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.

God this is brutal. The Telegraph on Biden:

“Anyway” is a word that is constantly being used by Mr Biden – seemingly when he senses he is starting to lose track of what he is saying.

The US president sometimes uses it as a filler, giving himself time to marshal his thoughts before returning to the subject. More disconcertingly, he often uses it to change subject abruptly or trail off altogether.

…

Mr Biden uses “look” in a similar manner to “anyway” – to throw himself a lifeline when he cannot remember how a sentence is meant to end.

The tactic, if not elegant, puts a stop to the long silences that marred his debate performance and stops him wandering up a rhetorical blind alley.

In a recent NBC News interview, he was asked about his “first reaction” to the assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania.

“My first reaction was, “My God. This is –” Mr Biden said, and promptly lost track of the sentence. “Look, there’s so much violence now and the way we talk about it.”

He went on to use the word repeatedly in the interview while being pressed about his comments on putting Trump in a “bullseye”.

“I was talking about focus on – look,” he said, blinking rapidly and holding out his hands as if trying to physically grasp his answer. “The truth of the matter was what I guess I was talking about at the time was there was very little focus on Trump’s agenda.”

…

But recently his speech has become less distinct, as he slurs his words and mumbles to the point where it is impossible to work out what he is saying.

In his NBC News interview, this happened when he was asked whether he would drop out of the race if he repeated his disastrous debate performance.

“What happened…” Mr Biden said before tailing off. NBC’s transcribers gave up at that point, marking the rest of the sentence “INAUDIBLE”.

…

At the Nato press conference, he suddenly became animated by the subject of school shootings, which had not even been mentioned by his questioner.

“More children are killed by a bullet than any other cause of death,” he shouted in an apparent fury, making stabbing motions with one hand while the other clenched his lectern.

His voice raised and brows tightly knitted together, he continued: “The United States of America. What the hell are we doing?” A few seconds later, he clenched his fist and waved it in the air.

…

Abrupt changes in volume have become a hallmark of Mr Biden’s speeches.

While he is prone to suddenly start shouting, at other times he will break into an exaggerated stage whisper without warning.

The habit is more common in press conferences than set-piece speeches, where the president seems to be suggesting to reporters that – even though up on stage with a microphone – he is confiding in them.

The effect can be slightly eerie, however. Unfriendly news outlets have dubbed it the “creepy whisper”.

He stares a lot.

In his first presidential debate with Trump in 2020, Mr Biden barely looked at his opponent and treated him as an irritating side-show.

While the Republican hectored, heckled and interrupted him, the Democrat stuck to his scripted remarks, addressing them to the studio audience or speaking directly to the camera.

The positions were reversed in their latest showdown in June. Mr Biden spent much of the night in profile as he turned over to stare at Trump, his eyes wide and his mouth hanging open in a permanent expression of befuddlement.

…

Recently, the Democrat has developed a habit of appearing to stare off blankly into space at public events.

At a “Juneteenth” concert in the grounds of the White House, Mr Biden appeared frozen, grinning vaguely while his arms stuck rigidly at his side. The impression was likely not helped by his spinal arthritis.

He appeared wide-eyed in a recent NBC News interview, as he defended himself from accusations of cognitive decline.

“My mental acuity’s been pretty damn good,” he insisted, sliding out of his chair towards interviewer Lester Holt, while staring at him unblinkingly. “I’ve gotten more done than any president has in a long, long time.”

And then there’s blinking.

A key sign that Mr Biden is struggling to recall something is that he will blink rapidly when he is trying to respond.

He spent much of the presidential debate struggling to dredge up various facts and figures, blinking constantly as he cast his mind back to practice sessions at Camp David.

…

During his NBC News interview, he blinked rapidly at the start of virtually every question as he tried to marshal his thoughts.

“The truth of the matter was what I guess I was talking about at the time was there’s very little focus on Trump’s agenda,” he said at one point, blinking 17 times in the space of a few seconds.

Brutal.

Hm. Should we get in a huff because the Royal Parks admit that there are some aspects of the Albert Memorial that are a tad shall we say embarrassing?

I would say nah. The empire stuff is embarrassing. Also – and the Telegraph leaves this bit out – Al’s Mem has always been seen by many as a tad vulgar, to say the least. It’s also always been seen by many as an ugly blot on a beautiful park. It’s never been universally embraced as just a wonderful gift to the nation. Let’s not forget: Q. Victoria was considered very self-indulgent and derelict for going into such complete seclusion after Albert died. She had a job to do and she refused to do it; that was not universally admired.

