#tavistock group

[immaculatasknight]

Fright factory

[eternal-echoes]

“The makers of puberty blocking drugs such as Lupron and Supprelin warn that possible side effects include emotional instability, mood changes, aggression, nervousness, anxiety, agitation, confusion, delusions, insomnia, and depression, adding that you should "monitor for development or worsening of psychiatric symptoms during treatment."(12) Depression is considered a common side effect of puberty blockers, and according to drug manufacturers, "may be severe."(13)

Girls who take GnRHa experience a significant increase in behavioral and emotional problems and are more likely to self-harm.(14)

According to the largest gender clinic in the UK, after a year of being on puberty blockers, there was a significant increase in young women who agreed with the statement "I deliberately try to hurt or kill myself."(15) It should be noted, however, that there was no control group in this study, and so one cannot infer causation. What's clear, though, is that the drug was hardly curing the psychological distress of the children who took it. Rather, they expressed greater dissatisfaction with their bodies after being on the drug.(16) In the words of a team of researchers who promote the treatment, "It is therefore unlikely that GnRHa treatment will result in significant reduction in body dissatisfaction.’(17)

Understanding the role of hormones in brain functioning helps to explain why the drugs could have a negative emotional impact.

Puberty blocking drugs shut down the production of estrogen and progesterone. However, researchers believe that estrogen can have a protective effect against mental illnesses such as depression, acting as "nature's psychoprotectant."(18) Dr. Karen Berman, a senior investigator for the National Institutes of Mental Health, studied the effect of Lupron on the female brain. After injecting women with the drug, she scanned their brains with a PET scan and found that the activity in the frontal lobes of their brains had slowed to a near stop.(19) This leads to dulled or inappropriate emotions, lack of motivation, impulsiveness, and altered mental states such as delirium, disorientation, and confusion.(20) Studies also showed that puberty blockers cause memory problems and stunt brain development, which is the last thing a young person needs when making life-changing decisions about his or her future.(21) Therefore, those who argue that the outcomes of puberty blockers are uncertain are guilty of what some psychologists call "HARKing:" hypothesizing after the results are known.”

-Jason Evert, Male, Female, or Other: A Catholic Guide to Understanding Gender

—

Work cited:

12) Safety and Tolerability Profile, https://www.supprelinla.com/hcp/safety-tolerability-profile/; https://www.lupronpedpro.com/content/lupronped-hcp/countries/north-america/ us/en_us/pages.html, https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2014/020517s036_019732s041lbl.pdf

13) "Package leaflet: Decapeptyl" SR 11.25 mg," Ipsen Ltd. 2017, retrieved from http://www .medicines.org.uk/emc/product/780/pil.

14) Cf. Biggs, "The Tavistock's Experiment with Puberty Blockers," 6.

15) The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, Board of Directors, June 23, 2015; Cf. Cohen, Deborah and Hannah Barnes, "Transgender treatment: Puberty blockers study under investigation," BBC Newsnight (July 22, 2019).

16) Cf. Biggs, "The Tavistock's Experiment with Puberty Blockers," 9.

17) P. Carmichael et al., "Short-term Outcomes of Pubertal Suppression in a Selected Cohort of 12 to 15 Year Old Young People with Persistent Gender Dysphoria in the UK," PLoS One 16:2 (February 2, 2021).

18) G. Fink et al., "Estrogen Control of Central Neurotransmission: Effect on Mood, Mental State, and Memory," Cellular and Molecular Neurobiology, 16:3 (1996), 325-344.

19) Blum, Sex on the Brain, 206.

20) Cf. Chandler Marrs, "Lupron Side Effects Survey Results Part One: Scope and Severity," Hormones Matter, October 4, 2017.

21) Cf. M. Schneider et al., "Brain Maturation, Cognition and Voice Pattern in a Gender Dysphoria Case under Pubertal Suppression," Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 11 (November 2017), 1, 4-6; "Gender Dysphoria in Children: Understanding the Science and Medicine," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOniPhuyXeY.

—

For more recommended resources on gender dysphoria, click here.

[yearningforunity]

Groovy! A group of women enjoy the blasting sound systems in Tavistock Crescent in west London for Notting Hill Carnival in 1975. The festivities take place over the August Bank Holiday weekend. Sunday is traditionally the more family-friend day of celebrations, with the Monday more notorious for unrest and violence.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Bernard Lane

Published: Dec 5, 2023

On the up

A study of young people who on average spent almost five years identifying as transgender has found they experienced better wellbeing and less gender dysphoria after they detransitioned from medical treatment or desisted in their opposite-sex identity.

“Detransition and desistance [giving up a trans identity before any medical treatment] were associated with marked improvements in psychological functioning,” says a new article published by the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior and authored by public health researcher Dr Lisa Littman, psychotherapist Stella O’Malley, detransitioner Helena Kerschner and sexologist Professor J Michael Bailey.

“On several relevant measures—gender dysphoria, flourishing, and self-harm—participants indicated great improvement after they stopped identifying as transgender,” the paper says.

[ Chart: Flourishing, or general wellbeing, rated by detransitioners, with the vertical access showing the number of participants for a given flourishing score, 10 being the highest wellbeing ]

Settling back into birth sex

Among the study group of 71 American females and seven males, aged 18-33, the overwhelming majority said they felt most “authentic” after they detransitioned or desisted.

External pressures—such as anti-trans discrimination, family resistance or religion—were rated as the least important drivers of detransition and desistance.

“The factors most important to relinquishing a transgender identification were internal factors, such as participants’ own thought processes, changes in participants’ personal definitions of male and female, and becoming more comfortable identifying as their natal sex,” the paper says.

Another reported impetus was the feeling that the causes of their gender dysphoria were more complex than they had believed. Looking back, the young people said a key influence in becoming trans was mistaking mental health problems or trauma as gender dysphoria.

“Against official advice I met [in 2021] a young lady called Keira Bell. She was a lesbian who told me the horrific experience that she had at the Tavistock [gender] clinic. It was an eye-opening experience [for me]. I know that [another MP] talked about ‘transing away the gay’ in his speech… We are seeing, I would say, almost an epidemic of young gay children being told that they are trans and being put on the medical pathway for irreversible decisions and they are regretting it… I am making sure that [in future] young people do not find themselves sterilised because they are being exploited by people who do not understand what these issues are…”—speech in the UK parliament, Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch, 7 December 2023

Suddenly syndrome

Analysis of survey responses suggested that at most, 17 per cent of the group would have met the diagnostic requirements for the classic form of gender dysphoria with onset in early childhood.

Just over half the group (41/78) said they recognised themselves in the new, much more common form known as rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) with its onset during or after puberty.

