Two irreconcilable outlooks
The Guardian reports there is conflict over the revamped NHS gender idenniny development service.
The opening of the hubs has been delayed by more than a year amid difficulties in recruiting staff, and tensions over how to train employees in caring for young people with gender dysphoria. Meanwhile, the waiting list of young people seeking help has grown to 5,766.
As delays to the openings continue, NHS England (NHSE) has started to divert thousands of 17-year-olds, and 16-year-olds who turn 17 before next March, towards the adult waiting list, where they are likely to receive a different, less exploratory form of treatment.
This development so concerned the mothers of two 17-year-olds that they launched a judicial review challenging the stark disparities between the child and adult services.
You can see why they’d worry. “Less exploratory” probably means more eager to offer drastic interventions because hey, once you’re 17 you’re totally immune to being deluded about being the sex your body isn’t.
To complicate matters further, an NHS consultation designed to gather views on how best to support children with gender dysphoria has identified two irreconcilable outlooks on the best approach: one group is cautious about the prescription of puberty blockers, while the second is suspicious of exploratory therapy, arguing that it could enter the realm of conversion practices.
And clearly it’s far more risky to avoid blockers and surgery than it is to embrace them, right?
Tensions have also emerged in the small team charged with developing teaching materials for staff at the new clinics. There are polarised views on how quickly patients with gender dysphoria should be assisted towards social and medical transition, and how much focus should be given to other issues present in their lives, such as trauma and homophobic bullying.
In other words same old same old same old. Some people think being trans is the best thing since pumpkin lattes and other people think it’s a warped fad that is going to ruin a lot of lives.
Meetings are said to be polite, but privately clinicians have dismissed those holding opposing views variously as “activists”, for promoting trans rights, or “conversion therapists” or “transphobes”, for questioning a child’s self-diagnosis.
So it’s like Twitter but with physical consequences.
One current member of Tavistock staff said: “What they are proposing to do is gender exploratory therapy. My view, as a clinician working in gender services, is that this is tantamount to conversion therapy for trans youth. It’s very problematic and very unethical.”
But it’s not problematic and unethical to charge ahead with diverting teenagers’ puberties. How can they be so confident of that?
I’ll see their “exploratory” and raise them to “experimental.”
And here’s the rush to judgement that says “gender dysphoria=trans.” You’d think that finding the actual cause of a patient’s discomfort and anguish would be important, particularly if those causes could be multiple. Sounds like the gung-ho group eager to dose kids with blockers and start cutting them up is fine with desisters and detransitioners as collateral damage. If some of these kids are destined to grow out of this phase, that’s a good thing, rather than a terrible fate that must be avoided at any cost. Are they really more interested in their patients’ well-being, or defending their judgement and diagnoses from unwanted scrutiny and second-guessing by people they deem unqualified?
All that these clinicians have at their disposal is a hammer, which makes all those dysphoric children look very much like nails. They’ve been hired to drive nails and by God, that’s what they’re going to do. They’re not going to let those pesky, interfering worrywarts talk their
potential customerspatients out ofbuying their productnecessary, life-saving, affirming care.YNNB,
I think that in this context, “exploratory” therapy is the equivalent of what used to be called “watchful waiting,” meaning “let’s explore your feelings in talk therapy before we do physical interventions.”
Hi Screechy;
My “experimental” was aimed at those clinicians keen on blockers and surgery. I had interpreted their use of “exploratory” in the context of their disagreement with the watchful waiters to be derogatory (tentative, unsure, etc.), so I was rebranding their own “affirmation only” approach as “experimental” which, given the apparent lack of interest in whether or not it works or helps in terms of patient well-being, is more accurate. Sorry if I didn’t make that clear in my pokerish “see and raise” phrasing.
What other field of medicine permits self diagnosis? What other field of research calls debate over theory or method unethical?? This entire subject is a toxic cesspit.
Homeopathy. Their remedies are available over the counter to anyone.
Make of that what you will.
Heh. “Water? Yep, you can have that over the counter.”
“We have diluted this water with other water 1,000,000 times, so now it is REALLY GOOD at quenching your thirst!”