, 32, who went by the name Ava in the past, is a CLIWS sufferer who received Luprod for five years from solar age nine to fifteen before being administered estrogen. He spoke to this reporter about what the bill would mean to him. “My parents were so distressed that I was a faggy boy that they pushed hard to get me on Luprod by nine years old. There’s good evidence that the younger a child was put on it, the worse the cumulative effects are. I went on estrogen when I was sixteen. Once I did, the effects really started to hit me. I had it every month and it was awful: diarrhea, cramping, gas, mood swings, it was horrible. In fact, during the time that all that was going on, we had to take sick leave for our periods all the time; a lot of us did. For years, I assumed that my CLIWS symptoms were period symptoms. Not that it would have mattered; I was already off Luprod and the damage was done. We all have different experiences and it’s important not to exclude someone on the basis that he doesn’t have all the same symptoms as an arbitrary standard. It’s not a binary, it’s not ‘you either have every symptom or you don’t have CLIWS’. All of us who were on Luprod have it to some degree, and all our claims to financial assistance are valid.”
Julieta Gomez, a midwife who was incarcerated for nine years for rejecting male applicants to her women-only reproductive health retreats, and who spent part of that incarceration in solitary confinement after being convicted of referring to her cellmate’s penis as “his penis” during a hearing in which she alleged he had sexually assaulted her, has publicly objected to the use of public funds to, in her words, “pay for the lifestyles of men who subjected themselves to a drug regimen that they related to women’s menstruation, when women receive no financial assistance and continue to experience dysmenorrhea and endometriosis that can leave some of us unable to work for several days each month. We don’t get sick leave; we just get fired. Why should men who gave themselves so-called ‘periods’ as a sexual fetish get a check every month, when women whose period symptoms are caused by being born female get nothing? Where’s the medical research into our legitimate physical maladies, or the drug research to replace all the needed drugs that were taken off the market because men were using them irresponsibly?” Although this view is generally considered extreme, several of the women this reporter spoke to made similar bitter remarks off the record.
Jackson, who stopped taking estrogen at 24, came out to his parents as a gay man shortly after. He says that his parents struggled with the news. “My dad in particular, he just didn’t want to accept it. He showed me photos and videos of me as a kid wearing pink and sparkles and told me that was proof I was a girl, but I had already gone off the estrogen by then and I knew I wasn’t going to go back. But my relationship with my parents became very strained. Unfortunately they passed away before we were able to come together as a family.”
Jackson says that his decision to stop estrogen came about after he realized that he was not a woman. “I was a man taking estrogen and wearing dresses. None of the women I knew took estrogen or wore dresses. I loved pink and sparkles. None of the women I knew loved pink or sparkles. I started to question why I was so different from other women. It was actually when I was talking to my friend Isabella. At the time she was going by ‘Leo’. She hadn’t had her phallo yet. She got it really soon after. But at the time, she was using a prosthesis. And I remember her joking about how she was like a cis man with her packer. And it just popped out: I told her that I’d never heard of a real man pissing through a silicone cylinder. That I didn’t even know if that was possible for a man to do. She laughed it off but I kept thinking about it. And I realized, there’s nothing less manly than holding a hollowed-out dildo to your crotch in order to take a piss. And if that’s the case, than there’s nothing less womanly than putting slow-release red gel capsules in your neovagina to simulate a period. Literally no woman on Earth does that. That’s when it hit me. I wasn’t a woman. So I should stop pretending.”
Jackson describes what it was like to be a destransitioner before the end of the Gender Panic. “Oh, I lost everything and everyone. All my friends in the gender community cut me dead. I even lost access to my bank account for a while because they didn’t have a mechanism to switch back to natal sex. The college I went to refused to reissue my diploma because they said their policy was name at acceptance. The only exception was for transition, but they said detransition didn’t count. My endocrinologist fired me as a patient because he didn’t want to have to adjust his success rates. My roommates asked me to leave because they were afraid people would suspect them of questioning gender ideology if people found out they were living with a detransitioner. I moved back in with my parents but that was very uncomfortable because they still saw me as a girl. It was too much, so I moved out. I became a sex worker. There was a whole fetish for that: for guys who had never developed, who had gone on estrogen and then stopped, it made a different kind of body, you know. Something they hadn’t seen a lot of. So it was kind of a niche thing. And I could make some money that way. But they saw me as a freak and they abused me a lot. It wasn’t worth the money, because now I have to live with the trauma of it all. If I could go back, I would just… leave myself alone, you know? Just be a boy, grow up, go off into the world, fall in love, and everything. I didn’t get to do a single thing right. I was only nine years old. I was only nine!”
