Eminent doctor yes, Stonewall no
Psychiatrists fear that transgender children are being “coached” into giving rehearsed answers when trying to access puberty blockers, the Court of Appeal has heard.
Dr David Bell, a former governor at a gender identity NHS trust, expressed concern that children may be pressured by parents, friends or websites when trying to address feelings of gender dysphoria.
How could children not be at least influenced by friends or websites or both when trying to address feelings of gender dysphoria in this climate? When the whole subject is so saturated with bullying and righteous fury and social pressure that would get juice out of a brick?
Dr Bell, who was a psychiatrist at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust from 1996 until earlier this month, was granted permission on Friday by two senior judges to intervene in a landmark case examining whether transgender children can legally take puberty blockers.
He feels that he can speak more freely now because he’s retired from the Trust.
In legal papers lodged before the Court, Dr Bell is described as a “high profile whistleblower” after he published a report in August 2018 which “investigated serious concerns” raised by ten clinicians working at the Tavistock.
The report found that the Tavistock’s gender identity clinic, GIDS, “is not fit for purpose” and some young patients “will live on with the damaging consequences.”
After the report he felt that the Trust victimized him, which is why he didn’t want to participate in the Keira Bell case. But he retired earlier this month, so…
He was afraid to talk, so maybe others there are afraid too.
Maybe all of them are. Maybe none of them believe the dogma but they’re all afraid of each other.
How did that happen? How did what should be a medical/psychiatric issue become so political and so coercive?
“There is evidence that staff members may be frightened of coming forwards,” the documents continued. “Dr Bell, a highly eminent psychiatrist who until recently occupied a senior position with the Appellant, is now free from his employment and able to describe the concerns, which he investigated in some detail.”
Lady Justice King and Lord Justice Dingemans granted his application to intervene in the appeal, which will be heard over two days in April, while other groups, including the LGBT charity Stonewall, had their application denied.
Good. That’s part of the answer to my question right there – Stonewall. Stonewall made what should be a medical/psychiatric issue so political and so coercive, along with Pink News and Twitter and a thousand blogs.
Well, according to one comment to an unintentionally ironically-titled post on the blog of one of the FTB mob (whose profile pic you posted here once, and I’ll never unsee that) that is just insulting the intelligence of children, because if a 5-year-old can tell an optician which lens makes them see clearer, then a 5-year-old is quite capable of expressing their thoughts on their gender. Also, if we allow children to wear corrective lenses then there’s no reason not to allow them puberty blockers and all the rest.
Seriously ; no laughing at the back!
Because understanding and communicating complex gender issues is no harder for a child than telling whether lens #1 or lens #2 makes a picture the least blurry. What absolute horseshit!
In that post, the blogger calls the LGB Alliance a ‘neonazi(sic) group from the British extreme right wing before claiming that those who oppose the unrestricted use of blockers in children do so because they are
This is the level of stupidity, dishonesty and invented ‘facts’ that we are up against, and personally I find it impossible to accept that the people who spout it genuinely believe what they say. They know it’s all wrong, but they are prepared to say whatever it takes to get their own way no matter how many kids are irreparably damaged in the process.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/intransitive/2021/01/25/try-and-try-again-repeating-the-lies-in-hope-that-one-sticks/ (and if that title isn’t projection I’m a monkey called Maureen Monkeynuts).
@AoS
The most stunning stupidity in your link is the meme that shows two women talking and one says it’s ridiculous to let 12 year olds decide their future [by getting blockers] and the counter “argument” is that “Well they make the decision to kill themselves”. FFS that should make it blazingly obvious that 12-13 year olds are REALLY BAD at making life altering decisions, not that they should get what they want, like getting puberty blockers.
Heck….last week I, a well into middle aged adult, went through a lengthy exam at the optometrist. And I am today wondering what went wrong because these new glasses are WEIRD.
But my feeling I am really a dragon…that is completely nailed down!
