The Tavistock have suspended new referrals
There’s a ruling in Bell v Tavistock:
Children under the age of 16 considering gender reassignment are unlikely to be mature enough to give informed consent to be prescribed puberty-blocking drugs, the high court has ruled.
Even in cases involving teenagers under 18 doctors may need to consult the courts for authorisation for medical intervention, three senior judges have ruled in an action brought against the Tavistock and Portman NHS trust, which runs the UK’s main gender identity development service for children.
An NHS spokesperson welcomed the “clarity” the decision had brought, adding: “The Tavistock have immediately suspended new referrals for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for the under 16s, which in future will only be permitted where a court specifically authorises it. Dr Hilary Cass is conducting a wider review on the future of gender identity services.”
The 19-page judgment in effect introduces guidelines for the way in which the London clinic handles young patients who experience gender dysphoria – the condition where they are distressed because of a “mismatch between their perceived identity and … their sex at birth”.
But is that in fact a “condition”? Or is it just a feeling, an idea, a desire, a longing, a persistent mood? Is it a medical “condition” or an existential one? Have the people in charge been a tiny bit hasty in agreeing that it is a medical “condition” that can be treated by opposite-sex hormones?
What does it even mean to talk about a mismatch between one’s “perceived identity” and…pretty much anything? What is “perceived identity”? What is a perceived identity that doesn’t match the facts about the person who claims to have it?
The whole idea is vague enough and questionable enough and recently imposed enough that it seems incredibly reckless to stuff children with cross-sex hormones to “fix” it.
In their decision, Dame Victoria Sharp, president of the Queen’s bench division, Lord Justice Lewis and Mrs Justice Lieven, said a child under the age of 16 may only consent to the use of medication intended to suppress puberty “where he or she is competent to understand the nature of the treatment”.
Such an understanding must include “the immediate and long-term consequences of the treatment, the limited evidence available as to its efficacy or purpose, the fact that the vast majority of patients proceed to the use of cross-sex hormones, and its potential life changing consequences for a child”.
Which is more than most adults seem to have, so how children could have it is anyone’s guess.
This is some welcome news. As Trump has discovered, the level of evidence and argument in court is different than what pushes the ideological and emotional buttons of the predisposed.
I don’t really have a problem with the wording here. Anorexia Nervosa is a condition where the patient is distressed because of a mismatch between their perceived weight and their real weight. What makes it clinical is the amount of distress — is it extreme and seriously interfering with an ability to function more or less normally? And the use of the word “perceived” with “perceived identity” (rather than just “identity”) and the reference to “sex at birth” (instead of “sex/gender assigned at birth”) looks like it allows ample room for skepticism.
I agree with Sastra; I do think it is a condition. I have body dysphoria myself, which in the past manifested in Anorexia nervosa. These days, it’s just plain old garden-variety depression. But I suspect it may be less a condition than a symptom of another underlying condition, in my case, severe depression and anxiety. Either way, there are ways to treat it that are going to be better than puberty-blocking hormones and sex reassignment surgery, especially in the very young. So yeah, not a problem with it being a condition; in fact, I think that makes more sense than the idea that it is a thing…an innate, inherent knowledge of self that no one else is competent to recognize. Not TWAW, but TWTTAW (Transwomen think they are women). Perception, delusion, or just plain not liking who you are.
Hmm, I wonder if those three seniior judges will be receiving a flurry of insults and demands to educate themselves from Maugham and Cox?
For certain ‘allies’ *cough PZ’s mob cough* this ruling will be further proof that Britain is a hotbed of TERFs and transphobia, and legally-sanctioned to boot.
See this comment #5 to a PZ post from yesterday, for example:
That comment, by the way, contains this unevidenced and either exaggerated or totally invented claim:
I do not believe that such a checklist exists that is in any way like the one that is claimed to be circilating so freely, and I know for a fact that nobody who lives outside of the commenter’s fevered imagination is talking of herding TIMs into ghettos to keep them contained until the concentration camps are ready, which I believe was the Nazi way, but facts do not matter to the TRAs. Now it’s been said it will be accepted as fact, repeated endlessly and added to the ways in which the trans are oppressed and persecuted worse than any people in history.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2020/11/30/richard-dawkins-loses-the-plot/
How is it that I can spell ‘circulating’ but my ‘smart’ phone can’t? Can these devices suffer from occasional dyslexia or is mine just amusing itself by making me look silly?
