A transient phase
The Times reports on the NHS’s shift on gender magic:
Most children identifying as transgender are simply going through a “transient phase”, new NHS guidance states. Doctors caring for youngsters distressed about their gender have been told that it is not a “neutral act” to help them transition socially by using their preferred new names or pronouns.
The draft guidelines say doctors should “carefully explore” all underlying health problems, including mental ill health, amid concerns that the NHS is rushing children on to irreversible puberty-blocker medication. The new “watchful approach” adopted by the NHS is a significant change of course from the “affirmative” approach advocated by campaign groups, including Mermaids.
This is in the wake of the damning Cass report.
NHS England’s draft guidance states that there is “scarce and inconclusive evidence to support clinical decision-making” for children with gender dysphoria. It stresses that “in most cases gender incongruence does not persist into adolescence” among younger children. “The clinical approach has to be mindful of the risks of an inappropriate gender transition and the difficulties that the child may experience in returning to the original gender role upon entering puberty if the gender incongruence does not persist into adolescence,” it reads.
If the child has “transitioned” and the gender incongruence does not persist, that child is pretty much guaranteed to experience “difficulties.”
The day before I visited the Space Needle and KEXP, after the shouty Nasty crowd at the SPL had dispersed, I was invited to a pizza party for detransitioners. I met several young adults who were desisters and detransitioners, and during a roundtable discussion they shared their experiences of being rushed into transition, convinced they were trans during their teens.
The rush to transition medically or block puberty seriously indicates a lack of trust that kids are trans so they are pushed. I think that many fall to the sunk cost fallacy once they near adulthood age and have spent so much of their teen lives and money on the process of transition.
Argh god the awfulness of that is hard to fathom.
The world is awash with people seeking to enrich themselves out of childhood dreams and fantasies. Not so fashionable are those concerned more to develop their own and others’ critical faculties. Where are our Aesops and brothers Grimm?
There’s an opening here for the Disney organisation. I’m surprised they have not taken it. I mean, the opportunities are there:
Et cetera, et cetera.
This is what I keep saying, and not in jest. Fantasy is good and healthy just as fiction is, BUT.
I’ve often wondered at the logical disjunction between a), the push for self ID, wherein men can just declare themselves to be women without surgery or anything, and b), the push to trans kids. My own answer has been that the AGP proponents of a) want to create, through b), a cadre of committed “footsoldiers” supporting trans “rights” who have sacrificed their flesh (or their maybe children’s flesh) for the cause. I don’t think that AGPs really care about “trans kids”; they’re just useful tools to boost numbers and present a face for the “movement” or “community” that is perhaps more conducive to generating uncritical sympathy than a bunch of creepy, fetishistic, straight, white men. “PROTECT TRANS KIDS!” is a more acceptable battle cry than “I WANNA FUCK LESBIANS!”, though there’s been enough of (what amounts to) the latter to make me suspect that they’re not really as concerned with optics as I might have imagined.
No one seems capable of considering that relentless ‘affirmation’ IS conversion therapy.
In the ‘recovered memory’ mania, they kept shouting ‘believe the children.’ But they were shown to bully and coerce children into producing the desired claims.