Although a hypothesis rather than a formal diagnosis, ROGD seems to describe the post-2010 international explosion in socially influenced clusters of teenagers, chiefly girls, suddenly embracing trans or non-binary identities.

The study by Littman et al found that young people in the group who reported less gender dysphoria in childhood were more likely to say that the term ROGD did apply to their experience.

“The purpose of this research is to learn about the experiences of desisters and detransitioners—specifically, to explore: 1) factors that may or may not be related to the development of and desistance from transgender identification; 2) whether or not individuals experienced changes in their sexual orientation during and after transgender identification; and 3) what kinds of counseling and informed consent were received by those who sought medical care to transition.”—flyer used to recruit participants for the Littman et al study

Inconvenient for gender experts

The authors say their findings are “necessarily tentative” and acknowledge several limitations in the research, which involved a convenience sample of young people being asked to recall their experience before, during and after gender transition.

The study cannot show how common detransition is, nor establish whether these particular young people happened to be bad risks for transition, nor elucidate whether better psychological health is a cause or an outcome of detransition.

Detransition and desistance are understudied and contentious topics. ROGD has awkward implications for the “gender-affirming” treatment approach with its dogma of young people as “experts in their gender identity”.

Activists highlight the paucity of research on ROGD—first described in 2018 by Dr Littman—while seeking to sabotage any more studies and pressuring journals to retract papers exploring this phenomenon.

The Littman et al study just published had to adopt videoconference screening to check that would-be participants were genuine; activists had boasted on social media about taking the online survey and giving fake responses.

“When little is known [about detransition and desistance], imperfect research is often better than no research,” Dr Littman and her colleagues say in their paper. “It can provide provisional answers, better-informed hypotheses, and ideas for future research.”

“Despite the absence of any questions about this topic in the survey, nearly a quarter (23 per cent) of the participants expressed the ‘internalized homophobia and difficulty accepting oneself as lesbian, gay, or bisexual’ narrative by spontaneously describing that these experiences were instrumental to their gender dysphoria, their desire to transition, and their detransition.”—A survey of 100 detransitioners, Dr Lisa Littman, September 2021. (Dr Littman believes there would be little if any overlap in participants between this 2021 group and those surveyed in the current 2023 study.)

[ Video: Corinna Cohn, who transitioned three decades ago when safeguards were stronger, testifies in support of a bill restricting paediatric transition in the American state of Ohio ]

Yes, they were trans

In the 2023 Littman et al study, all the males and most of the females had taken cross-sex hormones, almost a third of the females had undergone mastectomy and a small number had their uterus or ovaries removed. (Only two participants had taken puberty blockers, which Dr Littman attributes to the average age of trans identification being too old at 17 years.)

“Our participants invested a great deal of their lives in their gender transitions—in terms of time, disruption, and serious social and medical steps. Thus, we do not believe that a principled case can be made that participants detransitioned because they were never gender dysphoric,” the Littman et al paper says.

The researchers say that follow-up studies of gender dysphoric youth are “urgently needed”, and that gender clinics have “a particular obligation” to keep track of past patients—“Unfortunately, in North America at least, we see little evidence that this presently occurs.”

“Detransition has become much more visible in recent years. However, it was only recently that the rates of detransition began to be quantified. According to recent UK and US data, 10–30 per cent of recently transitioned individuals detransition a few years after they initiated transition.”—Current concerns about gender-affirming therapy in adolescents, Professor Stephen B Levine and E Abbruzzese, April 2023

Some other key points of the 2023 Littman et al paper—

Only 27 per cent of the young people had told their former gender clinicians they had detransitioned. Most of those who took cross-sex hormones obtained them through the fast-track “informed consent” model. Two-thirds of the group felt they had not been adequately informed about the risks of medical transition. Fewer than one in ten had been told about the lack of long-term outcome studies for females with adolescent-onset dysphoria. Important influences for females becoming trans men included wanting to avoid mistreatment and sexualisation as women. Almost half the females indicated they were exclusively attracted to women. ROGD may be chiefly a female condition, with the possibility that some males taken to be ROGD may actually be manifesting hitherto-suppressed autogynephilia (sexual arousal among males who cross-dress and/or imagine themselves as women). More than a third of the group said most of their offline and online friends became trans-identified and it was common to mock people who were not trans. Among counter-intuitive results, acknowledgment of the ROGD label by participants was not significantly related to the age at which they took on a trans identity. Psychiatric diagnoses before transition were common, including depression (63 per cent); anxiety (60 per cent); attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (24 per cent); eating disorder (23 per cent); obsessive compulsive disorder (18 per cent) post-traumatic stress disorder (15 per cent); bipolar disorder (12 per cent); hair pulling (10 per cent); and autism spectrum disorder (9 per cent). Young people in the study showed relatively high scores on a trauma measure of “adverse childhood experiences” such as abuse inflicted within the family. The participants had generally liberal politics and a clear majority supported gay marriage (67/78) and trans rights 71/78).

==

Coming to terms with the nature of your body, rather than chasing a fantasy and delusion, leads to better mental health. Imagine that.

[homosexuhauls]

Did any UK radfems catch "Gender Wars" on Channel 4?

Non-UK link here (I just found the link on twitter, no idea who this person is or what their politics are)

It was a pretty surface level look at the gender ideology debate, primarily focusing on Dr. Kathleen Stock's experience within the academic world, and on those who have disagreed with or protested against her. There was talk of male violence, "trans women are women", single-sex spaces (limited mostly to bathroom chat and a brief mention of rape/domestic violence shelters, which was frustrating) and freedom of speech, but no mention of statistics, women's sports, Mermaids/Tavistock/ROGD, the "cotton ceiling", same sex healthcare provision, and a whole other host of things I'm forgetting. I understand that the documentary had to limit the issues discussed, but I think they overlooked some of the higher priority conflicting needs/interests in favour of the flashier or more digestible conversations.

I'm glad that Dr. Stock, Julie Bindel and Linda Bellos* were the high-profile "TERFs" featured in the documentary. It's nice seeing the focus taken away from demagogues like Kellie-Jay Keen (aka Posie Parker). Homophobia is at the heart of gender identity ideology, so it makes sense to centre parts of the gender critical discussion around the lesbian perspective.

Some of the trans participants (Dr. Finn Mackay and Stephen Whittle afaik) in the documentary have claimed to have been misled regarding the context of their interviews. The former tweeted about not being informed that the documentary would focus on Dr. Kathleen Stock, and said that had this been made clear, the invitation to appear would not have been accepted. I won't defend Channel 4 for using deceptive journalistic practices, but I was glad to hear their perspectives as two female trans people - the documentary was otherwise very male-centric on the trans side.

