Lawyers accused of ‘dangerous and false’ trans suicide claims

That’s the Times saying that on Friday.

Activists lawyers are spreading “distressing and dangerous” claims that transgender children will kill themselves because of a ban on puberty blockers, a government review has found.

Professor Louis Appleby, the government’s adviser on suicide prevention, found that there was no evidence to support claims of a “surge” in suicides among trans children.

The Good Law Project, a campaign group led by the barrister Jolyon Maugham, has repeatedly invoked statistics on social media purporting to show an “explosion” in deaths among children being treated for gender dysphoria at the Tavistock and Portman NHS trust.

He loves attention, but perhaps not that kind of attention. Maybe that’s why he decided to write a love letter to himself and pretend it was from an admirer yesterday.

As a result, Appleby was asked by the government to conduct an independent review of NHS data. He found that it “does not support the claim that there has been a large rise in suicide in young gender dysphoria patients at the Tavistock”.

That’s interesting. Appleby conducted the review because of Maugham’s dangerous false claims. The latter must be feeling torn between thrills at the attention and rage at the exposure of his reckless harmful lies.

In his review, Appleby criticised the toxicity of the debate on social media. He said: “The way that this issue has been discussed on social media has been insensitive, distressing and dangerous, and goes against guidance on safe reporting of suicide. One risk is that young people and their families will be terrified by predictions of suicide as inevitable without puberty blockers — some of the responses on social media show this.

“Another is identification: already-distressed adolescents hearing the message that ‘people like you, facing similar problems, are killing themselves’, leading to imitative suicide or self-harm, to which young people are particularly susceptible.

“Then there is the insensitivity of the ‘dead child’ rhetoric. Suicide should not be a slogan or a means to winning an argument.”

Appleby is a psychiatrist based at the University of Manchester who leads the National Suicide Prevention Strategy for England. His review detailed how the Good Law Project had shared online claims of a surge in suicides since puberty blockers were banned.

Maugham should be feeling and displaying scalding shame and remorse. He’s not. Instead he’s displaying new levels of vanity and narcissism.