Do you know what else causes permanent changes to the human body? Falling down the stairs because your parents didn’t get you eyeglasses because they read a really stupid blogger; they knew a 5 year old can’t decide about puberty blockers (before they know a flying fuck about what puberty is), so they realized they couldn’t make decisions about eyeglasses, either. Yeah. Fortunately, most parents aren’t that stupid.
My mother took me to the eye doctor to get glasses when I was just a child of nine. The glasses worked fine, though not every pair I get does. She would not let me get my ears pierced until I was 15, because that was something that once done, it was done. If the glasses were wrong, she could take them back to the doctor and say “Hey! You messed up my kid’s eyesight! Fix it immediately!” (And that is probably how my mother would have said it; she didn’t mince words, and was very difficult to get along with.)
So when the kid reaches the age of puberty, and every kid around him/her is going through puberty, maturing in uncomfortable but perfectly normal ways, but the kid isn’t because when (s)he was five (s)he thought (s)he would really, really want to be the opposite gender forever and ever, and now all the kids are growing up, and (s)he is being left behind, and is an outcast because (s)he has a body that has not developed, is not developing, and will not develop normally. Now that’s a recipe for self-harm if I’ve ever heard one. I know, because I was the weird kid, the one that didn’t fit in, and I did engage in self-harm; fortunately, the attempts I made that were potentially lethal were discovered and someone took my agency away by having my stomach pumped. I had made a decision (as an adult) that was not good for me, and I was placed in care against my will, and boy, oh boy, am I glad these days that I was.
Yeah. I was five once. I had a five-year-old son once. I have known a lot of five-year-olds. Most of them know if they can see the stairs without falling down, but not one of them has had a clue what going through puberty really means. Most of them have not yet heard the word.
#1
……………………christ! And there I was, thinking Abbeycadabra was FTB’s unopposed king of awful reasoning employed in deliberate bad faith. Turns out it’s a tie.
Anyway, the thing that grabbed me was the claim of LGB Alliance being a neonazi organisation(!), so I thought I’d check it out. The link is to a Pink News article, “Neo-Nazis and homophobes are among those supporting the UK ‘anti-trans’ pressure group the LGB Alliance”*, and the keen eyed will spot that the claim made by the headline is not that the LGB Alliance is a neonazi organisation, as Intransitive puts it. Rather, it claims that some neonazis support the organisation. I was going to say that this suggests Intransitive never bothered reading past the headline, but even that assumes he read the headline.
Anyway, even if Intransitive had characterised the article correctly, even that weaker case being made by the article is extremely tenuous. I’ll lay out their whole reasoning:
Ah! This image, which I’m getting to soon, shows that neonazis support the LGB Alliance. An image on a site that is not LGB Alliance’s site, but anyway. BEHOLD:
https://s31242.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/spinster-pic.jpg
That’s it. That’s the proof that neonazis support LGBA. The argument that this constitutes such proof is as follows:
That really is it. Someone posted a picture of a person wearing both an LGBA shirt and a skullmask, and did you know nazis were known to have skulls on some of their uniforms? Never mind that nazis did not wear skull masks, they had skulls on their uniforms and this picture has a skull on it close enough shutup.
The rest of the article is all about various guilts-by-association, but never adds anything further as evidence that neonazis support LGBA beyond that picture. The ENTIRE CASE is that picture and nazis wore skulls on their uniforms. I guess that means every single thing with iconography that includes a skull is now also a nazi. Oops!
*
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/04/03/lgb-alliance-neo-nazi-homophobia-spinster-death-head-charity-commission/I am privileged to have known a highly intelligent and successful man since he was an obviously autistic and non-verbal four-year-old. He had a lazy eye as a baby, so had to see an optician from a very early age. No-one can convince me that a baby understands, let alone can answer, questions about their eyesight. My youngest sister (much younger than me) had the same problems, so I am familiar with spectacles and toddlers. Anyway, having seen the same optician since he was a baby, this remarkable lad memorised which buttons he was supposed to press, in which order, and repeated the actions at every visit. At home and, later, at school, he simply refused to wear his glasses; or, if his parents insisted, he would push them to the end of his nose and peer over them.