There was a very painful moment to watch in the documentary, as a debate about the right to cause offence, held at Cambridge Union, was used by one of the participants to make personal attacks on Dr. Stock's character. She was visibly affected by this, but made it clear that she would defend any opponent's right to argue against her. I think she came off very admirably here, showing herself to be consistent in her principles (belief in free speech) but also not hiding her emotional response to baseless insults.

A final noteworthy observation is that all of the trans interviewees made constant reference to the belief that Dr. Stock's views (or any gender critical views) are putting trans people's lives at risk. In their eyes, it's the inherent and apparently lethal danger that gender criticism poses, which justifies all manner of tactics used in the name of trans rights. This isn't new to me, or to radblr, but I think it will shock some of the offline crowd, considering Dr. Stock made multiple references to trans people absolutely needing ongoing legal protection.

Overall, I think Channel 4 have created a very balanced, very superficial introduction to gender identity ideology and its feminist critiques. Drawing a clear line in the sand between gender critical feminism and conservative transphobia will likely anger both conservatives themselves and those who conflate the two groups. But I found it really refreshing.

*Linda Bellos only featured very briefly at the end, and I absolutely wish we could've heard more from her.

Cambridge Union - "We have the right to offend" - full debate

[someone-will-remember-us]

A government-ordered review has dismissed claims that suicide rates in young people with gender dysphoria have risen sharply since the NHS restricted access to puberty-blocking drugs.

A report by the government’s adviser on suicide prevention also found that the claims – made by the campaign group the Good Law Project – were not supported by data and could prompt children under the age of 18 to take their own life.

The health secretary, Wes Streeting, last week asked Prof Louis Appleby, a leading authority on mental health at Manchester University, to look at suicide rates among current and former patients of the now-discontinued gender identity development service (Gids) at the Tavistock and Portman NHS trust.

And in his paper, published on Friday, Appleby said he had found no evidence to back up the claims.

“The data do not support the claim that there has been a large rise in suicide by young patients attending the gender services at the Tavistock since the High Court ruling in 2020 or after any other recent date,” his analysis concluded. It covered the care received by and outcomes seen among patients of the London-based specialist mental heath trust.

The Good Law Project’s executive director, Jo Maugham, said in response: “I was not contacted in advance of the statement being released and will obviously need time to respond. I do have difficulties with the figures and analysis and will respond in due course.”

Appleby also advised patients, NHS staff and campaign groups to not see the provision of puberty blockers “as the touchstone issue, the difference between acceptance and non-acceptance [of gender dysphoria]. We need to move away from this perception.”

He was asked to examine the evidential base for claims that the NHS’s decision to limit access to puberty-blocking drugs after the high court’s ruling in the Keira Bell case in December 2020 had led to a “surge” or “explosion” in suicides among young people with gender dysphoria. Three judges ruled that those under 16 lacked the capacity to decide whether or not to give informed consent to take the drugs.

As well as finding no evidence to support the suicide claims, Appleby also highlighted “the way that this issue has been discussed on social media has been insensitive, distressing and dangerous, and goes against [Samaritans] guidance on safe reporting of suicide”.

“The claims that have been placed in the public domain do not meet basic standards for statistical evidence,” he added.

He flagged up the possibility of “already-distressed adolescents hearing the message that ‘people like you, facing similar problems, are killing themselves’, leading to imitative suicide or self-harm”.

Appleby, an expert in mental health statistics, found evidence of 12 suicides among current and former Gids patients in the six years between 2018-19 and 2023-24. Six of them were among under-18s.

Five suicides occurred in the three years before 2020-21 and seven in the three afterwards. “This is essentially no difference, taking account of expected fluctuations in small numbers”, he said.

Kate Barker, chief executive of the LGB Alliance, said: “It’s distressing that the completely unevidenced claims of increased suicidality were allowed to take root, and given credence by people in public life who should have known better than to play politics with such an emotive issue.

“Now the whole world can see these claims for what they are: a cynical attempt to spread misinformation to serve a dangerous and homophobic ideology.”

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Mira Lazine for Erin In The Morning:

[Note: This edition of Erin In The Morning is brought to you by Mira Lazine, who is guest writing for Erin In The Morning after the passing of Erin’s mother. Mira Lazine is a freelance journalist covering LGBTQ+ issues, politics, and science.] On Thursday, Jo Maugham - director of the United Kingdom legal advocacy organization The Good Law Project - wrote a detailed thread on X/Twitter in which he alleges that there has been a substantial increase in the number of suicides for young trans people on the National Health Service (NHS) waitlist, and that the NHS has been suppressing the evidence. Maugham says that this occurred after the infamous 2020 Bell v. Tavistock ruling that restricted care for those under 16. While this ruling has since been overturned, the damage from it is still being felt today.

Maugham, who first announced some of these claims in a Good Law Project fundraiser opposing the British puberty blocker ban, says that he spoke with two whistleblowers. “I have seen their staff IDs and each has provided me with some internal Tavistock documents. There is no doubt they are who they say they are.”  The first whistleblower reportedly said that prior to the 2020 Bell ruling, only one young trans person died from suicide in seven years and that since the ruling, there have been sixteen deaths. This data is reported to come from an anonymous doctor referred to as “Named Doctor for Safeguarding Children.”

He then goes on to say that the whistleblower tried to alert higher ups about this, including a director at the Tavistock gender clinic and Dr. Hillary Cass. Cass is the primary person behind the infamous Cass Review, a systematic review that has led to the temporary prohibition of puberty blockers for transgender youth in Great Britain. Details related to the whistleblower’s concerns aren’t apparent within the Review, suggesting that Cass ignored concerns as the Review was being drafted. Cass, who has no professional history working with transgender young people, collaborated with people who had ties to SPLC-designated hate groups like Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine. During the writing of the Review, she met with Ron DeSantis-appointed members of the Florida medical board.

Maugham reached out to Tavistock and Cass for comment. Tavistock did not respond, while Cass referred Maugham to paragraph 5.65 in the Review, where she offhandedly discusses these suicides while underplaying the link between the NHS, Gender Identity Service (GIDS), and these deaths. Additionally, Cass fails to mention the total number of suicides in the Review from either before Bell or after. The second whistleblower claims to be able to substantiate the claims made by both the first whistleblower and the “Named Doctor for Safeguarding Children.” They claim that staff planned an open letter in response to these allegations, and that Tavistock retaliated and threatened them with disciplinary action before suppressing the material. Maugham then substantiates the allegations made by both whistleblowers by revealing meeting minutes that show Tavistock staff members were well aware of these deaths. He points out that this ignores attempted suicides and does not necessarily capture all deaths. Additionally, he shows additional notes that suggest that some data was deliberately left out of Freedom of Information Act requests.

