I’m reading Bernard Lane’s review of Hannah Barnes’s Time to Think at Quillette, and this bit jumped out at me:

In a 2015 parliamentary submission, Carmichael and her Tavistock colleague Bernadette Wren, both clinical psychologists, reported:

We offer assessment and treatment not just to those young people who are identifiably resilient and for whom there is an evidence base for a likely ‘successful’ outcome. We have carefully extended our programme to offer physical intervention [such as blockers] to those who have a range of psychosocial and psychiatric difficulties, including young people with autism and psychiatric difficulties, and young people who are looked after [in care].

Their stated rationale for this approach was that “[we] have felt that these young people have a right to be considered for these potentially life-enhancing treatments.” The clinic’s leaders were admitting that they were providing physical interventions for, in Barnes’s words, “those to whom the evidence base does not apply.” And their basis for doing so was apparently the psychologists’ own feelings.

What’s striking about it, to me, is the not spelled out but nevertheless clear fact that for some reason Carmichael and Wren framed this and perhaps understood it as a matter of A Good Thing being withheld from these young people, when the “Good” part was very very very much in question. They framed it as a matter of these young people having a right to the “treatment” without saying anything about the young people’s right to go through a normal puberty or the young people’s right not to be experimented on or the young people’s right to be protected against faddish but drastic interventions.

I mean we know that’s what they thought, of course, but it’s interesting how blithely they frame it that way. Interesting and blood-curdling. It’s like saying “we have felt that these young people have a right to be anorexic.” An illness isn’t really a “right” as commonly understood.

I suppose we can be grateful they said “potentially life-enhancing” as opposed to just “life-enhancing,” but why didn’t they think about the “not life-enhancing but life-damaging” potential? Why were they so much more confident about the enhancement than they were about the damage?

Why didn’t these young people’s “right” to be not tampered with weigh at least as heavily as their “right” to be tampered with? It’s as if transing were a kind of heaven on a distant mountaintop that everyone gazes it with longing, and the GIDS people know how to get everyone there.