The 176ft Albert Memorial opposite the Royal Albert Hall in Kensington Gardens, west London, was built to honour Queen Victoria’s late husband in 1872, when the British Empire stretched across the globe. 

It includes a golden sculpture of the Prince Consort himself, along with four groups of large statues representing the people and animals of four continents.

Asia is depicted as a woman on an elephant, America as a native American [man], and Africa as a woman riding a camel. The African sculpture also includes a white European woman reading a book to a black African tribesman.

Funny that the Telegraph thinks it needs to specify “woman” but “man” is automatic. Default-male much?

The Royal Parks website now says that the Albert Memorial’s “representation of certain continents draws on racial stereotypes that are now considered offensive”.

It tells how Victorian guidebooks about the memorial “describe how this ‘uncivilised’ man hunches over his bow. This pose was intended to represent him ‘rising up from barbarism’, thanks to his Western teacher. At his feet lie broken chains, which allude to Britain’s role in the abolition of slavery”.

Is it so terrible to include some commentary of that kind? I don’t think so.

Oh man. There isn’t enough cringe in the world to deal with this one. Jolyon Maugham claims to be in receipt of a drooling mash note from someone Very Important, but when you go to read the mash note you find that it’s obviously written by Joly himself. Nobody else on the planet could or would possibly have written it. I’m genuinely surprised he didn’t realize how obvious that is. It’s like “I agree with PollyO” all over again.

Excuse me excuse me. People don’t talk like that.

Cringe cringe CRINGE.

We’re waiting for the wings to fall off before we decide to make an emergency landing.

Democrats were caught in an apparent stalemate on Saturday as a dug-in Joe Biden continued to endure high-profile calls to end his re-election campaign after a week of astonishing party moves to unseat the president in favor of a candidate many hope will be more likely to beat Donald Trump.

In the weeks since his disastrous debate performance against Trump, the 81-year-old Biden has attempted to fight off calls for him to step down from the top of the ticket amid concerns that his age and mental acuity are no longer up to the job.

Well you can see his point. There’s no need for mental acuity in the job he’s going for.

Frustration within the Democratic party establishment at what they see as Biden’s intransigence comes as the outlet also reported on Saturday that the president in private is complaining that former aides to presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton would be lecturing him on election strategy after Democratic 1994 and 2010 midterm election losses that he had avoided in 2022.

There’s that mental acuity now. The issue isn’t so much election strategy as it is the wings have fallen off and the ground is getting closer by the second.

According to the Washington Post on Saturday, the tight-knit Biden family has not called an emergency meeting to discuss the spiraling crisis, but is instead exchanging usual daily phone calls and text messages.

Rising anger within the family, which has enjoyed nearly half a century of Joe Biden’s power in Delaware, both as a senator, vice-president and president, is fueled by the belief that his dismal debate performance could still be overcome by a determined fight back and a display of loyalty. “It’s like they don’t know he’s Irish,” the Post quoted a person close to the family.

Oh fuck off with that. We don’t care that he’s Irish. We care about those wings that are gone.

Originally a comment by Alan Peakall on Progress has a plan.

Perhaps better history teaching covering the real ugly complexity of the moral struggles of the past should be part of the solution. A good example to start with would the the checkered relationship between the anti-slavery Republican Party of Lincoln and the nativist penumbra adjacent to it which gave rise to a vociferously anti immigrant state government in Massachussets with a sterling record of socially reformist measures. Instead popular culture gives us Gangs of New York.

Around the beginning of the current century the aphorism that Marxism filled a God-shaped hole was succeeded by the wisecrack that European integration filled a Marx-shaped hole. I think that Francis Spufford captured the idea more elegantly at the conclusion of Red Plenty in the rhetorical question “Can it be otherwise?”. It’s because we are human that it can’t be otherwise and equally because we are human that we can’t accept that it can’t be otherwise.

Jolyon must be feeling So Important.

Review dismisses claims youth suicides rose after NHS curbed puberty blockers

A government-ordered review has dismissed claims that suicide rates in young people with gender dysphoria have risen sharply since the NHS restricted access to puberty-blocking drugs.

A report by the government’s adviser on suicide prevention also found that the claims – made by the campaign group the Good Law Project – were not supported by data and could prompt children under the age of 18 to take their own life.

