Planning to fast-track

NHS Scotland wants to do more of it, faster.

Scotland’s NHS is planning to fast-track irreversible surgeries for transgender patients, documents seen by The Telegraph reveal.

Quick, before someone stops us.

An NHS Scotland report, suggesting new transgender treatment rules, calls for “barriers” to gender reassignment surgery to be removed and proposes radical measures to make operations more widely available.

These include allowing GPs, rather than specialists, to send patients for procedures and that a “single opinion” is enough to refer for surgery in most cases.

Let’s err on the side of reckless haste, because why not?

The report goes on to call for an “affirming” model of non-surgical care to still be delivered to children, despite an expert review for NHS England, conducted by the esteemed paediatrician Hilary Cass, raising concerns about the approach.

I wonder if, ten or twenty years down the line, NHS Scotland will be calling for an “affirming” model of care for children who identify as tigers or eagles or pythons.

David Bell, the consultant psychiatrist and Tavistock Clinic whistleblower, said it was “very troubling indeed” to see the Scottish NHS treat WPATH as an “authority” on matters of trans health, something he said was a “complete fiction”.

He also claimed that contrary to the document, clinicians had a responsibility to fully examine a patient’s mental health and background before referring them for irreversible surgeries which they may later come to regret.

Irreversible and very drastic.

“It’s a very disturbing situation,” Dr Bell said. “The attention of ministers seems to be more captured by groups representing an ideological movement, than those that represent an objective scientific approach to these matters, such as NHS England and the Cass Review.

“It is never a doctor’s job to affirm or not affirm, it is a doctor’s job to understand. That means understanding the narrative of a patient’s life, their childhood, how they developed particularly in terms of sexuality and gender, and how they’ve come to be the person they are.

“We have an ethical duty towards young people and adults not to treat things at face value. That is something that is completely incompatible with a proper clinical approach.”

But treating things at face value is portrayed as absolutely mandatory, on pain of ostracism and abuse, by the very ideology that’s capturing the attention of ministers and speeding up this already speeding train.

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