[...] An investigation from The Guardian two years ago reveals that there are systemic failures in the United Kingdom’s mental health service which is attributable to many suicides, including some for transgender youth. Considering that several adults also died due to suicide while on waitlists, and that the majority of people on waitlists for gender affirming care have been there for more than 18 weeks, it’s possible that there are additional suicides unaccounted for This investigation, alongside the allegations made by Maugham, opens up substantial questions about how seriously medical professionals treat suicides of transgender youth. If Maugham’s allegations prove true, one of the country’s biggest medical scandals in history may unfold.

Mira Lazine writes in Erin Reed’s Erin In The Morning Substack about how the NHS in the UK covered up suicides of trans youths, especially after the Bell v. Tavistock ruling. The Cass Review ignored the impacts of suicide of trans youths as result of the post-Bell climate.

[accessible-tumbling]

At source, the thread continues:

I follow/am followed by a lot of trans or trans-adjacent folks, but I have no idea how many people who follow me don't really know any trans people, and who, on seeing the rising hysteria about trans people, feel that maybe there really is something to worry about.

Maybe they feel no hostility to trans people, but have been led to believe that there are 'reasonable concerns' to be addressed, or that they are 'just asking questions'. At least one of my followers follows Cambridge Radical Feminists network, an openly trans-hostile group.

So if you're trans, or an ally, CW for transphobia and sadness here, maybe don't read this. But if you are feeling a bit 'on the fence' I'm begging you, listen to those of us telling you things are really bad here, and getting worse.

Neither my niece or my nephew were brought up with 'traditional gender roles'. My husband is the virtuoso cook in our household, and we have loads of pictures of both 'nephews' cooking with him. My niece wore her hair long, because she liked it long, and hated haircuts.

Her favourite colour is purple, so it featured a lot in her wardrobe, but I think because no fixed ideas of what it meant to 'be a boy' were imposed on her or her self-expression, gender was just a shrug to her. Until puberty hit, and suddenly she was very uncomfortable.

She was a bit grouchy and withdrawn, and began to act out at school. Not surprising for a kid in their early teens to be moody and challenging, not the stuff of newspaper headlines. We just took it in stride. Then a few months later it all came together - she was a girl.

We swapped pronouns, and once she decided on a new name, adopted that (it's a lovely choice!). My happy, goofy, animated little weirdo came back out of her shell. Her school friends are wonderful and supportive (we had a 'Gender Repeal' party where they brought hand made cards!

But getting healthcare, counselling and support for her was another story. Obviously we all had questions around whether this was a phase, or perhaps a stepping stone to something else - nonbinary identity, or just life as a boy who was quite gender-nonconforming.

These aren't things we are qualified to help her work through! Also, if in time and with a good counsellor it is established with certainty that yes, she is a trans girl, then we want her to have a therapist to help her with her feelings around that.

It's not an easy path through life, and it would be reasonable to have some anger, some 'why me' feelings, or some fears about that. We really want her to have that support.

We also wanted to have puberty blockers for her. She had expressed a desire for them, and it would buy her some time to think about what she wants from her future and her body without the pressure of a body that is changing in ways that are deeply distressing to her.

Since the Tavistock closed, there is no Gender Identity service on the NHS to refer her into. The new system is expected to open with a three year wait list. Her friends won't get their first appt until they are around 17 or 18.

We got her blockers privately. It's challenging because not all GPs will agree to share care with private services, so you're always hopping between two systems. It's not cheap either. Just over £100 a month. Not a lot of families have that going spare right now.

She had a fantastic youth club for LGBT+ kids that has been such a fantastic source of support. Their windows have been smashed more than once. Newspapers regularly talk about the threat trans women pose to us. There was even a debate about it in Parliament. It's hostile here.

At the beginning of the year, when Gary Lineker was being hauled over the coals for suggesting our government's narrative around targets of hatred was akin to 1930s Germany, the kids' parents offered them to move to Canada. Their dad texted us to say they seemed keen.

Canada has a better healthcare system for trans people, and there, my niece can change her gender officially with a minor bit of paperwork. Nowhere right now is perfect, but it's better.

So today, my niece and nephew left their home, their friends, their school, and most of their family to seek a better life away from the UK, which has become intolerably hostile.

I'm relieved. Canada is lovely. Travel broadens the mind. They are charismatic, kind, engaging kids. They will make new friends.

But we won't get their formative teenage years back, with them living ten minutes' cycle away. They won't get homework on my couch after school.

They won't get time with their dad or their grandparents, except for holidays. They won't play frisbee with their uncle, or go kayaking with me after school. We will be half a world away, hoping for the best.

This is the cost of the rising tide of transphobia. Lineker was right. Having a chunk of your family uproot for their safety and wellbeing while being victimised by your government probably does feel reminiscent of 1930s Germany.

I encourage you to scratch a little deeper at the 'just asking questions' brigade, at JK Rowling's desire to just 'protect women and girls'. That protection doesn't extend to my niece. The questions about her personhood left her without counselling, support or healthcare.

And one day, when she is not a trans child but a trans woman, I don't want her living somewhere that her identity is constantly sharing space with 'just asking questions about rapists', 'dangerous men in dresses', or discourse around whether she is allowed to pee outside her home.

The anti-trans brigade shares space, and a great deal of its ideals with fascism. Nazis attend their rallies. They quote Hitler. The policing of identity, the reinforcement of gender norms, the intense focus on fertility - all straight out of the fash playbook.

And those pressing for the marginalisation of a minority, squeezing them out of public life, pillorying them in the press, ruining their public standing - they don't stop there. Other targets for hate *will* emerge, if left unchecked.

One of the most famous images of Nazi book burning is from the looting of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute of Sexology, which was leading research in trans and gay identities/sexualities at the time.

And fascist powers don't start with laws that say things like 'kill all the Jews'. They are worded as positives. The first anti-Jewish law was 'Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service' barring Jewish and 'politically unreliable' people from service.

(You can read more about anti-Jewish legislation here)

So when you see things framed as 'protecting women and girls' and 'defending women's sex-based rights' (surely things *no one* reasonable can disagree with!) ask yourself protect *from who* and *at whose expense*.

As we are left behind in a nation that is increasingly demonising foreigners and turning on its own, I am left with the thought experiment we were all given at school, 'What would *you* have done if you had lived in that place, at that time?'

Now is the place and the time.

Please, do something.

