DocBug https://www.docbug.com/blog Intelligence, media technologies, intellectual property, and the occasional politics Mon, 28 Jul 2025 04:22:33 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.2 Remembering Tom Lehrer https://www.docbug.com/blog/archives/1340 Mon, 28 Jul 2025 03:45:15 +0000 https://www.docbug.com/blog/?p=1340 I just heard Tom Lehrer died yesterday at the age of 97. I first heard of Tom Lehrer reading the lyrics to The Hunting Song in one of my Dad’s old Mad Magazines, though like many of my generation I didn’t realize he was the same guy who sang Silent E, L-Y and a bunch of other songs I had probably already heard on The Electric Company. I still remember learning all the lyrics to The Masochism Tango long before I had any idea what the word meant, subjecting all my friends to my rendition of The Irish Ballad, and lying in the way-back of a station wagon coming back from a high-school chess tournament while listening to a bootleg tape of of Tom Lehrer, Revisited (or perhaps Tom Lehrer Discovers Australia).

Tom Lehrer wasn’t just a brilliant musical satirist, he was also a mensch: a few years ago he signed over literally his entire catalog to the public domain and put the whole thing — including a music files, sheet music and lyrics — on his website at https://tomlehrersongs.com/. So download and stream to your heart’s content. Just take note of the warning at the end of Lehrer’s personal note: “THIS WEBSITE WILL BE SHUT DOWN AT SOME DATE IN THE NOT TOO DISTANT FUTURE, SO IF YOU WANT TO DOWNLOAD ANYTHING, DON’T WAIT TOO LONG.”

]]> Kaiser pauses gender-affirming surgeries for patients under nineteen https://www.docbug.com/blog/archives/1337 Fri, 25 Jul 2025 19:02:50 +0000 https://www.docbug.com/blog/?p=1337 Kaiser Permanente just announced that as of August 29th they will stop offering gender-affirming surgeries for patients under the age of nineteen, following a similar pause by Stanford Medicine announced last month. The Trump administration has threatened to withhold federal funding to institutions that provide gender-affirming care of any kind, and a few weeks ago the DOJ announced they have issued subpoenas to at least twenty providers to investigate “healthcare fraud, false statements, and more.” Both Kaiser and Stanford are continuing other kinds of gender-affirming care, including hormone therapy.

The vast majority of gender-affirming surgery for minors are mastectomies (breast reduction) performed on cisgender males (i.e. removal of “man boobs”), which are not being paused or targeted by the Trump administration. Gender-affirming surgery for transgender youth is much more rare (probably fewer than 100 cases per year in all of Kaiser NorCal), with the vast majority being that exact same breast-reduction surgery. These will generally be the most extreme cases of gender dysphoria, where other forms of gender-affirming care aren’t enough and the risks and permanence of surgery are outweighed by the risks of self-harm or suicide. As an example, see this case study of a 16-year-old trans male patient who was admitted to the emergency room after an attempt to remove his own breasts.

So what are Kaiser and Stanford thinking? Stopping surgeries while continuing to provide other forms of gender-affirming care is unlikely to placate the Trump administration, which has vowed to end all forms of care. And Trump has repeatedly shown that he treats any capitulation as weakness and a reason to push even harder.

Both providers presumably know all this, so even if they think pausing surgeries will disrupt the least number of patients, why bother if it does no good? Do surgeries come with more legal jeopardy than hormone treatment or other forms of care, even though the administration suggests all forms of gender-affirming care are fraud? Or is this just the first step to giving up on all trans kids in their network?

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