See there? A shoutout to Jolyon and his project – a shoutout saying he was wrong at best and lying at worst, but hey, it’s still a shoutout. He does love attention, that man.

The health secretary, Wes Streeting, last week asked Prof Louis Appleby, a leading authority on mental health at Manchester University, to look at suicide rates among current and former patients of the now-discontinued gender identity development service (Gids) at the Tavistock and Portman NHS trust.

He looked, and reported he had found no evidence to back up the claims.

“The data do not support the claim that there has been a large rise in suicide by young patients attending the gender services at the Tavistock since the High Court ruling in 2020 or after any other recent date,” his analysis concluded. It covered the care received by and outcomes seen among patients of the London-based specialist mental heath trust.

The Good Law Project’s executive director, Jo Maugham, said in response: “I was not contacted in advance of the statement being released and will obviously need time to respond. I do have difficulties with the figures and analysis and will respond in due course.”

Diddums wasn’t contacted. Diddums is caught saying untrue things about suicide among teenagers and Diddums is annoyed that he wasn’t contacted.

As well as finding no evidence to support the suicide claims, Appleby also highlighted “the way that this issue has been discussed on social media has been insensitive, distressing and dangerous, and goes against [Samaritans] guidance on safe reporting of suicide”.

“The claims that have been placed in the public domain do not meet basic standards for statistical evidence,” he added.

He flagged up the possibility of “already-distressed adolescents hearing the message that ‘people like you, facing similar problems, are killing themselves’, leading to imitative suicide or self-harm”.

Which many people have been pointing out to Maugham all along, and which he has determinedly ignored.

Radio 4 has a thing on…LGBTQ Life in Weimar Germany

There was no such thing. For some reason, Weimar Germany was not 2024 London, so it didn’t have people throwing paint around at the Tate Gallery and it didn’t have LGBTQ life. It was a different place and it was a century ago. Different things are different.

Under the counter hormones for the kids:

The former CEO of trans youth charity Mermaids is launching a private clinic that will “exploit a legal loophole” to bypass the ban on puberty blockers, [i news] can reveal.

Susie Green, who left the controversial charity in 2022, will open Anne Health this weekend to provide a range of medical, pharmaceutical, and psychological support services – including puberty blockers, hormone treatments, and counselling – to transgender people of all ages.

But puberty blockers are not “medical services” for transgender people.

But the loopholes that Ms Green’s clinic will use to provide medication to young people raise questions about the effectiveness, scope, and robustness of the government’s ban. i understands that DHSC officials are willing to explore the possibility of criminal sanctions against anyone involved in the supply of puberty blockers.

Maybe science can come up with just plain adulthood blockers, so that people can remain 11 years old for 60 or 70 extra years. No doubt they will have some harsh side effects but it will be worth it.

The clinic will defer to treatment protocols established by WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, she said.

WPATH is not without controversy. It is a membership-funded advisory body that provides guidance on transgender health to a wide range of organisations, but has come under fire recently for using low quality sources. Ms Green co-authored the most recent version of its guidelines.

Cool, so she’s promising to defer to her own guidelines. How very responsible of her.

Oh hey, it turns out Mridul Wadhwa is on involuntary leave. At long last. Now they need to make it permanent.

Mridul Wadhwa, a man who identifies as a woman, was sent home in May by the board of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC) after being identified as the “invisible hand” behind a “heresy hunt” designed to force out Roz Adams, a counsellor with gender-critical views.

The outcry over Wadhwa’s behaviour intensified following the sentencing this week of Cameron Downing, a coercive and manipulative male sex offender, who identified as non-binary and claimed to have received extensive support from ERCC.

It’s almost as if trans ideology/activism attracts poisonous people, isn’t it.

Downing, 24, was sentenced to six years in prison after he was convicted of ten charges including assault, sexual assault and domestic abuse. He falsely accused a male partner of rape and then blackmailed him into carrying out sexual acts. He was also convicted of sexual assault against three women and another man.

Before his arrest, Downing said ERCC was the reason he was “able to keep going” and he “cannot put into words how much they’ve helped me”.

ERCC helped him do all that? So it’s not so much a rape crisis centre as a rape encouragement centre?

It has now emerged that Wadhwa was suspended when a tribunal concluded nine weeks ago. “Mridul is not on leave voluntarily; she has been put on leave,” a source said.

Wadhwa was found to have orchestrated a campaign against Adams after the counsellor had expressed sympathy with a victim’s wish to have only a female counsellor.