[partly-hueman]

All about Jazz

I'll admit I have seen exactly ONE episode of I am Jazz and there is one thing that stuck out like a sore thumb. Jaron's mom, (Jaron is his real name) is a psychopath. I don't mean that in a crude name calling way. I'm describing her.

In 2003, when Jaron, "Jazz" was just 3 years old his mom noticed that he kept opening his onsie. She took this to mean he was trying to change it into a dress. She became convinced that her son was actually her daughter and by the age of 5 his mom socially transitioned him into a girl.

It's like if you stumble upon some liberal lunatic who tells you that her cat is a vegan. We all know who made that choice.

Jazz's mom consulted the UK trans lobby group Mermaids. Who has since been exposed as frauds and just downright evil bastards. At a conference in 1998 a Mermaids speaker admitted only a third of children exhibiting gender dysphoria "will grow up to be transgendered adults". Over a half would be gay, she said. And that was 25 years ago, before trans became the latest and greatest cause of the left. http://gender.org.uk/conf/1998/merm

Then she she then took Jazz to see Marilyn Volker, a therapist who had been a sex surrogate. She had sex with her clients, and even married one of them. Top notch care eh? So what was the outcome? Puberty blockers of course. This would help Jazz and his "traumatic gender dysphoria" as his mother calls it.

Once puberty blockers became available Mermaids became Britain's foremost campaigners for their use. But if only a third of kids with dysphoria will become trans adults, two thirds of the kids who get medicalised are not receiving any so-called "benefit" from blockers. Even those who may become "trans" are being harmed. The cognitive impact of blockers appears to be major and irreversible. Young animals on blockers become more anxious and withdrawn. The Tavistock found they made gender dysphoria worse in many kids.

Marci Bowers, Jazz's surgeon and star of "What Is A Woman", has admitted that no child who goes on blockers at the "recommended time" will ever be able to sexually function properly or orgasm. Did you catch that? Thousands of kids are being deprived of their birthright to become a sexual adult.

Why are so-called "trans kids" put through all this pain? I have a theory that the parents and doctors harbor a nefarious subconscious disgust for effeminate boys and butch girls.

Isn't it ironic that gay rights -which began as a movement championing sexual freedom- has been taken over by a cult that now sterilizes mainly gay teenagers, robbing them of sexual freedom?

Jazz has become what we have warned people about for over a decade. At just 21 years old, Jazz has become a tragic figure. Obese, depressed and often suffering from anxiety attacks, he has struggled to form anything remotely like an intimate relationship.

We were sold "Jazz Jennings" by The Church of Transgenderism and it's cult members. "Jazz" is a true success story and is propped up and highlighted as a rousing success of early gender reassignment for children. In truth, he’s been left sexless, sterilized and physically mutilated. Jazz is not an example to follow. His tragic life is an indictment of the trans movement.

[mightyflamethrower]

 group of senior clinical psychologists have apologised for the role their profession played in the promotion of transgender ‘medical’ treatments to children in the UK following a damning report which found that such interventions were done on “shaky foundations”.

In a joint letter published by the left-wing Guardian’s sister paper The Observer, 16 unnamed “senior clinical psychologists”, including some who actually worked in the now-discredited Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) clinics that prescribed hundreds of children life-altering puberty-blocking drugs, said that their profession led the way in pushing children into such a direction.

“These were psychology-led services. Whether intentionally or not, and many were doing their best in an impossible situation, it was clinical psychologists who promoted an ideology that was almost impossible to challenge,” they wrote.

“It is also our professional body, the British Psychological Society, that has failed (despite years of pressure) to produce guidelines for clinicians working with young people in this complex area; and that, forced into making an official response for the first time, now minimises its own role in events and calls for ‘more psychology’ as the answer. We are ashamed of the role psychology has played,” the group added.

They said that what occurred at GIDS clinics was a “multi-factorial systemic failure” but said that those within the psychology profession should be “fully examined” and held accountable for the role they played, noting that many “failed to carry out proper assessments of troubled young people, and thus put many on an ‘irreversible medical pathway’ that in most cases was inappropriate; and who failed in their most basic duty to keep proper records.”

The admission comes in the wake of a National Health Service-sponsored report from leading paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass, which argued that the NHS should no longer provide puberty-blocking drugs to children under the age of 18, given that many of that their prescription was “built on shaky foundations”.

The Cass report went on to say there is little evidence to support the so-called ‘gender affirming’ claim that hormone-altering treatments improved children’s mental health and that there has been little investigation into the potential ramifications such drugs have on the “cognitive and psychosexual development” of the children as they age.

Additionally, it argued that because many children will naturally grow past feelings of gender dysphoria “for most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress”.

A preliminary version of the report forced the NHS to order the closure of the Tavistock Centre and its controversial Gender Identity Development Service clinic, which served as the nation’s top transgender clinic for children. Cass argued that the treatments offered by Tavistock were “not a safe or viable long-term option” for children.

The clinic has long faced criticism over the apparent lax standards used to determine if children were displaying signs of transgenderism, with former governor of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, Dr David Bell, whistleblowing in 2022 to reveal that that staff would make such decisions based on flimsy evidence, such as if young girls failed to show interest in “pink ribbons and dollies“.

Last year, a re-examination of a 2011 study from University College London Hospitals (UCLH) and the Tavistock Centre — which claimed that there were no negative impacts of puberty blockers on the psychological function of 12 to 15-year-olds — overturned the initial claims, with University of Essex Professor of Psychology Susan McPherson and social scientist David Freedman finding instead that 34 per cent of children placed on puberty-blocking drugs saw their mental health “reliably deteriorate”.

While many in the United States continue to advocate for medical interventions for allegedly transgender children, there is a growing consensus in Europe against the practice, with progressive countries such as Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and the UK having all begun to restrict transgender treatments for children. Last month, a report commissioned by French senators asserted that providing children with life-altering transgender drugs will be remembered as one of the “greatest ethical scandals in medical history” and called for the practice to be restricted in France as well.

Don't expect to see anything like this in the US. American Leftist never admit being wrong. Never

[a-room-of-my-own]

A trans lobby group helped to draft NHS plans for treating children questioning their gender, The Telegraph can disclose.

Susie Green, then chairman of the charity Mermaids, was part of a task group reviewing services at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation trans clinic.

The service specification, which outlines treatment for children, included details on how “hormone blockers will now be considered for any children under 12”. The relationship between Mermaids and senior NHS employees is laid bare for the first time in documents seen by The Telegraph.

The Tavistock claimed that it did not have emails or minutes of meetings with Ms Green but after the information regulator threatened court action, it released more than 300 pages.