When he was about eight his father, in frustration, took him (and his records) to a completely different optician, who had a totally different way of doing things. Foiled by not being able to keep to his routine, the lad had to answer the questions honestly. His prescription had, not surprisingly, been way off for years.
Children simply do not know what is good for them; that is why they have to be taken care of – and not exploited by – adults.
A lot of five-year-olds insist they want to marry Mommy or Daddy.
Some 12-year-olds think it’s awesome that the 20-year-old youth pastor wants to date them, because it just proves how mature they are, and other 12-year-olds are just icky, and age is just a number anyway….
I’m getting the impression that most tattoo parlors are more conscientious about not letting children make permanent body-altering decisions than the “professionals” at gender clinics.
@AoS #1
I remember that comment. Of course, if a child has bad vision, we usually have some evidence.
Reminds me of the anecdote from the days of Stalin, wherein Party members gave one of his speeches a thunderous ovation that kept going on and on because nobody wanted to be caught as the first one to stop clapping.
That high contrast is pretty much useless for proving anything. High contrast graphics like that are great for mashing all sorts of things together because the subtle differences in tone, colour, cotrast etc., that can give away a bad cut and paste job in a “normal” image are completely obliterated in the conversion to hi-con black and white. For example, the mask and/or t-shirt logo could be from entirely different source images. Even the gun could be added or changed, but that would be harder to do. I’m not saying that this is what was done to produce this image, but it could very easily be the case. Without the original, continuous tone source image from which this high contrast derivation was created, it’s proof of nothing.
That LGB Alliance logo could have come from a totally different picture.
What struck me about that cartoon was that it read less like a serious argument for the decision-making abilities of children and more like a suggestion to the children themselves that suicide threats are a legitimate form of argument if they encounter resistance from the adults.
@AoS #11
Either way you look at it, it’s appalling.
I agree entirely. The entire desperate attempt to allow children pretty much unfettered access to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and the like is appalling, the methods they use and the arguments they deploy are appalling, the coaching (grooming? I think so) of the children in how to act and what to say is appalling, the complete lack of concern for the long-term health of the children is appalling, their disregard of facts is appalling.
It is just appalling story after appalling story, and yet nobody seems to want to listen to those of us who point out how appalling it all is, siding instead with the appalling TRAs to tell us what awful bigots we are.
We don’t carry baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire. And we don’t make coercion art out of them, either.
“Keep away from children”
How rude to suggest that children can’t make their own decisions about putting plastic bags over their heads.
One of my parlor games is to make people guess how old I was when I got my first pair of glasses. Answer: 10 months old. I’m pretty sure I didn’t give any answers to the examiner who fitted the glasses.
I do remember giving answers in eye exams when I was 5 or 7, or so, and I tell you what, it’s really hard to tell whether #5 is better than #4, or better than #6. I gave answers, but I’m not sure (and I wasn’t sure then) that I had got it actually correct and accurately. The glasses were good enough for me to be able to use them successfully, and believe me, I needed them. I couldn’t read without them, for example.
To this day, I can’t really wake up until I put my glasses on. Can’t function without them. First thing I do in the morning: put on my glasses. Last thing at night, when I’m going to sleep: take off my glasses.
Maddog,
My glasses are relatively recent and sudden being due to having my own lenses replaced with artificial ones. Like you, glasses on first thing, glasses off last. I can’t be doing with these namby-pamby part-timers.
My problem with the optician is that I’m always trying to second guess her. I can never tell whether A or B is clearer but I think she might be trying to trick me by putting up the previous slide or the one before… so I wonder whether I should say “clearer” because that’s what I said then.
I know I’m only harming myself, but since I can’t tell the bloody difference anyway I can only either answer at random or try to ‘trick’ the optician and thereby feel superior. Unable to see, but superior.