The University of Louisville is paying big time for firing a professor who criticized “gender-affirming care.” The school is paying almost $1.6 million to Dr. Allan Josephson to settle a lawsuit he filed after his unfair firing.
Josephson’s lawsuit alleged that the school demoted him in 2017 and later fired him after he questioned the wisdom of prescribing hormone treatments and surgery for children suffering from gender dysphoria.
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which represented the former professor in his lawsuit, noted how well he performed in his position for over a decade before being terminated because of his rejection of progressive gender ideology.
Dr. Allan M. Josephson led the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychology at the University of Louisville for nearly 15 years. In total, he was in academia for nearly 40 years and received the prestigious Oskar Pfister Award, which honors outstanding contributions in the field of psychiatry and religion.
When he arrived at the school in 2003, he took over a struggling program. After many years of careful research, dedicated leadership, and hard work, he helped the program become nationally recognized—benefiting the university greatly in the process. Thirteen times, the university asked him to teach other division chiefs how to improve their divisions.
During this time, the lies of gender ideology began to quickly spread beyond the theoretical realms of academia and burst into the culture. Thanks to the social contagion it spawned, many parents were suddenly faced with questions and struggles that they weren’t prepared to deal with. They needed help from trusted voices in the medical and mental health fields
But unfortunately, “experts” in those fields abandoned common sense and the truth in favor of advancing gender ideology.
Over recent years, progressives have been pushing gender ideology through the education system, medical institutions, and other avenues. They popularized the “gender-affirming care” concept, which involves encouraging kids to socially transition to the opposite sex.
Proponents then push puberty blockers, hormone treatments, and in some cases, surgeries, on minor children. Therapists and other professionals have pressured parents into these questionable treatments without even considering other methods, such as talk therapy.
As early as 2014, Dr. Josephson became concerned with how doctors were treating gender-dysphoric children: accepting the child’s claimed gender identity, prescribing sterilizing hormones, and setting the stage for life-altering surgery.
In 2016 and 2017, Dr. Josephson served as an expert witness on several legal cases on the subject, and in October 2017, he participated in a panel discussion on gender dysphoria at the Heritage Foundation, a well-known think tank in Washington, D.C. There, Dr. Josephson expressed his professional view on treatments for children experiencing gender dysphoria.
Dr. Josephson said that medical professionals should seek to understand and treat the psychological issues that often cause this confusion, rather than rushing children into more radical, invasive, and aggressive treatments like puberty-blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones.
Speaking as a psychiatrist with over 35 years of experience, Dr. Josephson argued that children are not mature enough to make permanent, life-altering decisions of any kind, let alone medical ones such as this. As other professionals in the field have pointed out, 80 to 95 percent of children who say they experience gender dysphoria naturally come to accept their biological sex over time.
But a few university faculty and staff did not like Dr. Josephson’s views.
Now, after a legal battle that dragged on for six years, Josephson has been vindicated. But the fact that he even had to fight this war is a disturbing reminder of where we are as a society. Progressives have done their level best to convince, cajole, coerce, and compel the rest of the country to embrace the absurd notion that men can become women and vice versa.
However, the backlash against the advance of gender ideology intensified when it was revealed that these people were going after children. Most Americans, regardless of political affiliation, reject the idea that kids should be subjected to treatments that can cause irreversible harm – especially after they reach adulthood. Lawfare has been an important weapon against this movement. Hopefully going after their wallets will prompt them to reconsider their obsession with “gender-affirming care” and kids can finally get the help they need.
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