Guardian takes thumb off scale, sits down on it instead
Another Guardian piece today from the same reporter, Robyn Vinter:
Trans children in England worse off now than four years ago, says psychologist
As if it’s just settled fact that there are “trans children.”
Transgender children are being left in a “far worse position” than before the Cass report, with a service that is “going backwards instead of forwards”, according to a psychologist who has set up a private gender service.
Dr Aiden Kelly, a clinical psychologist specialising in gender who was part of the team at the Tavistock and Portman NHS mental health trust’s gender identity development services (Gids), said he was “very, very worried” about the NHS’s ability to deliver a suitable gender service based on the findings of the Cass review.
I wonder if this reporter has an agenda at all.
“We’re in a far worse position than we were four years ago,” he said. “The Cass review and NHS England’s policy updates, and the kind of measures and decisions they’ve made in terms of what to do with services, how to set up services – or not, as the case may be – means we’re in a far worse position.”
Got that? Should she have said it a third time?
Kelly, who now runs an independent gender service, Gender Plus, with some former colleagues, said there was an “unjustifiable” level of caution from the Cass report that did not match his experience in the service and that poor outcomes had been overemphasised, leaving England “out of step” with the rest of the world.
He said: “It’s important to remember that people carrying out this expert review have never worked in gender. The people who actually know the work, and have been doing the work for a long period of time, don’t hold that level of caution and fear.”
Ah yes. And people who work in, say, the tobacco industry don’t hold that level of caution and fear about the health effects of smoking, because their livelihood depends on their not holding it.
The key word in this quote is “we.”
Dr Aiden Kelly, a clinical psychologist specialising in gender, is not a “transgender child.” He’s a man who makes money saying boys and girls are “transgender children.” Yes, he and his ilk (the “we” of his statement) are in a worse position than before – they can’t make as much money from doing irreversible damage to boys and girls as they did before. The children, now they’re better off.
Even aside from the monetary incentives, it’s just hard for someone intellectually to come to the conclusion that the sub-field they’ve devoted themselves to is built on shoddy foundations. Especially if the implication is that they may have mistreated patients.
I may be mis-remembering, but I don’t think that “recovered memory syndrome” was discredited because therapists who believed it announced that oops, we were wrong. If string theory is a dead end in physics, you’re not likely to hear it from string theorists.
Screechy, that’s very true, even for supposedly objective professionals. There are still people who maintain the guilt of those wrongly arrested and convicted in our most famous satanic panic/recovered memory trial are guilty (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Ellis_(childcare_worker)). Sadly, it seems that some of those children who were wrongly convinced by well-meaning adults that they were abused have had their lives negatively impacted simply through that belief.
I had an elderly lecturer in geology way back who gave us a lecture proposing that over time Earth had expanded (somehow) and used as proof that the current land masses fitted together pretty well on a smaller globe. Other lecturers looked uncomfortable and shut the conversation down when asked why he was being permitted to present that shit.
Ah yes, the good Doctor runs a specialist ‘top surgery’ clinic. he thinks it’s important to affirm those pesky breasts away. https://londontopsurgery.com/gender_specialists/dr-aidan-kelly/
It’s not so easy to shut people up when they are elderly and have established tenured positions. When I studied chemistry at Oxford in the 1960s students at Keble (not my college) had tutorials with an elderly man who didn’t believe in electrons. There were no electrons when he learned his chemistry, so why should we have them now? I don’t think the College tried to silence him; they discreetly arranged for the students to have tutorials in a different college (as far I can remember, but that was a long time ago, when the world was young).
So, what you are saying is that you lot are reckless? I think we probably figured that out already, but thanks for the admission.