They show that Ms Green had a direct line to Dr Polly Carmichael, Tavistock’s director, and demanded to be regarded as a professional so she could refer ­children for treatment when their GPs refused. Ms Green, who has no known formal medical training, held an advisory role on two of the studies that the clinic was involved in on the long-term effect of gender identity.

The service specification, which is still available on the NHS England website, was due to be replaced in 2020 but was put on hold when the Government ordered the independent Cass Review into the clinic.

The Tavistock said: “Like many NHS services, GIDS [gender identity development service] works with a range of third-sector patient support groups and charities that have different views about how the service can improve.”

Mermaids said its “primary focus is to support the mental and physical wellbeing of trans and non-binary young people throughout the UK”.

Ms Green said it was “not a secret” that she was involved in the service specification”.

An NHS spokesman said: “We have started implementing advice from Dr Cass and we have held a public consultation on a new interim service specification, which will be published in the coming weeks.”

'The Tavistock were really in thrall to these activists'

They are the documents that the NHS Tavistock gender clinic claimed did not exist. More than 300 pages of emails and minutes that lay bare for the first time the extent of Mermaids’ involvement in England’s only clinic for transgender children.

The controversial transgender charity has long been named by some whistleblowers as one of the reasons why the Tavistock lost its way, with claims that activists pressured staff to prescribe potentially life-altering drugs.

Now The Telegraph can reveal how Susie Green, then chairman of Mermaids, had a direct line to the clinic’s director Dr Polly Carmichael and was able to make referrals even when a child’s GP repeatedly refused.

The documents lay bare the depth of her involvement in the service, including helping to redraft the service specification and advising on a number of trials designed to inform the way they treated young patients.

The Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust had originally refused to release the details of the meetings between 2014 and 2018, relying on an exemption under Freedom of Information law which said it would have a “disproportionate or unjustified level of disruption, irritation or distress”.

When the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) asked them to justify that refusal, the Trust withdrew it and said that following “an extensive search of emails … the Trust does not hold the requested information”.

The ICO said that “on the balance of probabilities” it did hold the information and threatened to refer them to the High Court unless they complied with the request from a parent. The Tavistock has now released 322 pages of communications between 2014 and 2018.

They include emails between Dr Carmichael, who still works at the Tavistock, and Ms Green, who has left Mermaids and now works for an online GP which prescribes puberty blockers. In one exchange from 2016, Ms Green contacted the head of the service to question the decision of staff to refuse a referral she had made.

Upset not to be seen as a professional

Ms Green, who has no known medical training, said that she was told “that the referral was not validated or risk-assessed by a professional” and that is why it was rejected.

She added: “I can only assume from this statement that I am not seen as a professional? I am now very confused, as my understanding was that your service would accept referrals from Mermaids, but this statement appears to suggest the opposite….

“If you do NOT accept referrals from Mermaids due to the fact that I am not a professional I would like to know the reasoning behind this? Referral by a non-healthcare professional is acceptable from schools, social services etc, and my understanding has been that Mermaids referrals were accepted.

“Your admin person made it clear that immediate action was needed or this referral would be refused, so can I ask for a level of urgency to be applied to dealing with this issue?”

Dr Carmichael replied: “We do accept referrals from third sector groups and I know that you have helpfully sent in referrals in the past. This continues to be the case. Third sector groups often play a vital role in supporting young people and their families and we greatly value their involvement.”

Referrals 'unsupported by their GP'

Ms Green sent referrals for young people who were “unsupported by their GP” and in one case she sent the referral noting that the GP “has consistently refused to refer”.

The documents show that as early as 2014 she was involved in the “redraft of the service specification” for the NHS’s gender identity development service (GIDs) for children. She was one of the 10 people who attended a meeting.

Others include Dr Carmichael, who chaired the session, Rob Senior, the Trust’s medical director, Prof Gary Butler, a University College London Hospital consultant who is now the clinical lead for the children’s gender clinic, and Bernard Reed, the founder of the campaign group the Gender Identity Research and Education Society.

The minutes show they agreed that they would act as a “task and finish work group” and that “the content of the discussions were expected to remain within the group”.

They noted the initial findings of “research into the age for hypothalamic blocker treatment” which “suggest that the blocker could be prescribed from early puberty”.

The Tavistock has not provided minutes relating to any further meetings of the group, despite notes stating that they would meet two to three times and share details of their review. As a result, Ms Green’s contributions remain unclear

Greater emphasis on medical treatment

A new service specification was published by NHS England in 2016, which placed greater emphasis on medical treatment for children.

The new specification said for the first time “that hormone blockers will now be considered for any children under the age of 12 if they are in established puberty”.

It also updated the “informed consent” section to state that: “Age alone does not determine capacity to give consent. If it is concluded that a client has sufficient autonomy and understanding of what is to be offered, plus other key eligibility and readiness criteria have been met, they can consent to treatment.”

The involvement with the service specification came as Mermaids were putting pressure on the Tavistock to lower the age for cross-sex hormones to 14, as Dr Carmichael revealed in an interview at the time.

The charity was also calling for a reduction of time that teenagers had to spend on puberty blockers before they were prescribed cross-sex hormones.

In one email chain Ms Green was involved in, her fellow campaigner Mr Reed questioned if there “are proposals to speed up” the process. He noted that children had to be on puberty blockers for six months to a year before being given cross-sex hormones, which they had to wait until they were 16 to access.

In the response in November 2016 Sally Hodges, one of the Trust’s directors, said that “the situation is rapidly changing” as the service had received more money and “Polly Carmichael is in touch with Susie to ensure that you have the most accurate and up-to-date information”.

Gender reassignment at 16

Ms Green, who now works for Gender GP, an online service which prescribes cross sex hormones, had taken her own child – who was born male – to the US for puberty blockers before their 16th birthday. On their 16th birthday she took them to Thailand for cross-sex surgery.

In one exchange she sought “clarity” from Dr Carmichael on whether the Tavistock would treat children whose parents had sought hormone blockers or cross-sex hormones privately either because of waiting lists or because the drugs were not prescribed on the NHS to under-16s.

“This would be a huge weight off parents’ minds,” she wrote. “Many want to access blockers privately for their children due to the distress caused by ongoing pubertal changes and the huge wait to be seen and assessed, but are then caught in a position of having to fund blockers indefinitely themselves.”

Dr Carmichael replied that she was “very sorry to hear that there has been confusion” and said that “individual circumstances vary widely and so it would be a case-by-case basis”.

She said if the child was already seeing an endocrinologist through the Tavistock they would be removed from their care if they started getting drugs privately, though could still have therapy. But she added that patients “may choose at a later date to be referred to the endocrine clinic, if for example they started cross-sex hormone treatment outside the service at an earlier age than the service offers”.

