College Cancels Student’s Presentation on Harm of Transitioning in Response to Left-Wing Threats

The "trans-gender" insanity keeps growing. A person with personal experience is prevented from sharing it by threats and intimidation from "trans-gender" activists.

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

Simon Amaya Price planned to use his own experiences for a campus presentation on the dangers of pressuring children to transition, but Berklee College of Music 'indefinitely postponed' it.

Administrators at Berklee College of Music pressured a 20-year-old “desister” into canceling his planned presentation on the harms of affirming gender confusion after a deluge of threats and invective from left-wing detractors.

The Daily Signal reported that in ninth grade, Simon Amaya Price, who has been diagnosed with autism, began to consider that he might actually be a girl. A therapist referred him to Boston Children’s Hospital for both surgical and chemical “transitioning,” and his pediatrician went so far as to assert that he would most likely kill himself if not allowed to go through with it.

His father, Gareth, flatly refused to condone the procedures, however, for which Amaya Price says he initially “hated him” but eventually came to recognize “he did the best thing he could have done.” Price now considers himself a “desister,” someone who once considered himself transgendered but ultimately rejected transition (as distinct from “detransitioners,” people who underwent medical interventions for a new “gender identity” but ultimately regretted them and went back to living as their true sex).

For a project requiring students to create a presentation about social changes, Amaya Price chose as his subject “Born in the Right Body: Desister and Detransitioner Awareness” using his own experiences. 

The presentation was originally slated for October 20, but he ultimately forced to cancel in the face of nearly a thousand hostile social media comments, including “take a long walk off a cliff,” “i am going to throw expired groceries at you,” “bro you should be SCARED for sunday,” “drop out please,” and calls to disassociate from the autistic and “queer” communities (he identifies as bisexual but wants to marry a woman and have children).

During a meeting between himself, his father, school vice president Ron Savage, and dean Rodney Alejandro, it was recommended that he postpone the event, to which he agreed. The vitriol continued, and in a subsequent meeting Savage said he was “indefinitely” postponing it. The Berklee Office of Diversity & Inclusion, which initially approved the event, withdrew its sponsorship as well.

“The event was supposed to be a necessary, culminating project in my class ‘Songwriting and Social Change,'” Amaya Price said. “The event was approved by my professor, and the fact that Mr. Savage has decided that I am not allowed to do my event is a violation of my academic freedom and a major barrier in my way to graduating on Dec. 12.”

“The determination and the willingness of these people to go out of their way to essentially harass, bully, and slander me is really remarkable and does not make me feel safe on campus,” he added.

A significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often-irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.

Studies find that more than 80 percent of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.

Many oft-ignored detransitioners attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion that “transitioning” is the best solution.

“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with a 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”

In December, the U.S. Supreme Court will begin considering arguments about the permissibility of state laws prohibiting the gender “transitioning” of minors.