Hospital follows law... outrage ensues (08-15-2025--Hour2)

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to vpeteclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. Alrighty, so story at the Charlotte Observer by Chase Jordan. Atrium Health big hospital chain here used to be Carolina's Medical Center, I believe CMC, and now it's Atrium, but now I think they're actually they're owned by another parent company called Advocate Health, which it's kind of like one of those it's kind of like one of those names of a bill that is like the opposite of what it's actually going to do, you know. Anyway, I kid, I kid, I kid. The hospitals Atrium Health recently stopped providing gender affirming medication. By the way, this is a good example of how the media defers to the leftists for their narrative crafting by adopting the vocabulary that the left demands it adopts. Right. That's why you see things like gender affirming care, gender affirming medication, and by the way, I did count it up, fifteen mentions of gender affirming in this piece. Also, nothing in this piece, not a single counterpoint to the gender affirming care narrative. Okay, So it's just allowed to stand as sort of a foundational truth underpinning all of the rest of the story. It's never questioned, which is something that once you, once you sort of practice the challenging of the assumptions, a lot of these reports but also a lot of arguments kind of disintegrate before you. It is because you once you start, once you start trying to assess what is the underlying assumption, then you get at the core of your political opponent's argument, right, And when you challenge that and you go after that underlying assumption, then their argument disintegrates and you are no longer trapped in this vocabularic box that is crafted by them. Because see, gender affirming care puts you on the defensive, because if you adopt that language, then that means you're anti affirmation. That means you're denying, right, You're denying transgenderism. You're denying somebody healthcare. Right. But if you get at the root of it, the root of this term gender affirming care or medication whatever, it's not actually gender affirmation. It's denial. It's denial of your biological sex. That's what this is. And so the media, this is an example of how reporters and publications will adopt whatever the left tells them to adopt as the new norm for how to define issues. This is why, you know, women's reproductive rights or reproductive care, that's why they use those terms. Now. It's because the left keeps shopping, you know, keeps workshopping these different focus group tested terms in order to mask what is actually occurring. Right, they didn't like the pro choice, and the same thing happens with like different labels. They have been doing it my entire life when trying to define you know, black people versus white people versus Hispanic people. Right, they changed black and then because like when I was growing up, black got changed to African American, and then it got changed back to black but with a capitalized B right now, and then that became the norm and the ap and all of these publications still do that that is a political position that they have adopted to capitalize the B in black when describing somebody's race. They do not capitalize the W because they're going to like right historic wrongs between the races through capitalization or something. So. Atrium Health recently stopped providing sex denying medication for people under eighteen or eighteen younger, I should say, a move that transgender rights and other LGBTQ organizations around the Charlotte region immediately decried. They claim that the Charlotte areas largest healthcare provider buckled under political pressure. Okay, well it's actually the law now, so it's not like you're buckling under political pressure. You you're conforming with the law. Okay. For LGBTQ rights groups issued a blistering statement on the Facebook. The statement was on the page for Time Out Youth, a Charlotte nonprofit providing resources for LGBTQ plus people ages thirteen to twenty four. The group was joined by Charlotte trans Health, the Gender Education Network, and p Flag Charlotte. Oh, maybe the P is silent there. Maybe it's just flag because it's pflag, or maybe it's not silent and it's just like per flag like Puffifer. I don't know the groups said Atrium and its parent company, Advocate Health, are making a decision based on fear of retaliation by hostile federal agencies or funding cuts. Once again, it is also to comply with state law. In January, President Donald Trump issued in an executive order limiting youth access to gender affirming care or sex denying procedures and medications. It defines individuals as nineteen or young under the age of nineteen, so eighteen and younger, right, and they define that as children. And I guess I'm supposed to be outraged that we're now defining eighteen year olds as children or something, because I'm old enough to remember when children were deemed to be twenty six and younger in order to stay on mom and dad's health insurance, they were called children through age twenty six. So now it's eight so we're back to eighteen again. See this is this goes to another issue. I'm not going to get into it, but it's like these rights of passage that mark your progression from childhood into adulthood. You know, I really do think that as a society, we should we should try to figure out a number, you know, just a uniform age when like, once you hit this age, you are now full blown adult, Like you have gone through the registering to vote, registering for the draft, right driver's license, you know, off of mom and dad's insurance. You could finally get the you know, the