I concede that I do not exactly have my finger on the pulse of the non-white, lower-income communities of the UK, but somehow I find it hard to believe that they are hotbeds of trans wokeness.
Most of the trans advocates are (wait for it) upper class, rich, and white. (Lots of them male, too, even if they do wear dresses).
They linked themselves with LGB, and LGB let them do it, giving them instant credibility and oppression status merely by linking T with letters it doesn’t belong with. They have tried to link themselves with feminism, but those annoying second-wave feminists (who, remember are all old and white – not a person of color anywhere, of course) continue to resist saying they are women. Now they are linking their cause with racism in the hopes of adding still more instant, unearned credibility, and with the Holocaust because we all know the Holocaust was bad, so if it was bad, this must be badder…
So they fling unsupported accusations of racism and Naziism, and now anti-Semitism, without needing proof. They just say so, and expect the progressive world to do all the hard work for them, while they sit around calling women names on Twitter. I mean, seriously, even charges of transphobia are inaccurate for people who don’t give a damn if they’re trans, be trans, have the same rights as others, just play act in someone else’s space, because women need spaces free from male-bodied people, even if said male-bodied people say they are female-bodied.
Acolyte: the letters u and i are right next to each other on the keyboard. I hit the wrong key all the time when I type on the tiny phone keyboard. If that doesn’t happen to you more often than this, I am impressed.
I recognize that gender dysphoria describes a real variety of distress, but I don’t like the definition given very much:
I think that sometimes people suffering from gender dysphoria are encouraged to have a different “perceived identity,” when what they have isn’t so much an identity as an intense discomfort. It’s not that these boys are start off thinking they’re really women so much as that they hate being men, and transitude seems like the only alternative.
Harald, #7. Well, I do have rather large fingers, butterflies then again personal responsibility is so last century :-)
But then again, I swear I did NOT type ‘butterflies’ rather than ‘but’! Not even my fingers are that incompetent.
My phone is definitely laughing at me.
My phone has still not learned that I pretty much never use the word “ducking.” I know the “d” and “f” keys are right beside each other, but it’s really not a typo….
From Myers’ post yesterday:
“Complex multifactorial entity” is so much squid ink here, along with the rest. One doesn’t need a spreadsheet to define what a “woman” is, any more than we need a multifactorial process to tell day from night. If I turn on a light outside my house at night it doesn’t make it day, anymore than a male putting on a dress makes them female. Myers’ dissembling above doesn’t do anything to define what a woman is, it defines it away to make it whatever one wants it to be to suit themselves, aka self-ID. Which, by the way, is something that a scientist should know better than to do themselves.
I had been wondering at the assertion that the UK was inherently more “transphobic” than the United States considering that it’s only in the UK where cops would show up at your house after you call someone a man on Twitter. So the accusation is coming from PZ and his ilk?
@JA#12:
Equivocation. “What it means to be human” can either be a biological question or an exploration of the complex, multifaceted entity that is the “human.” When doing the latter there will be overlap with other species, particularly if they are the kind we turn into pets. Someone who insists on bringing their pot-bellied pig onto an airplane because it checks off a lot of the boxes and therefore qualifies as “human” would probably try to pushback against refusal by arguing that just looking at DNA and biology shows a sad, sad lack of appreciation for the complex, multifaceted entity that is the “human.”
@J.A. #12
I wonder if PZ Myers would say that “TERF” is a “complex multifactorial entity”?
PZ has grandchildren. He refers to them by their sex. How does he know he is not misgendering?
PZ experiments on spiders and separates them into male and female for breeding. How does he know all the females identify as females? Can he be sure there are no trans spiders?
For a bloke who taught me a lot about biology, he is sure turning into a caricature of a uni professor.
This may be a quiet turning point. Sex. At. Birth. with no hedging about imaginary ‘assigners.’