Charity boss invited to take part in research

In 2018, Dr Carmichael emailed Ms Green again to invite her to take part in research which was supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR). She wrote: “We are in the process of submitting an application to NIHR to follow younger service users. It would be great if Mermaids would be involved.”

Ms Green replied that she would be “delighted to look at working with you on the NIHR application and delivery”.

The study looking at the development of gender identity in children aged 3-14 started in 2019 and it was hoped that it would “inform health and education providers”.

Stephanie Davies-Arai, founder of Transgender Trend, said: “The Tavistock were really in thrall to these activists. They were ideologically captured.”

Ms Davies-Arai, who campaigns for evidence-based healthcare, said that she had first contacted the Tavistock in 2016 amid concerns about the treatment they were offering and was told that they would welcome her input as they were keen to hear from different voices.

However, when she emailed Dr Carmichael with concerns, she got no response.

Ms Green said that it was “not a secret” that she was involved in the service specification and she applied to be involved “as the CEO of the largest UK (and probably European) charity to support transgender children, young people and their families”.

She said that she was “pleased” that the new specification “removed an arbitrary age range” for hormone blockers and agreed to consider them for children under 12.

[shiftythrifting]

A vinyl album from The Clancy Brothers - with a group of women who must have been very uncomfortable standing on that yard with bare feet. Wearing just nice jumpers.

This was in the TASS charity shop in Tavistock, in Devon, England.

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

The medical transitioning of children has become one of the most controversial and polarising issues of our time. For some, it is a medical scandal. For others, life-saving treatment.

So, when hundreds of messages were leaked from an internal forum of doctors and mental health workers from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, it was bound to spark interest. WPATH describes itself as an “interdisciplinary professional and educational organisation devoted to transgender health”. Most significantly, it produces standards of care (SOC) which, it claims, articulate “professional consensus” about how best to help people with gender dysphoria.

Despite its grand title, WPATH is neither solely a professional body – a significant proportion of its membership are activists – nor does it represent the “world” view on how to care for this group of people. There is no global agreement on best practice. The leaked messages (and the odd recording) – dubbed the WPATH files – are disturbing. In one video, doctors acknowledge that patients are sometimes too young to fully understand the consequences of puberty blockers and hormones for their fertility. “It’s always a good theory that you talk about fertility preservation with a 14-year-old, but I know I’m talking to a blank wall,” one Canadian endocrinologist says.

WPATH’s president, Dr Marci Bowers, comments on the impact of early blocking of puberty on sexual function in adulthood. “To date,” she writes, “I’m unaware of an individual claiming ability to orgasm when they were blocked at Tanner 2.” Tanner stage 2 is the beginning of puberty. It can be as young as nine in girls.

Elsewhere, there are extraordinary discussions on how to manage “trans clients” with dissociative identity disorder (what used to be called multiple personality disorder) when “not all the alters have the same gender identity”. Surgeons talk about procedures that result in bodies that don’t exist in nature: those with both sets of genitals – the “phallus-preserving vaginoplasty”; double mastectomies that don’t have nipples; “nullification” surgery, where there are no genitals at all, just smooth skin. And doctors discuss the possibility that 16-year-old patients have liver cancer as the result of taking hormones. The problem is not necessarily the discussions themselves, but that the organisation is not so open when speaking publicly.

The views of WPATH matter to the UK. For years, the organisation and its SOC have been cited as a source of “best practice” for trans healthcare by numerous medical bodies, including the British Medical Association and the General Medical Council – and still is. The Royal College of Psychiatrists refers to WPATH in its own recommendations for care.

Most relevant is that WPATH is cited as “good practice” in the current service specifications underpinning youth and adult gender clinics in England and Scotland, albeit in both cases it is WPATH’s previous SOC that is mentioned. The most recent version does away with all age limits from the beginning of puberty for hormones and surgical interventions, other than female to male genital surgery, and contains a chapter on eunuchs.

Several staff at England’s NHS adult gender clinics are not just members of WPATH (one is the former president), but authors of that current SOC. So too was Susie Green, the former boss of the young people’s charity Mermaids; a lack of medical expertise does not exclude either membership of WPATH or the power to influence policy.

England’s only NHS children’s gender clinic – the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) at London’s Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust – will close its doors at the end of March, having been earmarked for closure since July 2022. But the 2016 service specification still underpinning Gids states that “the service will be delivered in line with” WPATH 7. While Gids was generally more cautious than other WPATH practitioners, clinicians I spoke to for my book, Time to Think, also relayed how young people claiming to have multiple personalities, or who identified with another race, could be referred for puberty blockers.

Gids staff have also presented at WPATH conferences for the past decade, including the most recent, held in 2022. This doesn’t imply agreement with WPATH’s principles, but association with the group becomes harder to justify as its views become more extreme.

It is difficult to see how the Department of Health’s assertion that NHS England “moved away from WPATH guidelines more than five years ago” holds.

What is true is that there is no mention of WPATH in updated guidance that will underpin the new youth gender services opening on 1 April. What’s more, NHS England has made it clear that WPATH’s views are irrelevant to its core recommendation that puberty blockers will no longer be available as part of routine clinical practice.

There is a battle raging over how best to care for children and young people struggling with their gender identity, with ever increasing numbers of European countries choosing to take a more cautious, less medical, approach after finding the evidence base underpinning those treatments to be wanting. NHS England insists that new services will operate in accordance with recommendations of the independent Cass review, and that it is well placed to develop policies “in line with clinical evidence and expertise”. But it won’t be easy. There is already discussion among professionals working in gender services planning a pushback against Cass’s as yet unpublished final recommendations.

It was difficult for Gids to stand up to external pressures, allowing the care it offered to suffer. At the same time, NHS England failed in its duty to provide proper oversight. Both they and those in charge of the new services must do better if they are to avoid the mistakes of the past. Without proper, evidence-based guidance on what good practice looks like, organisations like WPATH will continue to have influence.

[toscanoirriverente]

Hannah Barnes’s book about the rise and calamitous fall of the Gender Identity Development Service for children (Gids), a nationally commissioned unit at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in north London, is the result of intensive work, carried out across several years. A journalist at the BBC’s Newsnight, Barnes has based her account on more than 100 hours of interviews with Gids’ clinicians, former patients, and other experts, many of whom are quoted by name. It comes with 59 pages of notes, plentiful well-scrutinised statistics, and it is scrupulous and fair-minded. Several of her interviewees say they are happy either with the treatment they received at Gids, or with its practices – and she, in turn, is content to let them speak.

