A culture of secrecy and ideology
Health Secretary Victoria Atkins says she has had “enough” of a “culture of secrecy and ideology” around gender care for children. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, she criticised NHS England practitioners, in response to a landmark review into gender care practices.
It is a very weird culture for a medical issue. We’ve been saying that all along. It’s more like a religion than it is like normal medical practice. There are taboos, heretics, inquisitions, expulsions, lies, bullying, slogans, blasphemy laws – none of which you want in a medical issue.
The Cass review said children had been “let down” by a lack of research on the use of puberty blockers. It called for gender services to match the standards of other NHS care.
As opposed to being a special, sacrosanct service all its own.
The paediatrician behind Wednesday’s report, Dr Hilary Cass, said clinicians were also affected by the “toxicity” of public debate around transgender identities. “There are few other areas of healthcare where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media, and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behaviour. This must stop,” she wrote.
And you know what? It needs to stop everywhere. Healthcare yes, but also education, politics, entertainment, social media – you name it.
Good article.
Joan Smith pointed out something insightful today. the “conversion therapy” laws promoted by political extremists in the grip of a moral panic, and that UK Labour has discussed implementing, would criminalize “criminalise parents and counsellors who approach children with precisely the caution recommended by Cass”.
I’m dating a woman who distrusts the medical establishment and wants me to wean off the cardiac meds I take in favor of Herbal remedies and teas. Until I became aware of the trans issue and endocrine quackery it was natural for me to defend the medical establishment. It’s “science,” I would say, in my best skeptical voice. But I realize that I was relying on argument from authority. I’m finding it very difficult to justify a blanket defense of medical science seeing the recent reports such as this one, and also the boom in the practice of tongue snipping of newborns so they can latch for breastfeeding. Physicians are not as ethical as I once held them to be.
Once the levy breaks all the quacks will use this as examples to help bolster their case. We Need or skeptics to wake up and join you, Ophelia, in exposing the bullshit.
Joan Smith article here:
https://unherd.com/newsroom/stonewall-memory-holes-opposition-to-cass-report/
The whole concept of “gender care” for children is suspect. Is there “today I am an elephant care” or “today I am an astronaut care” for children? “Imaginary friend care” for children? Children grow out of these phases, as do most children suffering from dysphoria, if the figures on desistance are accurate. So let them grow out of it. I’m now suspicious of how many of those who do not desist have had their supposed “wrongness” instilled in them from external sources. Parents might now immediately affirm their young child’s supposed “transness,” (but interestingly, not their elephantness). How can they not but impart their incipiently homophobic concern over the child’s “incorrect” choices of toys and clothing to their child? Children sense, see, and learn. Sometimes all too well. I can’t imagine any other way that very young children would ever get the idea that they were “born in the wrong body” but from outside. Older children and teens now have, among other channels, many social media sources for homophobic self-diagnoses offering the possibility of escaping personal discomfort over their sexuality, societal homophobia, or sexist stereotypes, by becoming the sex they are not. I now think that the number of dysphoric children who truly are “trans” is incredibly small, if not zero.
Most adults have a pretty good idea of what is real, and what’s imaginary, of what is possible and what is impossible, though apparently this faculty can be variable and situational. It is used selectively. It is “fluid.” Sometimes, when there is a desperate need for responsible adults to be present in the room, there are none left to be found.
Parents, teachers, and doctors don’t try to turn children into elephants, because they know the child is engaging in imaginative play when they claim to be one. Anyone who tried to use drugs or surgery to do so would be vilified and arrested. There is a pathway that can let children become astronauts, doctors, pilots, or lion tamers. But no there is no pathway to the impossible. Too many adults have lost sight of the fact that turning a child into the other sex is not like training them to be an astronaut or a doctor; it is like trying to turn them into an elephant. It is not possible. These people can’t see that they are engaging in horrifically destructive, delusional “play,” using children as their experimental playthings. Anyone who tries to use drugs or surgery to attempt to change a child’s sex, which is something that is not possible to do, deserves to be vilified and arrested.