He describes how gender treatment most affected his life: “I’m attracted to men, but I don’t have anything men want. Not what straight men want or what gay men want. So I am in limbo, romantically. I don’t have sexual function or organs but I’m still a romantic person, I still want to be in love and have a partner. I don’t get that emotional connection from the Man-akin, and since I’m not sexually functional, he’s like a piece of furniture more than anything else. I honestly haven’t even charged him in weeks. I would love to be in a relationship with a flesh man some day, but as soon as I tell someone that I’m subadult, he’s not interested. They’re not cruel to my face, but I can see the interest just dries up. A few times I tried not telling, but it didn’t make a difference. As soon as they realized, it was over. They were polite, but I could see they were sad, they felt pity for me. That’s not what I want.”
He describes attempting to have a relationship with another man in the same situation. “I’ve never been attracted to that. I’m attracted to male attributes, actually virile men. They definitely don’t have to be ‘masculine’, that’s not what I’m saying. But virile, biologically male, fully developed and functional, yes. And subadult men aren’t any of those things, even if we’re really masculine in terms of clothes and behavior and all that. It took me a while to realize that it’s not someone’s style choices that I’m attracted to, or that define them. And because of what I don’t have, presentation is all I’m left with. No one of substance is attracted to surface. I don’t honestly know any subadults who are in healthy relationships with anybody. I know plenty who are in relationships, but I don’t call it healthy to be with someone who fetishizes you. The men who are into subadults are turned on by the fact that we can’t enjoy sex. That creeps me out. It feels almost rapey in a way. So I’m just alone. I would give anything just to feel partnered to someone, to cuddle, who feels like mine. Maybe it will happen someday.”
Jackson believes that his difficulty in holding a job is a combination of his CLIWS and LIDD symptoms and the lasting effects of having been sexually active in his teen years. “I met a man online when I was fifteen. He told me he wanted to ‘mentor’ me. He was attracted to me because I was prepubescent. I looked and sounded like I was ten years old. There was a lot of that. All the other kids I knew who were on Luprod got a lot of attention from men like that. They weren’t technically considered pedophiles, because we were all teenagers. But the reason they were attracted to us was because we looked like we were ten. And pseudopedophilia isn’t recognized as a crime or disorder. They just call it a harmless kink. Because the victims are fourteen and up, so, over the age of consent. But we hadn’t even entered puberty. Mentally and physically, we were ten years old. I feel like no one understands.” Jackson describes his relationship with an older man as “violating and disorienting,” but acknowledges that he was of age and the relationship was consensual. “I think a lot of people don’t understand that ‘legally consensual’ doesn’t mean that it wasn’t still harmful. There is a huge number of people who were on Luprod who were preyed on [sic] by adult men simply because we appeared to be prepubescent. So, the men who were having sex with us were essentially pedophiles. It’s very damaging to us. But no one takes it seriously, because we were technically of age. No one understands that ‘of age’ doesn’t mean anything when the whole purpose of Luprod is to ‘stop the clock’ on a person’s development.”
Jackson’s treatment consists of a CLIWS protocol that he finds physically demanding and exhausting, and psychotherapy that, he says, “is even more draining than the physical therapy and medication. Mostly we work on my anger issues. My parents are dead; I have to forgive them for my own sanity. I feel like I was failed by every person who was supposed to care about me: relatives, friends, community members, teachers, doctors. Even the government. No one wanted what was best for me. No one stopped to ask if it was really a good idea to turn a nine year-old boy into a eunuch. But they don’t have to live with the consequences: I do. I’ve never had an orgasm. I don’t even know what it is. But sometimes I feel like everything that happened to me, ultimately, it happened so other men could get off. That’s what I think. That’s what I talk about with my therapist. I still have a lot to work through.”
Cori Lazaro, 36, a reidentified woman who suffers from osteoporosis (she has, she says, the bones of a ninety year old woman), is sterile, and has never had sexual function in her life, campaigns for the rights of former gender patients, especially Luprod survivors. She came to prominence when she brought an initially female-only class-action lawsuit that was later expanded to include all gender patients, and although the lawsuit was not financially remunerative, it is still considered a victory in that it contributed to the removal of leuprorelin from the market. Lazaro, who underwent a total gynectomy at eighteen, says that success for her would be for the medical community to take responsibility for how gender patients were failed for so long. “They were treating us like guinea pigs. There were no studies, no research at all. They were giving us Luprod because it appeared to be safe in eighty year-old men with prostate cancer whose life expectancy was only four years anyway, men who had gone through natural puberty seventy years prior and who had had a lifetime of sexual function, fertility, and bone growth. There was no way to predict how our bodies would be affected, but they did it anyway. Doctors didn’t act in the best interests of their patients. I hold the doctors responsible for this.”
