Dangerous waters
Jolyon Maugham pretends not to know the difference between post hoc and propter hoc. (Maugham or someone else at “Good Law” Project, but I doubt the someone elses are allowed to deviate from the party Jolyon line.)
A freedom of information request by Good Law Project has found that deaths by suicide of trans young people under 18 surged following the withdrawal of gender-affirming healthcare
For years, successive governments have denied an increase in suicides among trans youth following the withdrawal, and criminalisation, of gender affirming healthcare. And, when Good Law Project raised the alarm about rising deaths, health secretary Wes Streeting responded with a review that criticised our figures and attacked our reporting as “dangerous”.
Those of us in or close to the trans community have been to the funerals of those we love. And we have wept together for those we have been unable to save on Trans Day of Remembrance. We know the truth – we see it with our own eyes. And, to us, the decision by Wes Streeting to commission a review into suicides which downplayed the scale of these tragedies was unforgivable. His report denied the reality of trans deaths, as Streeting’s ban on puberty blockers denied the reality of trans lives.
He doesn’t actually say the ban on puberty blockers caused the purported rise in suicides, but he implies it as heavily as he possibly can. Very lawyerly of him, I suppose.
To silence those raising the alarm on rising trans suicides as “dangerous” while ramping up the policies correlating with that rise is an act of grave moral wickedness.
And it’s not an act of grave moral wickedness to act on a new and peculiar idea of what human sexes are by helping teenagers harm their own bodies?
From the official report from Department of Health & Social Care actually cited by Goodlaw Project:
So, no “surge”.
The report also points out the actual “surge”, that of young people jumping on the “idennify as” bandwagon generally — consequently, there are more “trans” young people committing suicide simply because there are more “trans” young people in the population. Also, the figures encompass the pandemic period, when there were generally more mental health stressors for all of us.
The whole report is thoughtful, reasonable and informative.
In order for this claim to hold water, they would also need to demonstrate that trans-identifying kids were killing themselves at a higher rate prior to Tavistock opening up in the first place. If gender dysphoria is really such a crisis, and so common as they claim, then it should be childs’ play to show a marked decline in teen suicides in areas that adopt pro-trans policies, vs. those that do not.