Such a book cannot easily be dismissed. To do so, a person would not only have to be wilfully ignorant, they would also – to use the popular language of the day – need to be appallingly unkind. This is the story of the hurt caused to potentially hundreds of children since 2011, and perhaps before that. To shrug in the face of that story – to refuse to listen to the young transgender people whose treatment caused, among other things, severe depression, sexual dysfunction, osteoporosis and stunted growth, and whose many other problems were simply ignored – requires a callousness that would be far beyond my imagination were it not for the fact that, thanks to social media, I already know such stony-heartedness to be out there.

Gids, which opened in 1989, was established to provide talking therapies to young people who were questioning their gender identity (the Tavistock, under the aegis of which it operated from 1994, is a mental health trust). But the trigger for Barnes’s interest in the unit has its beginnings in 2005, when concerns were first raised by staff over the growing number of patient referrals to endocrinologists who would prescribe hormone blockers designed to delay puberty. Such medication was recommended only in the case of children aged 16 or over. By 2011, however, Barnes contends, it appeared to be the clinic’s raison d’etre. In that year, a child of 12 was on blockers. By 2016, a 10-year-old was taking them.

Clinicians at Gids insisted the effects of these drugs were reversible; that taking them would reduce the distress experienced by gender dysphoric children; and that there was no causality between starting hormone blockers and going on to take cross-sex hormones (the latter are taken by adults who want fully to transition). Unfortunately, none of these things were true. Such drugs do have severe side effects, and while the causality between blockers and cross-sex hormones cannot be proven – all the studies into them have been designed without a control group – 98% of children who take the first go on to take the latter. Most seriously of all, as Gids’ own research suggested, they do not appear to lead to any improvement in children’s psychological wellbeing.

So why did they continue to be prescribed? As referrals to Gids grew rapidly – in 2009, it had 97; by 2020, this figure was 2,500 – so did pressure on the service. Barnes found that the clinic – which employed an unusually high number of junior staff, to whom it offered no real training – no longer had much time for the psychological work (the talking therapies) of old. But something else was happening, too. Trans charities such as Mermaids were closely – too closely – involved with Gids. Such organisations vociferously encouraged the swift prescription of drugs. This now began to happen, on occasion, after only two consultations. Once a child was on blockers, they were rarely offered follow-up appointments. Gids did not keep in touch with its patients in the long term, or keep reliable data on outcomes.

A lot of this is already known, thanks largely to a number of whistleblowers. Last February, the paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass, commissioned by the NHS, issued a highly critical interim report into the service; in July, it was announced that Gids would close in 2023. But a lot of what Barnes tells us in Time to Think is far more disturbing than anything I’ve read before. Again and again, we watch as a child’s background, however disordered, and her mental health, however fragile, are ignored by teams now interested only in gender.

The statistics are horrifying. Less than 2% of children in the UK have an autism spectrum disorder; at Gids, more than a third of referrals presented with autistic traits. Clinicians also saw high numbers of children who had been sexually abused. But for the reader, it is the stories that Barnes recounts of individuals that speak loudest. The mother of one boy whose OCD was so severe he would leave his bedroom only to shower (he did this five times a day) suspected that his notions about gender had little to do with his distress. However, from the moment he was referred to the Tavistock, he was treated as if he were female and promised an endocrinology appointment. Her son, having finally rejected the treatment he was offered by Gids, now lives as a gay man.

As Barnes makes perfectly clear, this isn’t a culture war story. This is a medical scandal, the full consequences of which may only be understood in many years’ time. Among her interviewees is Dr Paul Moran, a consultant psychiatrist who now works in Ireland. A long career in gender medicine has taught Moran that, for some adults, transition can be a “fantastic thing”. Yet in 2019, he called for Gids’ assessments of Irish children (the country does not have its own clinic for young people) to be immediately terminated, so convinced was he that its processes were “unsafe”. The be-kind brigade might also like to consider the role money played in the rise of Gids. By 2020-21, the clinic accounted for a quarter of the trust’s income.

But this isn’t to say that ideology wasn’t also in the air. Another of Barnes’s interviewees is Dr Kirsty Entwistle, an experienced clinical psychologist. When she got a job at Gids’ Leeds outpost, she told her new colleagues she didn’t have a gender identity. “I’m just female,” she said. This, she was informed, was transphobic. Barnes is rightly reluctant to ascribe the Gids culture primarily to ideology, but nevertheless, many of the clinicians she interviewed used the same word to describe it: mad.

And who can blame them? After more than 370 pages, I began to feel half mad myself. At times, the world Barnes describes, with its genitalia fashioned from colons and its fierce culture of omertà, feels like some dystopian novel. But it isn’t, of course. It really happened, and she has worked bravely and unstintingly to expose it. This is what journalism is for.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution. —Aldous Huxley, speech delivered to the Tavistock Group, California Medical School, University of California, Berkeley, CA, Mar 16, 1961

[Scott Horton]

[spiderfreedom]

currently reading 'Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children Book by Hannah Barnes'.

some interesting observations so far:

the original Gender Identity Development Service, or GIDS, in the UK, used puberty blockers and then cross sex hormones at 16

GIDS was housed with Tavistock, which was controversial, because the Tavistock people believed in a psychological approach

when susie green established Mermaids, it turned into a very powerful patient advocacy group that pushed for lowering the age of puberty blockers

there are interviews with people who went to GIDS! one is with ellie, a gender non conforming girl, who went to GIDS for her dysphoria, but decided to continue living as a girl and that the problem was with society.

there's also an interview with phoebe, a trans girl who went on puberty blockers. there are some warning signs in her story that concern me (describes herself as a 'very gender non conforming boy', says that she liked women's clothes, was bullied for being gender non conforming). but she also describes typical sex dysphoria in the sense of being uncomfortable looking at herself in the mirror or naked. she was able to transition young and doesn't regret it, but believes that the process may be less stringent today and therefore some people will end up detransitioning. she worries some people may identify as trans as a 'phase' and that they should have more time before starting puberty blockers to think about what they really need.

there's a heartbreaking moment where phoebe describes wanting to preserve her sperm so she can have kids after she transitions, but the sperm preservation facility refused her because they believed sperm preservation was 'at odds' with 'gender reassignment' and that her transition might put her future child at risk. as someone worried about the sterilization risks of young kids transitioning, it's also horrifying to read about how she was unable to preserve her sperm even though she had the opportunity to.

around 2004-2005 GIDS moved to the dutch protocol, which began puberty blockers at 12 instead of 16

the Dutch admit that lowering the age of puberty blockers might "increase the incidence of 'false positives'" aka people who end up transitioning who may not have needed to.