A group of lesbians represented by Lazaro’s lawsuit has vocally criticized the educational system for failing to prevent them being, as Madelyn Larson puts it, “cornered and forced to transition if we wanted to stay in school”. Speaking to this reporter, Larson said, “I knew I was a lesbian when I was six years old. I knew I was a woman. But they had boys in our school bathrooms, there were boys in my Girl Scouts sleepovers. By the time I was in high school, everyone knew I was a lesbian, and they were demanding that I… Anyway, the only way to avoid sex with them was to tell them I identified as a boy. They were only interested in lesbian-identifying females.” When asked if she believes that it was common for young lesbians to transition solely for an excuse to avoid the sexual demands of lesbian-porn addicted young men, she agreed. “I know loads of us. Those boys were addicted to lesbian porn by the time they were ten years old. They had created an impossible situation for themselves. The only kind of sex they were interested in was this idea of lesbian sex that they grew up watching. The only way to avoid them was to transition. Then, at least, we could be with each other quietly.” Larson blames schools for not protecting girls’ spaces from their male peers, many of whom had grown up on violent pornography depicting sexual attacks on girls in private spaces. “The teachers held special events at the beginning of every year to teach the girls how to be ‘welcoming’ and ‘inclusive’ of any boy who wanted to watch us change. If we didn’t act ‘inclusive’ enough, we were excluded from the activity or sent to detention. I was suspended for five days in seventh grade for asking a boy to leave the girls’ bathroom for a few minutes because I needed some privacy at the sink. It was okay, though. It was my first period, and I ended up being glad I had it at home.”
Countless stories like Larson’s have been compiled online, but to date no public authorities have accepted responsibility for what Larson and others like her call “the complete disregard for girls’ and women’s safety, dignity, and citizenship.” Larson runs Letsbians, a support group for thousands of lesbians who transitioned in order to escape predation from porn addicts, but the claim is considered highly controversial. A popular sociomedial group called That Never Happened works to discredit the experiences of Letsbians members, and boasts over three million members.
Dr. Mason, who was incarcerated for seven years in the late 2020s and early 2030s for publishing papers that were ruled to be ‘discounting the experiences of the [gender] community’, points out that many scientists, researchers and clinicians alike, tried to act responsibly, but with revoked licenses, shut clinics, and periods of incarceration, “it was more difficult than it should have been.” She also points to the very high rate of black-market leuprorelin sales online. “Luprod, or ‘loops’, started out being sold online from Spain, Canada, China, but kids who either couldn’t get ahold of a credit card, or who couldn’t find an alternative way to pay, started buying it at school from dealers. I’ve seen patients who were taking loops as young as six, either because their older siblings gave them to them, or because they were part of a peer group that was doing them. And of course there were plenty of children whose parents bought them loops on the black market too, when the gender clinic waits were too long, or if they were turned away. There was a brief period in about 2026 or so when obviously autistic girls were being turned away from a few of the clinic franchises, and in a lot of cases, their parents were buying them loops online. I’m not going to defend all doctors. A lot of physicians acted in a highly irresponsible manner, and I have openly questioned before why they are still in possession of their licenses, but the statistics show that a large proportion of leuprorelin users were never under a doctor’s care.”
Rep. Kenya Lewingworth (I-MS) expressed dismay that those suffering from other maladies brought on by the poorly regulated drug industry of the early part of the century have been largely ignored. In an interview with Amazon on Tuesday, she said: “I feel empathy for CLIWS sufferers, but I wonder why we have not had any success in our attempts to assist those with Delayed Onset Taser-Induced Dystonia, which primarily affects black citizens, or the Lost Generation [once-refugees who were separated from their families as infants and toddlers, and so have severe psychological and emotional trauma]. My constitutents are compassionate, but it’s a different demographic affected by CLIWS. They want to know when they can expect their government to pay more attention to the diseases that affect them: polio, screen-induced ophthalmic disease (Light Blight), plastics blood poisoning, and antibiotic-resistant infections. In my district last year, we lost ten percent of the women who gave birth because antibiotics only work in about sixty percent of patients. We all know this is going to get worse. Where is the government response to that?”
Under the Turner administration, funding for research into these diseases has been consistently cut or completely denied, forcing researchers to move abroad to continue their work.
Former gender patients took to the sociomedia platform Rore to demand that Rep. Lewingworth be impeached for appearing to invalidate the struggles of CLIWS sufferers, as well as “implied misoleucandry”, to which she replied, “failing to elevate them above all others is not the same as invalidating their struggles.” However, earlier this morning, she posted an apology on Rore and said that her comments had been “taken out of context”, and that she was not a misoleucandrist, and did not tolerate or condone such attitudes. Detractors called her apology “insincere” because she has not yet offered to co-sponsor the bill.
Rep. Carlisle’s bill is expected to reach the floor within the next several months. President B. Turner has expressed support for the bill, saying, “Yeah, I think we’re going to do this one. This is going to help out a lot of guys who got screwed. They got screwed real bad.”
It is the policy of this publication to report age of identification. Some older scientific studies referred to in this article relied on solar age.
@Alecto@spinster.xyz