Specialists
When headlines manipulate the readers:
Gender identity specialists accuse psychology body of ‘contributing to fear’
What are gender identity specialists? What is gender identity? What kind of thing is gender identity? How are specialists in gender identity trained? What do they know? Why can’t they make it make sense?
Some of the most senior gender identity specialists in the UK have accused their professional body of “contributing to an atmosphere of fear” around young people receiving gender-related healthcare.
What is “gender-related healthcare”? In what sense is it health care? In what sense is it not experimentation on children and adolescents?
More than 40 clinical psychologists have signed an open letter to the Association of Clinical Psychologists UK in protest at the organisation’s recent position statement on the provision of services for gender-questioning children and young people.
What do they mean by “services”? Who is defining them as “services”? Is it a “service” to mutilate people’s genitals and/or breasts? What does “gender-questioning” mean? How is it different from “gender identity”? Why was the term changed without explanation?
They say they believe there was a failure to properly consult experts in the field or service users, resulting in a “misleading” statement that “perpetuates damaging discourses about the work and gender-diverse identities more broadly”.
What makes people “experts in the field”? What exactly is “the field”? What is “the work”? What does “gender-diverse identities” mean? Is it the same as “gender identities” and “gender-questioning”?
The co-organisers of the letter, Dr Laura Charlton, who worked at GIDS from 2014 to 2020 and is now clinical lead at the Leeds Gender Identity Service, and Dr Aidan Kelly, who worked at the service from 2016 to 2021 and is now principal clinical psychologist at the Nottingham Centre for Transgender Health, said that the letter was particularly significant because it was the first time that these practitioners, who share many decades’ worth of experience, had come together in public to express their concerns.
Yes but experience of what? Can we be sure it’s not experience of credulous affirmation of a new and highly questionable ideology?
“We acknowledge that there were some valid concerns about the GIDS service, not least the significant waiting times, but we take issue with how it is now being portrayed. This is the first time that so many specialists working within UK gender services have come together to speak out about their portrayal, often by people who do not share our specialist knowledge.”
But what is the “specialist knowledge”? Is it really knowledge? Is it more a collection of assumptions? Is it like specialist knowledge of infectious diseases or specialist knowledge of homeopathy?
So they have decades of experience? On something that prior to the past two decades was such a small portion of the population they weren’t significant? Is it a large enough sample size? Were enough of them children to determine the effect on children?
The questions just sort of go on forever, don’t they? Time for infinite regress.
The questions go on forever yet the Guardian reports on the subject as if there were no real questions. It’s pathetic.
I’ve been reading Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism lately, and it’s (unsurprisingly) easy to see this and the rest of the “social justice” phenomenon as proceeding by means of “thought reform”. There are so many parallels that to list them would be a book in itself.
Sometimes I think about the doctors who specialized in lobotomy back in day (which is actually not so far back at all). How did they keep doing it? At some point, didn’t they realize that they were literally cutting away people’s minds—robbing them of their ability to reason and express themselves, condemning them to a perpetual twilight state of defenseless dependency? (The cognitively mutilated people in question were, of course, disproportionately women.) Were these doctors so adept at self-deception that they honestly believed they were doing right by their patients? Or did they make the cold, calculated decision that they’d rather have filthy lucre than clean hands? Were some of them sadists who actively derived pleasure from evicting their victims from their own brains?
As ethically bankrupt as underage transition may be, it’s not as horrifying as lobotomy. Very few things are. But many gender critical thinkers have commented on the parallels, and I believe justifiably so. Personally, I have the same question about the pediatric gender clinicians that I do about the lobotomists: how do they sleep at night? Are they just riding the gravy train, or have they sincerely bought into their own con?
“We’re experts on the subject of ‘gender’ (which we can’t define). This undefined ‘gender’ is what gives one their ‘gender identity’ which is either innate and fixed (or fluid). ‘Gender’ should not be confused with ‘sex’ (which we sometimes say doesn’t exist — except as a social construct). Unlike uninformed ‘gender critical feminists’ (or ‘TERFs’) we do NOT believe that ‘sex’ determines ‘gender.’ (Whatever either of those terms mean.)
Nonetheless, we believe that ‘Transwomen are women’ and that ‘Transmen are men.’ (Please note: We can define neither of the terms ‘women’ or ‘men.’)
When we say ‘live as one’s gender’ that means that ‘transwomen’ wear dresses and wigs and fake breasts and affect a falsetto voice and that ‘transmen’ wear t-shirts and jeans and grow their new beards and work-out with weights.
It is our expert opinion (based on absolutely nothing) that says it is absolutely vital to allow teenagers ‘questioning their gender’ (again: ‘gender’ is a meaningless term) to surgically remove parts of their body they don’t like and to put them on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones (the latter permanently).
“We acknowledge that there were some valid concerns about the GIDS service, not least the significant waiting times, but we take issue with how it is now being portrayed.”
It infuriates me that they can take the several reports and court decisions and come away with it as being about “significant waiting times”. Yet that seems to be how the transactivists are framing the findings. I would venture to say that the “waiting times” issue is indeed “the least” of the problems, and might even be considered a benefit.
Since they’re claiming to be able turning boys into girls, and men into women (and vice versa), my vote would be that it most resembles the specialist “knowledge” of the equally mysterious and impossible feat of turning bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.
GOOD POINT.
I see that one of the signatories to this open letter is Dr Bernadette Wren. Dr Wren, who is now, I believe, retired, was formerly Head of Psychology at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust and Associate Director of the Gender Identity Development Service. Among her many academic publications is an article with the title Thinking postmodern and practising in the enlightenment: Managing uncertainty in the treatment of children and adolescents. Here is Dr Wren’s conclusion:
Time to break out the decoder ring again. Here’s what I get out of this:
We really don’t know what the fuck we’re talking about, but if we notice that we’re in danger of drifting towards concepts of “truth” and “fact”, we’ll move swiftly back to confusing obscurantism that cloaks our ignorance in a smokescreen of esoteric, multisyllabic verbiage. We might be making this shit up as we go along, but at least it will look like we’re doing something.
In the meantime, we’re going to screw around with drugs and “surgery” that might not even help you feel any better about yourself, but we’ll have made you and your family complicit in your own mutilation and permanent medico-psychological dependency. We’re making sure there’s plenty of blame to go ’round, and lots of others who aren’t us to share in it.
There is no end-point or goal in this process beyond the process itself. We don’t know what “transness” is, but we’ll leave no stone unturned in our search for whatever we end up deciding it might be, for the moment. Then it might mean something else, and we’ll chase that fleeting idea too. After all, it’s the journey that counts, and who better to travel with than those of us who’ve helped shape your entire self-image and world view. But if things go south, you’re as much to blame as we are.
And aren’t “reflexive” and “thoughtful” opposites? Are they being hastily deliberative, or are they cogitating immediately? Perhaps she was reaching for “reflective”, but thought it sounded to ordinary and inactive, and so grabbed for the next word in the “matrix of meaning.” One word’s as good as another when you’re making shit up, right?
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