the transgender bottom and top surgeries all on your own, Like you get to make your own decisions, enter legal documents and agreements and such like, we need to pick an age. Do we want to make it twenty one? Like alcohol purchases tobacco purchases. Is it going to be twenty one and a twenty one? That's it? You're an adult. That's it no more, you know. Anyway, Advocate Health said that it has been closely following the evolving healthcare regulatory environment and acknowledged a changing federal environment. So again, this is a very lengthy piece. It's like a fifteen minute piece that takes you to read, and it's like four pages here, and never once in this do they actually address any of the competing science. They don't talk about it at all. It's just it's just a given. It is an assumption that all of this ideology is the science, and that this is the true and correct way, and that anybody who disagrees with this is anti science or their bigots. But that's not the case. What is the case is that the quote science was never really science in the first place. It was political ideology that had infected the medical industry. And now you've got other countries, you've got other medical organizations, and some have been opposed to this stuff from the very beginning, but they were peer pressured and they were shunned if they didn't get on board. But now we have the data, we have the science, we have the longer term studies that show there really aren't any benefits here, and in fact, most of the kids who are suffering from gender dysphoria will grow out of it after puberty. All Right, if you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events, and I know you do too, and you've probably heard me say get your news from multiple sources. Why, Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with ground News. It's an app and it's a website, and it combines news from around the world in one place, so you can compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out at check dot ground, dot news slash pete. I put the in the podcast description too. I started using ground News a few months ago and more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left and the right. See for yourself. Check dot ground, dot news slash pete. Subscribe through that link and you'll get fifteen percent off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. The leaders of the Advocate Health System, parent company of Atrium Health, announced the policy change to Atrium affiliated clinicians and pharmacists during what they called a very difficult Microsoft Teams meeting, which I think that actually describes like virtually every single time I use Teams, that's usually what happens there. Anyway, I'm just kidding. I like Teams just fine. A doctor associated with Atrium Health who was in that meeting provided an audio recording of it to The Charlotte observer and asked not to be named because they were not authorized to share the recording. The Justice Department also issued a new policy memo that could have significant implications for healthcare professionals, they said during this meeting. It suggested that doctors and other clinicians who provide specific types of gender affirming or sex denying care, both medical and surgical, to individuals under the age of nineteen, may face criminal charges. The memo also includes provisions that encourage and protect whistleblowers who report violations. Let me skip to the Uh yeah, let me skip ahead here too. This is a very lengthy piece. I've got to I highlight too much stuff in these articles. That's one of my problems. I highlight way too many things. So doctor Holla, executive director for Charlotte Tran's Health and Advocacy Group, expressed concern and disappointment over the decision, saying Atrium is operating out of fear rather than standing up for evidence based care. It's not standing behind the science and data. I say it like that because that's the mantra during COVID remember like in order to like if you like, when we were all gripped in the cult of the branch Covidians. This was their their mantra that was utilized in order to get people to you know, genuflect at the altar properly. It was all the science and data. And so they still cite these things, except now I can't ever hear them say the science or the data. I can't ever hear them say it without thinking of the mantra anyway. Advocate Health will focus on alternative, non invasive care such as behavioral health and peer support for patients. Yeah, counseling is fine. Counseling is absolutely fine. See, And what happened was these institutions became so captured by this ideology that they would give people like a cursory five minute consult and then start prescribing them all of the puberty blockers and such. There are reports from all over the country that this has been occurring. You can buy these things too online, so people are skirting laws like that now. There is also, as I mentioned, the state law House Pill eight to eight, enacted in twenty twenty three. It prohibits puberty blockers and surgical gender transition procedures for minors who had not already started treatment as of August one, twenty twenty three. Okay, so if you were already down that path, sorry, you're going to have to live with those consequences. So if you ever want a detransition, it's going to be very, very difficult. But if you're a kid that hasn't started any of that, you're not going to be able to get those things until you are adult. And when you're an adult, whatever age, that might be considered like, that's your choice at that point. But there is a reason, for example, that we don't allow parents to tattoo their children. Okay, you don't get to use your kid as some sort of virtual signaling