He’s a truly poisonous man. Running a rape crisis centre. Now will they believe this ideology isn’t the latest best most compassionate thing?

My god, I had no idea! Jolyon Maugham is facing down Trump AND Putin AND Murdoch AND the billionaires AND the Rothermeres. That is one hell of a lot of heroic facing down. I wonder, has it made any difference yet?

Well well well. Welcome aboard The Staggers.

24 Hour Fitness has a corporate policy on locker rooms. You can guess what it is without breaking a sweat.

RESTROOM AND LOCKER ROOM ACCESSIBILITY-TRANSGENDER EQUAL OPPORTUNITY POLICY

As set forth in 24 Hour’s Equal Opportunity Policy, all members shall have full and equal access to the club facility. Consistent with this Policy, all members shall have access to the restroom and locker room facilities that correspond to the member’s gender identity, regardless of the member’s sex assigned at birth. For example, transgender women (who were born male but identify as female) are permitted to use the women’s facilities, and vice versa for transgender men. Each member should determine the most appropriate option for her/him/themself. Any member who has a need or desire for increased privacy, regardless of the reason, will be provided access to a single-person facility, when available. No member, however, shall be required to use such a facility.

That’s interesting because it’s a contradiction. Women can’t actually have full and equal access to the club facility given the fact that men are allowed to use the women’s locker room.

Illustration of how this is so:

That’s not equal access.

Top front page news – drag queens and the cost of living.

Women, of course, have no concerns about the pinch of rising costs. All women are rich as well as cis. How hateful and privileged they are.

The stupid it burns.

One of the biggest challenges, particularly in this country right now to trans people are feminists who feel that trans women are not women.

Other way around, sport. We don’t “feel” that, we know it, we realize it, we’re aware of it. The people doing the feeling instead of knowing here are the people who “feel” that men are women if they say so. In short we’re not the ones who have our facts wrong.

They believe that trans women are actually just men

No, again, that’s not what we “believe”; it’s just reality. You’re the one doing the counterfactual “believing” here.

The thing that gets me the most about that argument is that you should see you’re on the same side

No, again, we’re not the ones who need to fix what we’re seeing here. Also, we’re not on the same side. Men who claim to be us are not on our side. If someone claimed to be Jodi Picoult and demanded all her royalties, would Jodi Picoult be on the same side as pretend-Jodi Picoult?

The rest of the clip is about having body-failure in common. Nope.

Quack doctor vows to continue harming children.

The General Medical Council has revoked the licence to practise of a controversial British doctor whose offshore clinic treats transgender children.

Dr Helen Webberley, 55, will lose her licence in Britain from Friday but will remain on the GMC’s register, following the decision by the medical regulator.

She lost it because she failed to re-validate it.

Webberley runs GenderGP, an online company registered in Singapore, which facilitates access to puberty blockers and hormones for adults and children.

She promises to keep doing what she’s doing, license or no license. Mess up those kids no matter what!

She says she was offered the chance to take an exam in order to revalidate her licence, but declined because they “don’t have one for doctors working in transgender medicine”.

Ah. Could that be because there’s no such thing as “transgender medicine”? Because it’s quackery all the way down?

The Good Law Project shares a thinkpiece by someone who transed her child.

On 4 July, the safety and wellbeing of our child was hanging in the balance. No child should lie awake on election night fearing for their future and their right to exist, as our child did. She is simply living her truth, and no attempt to eradicate trans identity or remove her rights will change this.

That’s a good start. Yes, the election was going to determine whether her child had a right to exist or not. Genocide: yes or no; that was definitely on the ballot.

Our daughter has no recollection of living as male, as this has not reflected her lived reality for the last 10 years, since age four.

Ok stop right there. These lunatics transed their kid at age four???

I have a big advantage in this discussion because I myself was once four, so I know what it’s like.

Oh wait, so does every other adult on the planet. Most of them don’t trans their toddlers.

How did this kid know he “wasn’t a boy” but was actually “a girl in a boy’s body”?

He didn’t, because he wasn’t. He probably freaked out his parents by being more interested in girl characters in tv shows and books and by wanting to dress and look like them.

It is not a reality we, or she, would have chosen, but it is one we have come to accept and defend, because the alternative would have undoubtedly caused her harm.

Ah no, that’s where you go so wrong. It’s not “undoubtedly” at all. It’s very doubtedly indeed.

