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The Guardian sees fit to publish this brainless glurge from a Trans ActivIst:
Based on the coverage in the UK’s rightwing media, where equality for trans people is most loudly and regularly opposed, you might have been convinced that Hilary Cass agrees with them and them alone…
There’s brainless and then there’s lying. Nobody opposes “equality for trans people.” That’s a ridiculous claim. Trans ideology has nothing to do with equality.
Cass criticises the lack of broader mental health care provision, including treatment for eating disorders. The community agrees, as would anyone who knows the first thing about NHS mental health provision. Cass cites the lack of autism awareness and assessment. Again, the community – well aware and unafraid of our propensity for neurodivergence – agrees. Cass calls for more and more local Gids service provision. Unsurprisingly, the trans community agrees.
So there’s an entity called “the community” and it has but one opinion on everything and Freddy McConnell knows what that opinion is in every instance?
Nonsense. What he means is: “here are the things trans people are supposed to think, and I’m claiming that they all do think exactly those things.” But he can’t know what they all think.
This one mistake might help explain all the mistakes. If you haven’t learned to pay attention to that kind of dopy generalization then trans dogma may seem entirely sensible and reasonable to you.
In reality, the problem has never been disagreement about how to care for trans children and young people. Rather, individuals genuinely motivated to create such services have been effectively sidelined by an overwhelmingly more powerful coalition of politicians, journalists and, indeed, healthcare workers who are motivated by an anti-trans ideology – a need to assert and somehow “prove”, to exclusion of all other possibilities, that trans people like me do not, in fact, exist.
There again – just a crude, dumb, basic mistake. No, nobody is saying that people who call themselves trans “do not exist.” The issue is the ideology they apply to themselves.
Take Dr David Bell, the psychiatrist behind a critical report of the Tavistock centre, and who has welcomed the Cass review. Bell is often presented as a moderate critic of Gids and yet has argued that trans children do not exist in nature but have been invented…
Same mistake all over again.
Giving Cass the benefit of the doubt, perhaps simply stating that trans children and adults exist seemed too basic – but in the clinical and cultural context we’re operating in, it remains vital.
And yet again. Description is not existence; existence is not description.
So why does the Guardian publish a think piece based on such a fatuous misunderstanding or misrepresentation?
Existence is not a predicate.
Bullshit. If you can’t define it, how do you treat it? In reality, the problem has been in immediately deciding children with any degree of dysphoria are “trans,” desistance and detransitioners be damned. How do you decide who qualifies as “trans”? What’s the test? What are the criteria? Desistance and detransition are huge red flags showing that somebody has got it wrong. They should be a valuable source of refinement and calibration of “trans” diagnoses, not shameful failures to be swept aside and demonized. If someone “wasn’t really trans to start with,” how do you decide who is?
Quite apart from the determination of the correct target group of patients, the “treatment” itself is flawed and problematic. Puberty blockers are not a “pause button” that allows children or youth “make up their minds.” Given the evidence of stunted cognitive development, puberty blockers literally prevent their minds from being made. There is no “wrong” puberty, just the one and only one your body has been aiming for since conception. If you miss the train, or fail to hit the mark, there is no other puberty available to you. These children can never have a “choice” of which puberty they will have; it’s one per customer, take it or remain unfinished and malformed. Treating puberty as a preventable disease, or like a flavour of ice cream is not a very good idea. The body’s gonna do what the body’s gonna do. Interfering with that (without an actual disease or disorder being present) is not going to end well. Selling someone an impossible fantasy is not “care.” Better a difficult truth than an easy lie. So yes, there’s always been disagreement, because your idea of “care” is a ticket to life-long body horror.
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Note the implicit assumption: “trans” people have a “propensity for neurodivergence.” Not, “autistic children are overrepresented among these patients and we need to understand why.” Not, “maybe autistic children are more vulnerable to trans dogma.” Nope. The correlation was subsumed into the narrative as soon as it was pointed out. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.