accessory. Okay. Atrium Health hasn't provided surgical gender transition procedures for minors under eighteen since the law was passed, which tells you what that they were doing. It that they were doing these transition surgeries on kids prior to the law being passed, which we were told there was no need to pass the law because this stuff never happens. But there's Atrium saying, oh, we actually were doing that until the law and then we stopped again. Not one single mention, not one counterpoint to the gender affirming care narrative, offered up in this lengthy Charlotte Observer piece is So that is the difference between seeking to inform and educate your audience versus propagandizing to your audience telling them what they want to hear, simply to reinforce their priors to signal that they're better than everyone else. I believe the quote, right, thing, I believe in the science and data. I am a true follower. Right. All of this stuff is simply regurgitated as fact, and it represents no competing claims. In the piece, they offer no representation for the competing claims, which is a standard practice in actual journalism, especially when you're talking about an issue like this, where the medical community is in fact debating this. They are divided. The community is divided on the proper approaches. It allows to stand uncontested that this notion that this is simply some form of targeted discrimination rather than protection of vulnerable kids in mental health crisis, because that's what other experts say, like the kids who are suffering from gender dysphoria. Right, there's usually the majority, and this is what the science and data, it's what it shows is that the kids who have these afflictions have underlying mental health issues. They're suffering from something else. There's something that triggers their dysphoria, and over time with counseling, but even sometimes without counseling, over time it dissipates. So you do not want to put a kid on a life altering course when you don't know if the thing that they are suffering from will eventually relieve on its own. There's no mention of research undermining the gender affirming care narrative, and there's no mention of any of the backtracking by European clinics and governments that were on the leading edge of this stuff, like they've actually dialed it back because they saw long term it's not working. Here's a great idea. How about making an escape to a really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina. Just a quick drive up the mountain and Cabins of Ashville is your connection. Whether you're celebrating an anniversary, a honeymoon, maybe you want to plan a memorable proposal, or get family and friends together for a big old reunion, Cabins of Asheville has the ideal spot for you where you can reconnect with your loved ones and the things that truly matter. 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This is in connection to the UH the story that I was just covering on the Atrium Health ending the gender affirming meds for youths as they should, and I think we're going to look back on what we have done as a society to these kids. We're going to look back on it much like they look back on the eugenics programs that were implemented during the progressive era. Well, except for planned parenthood. The left is still all about that. But yeah, the eugenic stuff, I think it's going to be looked at like that. It's indefensible, except now you've got some You have too many people that have been advocating this or participating in it, or have you know, trans their kids, and they will be sort of like the Japanese soldiers on the remote Islands that they can't give up the fight. They just can't because if they are to acknowledge that they were wrong, then like, what did you do? And that's something that's going to be very difficult for people to live with for the rest of their lives. And I always say whenever I bring up this topic, this is not any attack on people who are afflicted with gender dysphoria or dysmorphia. I do not comprehend what it must be like to feel like you are in the wrong body. Your brain is telling you that part of your body does not belong. And this also occurs, by the way, people who believe that they're called transabilists. They believe that they should be blind. They were born with eyesight when they shouldn't have been. Their brain is telling them that they shouldn't be able to see. And there are cases where they will go blind themselves with chemicals and such people will cripple themselves because they believe that they are a paraplegic. People believe that they are morbidly obese, when in fact they are emaciated right anorexia bulimia. But in none of those other instances, in none of these other dysmorphic afflictions, is the protocol to tell the patient that their delusion is reality except for this one. This is the only one. And I believe the reason why is that people who proceed down this pathway become the most radical types of people, and politically they become radicals. And there and there is so there is a there is an incentive there for people to encourage this kind of behavior. There is also an incentive for platforms like the Chinese communists owned platform of TikTok to encourage this kind of behavior because it helps to blow up the nuclear families. And that's one of the pillars of communism is that you have to destroy the nuclear family. It's one of the greatest threats to Communism, to Marxism. But all of this ties into a piece that's at the Hill, a piece by Forrest Rahm and Kevin Waldman. They are opinion contributors. They are researchers in clinical and applied psychology at Northwestern University. And here's what they wrote. This was a couple days ago at