We have watched our daughter develop and thrive, through the acceptance and support of family and wider community. And, we have watched our child become increasingly anxious and fearful for her safety under Tory governance, with violence and discrimination towards trans people legitimised

Wait, what? Where is violence towards trans people legitimized? Please explain. But of course she doesn’t, she just says it and then rattles on as if it were self-evident.

The Good Law Project is not good.

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on Becoming aware.

There seems to be this assumption that “the kids” are like prophets. Whatever they do is a sign of where History is headed. It is, in short, glorious and by-definition-good “Progress”. Why they do anything doesn’t matter, only that they do it. Progress has a plan, and Progress moves in mysterious ways.

If it’s got a rainbow or pastel flag, any change in its direction is Progress, and Progress must be supported. Why a change occurs is almost irrelevant from the perspective of those devoted to Progress, because action that brings the utopia nearer is good by definition. Such action is itself Progress, and Progress must be supported. If something happens as a result of Progress, then that, too, is Progress, and Progress must be supported. Is Genderism illogical and irrational? Does it demand the unethical? Leap past your concerns and doubts. Leave them behind, for Progress doesn’t require justification. Everything else must wait, because Progress demands your support, and Progress must be supported.

Kierkegaard wrote of a “teleological suspension of the ethical” in Fear and Trembling to describe Abraham’s submission to God’s demand for the sacrifice of Isaac. God’s design, the telos that He impressed upon all of Creation, supersedes everything else. All ethical reasoning is suspended in submission to the divine will. Suspending ethical reasoning in this way is illogical and irrational, however, because the suspension itself can be analyzed in ethical terms. Getting past this metaphorical gap requires a mental leap away from logic and rationality. (One could even argue that such a gap is itself evidence of the divine.)

Now, I happen to think Kierkegaard was actually a literary troll doing performance art to mock the obscurantist mysticism of Continental philosophy, but this explicitly nonsensical idea of a teleological suspension of the ethical does seem like a decent account of how otherwise moral people can support monstrosity. They willingly suspend their normal ethical processing, and everything represented by the divine, or the ideology, or the party, or whatever becomes a self-justified good. Taken as a description of how people do behave rather than of how they should, it’s somewhat compelling. And horrifying.

Interesting. It seems that anti-abortion states have crap healthcare for pregnant women. Keep your damn baby but you’re on your own, bitch.

The chances that a woman can see a doctor while pregnant — or during a time when she might become pregnant — have fallen significantly since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, according to a new report released Thursday.

The findings, from The Commonwealth Fund, a nonpartisan health care research foundation, show that women living in states with a history of health disparities — often in the Southeast — are affected the most. They are not only less likely to be able to afford a doctor’s appointment; they’re less likely to be able to find an OB/GYN in their area.

That “often in the Southeast” is interesting. The Southeast=the former slave states. The South (as it’s more usually called) is notoriously impoverished, illiberal, and reactionary. It’s almost as if there’s a connection.

The report looked at more than a dozen measures of women’s health care, including maternal mortality, preterm birth and postpartum depression, in all 50 states in 2022, the year of the Dobbs ruling.

That single action “significantly altered both access to reproductive health care services and how providers are able to treat pregnancy complications in the 21 states that ban or restrict abortion access,” the authors wrote.

States with the most restrictive abortion policies, including Mississippi, Oklahoma, Texas and West Virginia, scored lowest in the new report. States that protected abortion care, including Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Jersey, ranked highest.

Women must be forced to keep pregnancies they don’t want, but as for helping them have healthy pregnancies, well shoot, that would be socialism.

Ok yes sure that makes a whole lot of sense.

Republicans welcomed JD Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate on the same night devoted to blasting President Joe Biden’s leadership on the world stage.

Vance, the 39-year-old Ohio senator, offered his life story as a son of Appalachia to reaffirm Trump’s connections to Americans who feel alienated socially, economically and politically.

Oh those connections, right. Trump’s connections to Murkans who feel economically alienated – Trump with his palace in Miami and his palace overlooking Central Park and his satellite palaces in New Jersey and Scotland. I can totally see the connection, can’t we all?

Socially, well, sure, that’s a different story. Trump is “socially alienated” in the sense that he alienates people who prefer decent people to sadistic monsters, thoughtful people to bellowing idiots, generous people to greedy corrupt thieving cheats.

Politically is basically just socially all over again. Trump isn’t really political except in the sense that he wants to do whatever will piss off people who aim at fairness.