Hang on a second
Scotland’s NHS has paused prescribing puberty blockers to children referred by its specialist gender clinic. The Sandyford clinic in Glasgow also said new patients aged 16 or 17 would no longer receive other hormone treatments until they were 18. It follows a landmark review of gender services for under-18s in England. Dr Hilary Cass’s review said children had been let down by a lack of research and there was “remarkably weak” evidence on medical interventions.
And very drastic “medical interventions” they are, too – and in fact they’re not really “medical” as commonly understood. More like anti-medical.
Like other parts of the UK, Scotland has seen a rapid rise in the number of young people questioning their identity or experiencing gender dysphoria.
And why might that be? Could it possibly be because being trans is trendy? Could it possibly be because there is such an avalanche of fevered advertising for the joys of transition? Could it possibly be a fad, different from other fads only in how tragically drastic its effects are?
Dr Emilia Crighton, NHSGCC’s director of public health said: “The findings informing the Cass review are important, and we have reviewed the impact on our clinical pathways. The next step from here is to work with the Scottish government and academic partners to generate evidence that enables us to deliver safe care for our patients.”
I have to wonder why the fuck they weren’t doing that already.
Vic Valentine, of Scottish Trans and the Equality Network, said pausing puberty blockers was the wrong decision and said it would “harm trans children and young people”.
What if it’s the other way around, Vic? What if the harm is prescribing puberty blockers? What if it’s all been a horrible stupid fashionable mistake?
Trans activism certainly cuts itself a lot of slack in its deployment of the vague and infinitely elastic concept of “harm”. It also counts on everyone else’s hesitation to ask for details and specifics once they’ve declared something to be “harmful,” for fear of being seen (or branded) as cruel and churlish. Well, I think it’s time for some churlishness. When someone like Vic here makes a sweeping pronouncement like this, he should be asked exactly how children are harmed by withholding this “treatment” and exactly how are they helped by its provision. In another thread it was pointed out how some people had been waiting TEN YEARS for supposedly “life saving” “treatment.” It’s not like they were bleeding out, so the demand for immediate access for “life saving” reasons must not have been true. What other parts of your reasoning are also not true? How do we find out if we’re not allowed to ask questions? How can we take you at your word for anything when you’ve lied about something so fundamental and important? I can understand your reticence, though; you’ve turned yourself into The Boy Who Cried Wolf: what if there are no wolves, and there never were any wolves? Where does that leave you and your cause?
Make the activists justify and explain their claims. Most other actual social justice movements would welcome the chance to lay out their reasoning, as well as the relationship between their policy demands and their goals. With transactivism, all we get is the equivalent of SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!
Could we perhaps end the fad with a return to pet rocks? Or toe socks? (Too bad it’s not so easy; I’d buy a pet rock if it would end the trans madness.)
Ten years for an appointment to see someone with a view to getting harmful, unnecessary anabolic steroids and non-therapeutic telective plastic surgery is nothing, not when people are waiting to be seen for actual serious health issues.
In September 2021 I woke up one morning with a strange new symptom. In bright sunshine, I’d been getting migraine-aura-type sparkling in my vision for some time; but, for the first time, the bright light was causing pain so severe that I was quite unable to open my eyes. Sparkles and painful photophobia; just like an escalating migraine aura in v e r y s l o w m o t i o n, where the expected headache never arrives.
After months of visits to emergency eye clinics, I saw a specialist in January 2022. She put me through a battery of eye tests, all of which showed nothing wrong with my eyes, and recommended urgent MRI of my brain. To get one, though, I had to get an appointment with a neurologist. Given that I had been on the general waiting list to be assigned a neurologist since 2013, l didn’t hold my breath but looked for ways to cope. I took to wearing polarised sunglasses and a ski mask with a mirrored lens to cut down the light when I went outside, and tried to avoid, where possible, doing so on sunny days. I stitched three layers of black cloth to the brim of a wide-brimmed black hat, to block the sunshine when necessary. Unfortunately, this made me effectively blind whenever the sun shone, and I would have to rely on my husband to take over control of my wheelchair. Eventually, he managed to find some ski goggles which fit over my prescription polarised sunglasses, and block UV light completely, meaning that I can now see again, although bright sunshine still makes me flinch.
I received an appointment letter from the neurology department this March, the day we were going to set off on a trip to the UK to visit my Mum on her 90th birthday, with a date for a consultation two weeks hence. We re-scheduled the ferry crossing; luckily, we’d plenty of time as we’d originally planned to visit other people on our way to Mum’s, so we didn’t miss the celebrations (although we did miss them). I saw the consultant, a neurology professor at the university hospital, who said that it was unlikely to be migraine related, as migraine is episodic. I said that it’s unlikely to be anything sinister, or I would have died on the waiting list. She said that anyway it was too long since my last MRI, and she ordered one. I have an appointment on Friday.
I don’t mind the wait. This is a small country, with the population of a largish city, and they obviously have to give priority to people with life-threatening conditions. CoViD has done no favours to the system, either; they were already struggling before it hit.
My advice to those who decry the wait for an appointment with a gender butcher is to stop focussing on the things that others have persuaded you to hate about your body, start focussing on all the wonderful things you can do with it, and create something beautiful.