the Hill dot com. On today's college campuses, students are not maturing, they are managing. Beneath a facade of progressive slogans and institutional virtue signaling lies a quiet psychological crisis driven by the demands of ideological conformity. Between twenty twenty three and twenty twenty five, they conducted a little bit more than fourteen hundred confidential interviews with undergrads at Northwestern University as well as the University of Michigan. We were not studying politics, We were studying development. Our question was clinical, not political. Here's the question, what happens to identity formation when belief is replaced by adherents to orthodoxy? And so, what they asked the kids was, have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically. In other words, did you hide your actual beliefs and go along with the progressive tide? Did you claim to be more progressive than you actually are in order to succeed, either academically or in your social circles. Eighty eight percent said yes, they lied. Eighty eight percent said they pretended to hold these progressive views when they actually do not, but they did so in order to get a better grade, in order to get an assignment, in order to get some friends to like them more, or to get in with a particular friend group, or something. The researcher say, these kids, these students were not cynical. They were adaptive. They were adapting to what was required in a campus environment where grades, leadership, and peer belonging often hinge on fluency in performative morality, which is a great term, performative morality. Right, It doesn't actually matter if you believe the thing. What matters is that you're performing the morality, which is why you could say you were against genocide while supporting Hamas Right, it's performative. These young adults learn quickly to rehearse what is safe the result is not conviction. The result is compliance, and beneath that compliance, something vital is lost. Late adolescents and early adulthood represent a narrow and non replicable development window. It is during this stage that individuals begin the lifelong work of integrating personal experience with inherited values, forming the foundations of moral reasoning, internal coherence, and emotional resilience. But when belief is prescriptive and ideological divergence is treated as some sort of a social risk, well, then the integrative process stalls. Rather than forging some durable sense of who you are, of your sense of self through trial and error and reflection, the students. Instead they learn to compartmentalize. Oh I have to say this thing in front of these people. Oh I have to do this with those people publicly. They conform privately, they question often in isolation. Hence the rise of podcasts. Right, That's why people are listening to shows like this and podcasts like this. They are listening to this stuff in isolation because they cannot engage with these ideas with their peers or teachers, because it's all about the performative morality. You know. Stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things. To understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. They help us process the meaning of life, and our stories are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video. Started in nineteen ninety seven in mint Hill, North Carolina. It was the first company to provide this valuable service, converting images, photos and videos into high quality produced slide shows, videos and albums. The trusted, talented and dedicated team at Creative Video will go over all of the details with you to create a perfect project. Satisfaction guaranteed. Drop them off in person or mail them. They'll be ready in a week or two. Memorial videos for your loved ones, videos for rehearsal, dinners, weddings, graduations, Christmas, family vacations, birthdays, or just your family stories all told through images. That's what your photos and videos are. They are your life told through the eyes of everyone around you and all who came before you, and they will tell others to come who you are. Visit Creative Video, dot com, news Talk eleven ten ninety nine, three WBT seven O four five seven zero eleven ten, email, spt dot, thepetecleanershow dot com and UH email you, al said the email, I have an email from Ian who wants me to wish his wife, doctor Nina, a happy birthday. Happy birthday, doctor Nina. Do do do do do? And yes, I do those for pay, so if you would like, I'm just kidding, I don't charge for that. So this piece at the Hill, written by these two researchers at Northwestern University, performative virtue signaling has become a threat to higher education. And I would say it's actually more than just higher education. It's it's society. It's civilization. It's this year, it's you know, the next generation, next generation. When you teach kids that publicly they have to conform with the progressive view when they actually don't agree with that, but they feel they have to go along with all of that in order to get ahead. Like that's that's not a helpful thing for their development, but it's also not helpful for the society. I mentioned this the other day as well, and this is another example of it, which is the Rush Limbaugh example. Right, millions of people all over America thought that they alone had these questions and concerns and different opinions about various current events and political parties and figures and whatever. But they thought they were alone. And then Limbaugh gets on the air and he starts saying the things that they thought, and that creates they That creates a permission structure. You are now aware that you are not alone. And then you're hearing people call in and they're saying, I agree with you, rush diddo, right, I agree, I agree. And by the way, the diddo is the ditto is that you're saying, I, uh, you know, love your show, first time caller, longtime listener, love your show, whatever. So you just say ditto because you're saying the same thing that somebody else said. Anyway, that was where that came from. But anyway, the point here is that but people then had permission to say these things and say, I don't agree with this whatever narrative, the mainstream narrative that's being promoted by the only three TV networks that are out there, the handful of legacy media outlets that set the template of what was news of the day. And this is the same thing. Right, there needs to be a permission structure. Granted, the same thing happened just now in the last election with Donald Trump, right that it was why you saw football players doing that Trump dance thing as their touchdown celebrations. All of a sudden, it was okay to say I'm going to vote for Donald Trump, and people are no longer afraid or worried about saying this. The fever breaks right. Then comes the preference cascade, slowly at first, slowly, slowly, and then very quickly, and boom, the damn breaks right. Publicly, these kids are conformed, but privately they are questioning. The split between outer presentation and inner conviction not only fragments their identity, their own sense of self, but it arrests its development. They don't even know who they are because they're playing one role to the public, but internally they think something else. And by the way, this is the point of indoctrination, this is the point. It's to break you. It's to make you think in a certain way, at least publicly, because they can never fully know what you're is going on in your own head. And eventually people break and it's like, well, I might as well just give in. I mean, the stupid people will always go along with whatever you know they're being told is the truth and they never question it. But people who do question. The point is to break them in order to conform so they don't become troublemakers. That's the point of indoctrination, and unfortunately that has become the point of a lot twelve education. Seventy eight percent of students told us they self center their beliefs surrounding gender identity. Seventy eight percent self center, see we are the majority on this issue. Seventy two percent self censer on politics, sixty eight percent on family values. More than eighty percent said they had submitted class work that misrepresented their views simply to align with the views of their professors. In public, students echoed expected progressive narratives in private, though their views were more complex. Eighty seven percent identified as exclusively heterosexual and supported a binary model of gender. There's only two sexes, only two genders, male and female. Nine percent expressed partial openness to gender fluidity. Just seven percent embraced the idea of gender as a broad spectrum, and most of these belonged to activist circles. Those those are the radicals seven percent. That's what we're talking about seven percent. But they are dictating everything because people are afraid to stand up, because they think that they are alone. Seventy seven percent said they disagreed with the idea that gender identity should override biological sects in domains such as sports, healthcare, or public data, but they would never voice that disagreement allowed. We are on the side of the seventy seven percent majority. We are the vast majority here on this issue. But people are afraid to talk about it because they will get fired, they will get a lower grade, they will lose friends a few. It's the achy position to take what are you some fascist? You're a bigot? They don't want to be called names, because here's the thing. Generally speaking, nice people, good people, kind people don't like to be called these names. They're afraid what other people are going to think about them if someone's running around calling them a biggot because they know they're not a bigot, but the radicals call you that, and then everybody just goes along with it. Authenticity, once considered a psychological good, has become a social liability. Nearly half said they routinely conceal beliefs in intimate relationships for fear of ideological fallout. This is not simply peer pressure. It is identity regulation at scale. And it is being institutionalized. Verities often justify these dynamics in the name of inclusion, but inclusion that demands dishonesty is not ensuring psychological safety. It's sanctioning self abandonment. If you're trying to engineer moral unity, higher education has mistaken consensus for growth and compliance for care, unless, of course, see this is why I say, if the results don't make sense, always reassess the assumptions. You're assuming that growth and care were actually what the universities were attempting to achieve. See and I would submit that they have not been. They have not been attempting to achieve that they've been attempting to achieve consensus and compliance, because that's how you get your troops for the fight for the long march through the institutions. Whence dismantling these institutions of Western civilization. You need these troops for students trained to perform the act of telling the truth felt radical faculty administrators and institutional leaders who built a system that rewards moral theater while punishing inquiry. In shielding students from discomfort, they have shielded them from their own discovery. The result is a generation confident in self righteousness, but uncertain in themselves. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to dpetecallanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.